Sunday, August 16, 2009

Meat Trick


Dad used to work at the Beaunit rayon mill in Childersburg before it closed down in the sixties. He made friends with a fellow named Bill Eaves while there. After the closing, Dad went to work at the Kimberly-Clark paper mill right next door to the Beaunit plant. Bill Eaves went to work at a textile mill across the river in Columbiana, where he and his family lived. They stayed in touch for many years after. We would go visit the Eaves and they would come visit us via Perkins Ferry, which crossed Coosa river from Talladega county to Shelby county.

Dad liked to deer hunt but Bill Eaves' opinion was that hunting deer was a waste of time because the meat wasn’t any good when you got it. Bill's reasoning was that the deer had been run to exhaustion by the time it was killed and that wild animals didn’t eat well out in the woods. The combination of factors caused the meat to be tough and gave it a bad taste, in Bill's opinion. Dad disagreed but didn't argue. He did begin to scheme.

Some months later, Dad invited the Eaves over for supper on a Saturday night. He asked Mom to cook a venison roast from a four-point buck that he had killed that season. Mom was in on the trick and told the Eaves that they were having roast, but didn't elaborate.

While they were eating on the evening of the get-together, Bill and his wife bragged on how good the roast was. Bill had raised some cattle on his property and gave his expert opinion on the roast: it was obviously corn-fed beef, brought into the pens when it was young and fed nothing but grain so that the meat would not be tainted by the flavor of grass. Bill also also pointed out that the roast had been cut by an expert butcher.

At about this point Dad went to the trash and pulled out the butcher paper with “ROAST” written on it in Dad's own handwriting. That, along with the grin on Dad’s face clued Bill in that he’d been had. Bill Eaves shook his head and said, “You’re not going to tell me that this is deer meat are you?”

The answer was yes and we’re still laughing about this over 30 years later.


Links:

Beaunit Rayon factory: http://goforth-al.blogspot.com/2007/02/beaunit-rayon-factory.html

Perkins Ferry: http://alabama.hometownlocator.com/maps/feature-map,ftc,2,fid,152871,n,perkins%20ferry.cfm

3 comments:

  1. You know this is going to make me write about eating the pet chickens.

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  2. And that will lead to the story of the geese from hell.

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  3. I notice that you corrected my spelling with ROAST. I spelled it ROST on purpose since that's the way I remember seeing it spelled on all that butcher paper in the freezer. Dad was not an excellent speller.

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