“You know, those little round perfumey things in the bottom of urinals.”
“Why do they call them mints? They don’t taste like mints, do they?”
“Well, I’ve never tried one, Kevin, but I imagine they don’t taste like mints. Anyway, the Medgar plant was one of the leading producers of urinal mints in the entire country. Just about every urinal mint east of the Mississippi and south of Maryland came from Medgar.”
I thought about all those men, holding their penises and staring down at a urinal mint from Medgar, tearing the rinds off cigarette butts with their piss streams. Lux Industries, Medgar, Kentucky emblazoned on the splash guard. It made me proud.
“What happened to it?”
“They moved production to Mexico and closed it the same year the mines shut.” He looked over at me. “It wasn’t a good year for us.”
We took a right on 17 and followed the edge of the valley floor. The Mitchell farm occupied a prime funnel-shaped valley between two rolling hills of Rag Mountain that eased out of her like inviting legs. Next to Rag was the flat gray wound from the strip-mine operation, running across three stubbed hills and hollows.
We dusted up the dirt road, past a company of steer enjoying a morning cud, to the barns and pens and the slight incline of the lane, which signaled the business end of the farm. Farther up the hill, the Mitchell house, with its two stone chimneys, one at either end, watched old and proud.
Despite the name, Grubby Mitchell wasn’t a particularly messy farmer. In fact it was generally held that he ran the farm better than his father, or even his grandfather, Clovis Mitchell, who had the original misfortune to acquire the nickname “Grubby” in 1922. In Medgar, nicknames did tend to stick.
As the story goes, Grubby’s father, Liam, dug and built Clovis a private outhouse for his fiftieth birthday. One with a fancy metal toilet-paper holder, a hand-laid parquet floor, and a real porcelain toilet and seat (first one in the county). Clovis, a proud man, assiduous in appearance, lorded the toilet over the other farmers and miners who played cards at the back of Hivey’s Farm Supply, allowing everyone a look but denying all, even family, the opportunity to try the smooth, inviting seat.
One spring night six years later, with the toilet seat in full use by Clovis, the floorboards gave way, and he and the toilet splashed into the effluvium ten feet below. His shouts went unheard for a day and a half and the search was in high rash when he was discovered and retrieved from the black muck, clutching the broken halves of the toilet seat in both hands, mumbling incoherently.
The men at Hivey’s, all of whom participated in the search and were present when Clovis was hoisted from the hole, gut laughed uncontrollably when Dell Hitchens, a Negro who worked the farm, said loudly, “Das da grubbiest I ever seen Mr. Mitchell.” Clovis was never particularly well liked at Hivey’s, even before he got the porcelain toilet, and the name Grubby stuck like gum on a summer sidewalk.
When he died, the farm and the nickname passed to Liam, then to his son, Raymond, who was standing with Paitsel Meadows in the barn door examining the carburetor they had just pulled from his deep-red Massey Ferguson tractor when we rattled up into the barnyard.
“Morning, Grub, Paitsel,” Pops said as he eased himself down from the worn front seat of the truck and reached into the back for his brown veterinary satchel.
“Mornin,” they returned, staying fixed on the suspect carburetor.
I exited on the other side and followed Pops close behind.
“Grubby, this is my grandson, Kevin.”
They looked up from the engine piece.
“Heard you was livin here now, pleased,” Mr. Mitchell said and nodded.
Paitsel smiled. “Good to see you again, son.”
“Engine’s been leanin out so I thought I’d have Pait up to pull the carb and see.”
“Well, that’s sensible, Grub. While you’re doing that we’ll have a look at those bulls. Where are they?”
“Pen behind the pen barn.”
We walked to the back of the pen barn, which held two petulant bulls with proud horns and swaying testicles, who looked as if they wouldn’t relinquish them without a discussion.
“How are we going to do these bulls without getting kicked?”
“Getting kicked is the last thing we should worry about… Look at those horns.”
I leaned on the fence. Pops opened the double doors of a large barn and began assembling a run of portable fencing from the pen gate to the barn.
“Pops, really, how are we gonna do this?” I worried.
“Well, Kevin, I don’t rightly know; I’ve never done it before.”
“You’ve never done this before?”
“Nope, that’s why I asked you to come.”
“I’ve never done this before either, you know that.”
“Well, we’re just gonna have to learn as we go, I guess—do you want to hold the bull or do the cutting?”
I thought about my options for a moment. “Uh, I guess I’ll hold the bull.”
We moved inside the barn. It was kept as the rest of the Mitchell spread, well used and well placed, with five stalls, a wood ladder to a hay-stacked loft, honed farm tools of various utility shining the walls. The farm was fifty acres of pasture, feed corn, and steer, except for eight sheep, four goats, two horses, and a pig. Pops said that after the Mitchells’ only child, Ray Jr., was killed in Vietnam, Grubby threw himself into the place to stop from thinking about it. The farm was his pride now, and it showed.
“Well, Kevin, I think you’re off the hook. Mr. Mitchell has a squeeze chute for just such delicate procedures.” He gestured to a narrow aluminium-sided gauntlet with stocks attached to the exit gate for holding an animal’s head.
Grubby and Paitsel walked around the corner wiping their hands on a greasy towel.
“Bad float,” Paitsel said and moved to help Pops finish the run to the squeeze chute.
“You’re eight months late on these yearlings, Grubby. Why the delay?”
“Was hopin to stud em with Earl’s stock, but all they want to do is fight. Shem nearly got gored last week.”
“Where is he, anyway? You seem short of hands today.”
“Lazy sumbitch quit on me.”
“What are you going to do for hands?”
Grubby put out his and splayed his fingers like he was showing the years in a decade.
“I’ll stay an help,” Paitsel said.
“Appreciate it, Pait.” Never one for fence-post chat, Grubby opened the pen gate, split the bulls, and began sheepdogging the smaller one toward the squeeze chute.
“Gwan, bull, hep… hep gip, gya ha gwan.”
The bull responded immediately, sprinting out of the pen, into the run, and into the squeeze chute as if he couldn’t wait to be rid of the annoying protrusions from his head and the danglings between his legs.
Paitsel immobilized the bull’s head and shoulders in the stocks. Pops quickly loaded a syringe with lidocaine and began feeling the space between the bull’s ear and eye. “There’s a nerve called the cornual that snakes up into the horn. It’s easier on the animal if we take that out.” He tapped a spot on the bull’s skull and injected the lidocaine. Same on the other side.
“Son, hand me the dehorner. It’s the one that looks like a mini post-hole digger.”
I gave him the tool, hand grip first, and he slid the cup over the bull’s horn and pulled the handles apart like he was trimming an errant tree branch. The horn popped off and a spurt of blood pulsed from the bull. Pops reached into the cavity with forceps and pulled out the bleeding stump of artery, then switched the apparatus to the other horn and repeated the procedure. He sprayed both stumps with antiseptic.