Violence is part and parcel of country life. You’re forever being assailed by dead things: dead mice, dead rabbits, dead possums, dead birds. You find them in the yard, crawling with maggots, and smell them rotting under the house. Then there are the creatures you kill for food: chickens, hogs, deer, quail, wild turkeys, catfish, rabbits, frogs and squirrels, which you pluck, skin, disembowel, debone and fry up in a pan. I learned how to load and fire a shotgun, how to stitch up a bleeding wound, how to reach into the womb of a heaving sow to deliver a breached piglet. My hands did these
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