Collected Stories, page 16
The boy always felt October as a twilight month. Its whole function was the preparation for winter, a getting ready, a drawing-in of the sun like a snail into its shell, a shortening and tightening against the long cold. And that year, after his father bought the sow up on the north bench and brought her in to be fattened up in the corral behind the barn, he felt obscurely the difference between the two kinds of preparation going on. The footbridge came out, was piled up in sections and planks in the loft of the barn. That would go in again next spring, as soon as the danger of the ice and floodwater was over. But the sow was not going to be back next spring. Her preparation was of a more final kind.
He had the job of carrying the swill bucket to the corral every morning, carrying a sharpened stick to poke the frantic beast away from the trough while he poured the sloppy mess of potato peelings and apple peelings and bacon rinds and sour milk and bread crusts. The sow fascinated him, though he disliked her intensely. He hated the smell of the swill, he hated the pig’s lumbering, greedy rush when he appeared with the pail, he hated her pig eyes sunk in fat, he hated the rubber snout and the caked filth on her bristly hide. Still, he used to stand and watch her gobbling in the trough, and sometimes he scratched her back with the stick and felt her vast, bestial pleasure in the hunching of her spine and the deep, smacking grunts that rumbled out of her.
In a sense she was his personal enemy. She was responsible for the nasty job he had every day. She was responsible for the stink that offended him when he passed the corral. She was dirty and greedy and monstrous. But she was fascinating all the same, perhaps because all her greed worked against her, and what she ate so ravenously served death, not life. The day she broke loose, and children and dogs and women with flapping aprons headed her off from the river brush and shooed her back toward the corral, the boy and his brother, Chet, stood at the bars panting with the chase and promised her how soon she’d get hers. In just about a week now she wouldn’t be causing any trouble. Chet took aim with an imaginary rifle and shot her just behind the left foreleg, and then Bruce took aim and shot her between the eyes, and they went away satisfied and somehow reconciled to the old sow, ugly and smelly and greedy and troublesome as she was, because she was as good as dead already.
In the big double bed Bruce stirred, yawned, stretched his feet down and pulled them back again quick when they touched a cold spot, opened his eyes, and looked up. The mottled ceiling above him, stained by firemen’s chemicals when they had the attic fire, was a forest. He could see a bird with a big, hooked bill sitting on a tree. He yawned again, squinting his eyes, and twisted his head, and from the different angle, it was not a bird at all, but an automobile with its top down and smoke coming out behind. His eyes moved over the whole ceiling, picking out the shapes he and Chet had settled on definitely: the wildcat with one white, glaring eye; the man waving a flag; the woman with big feet and a bundle on her back. He lay picking them out, letting sleep go away from him slowly.
Downstairs he heard sounds, bumpings, the clank of a pan, and his head turned so that he could look out of the window. It was still early; the sun was barely tipping the barn roof. The folks didn’t usually …
Then he stabbed Chet with an elbow. “Hey! Get up. This is the morning for the pig.”
Chet flailed with his arms, grumbled, and half sat up. His hair was frowsy, and he was mad. “Don’t go sticking your darn elbow into me,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“The pig,” Bruce said. “Pa’s butchering the pig this morning.”
“Heck with the old dirty pig,” Chet said, but Bruce had barely got his long black stockings on before Chet was on the edge of the bed, dressing, too. Bruce beat him downstairs by about a minute.
The kitchen was warm. The washtub and the copper boiler were on the stove, and already sent up wisps of steam. Both boys, out of habit, huddled their bottoms close to the open oven door, watching their father finish his coffee.
He seemed in high spirits, and winked at Chet. “What are you up so early for?”
“Gonna help butcher the pig.”
Their mother, standing by the washstand with a couple of mush bowls in her hands, looked at them. “You just forget about the pig. Sit down and eat your breakfast. Are you washed?”
“No’m,” they said. “But we want to watch.”
She waved them to the washstand and set the table for them. While they ate, their father sat sharpening the butcher knife on the edge of a crock, and they watched him.
“How you gonna do it?” Bruce said. “Cut her throat?”
“Bruce!” his mother said.
“Well, is he?” Chet said. He added, “I bet it bleeds like anything,” and stared at the glittering edge of the knife.
“You boys better go play in the brush, or go up to the sandhills,” their mother said. “You don’t want to watch a nasty, bloody mess like this is going to be. I should think you’d feel sorry for the poor old pig.”
They jeered. Bruce got the vision of the throat-cutting out of his mind and punched Chet on the shoulder. “No more old slop to carry,” he said.
Chet punched him back and said, “No more old ugly sow snuffing around in the manure.”
“Sausages for breakfast,” Bruce said.
“Pork chops for dinner,” said Chet.
They giggled, and their father looked them over, laughing. “Couple of cannibals,” he said. He reached out and yanked a hair from Chet’s head, held it between thumb and forefinger, and sliced it neatly in two with the knife. Chet watched him with one hand on his violated skull.
“Well, I don’t think they should see things like that,” the mother said helplessly. “Heaven knows they kill a lot of gophers and things on the farm, but this is worse.”
The father stood up. “Oh, rats,” he said. “I always watched butcherings when I was a kid. You want to make them so sissy they can’t chop the head off a rooster?”
“I still don’t think it’s right,” she said. “When I was little, I had to go out with a bowl and catch the blood for blood pudding. It gave me nightmares for a month after. …”
She stopped and turned to the stove, and Bruce saw her shoulders move as if she had had a chill. He imagined her stooping with a bowl under the pig’s red, gaping throat, and the thought made him swallow twice at the mouthful he had. But a minute later his father went into the cellarway and got Chet’s .22, and they crowded on his heels as he picked up the knife and went out.
“Brucie,” his mother said, “don’t you go!”
“Aw, heck,” he said, and deliberately disobeyed her.
The morning was crisp, sunny, the air tangy with late autumn. In the far corner of the corral the sow heaved to her feet, her hindquarters still sagging loosely on the ground, and stared at them. She did not come near, and Bruce wondered why. Maybe because they didn’t have a pail with them. Chet leaned on the corral bars and jeered at her.
“All right for you, old sow. This is where you get yours.”
Excitement prickled in Bruce’s legs. He couldn’t stand still. With his hands on the top bar he jumped up and down and yelled at the ugly beast, and all his hatred of her ugliness and her vast pig appetites came out of him in shrill cries. The sow got clear up, and the father spoke sharply. “Shut up. You’ll get her all excited. If you want to help, all right, but if you can’t keep quiet you can go back in the house.”
They fell quiet while he loaded the single-shot Remington. The sow came forward a few steps, snout wrinkling. She stopped at the edge of the manure pile, under the hole through which it was pitched from the barn, and fronted them suspiciously.
“Where you gonna shoot her?” Chet whispered.
“Head,” his father whispered back. “Don’t want any holes in her meat.”
He leaned the gun over the rail and took aim for what seemed minutes. Then the sow moved, and he took his finger outside the trigger guard and eased up. Bruce let his breath out in a long, wispy plume, thinking: if she hadn’t moved just then she’d be dead now, she’d be lying there like a chicken with its head cut off. On a day like this, with the sun just coming up and everything so bright, she’d be dead. He swallowed.
His father reached down and picked up the butcher knife, sticking it into the top bar where it would be handy. “All right now,” he said. He seemed excited himself. His breath came short through his nose.
He laid the barrel over the bar again, and his cheek dropped against the stock. The sow lowered her head and snuffed at the manure, and in the instant when she was frozen there, perfectly still except for the little red, upward-peering eyes, the rifle cracked thinly, dryly, like a stick breaking.
The sow leaped straight into the air, her open mouth bursting with sound, came down still squealing to stand for a moment stiff-legged, swinging her head. Then she was running around and around the corral, faster than Bruce had ever believed she could move, around and around, ponderous, galloping, terrified, a sudden and living pain. The constant high shriek of agony, sustained at an unsustainable pitch, cut the nerves like a knife.
The boy stood stiffly with his hands on the bar, watching her. He heard the click of the bolt as his father threw the shell and the snip of metal as he reloaded. Then his father was running, almost as heavily as the sow, but more terribly because he was the killer and she the killed. The boy saw his red face, his open mouth, as he pursued the sow around the corral, trying to stop and corner her for another shot.
The squeal went on, an intolerable sound of death, and the sow charged blindly around the pen. A trickle of red ran down over her snout from between her eyes, and she went on, staggering, a death that did not want to die, a vast, greedy life hurt and dying and shrilling its pain. Even through his own terror Bruce could not miss the way she scrambled to avoid the man with the gun. She plunged up on the manure pile, was cornered there, raced down and around the bars again, and then in one magnificent running leap went clear up over the manure, through the hole, and into the barn.
“God Almighty!” the father yelled. “Head her off. Run!”
The two boys arrived at the barn door together, slammed the lower half shut, and peered over. The pig’s wild screaming came from the cow stable, empty now. The horses in the front stalls were trembling and white-eyed, and, as Chet pushed the upper door, the nervous mare lashed out with both hind feet, and splinters flew from the board ceiling.
Their father was beside them now, looking in, the gun in his right hand. His face was so violently red that Bruce shrank away.
“Get on out behind again,” the father said. “If she comes out through the hole, yell and keep her inside the fence.”
He went inside, and the boys fled around behind, their eyes glued to the manure hole, their ears full of the muffled and unceasing shrilling of the wounded sow. They heard her squealing sharpen, heard the new fear in it, heard their father shouting, and then she arched through the window again, jumping like a horse at a fence, front feet tucked up and hind legs sailing. Her feet hit the edge, and she fell rolling, but the squealing did not stop. She was up in a moment, head swinging desperately from side to side, and in that moment the father, coming around the corner, took quick aim and fired again.
The sow stood still. Her squeal went up and up and up to a cracking pitch. Her whole fat, mud-caked body quivered and began to settle, her legs spraddled as if to keep it from going down. Then the squeal trailed off to a thin whimper, the front legs buckled, the sow’s snout plowed into the manure, and the father was over the fence with the knife in his hand. The stoop, the jerk of the shoulder, the rush of bright blood …
“Jeez!” Chet said.
Bruce, strangling, tried to look, tried to say something to show that it had been wonderful and exciting, that it served the dirty old sow right, but he couldn’t speak. His eyes, turned away from the corral, were still full of the picture of his father standing over the dead sow, towering, triumphant, the bloody knife in his hand, his back huge and broad and monstrous with power. He gulped and swallowed as a rush of salty liquid filled his mouth.
“My gosh,” Chet said. “Did you see her run? Right between the eyes, and it only made her squeal and run.”
Bruce turned his head further and clung to the bar. He heard Chet’s voice, going away, getting dimmer. “What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet.”
“I am … not,” Bruce said. He straightened his shoulders and lifted his head, but a moment later he was hanging on the corral vomiting, heaving, clinging for dear life to keep the black dots in his brain from becoming solid.
And after a minute his father’s voice, still breathless and jerky with exertion. “Couldn’t stand it, uh? You all right, Chet?”
Chet said he felt fine, swell. Bruce clung to the voices, hung onto them desperately, because as long as he could hear them the terror wasn’t total, the black dots weren’t solid. “You better get on into the house,” his father said, and then raised his voice and called, “Sis!”
His mother came and held him with one arm and led him back to the house and, still frantically clinging to voices, to meanings, he heard her say, “You never should have watched it, it’s horrible, I knew all the time. …”
There was a while when he lay on the sofa in the parlor with his eyes closed. His mother came in once to see how he felt, but the duties in the kitchen and yard were demanding, and she stayed only a minute. Listening out of his still struggle with nausea, he heard the thumpings in the kitchen, the quick footsteps, the words, and as his nausea ebbed, he wondered what was going on now. Once, when the outside door was opened, he heard the voices of boys out by the barn.
Shame made him turn over and lie face down. What he had done was sissy. Chet hadn’t got sick, and the other kids out there watching now weren’t sick, or they wouldn’t be yelling that way. But they hadn’t seen the old sow run, or heard her squeal, or seen his father stooping with the knife. …
His mother was out there, though, helping to get it done, and she had said from the start that she hated it. Everybody was helping but him, and he lay inside like a baby because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. What if he’d been told to catch the blood, like Ma? The thought sickened him, and he lay still.
After a while he sat up tentatively, put his feet over the edge of the sofa. He didn’t seem dizzy. And he had to go out there and show them that he was as capable of watching a butchering as any of them.
He felt a queer, violent hatred for the old sow. It served her right to be shot and have her throat cut, have her insides ripped out. He would go out and get hold of her insides and pull, and everything would come out in a bundle like the insides of a fish.
He stood up. The dizziness had gone completely. Listening, he heard no sounds in the kitchen. Everybody was outside. Taking three deep breaths, the way he always did before going off the high diving board the first time in the spring, he went out to the back door.
Four boys stood in a ring around his father, who was squatting on the ground. The pig was nowhere in sight, but Bruce saw his mother bending over one of the washtubs, and he saw the rope that went up over a pulley at the corner of the barn and trailed near his father’s feet. Then his father took hold of the rope and pulled, and the boys took hold and pulled too, stepping all over each other, and the sow came in sight. But not a sow any longer, not an animal, not the mud-caked, bristly-hided old brute that he had carried slop to all fall. The thing that rose up toward the pulley was clean and pink and hairless, like the carcasses in Heimie Gross’s shop, and, as it swung gently on the rope that bound its hind feet, he saw the flapping, opened belly and the clean red meat inside. She hung there, turning gently half around and back again, so innocent and harmless that the boy was no longer sickened or afraid.
His father saw him come out and grinned at him, wiping his red hands on a rag. “Snapped out of it, uh? I thought you were a tough guy.”
“Brucie got sick,” Chet said. “When Pa cut her throat, Brucie threw up all over the corral.”
“Oh, I did not!” Bruce said. He clenched his fists.
“You big liar,” Chet said. “I can show you the puddle.”
Not daring to look at the other boys, Bruce went over to where his mother was washing a long, whitish mess of stuff in the tubful of bloody water. She held her face to one side, out of the steam that rose from the tub, and worked at arm’s length. “Feeling better now?” she said.
He nodded. Conscious of the boys behind him, knowing they must be laughing at him, shaming him, snickering, he pointed to the stuff in the tub. “What’s that?”
“Intestines,” she said. “They have to be cleaned to stuff sausage in.” With a disgusted grimace she went back to working the long, rubbery gut through her fingers.
Bruce stood watching a minute. So sausage was stuffed into intestines. He had always loved sausage, but he could never eat it again, not ever. He couldn’t eat any of the old sow. Looking over at the pink, harmless thing swinging gently by its heels, he found it hard to imagine that this was the sow. The eyes were closed, the jowly face was hairless and mild, almost comical. There was nothing to remind anyone of that violence behind the barn, until you looked right between her eyes and saw the two dark dots there, not more than a half inch apart. There were the death wounds, there was the difference. He went up and pushed the stiff front foot, and the carcass swayed. It was funny those two little dots could make all that difference. A half hour ago the old sow had got up full of life, and now she hung like a bag of grain.
“How’d they get her so clean?” he asked Chet.
“Scalded her,” Chet said. “You shouldn’t’ve got sick. You’d’ve seen something.”
“What’d her insides look like?”
“Go look yourself,” Chet said. He waved at the tub standing against the barn wall.
Slowly Bruce went closer until he could see. The bloody mess appalled him, but he had to see those insides, had to look at them carefully to keep himself reminded that it was really the old sow hanging there. If he didn’t keep remembering that, if he forgot the sow and remembered only the clean, butcher-shop carcass, he might forget sometime and eat some of her, and he knew if he ever ate any of her he would die.
