vituperation

“Hey!” Robyn called from the side stoop.

I was out in the chicken yard, giving them some old corn a co-worker had brought me. Giving the chickens their afternoon snack is part of my after-work routine. Every day, I snack up the chickens, feed the pigs, check for eggs, pick the garden, and then set about doing whatever work needs doing. Yesterday’s job was getting the pigs loaded up and sent off to die.

Robyn was holding the handset of the phone out toward me. She waggled it when I looked up, in case I didn’t get her meaning. As I walked toward her, I raised my eyebrows and mouthed who?

She shrugged.

“Hello?”

The guy on the other end introduced himself. He was the son of the woman at the feed mill who helped me find the man who was to pick the pigs up yesterday afternoon. The man scheduled to pick up the pigs — let us call him Chuck — had to work late in a distant town, and asked this guy to do the job for him. This guy actually worked at the meat processor’s, so knew where to take the pigs and what to do with them once he got them there.

No problem.

I gave him directions to our house and he told me he was leaving.

“I guess I’ll go feed them their last meal and see you in a few minutes,” I said. We hung up.

Robyn and I went out to feed the pigs a bucket of corn and some final cookies. While they ate, Robyn took pictures and I cable-tied a hog panel across the front of the catch pen, where they’ve been eating for the last week. The pigs barely glanced back to see what I was doing while I sealed their fate.

I finished my chores while I waited for the guy to show up. I paced around the yard. I picked up corn cobs, so we wouldn’t look so country. I paced some more. I bitched to Robyn about how long he was taking. Finally, some 45 minutes after he’d called, a three-quarter-ton pickup towing a 14-foot livestock trailer turned into our driveway.

The guy was about eight years old.

“Sorry it took me so long,” he said by way of introduction as he climbed out of the truck. He still had his baby pudge, and if he shaved at all it wasn’t daily. “I ran out of gas on the way here, just as I was pulling into the gas station. If I hadn’t had this trailer on the back to push me to the pump, I’d a’been stuck.”

We discussed the best way to get the rig out to the pigs — through the chicken yard or around the house — and decided to take the straight shot through the chicken yard. While he got back into his truck, I opened the first gate and shooed chickens away. This is not such an easy task when the chickens associate you with all the good eats in their lives.

It took about five minutes, but I got him through all three gates and into the pig yard. From the catch pen, the pigs watched us with interest. He kid parked the truck and walked back to survey my setup.

“Does the gate on the trailer swing out or lower?” I asked. When I was putting the catch pen together I envisioned someone backing a trailer in, lowering the back to make a ramp, and me luring the pigs in with cookies or doughnuts.

“I reckon it does both,” he said.

It didn’t do both. It swung out, making about an 18-inch step up for the stubby-legged pigs to take.

We agreed that I would remove the hog panel from the front of the catch pen while he backed the open trailer into position. The pigs stood by their troughs and kept a wary eye on us. As he jockeyed the truck into position, I made sure the pigs stayed in the catch pen.

The kid came around the back of the trailer and joined me with the pigs. He looked expectantly at me.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “This is all new to me.”

“I ain’t never done this neither,” the boy said. “I guess we just run ‘em into the trailer.”

When I’d spoken with Chuck last weekend, I made it amply clear that when it came to loading pigs on a trailer, I didn’t know my ass from my elbow. Chuck assured me that there wouldn’t be any problem, that he was an old hand at this, and that getting the pigs loaded up would be a walk in the park.

Then he sent a fellow greenhorn.

“You mean, like chase them?” I asked.

“I guess.”

I moved so that the pigs were between me and the trailer.

“GIT!” I said in a firm voice, and stomped my foot for effect.

Big Pig twitched his tail. A long, snaky poo slid out of him and piled at his feet like soft serve corn chunk ice cream. Other than that, neither pig moved.

“HYA!” I said, and gave Little Pig a swat on the rump with my palm.

Little Pig grunted, but didn’t move.

So I gave him a good hard smack on the ass. He yelped — with surprise, not pain — and tried to wheel around me. I grabbed at his front end to steer him back toward the trailer. The kid, meanwhile, leapt into action and tried to push Big Pig toward the trailer.

Full-grown pigs, as it turns out, are surprisingly strong.

For the next 30 seconds or so, we were a mess of people, pigs, and poo. Post pandemonium, people? Panting. Pigs? Placid. Poo? Profilic.

Big Pig was actually outside the pen, having forced his considerable girth under the trailer gate during the melee.

“That didn’t go so well,” I said.

“You got any rope?” the kid asked.

“Yeah, what did you have in mind?”

“I thought we could tie one of his front legs and lift. If we can get his legs up, he’ll do the rest hisself.”

I fetched a length of half-inch rope from my workshop.

“You sure about just tying one leg?” I asked. “Seems like it would work better if we put it all the way around his torso behind his front legs.”

“Just the one.”

I tied the rope around Little Pig’s left front leg and the kid set to pulling. I pushed from behind, giving Little Pig the occasional ass-smack like I was some sort of bizarre porn star.

Little Pig did not go into the trailer. He squealed and squirmed, and for good measure splattered some shit. I have come to the conclusion that shooting feces is a pig’s only means of self-defense.

At the end, the rope was slack and the pig was not in the trailer. The kid was sweaty; I was spattered with drops of foul-smelling pig dung.

“Want to try it with the rope around his midsection?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I tied the rope around Little Pig, who was (as always when we weren’t pulling or pushing him) at ease. At my signal, the kid pulled and I pushed. Little Pig flailed, and screamed so loud Robyn — who was inside the house — told me later she thought the next door neighbor (who was mowing his yard for once, instead of sitting on his deck watching me) had run over something with the lawnmower.

It became evident pretty quickly that what we were doing wasn’t going to work, so I got up in the trailer with the kid and helped him pull. Little Pig fought a mighty fight, and worked his way under the trailer door so that he was outside the catch pen. When he did, I ended up pinned to the wall of the trailer by the rope.

“Let it go,” I told the kid, who obliged. I didn’t want Little Pig to get injured. Or myself, for that matter.

We got out of the trailer. Little Pig was over by the mudhole with Big Pig, somehow free of the rope. I could see a big purpling mark on his forehead, in a straight line like he might have hit it on the bottom of the trailer door in his terror.

“Well, I don’t know what else to try,” I said.

“When I help my grandpappy, he has them in a wood barn with a concrete floor. We just back the truck up and beat ‘em till they run in.”

“We will not be doing that,” I said.

He considered.

“You got stuff to make a ramp?”

“I might have a couple of small pieces of 2×12, but not enough to use. If I’d known there would be a big step, I could’ve built something.”

“We could tie ‘em up,” he suggested.

“Like, hog-tie?”

“Yup. They couldn’t move then.”

“I don’t want to do that. I already feel bad enough about what we’ve done, I don’t need to make it worse.”

The kid looked at me like I was some kind of namby-pamby PETA person.

“I’m not some kind of namby-pamby PETA person,” I said. “But part of the reason I raised these pigs myself is so I’d know they were well-treated. Right now I don’t feel like I’m treating them very well.”

“I understand,” he said, not looking at all like he understood.

“You’ve killed one before, right?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What if we killed them and bled them out here, and you took them straight to Joe’s place?” Joe owns the slaughterhouse. “Do you know if he’d process them already dead?”

My thoughts were: If you can take them a dead deer to be processed, you should be able to take a dead hog, as long as it gets chilled quickly.

“I don’t know if he does that,” the kid said.

“Matter of fact, since they’re supposed to be killed tomorrow, what if you just stopped by tomorrow morning, killed them, and took them straight there?”

The kid looked at me like I was a damn fool.

“I got school tomorrow morning,” he said.

Of course. What twelve-year-old wouldn’t be in school?

“I could take some time off work and kill them myself, use my tractor to get them into the bed of the truck, and drive them to Joe’s.”

“You have a tractor?”

“Yeah.”

“How big?”

“Small. Twenty-six horsepower.”

“Front end loader?”

“Yep.”

“You think that loader would fit in the trailer door?”

“Nah, it’s about six feet wide. Trailer’s not more than five.”

“Got some chain?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a chain I use for pulling up posts and whatnot.”

“We could chain them hogs to the loader and you could lift them up to the trailer floor.”

That pretty much cinched the decision that had been banging around in my head for the last several minutes.

“No. Let’s just forget about it. I don’t want to traumatize them any more tonight. I’ll either buy a trailer myself and just feed them in it to get them used to it, or just keep them until it gets cold enough for me to kill ‘em myself.”

“You sure you don’t want to try it?”

“I’m sure.”

I pulled out the forty dollars I had in my pocket and held it out, sure the kid wouldn’t take it since he didn’t do the job. I was wrong. He pocketed the bills, thanked me, and got in his truck to leave.

The truck wouldn’t start.

“It does this when the engine gets hot,” he said, climbing into the back to get a hammer out of the toolbox. “Starter freezes up.”

He crawled underneath the truck and banged on the starter a few times. The truck still would not start.

“Guess I’ll just let it cool down some. It usually starts right up when it gets down to about 150 degrees.”

We made small talk about trucks and starters, and how he planned to take automotive classes at the tech school so he’d know more about trucks. Conversation eventually turned to the pigs.

“Look at ‘em,” I said. The pigs were snoozing in their stinky pee-laden mudhole. “I don’t know how they can stand it. I keep it nice and muddy, and put water in it, but they insist on peeing in it all the time and making it reek.”

“They say that of all the animals out there, pigs are closest to us.”

“I’ve heard that. Makes sense — we get insulin, heart valves, and all kinds of things from them.”

“Some folks that think that believe in evolution,” he said. “I myself don’t, but I know some folks do. I don’t care if they believe that as long as they don’t care if I don’t believe in it.”

“Yep.”

“Did you know there’s these people, atheists, trying to change Christmas now?”

I felt like I’d fallen down the rabbit hole. One second we were talking about stinky pigs and the next, well, atheists and Christmas.

“Oh yeah?” I asked. I was wary, treading softly through a verbal minefield, aware of how many people this kid would tell if he discovered my own lack of belief in a supreme being.

“Uh huh. My grandpappy — he grew up goin’ to church but he don’t go any more — he says that it was called Christmas when he was born and he’ll be calling it Christmas when he dies.”

“It does take a lot of gumption to try and change someone’s beliefs about a holiday that’s been around so long.”

“People like that’s crazy. My grandpappy says he’ll call it Christmas no matter what those atheists call it.”

“Yep,” I said.

We spent a good twenty minutes talking, with the kid going under the truck periodically to bang on the starter. Just when he thought it was time to call his mom to have her go buy him a starter and bring it so he could spend the evening in our pig yard, changing it out, the truck started.

From their comfy spot in the mudhole, the pigs watched us leave. I shut and chained the gate behind us, and opened the gate to the chicken yard for the kid. He drove through slowly, heading toward the gate that leads to the driveway. To get through the chicken yard he had to pass a huge pecan tree we call the “Poltergeist tree” because it’s so reminiscent of the tree from the movie. One of the smaller branches hangs low, and I planned to move it out of the way for him, but he swerved to miss it before I could.

That’s how he ended up stuck, with the truck on one side of a massive low-hanging branch and the trailer on the other. For ten minutes, he tried going back and forth to get unstuck, unsuccessfully. By now, our next door neighbors had taken up a vantage point on their deck to watch. Just as my blood pressure took me into stroke territory, he was able to get free.

Finally, he was gone, and I went inside to curse to my wife about it all. First, though, I needed to call Joe and tell him the pigs wouldn’t be there today. Joe didn’t answer.

“We need to go to Tractor Supply,” I said to Robyn while I wolfed down a quick dinner. “We have no pig feed at all.”

Neither did Tractor Supply, as it turns out. I bought the pigs a bag of cracked corn to hold them until I could get to the feed mill. When we got home, the phone was ringing as I opened the door. It was Joe, who’d seen my number on his caller ID.

“Sorry I missed your call,” he said. “I was out in the okra patch.”

We had a nice conversation about gardens, okra, and peppers. I explained what had happened and that I wouldn’t be bringing the pigs in. For some reason, Joe found my story funny.

“I told Chuck I didn’t know what I was doing when I talked to him,” I said, starting to laugh. “I’m pretty much a city boy in the country trying to raise some of my own food. And he sent someone else who didn’t know what he was doing. He even ran out of gas on the way over here.”

We shared a laugh.

“Those people in the subdivisions are gonna be in a world of hurt if they ever can’t get food from the grocery store. You’re doing the right thing. Tell you what. You gonna be around Saturday?” he asked.

“Yeah, I should be here all day.”

“I’ll come over with some help, and pick those pigs up myself. We’ll get you taken care of. That sound okay?”

It sounded more than okay. It sounded fantastic. For the rest of the evening, I waxed poetic to Robyn about what a great guy Joe the butcher is. The pigs have a one day stay of execution, I have peace of mind, and all is well at Crooked Acres.

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Still very missed