ch of the steel his
skin crinkled delicately and fell away; his tissues flaked off in tender
strips; and from him arose a bouquet of smells more varied and more
delectable than anything ever turned out by the justly celebrated
Islands of Spice. It was a sin to cut him up and a crime to leave him
be.
He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist or a curio collector, but by
the master hand of one of those natural-born home cooks--stuffed with
corn bread dressing that had oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into
it until it was a veritable mine of goodness, and this stuffing had
caught up and retained all the delectable drippings and essences of his
being, and his flesh had the savor of the things upon which he had
lived--the sweet acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the buttery goobers
of the plowed furrows, the shattered corn of the horse yard.
Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the mere slice. At least, nobody ever
did eat him that way--you ate him by rods, poles and perches, by
townships and by sections--ate him from his neck to his hocks and back
again, from his throat latch to his crupper, from center to
circumference, and from pit to dome, finding something better all the
time; and when his frame was mainly denuded and loomed upon the platter
like a scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and found there small
hidden joys and titbits. You ate until the pressure of your waistband
stopped your watch and your vest flew open like an engine-house door and
your stomach was pushing you over on your back and sitting upon you, and
then you half closed your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey for
supper, turkey hash for breakfast the next morning and turkey soup made
of the bones of his carcass later on. For each state of that turkey
would be greater than the last.
There still must be such turkeys as this one somewhere. Somewhere in
this broad and favored land, untainted by notions of foreign cookery and
unvisited by New York and Philadelphia people who insist on calling the
waiter _garcon_, when his name is Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots
where a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage corpse. And this being
the case, why don't those places advertise, so that by the hundreds and
the thousands men who live in hotels might come from all over in the
fall of the year and just naturally eat themselves to death?
Perchance also the sucking pig of the good old days still prevails in
certain sheltered vales and glades. H
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