And Uncle Asa blossomed. He ran up a batch of his dough-devil dumplings and threw them into the stewpot. He made them as you would make cream-o'-tartar biscuits and cast them, raw, into the kettle. In there, catching fire and inspiration from the pig's trotters inflamed with onion, the dumplings exploded into airy flowers of wheat, slick and moist on their outsides, but aerated with bubbles and bone-dry at their centers. Then my mother and uncle together marched the soup to the table and poured it out into our largest green tureen. Somebody blew the dinner horn toward the oakwoods, and the sound of its winding brought a dozen men and boys running for dear life and pig's feet over the crusts of the snow. And we fell on those feet and heaped the bones of them in hills around our soup plates.
No one has ever counted the bones in a pig's foot, for no one has ever had time to stop for such foolish and dry statistics when he has had his nose to a plateful of such pleasures. Who counts the flowers of the newly popped corn in one batch of the stuff smoking from the coals? 1 know a professor who docs things like that. But he is a professor of physics and sat all one day of his life on the side of the sea to disprove my theory that every so often a larger wave than the rest comes in. I don't know what happened that day, but apparently no especially large waves came in at all, just to make a fool of me and other poets. I wish a tidal wave had come in and swept him away, but my luck was out that time.
There are plenty bones, anyway, in a pig's foot. You think you have found them all, and you bite into another. And around every last little knob of a bone there is an envelope of such sweetness that your eyes water. Each bite is a new surprise. The bones are never in the same place. They seem to bed in the jelly of flavor where they will, and each one tastes sweeter than the one before. Uncle Asa, at the end, was walled in by a circle of bones. And his eyes were closed in peace.
I swear when we used to bite into those resisting bundles of jelly and meat on Lost Paradise Farm, and into those stewed biscuits of my Uncle Asa's, we all felt like Ponce de León in Florida and on the brink of the bubbling Fountain of Youth.
I know my Uncle Asa felt like Ponce, anyway. For Uncle Asa never grew old or—as my father used to say when he tired of Asa's being one of us boys and taking us all off to the Sagadahoc County Fair and riding us on the merry-ground, when we should have been digging potatoes—never grew up. It may have been that our stewed pig's feet were a Fountain of Youth to him. Being with us children at Christmastime always probably helped keep him young, too. Uncle Asa was just another one of us boys the sad year, in his ninetieth winter of pig's extremities, when he ate his last pig's knuckles and died. He had that last blessing—he left us after the last pig's feet were gone.
And if Uncle Asa's mother had still been around the day he died, I am sure that she would have said what an old mother said, in her hundredth year on the Maine coast, when they came and told her that her eighty-year-old fisherman son was no more: “By golly, 1 always knew I would never raise that boy!”
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