Blood-letting and Trichinosis

‘…cattle low best at a quarter-moon’. Why his grandmother told him this was as queer as a Quaker nickel, but tell him she did, her face sour as lemon biscuits. She told him many queer things, some so queer were he to have give them a second thought he’d have fallen willy-nilly to the floor, his mind a commode-pot of useless quips and quails. Her life, his grandmother’s, was in a shambles, the bane and torment of being a Quaker’s daughter. Blood letting and trichinosis: the Mormon cure-all for whooping and rickety-legs. The man in the hat told the shamble leg man that religion was the crack of the masses, a sure-fire cure for whooping cough and calcium deficiency. The shamble leg man saw no harm in a little goodhearted fun, as long as it didn’t cost more than a Mormon nickel or raise welts on the back of your neck.


His mother, the shamble leg man’s mother, died from underexposure to sunlight and too much butter. His grandmother, his mother’s mother, larded cakes and pies, tortes and flans with enough butter to choke an ox, her hands pasty with flour and yeast. She never once stopped to think that her larded psalteries, the term she used for anything made with wheat flour and butter, would arrogate veins and stiffen the rickets in her children’s bowed legs. The shamble leg man’s mother, having looked up the word ‘psalteries’ in the dictionary, couldn’t understand how her mother could mistake an ancient stringed instrument for baked goods, or why she felt an awful rumbling in her stomach after eating one of her mother’s mincemeat pies.