Shaking the Nickel Bush by Ralph Moody

Author:Ralph Moody [Moody, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Westerns
ISBN: 9780803282186
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 2013-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

10

Rice Pudd’n

CHRISTMAS morning I let Lonnie sleep late while I heated a dishpanful of water and washed my underwear, spare shirt, and jeans. I couldn’t do much about Lonnie’s washing. He was sleeping in his dirty shirt, and his old overalls were so full of grease that I couldn’t have got them clean without boiling them in lye water. After I had my washing done and hung out on a creosote bush I washed our dishes and silverware, and scoured the frying pan and Dutch oven with sand. With Shiftless shimmying the way she was, we kicked up as much dust as a cavalry regiment, and most of it seemed to have settled in the orange crate we used as a pantry. And from cooking over greasewood campfires the frying pan, Dutch oven, and dishpan had grown a black shell as thick and hard as a turtle’s.

After the dishes were done I started cleaning the hens Lonnie had swiped, but the job would have been easier if he’d just wrung their necks and brought them with their clothes on. In that way I could have rubbed clay into the feathers, smeared on a coat half an inch thick, and roasted them in the coals from a campfire. Then when we were ready to eat them all I’d have to do would be to whack them against a rock. The hard-baked shells would break like an old flourpot, taking the feathers off as clean as a whistle and leaving the meat hot and juicy. But I guess Lonnie had thought he could fool me about having swiped them. He’d yanked off about three-quarters of the feathers—just in handfuls—had torn the skin in half a dozen places, and had got sand ground into the torn parts.

Lonnie never would tell me where he swiped the hens, but it must have been off somebody’s roost, and it must have been plenty dark in that hen house. He’d picked two fat ones all right, but it had been years since they’d been pullets. There were dry scales along their breastbones, and they were poochy—like geese—in the rear. That kind of a hen will roast fine in clay, if you give it three or four hours in a good deep bed of coals, but if you try to roast it in an ordinary oven it will usually come out tougher than bullhide. I was afraid ours would come out even worse if I tried to roast them in the Dutch oven, so I decided to cut them up, roll the pieces in white flour, brown them in grease, and stew them into a pot of fricassee.

I could hear Lonnie snoring when I picked off the last pin-feathers and washed the sand out of the torn places, but I’d barely picked up the butcher knife to cut the old hens into pieces when he wailed, “Aw, buddy, it’s Christmas Day. You ain’t about to make stew out of them chickens, are you? I spent near onto an hour huntin’ fat ones like you told me, so’s’t we could roast ’em.

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