April 19, 1992 (Easter Day)
Bill says, “It is best to cut a hog on a falling moon. It keeps the bleeding down.” We cut two boar hogs today. Pigs out of a sow trapped six months earlier in Reed Swamp. We bred her to a Georgia boar and I have been feeding these swine corn and kitchen scraps ever since the day the sow built herself a mattress of dog fennel, hid underneath it, and dropped a litter of eight young ones. We turned the piglets and their mother out in the woods for a month to flavor them up, so to speak, lost two gilts to coyotes, and trapped the rest back in order to cut the boars and fatten them. I will have them butchered next month and they will weigh between forty and fifty pounds, dressed.
Bill’s brother, Jerry, who is in the pig business, came by early, before church, and after telling me that every inch of a pig makes fine eating—from the rooter to the pooter—sent his black helper into the pen. The short, stocky man, whose scars attested to a number of mistakes, moved like a dancer and herded the pigs into a corner. When it was right for him, he snatched a young boar by one ear, tipped it over, and, taking hold of a ham hock, handed seventy pounds of pig, effortlessly, upside down and screaming, over the railing. Bill set the boar hog on its back into an open-ended metal funnel with its head completely enclosed in an iron cone. Jerry cut down the middle of the pig’s scrotum, fished out the testicles one at a time with his forefinger, severed the canals, dropped the fruits of his work, and squirted the incision with menthol. Back in the pen, the barrow huddled in a corner, screaming louder than ever, until it spotted its nuts in the wallow and ate them. Neither he nor a second pig bled a drop. A sign of moonbeams and dexterity.
Later that day it rained on the farm for the first time in weeks. Almost half an inch, enough to clean off the grass, the air, and the plowed earth. Bill planted corn off and on until seven P.M. He went home but returned to the fields three times after the pigs were cut, once after church and twice between rain showers. He plants our corn with old mule planters he jury-rigged to pull behind the tractor. He sows in low gear, as anything higher flings the seeds past the slots out of which they are intended to fall. The exactness of planting corn while sitting on a tractor in front of a planter built to be used while walking behind a mule is demanding and antiquated, but it works. The rows are straight and true, just as the farmer in Bill wants them to be. I watch him from my office and wish he drank so I could offer him some whiskey. During a break he tells me that when he was a kid he used to peel the bark off of young sweet gums, wait a day or two, scrape the resin, mix it with some of his mother’s flour, and chew it while he worked, instead of gum, which cost a penny. Bill spins the tractor back on track and says, “Hell, it wasn’t nothing but sap and worm shit.” The light now is bright and yellow around the tractor; the earth turns black behind the planters.