By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--July 20, 2023
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This is not a musical perfection column, but Austin Moody came pretty close. His new song, released just a couple of weeks ago, got me to thinking and remembering. Maybe it will do the same for you.
I remember what they always called the smokehouse at the farm in Henry County. I thought I remembered them building it, but my brother remembers it being there for longer than I can remember. That means I’ve compressed some memories about it.
Austin Moody Grandpa’s Shed
It would have been about 1959 but the memories are a little vague. I remember my grandfather having some occasion to work on it. The man I only knew as Uncle came to help. He and his wife, whom I only knew as Auntie, had raised my grandmother and her sister when their mother had died in 1907. My grandmother was just five and her sister, my great aunt, was just two when they lost her. Uncle was born in 1878, same year as Auntie, and he and Auntie agreed to take and raise the girls because they had no children of their own.
The building had been built up on round ceramic tiles so it was off the ground perhaps three feet. It had a wood frame and asbestos tile siding, with a couple of wood steps up to the door. It was in the lower yard of the farmhouse. There was a big shade tree, a Wolf River apple, at the corner of the back porch which shaded the porch and the smokehouse. Around the corner the clothes lines stood next to the lane with the black locusts trees. Just to north stood the sprawling box elder tree, and beside it was the garden. Across the garden was our house.
The smokehouse probably started as a real smokehouse way back when. I think I remember there being a small brick flue in it, but my brother doesn’t remember that. Back in the day it would have been useful to have a place to smoke hams and bacon made from the hogs that were raised on the farm. This was the middle of the Corn Belt, after all.
It was the building nearest the garden, so it was where my grandparents kept the garden tools and clay flower pots. When my grandfather got a front-tine tiller, it spent its idle time under the building, beside the Lawn Boy lawn mower. I think the fishing poles might have lived there.
My grandparents would put potatoes on the floor to cure before storing for fall. They dried onions in there, too. There was a kind of work bench along two walls that held coffee cans of nails and screws and hardware of various kinds. There was some scrap lumber, an old trunk, and the like. On one of the benches was a square box that had the word “Oakum” printed on the side. The box had a hole in the top, and I didn’t know what oakum was, but my oldest brother told me that there was a snake that lived in the box, so I stayed far away from it. No point in taking chances. As a consequence, I was never real crazy about going in there by myself. It smelled of oil and dirt and old junky stuff. That oakum box with the snake in it always stayed in the same place. Nothing I wanted to see was on the same side of the building.
The smokehouse was the place where Uncle comes back to life in my memory. He helped work on something that day. I remember seeing him use a hand saw to cut boards and a claw hammer to drive some nails.
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At that time he would have been the oldest person I had ever known. He would have been in his early 80s. He was bent over a bit, and seemed to have leathery skin on his face. He had old hands. He was nice to everyone and very kindly, of course, and I could see that my grandmother loved him like a dad. Now and then the smokehouse becomes the stage in my mind. Uncle, born just thirteen years after the Civil War ended, appears there, along with my grandparents and my brothers. After they worked, Grandma Smith probably fed everyone. They sat and visited for a while. Uncle probably took eggs back with him when he went home to Auntie. A boy of six or seven, who stood in awe in front of the grill on the Oliver 70 tractor as it towered above him, remembers it as part of the lifestyle of generations long past.
How does an old shed have this effect? Why do I remember these things? Perhaps it’s because it belonged to people born in the 19th Century. They worked in the building. It was useful to them in their daily lives. Even Uncle came down to help because he was part of the family. It was part of a world long gone, but a world we can recall at will. The memories are in color, I just realized.
So if you go back to a place like the smokehouse in your own memory, keep an eye out for the snake in the oakum box. He’s probably still in there.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.