G rowing up on a farm, I wasn’t a fool. I knew our animals were destined to become food. But the year I raised my pig, I hadn’t expected to be the instrument of his death. Red wasn’t even supposed to be mine to begin with.
“Pigs are ‘farm savers,’ ” my brother insisted one night at dinner. “Everyone knows that.”
“We don’t need any more animals,” I said, thinking of our seven hundred laying hens, two Holsteins, and three goats. I was seventeen and in my last year of high school, and I wanted no part in raising pigs.
“Please, Mom. Please,” my brother begged. “We’ll just raise bottle pigs. You feed ’em until they’re big enough to survive on their own, then you sell ’em. Jimmy knows all about it.” (Not his real name.)
“Jimmy’s not going to be doing the work,” I argued.
“Sure he will! He promised. He’s gonna help me. Please, Mom. Can we get a sow?”
My mother’s brow wrinkled. Ever since we had moved to this town from the East Coast, we’d had trouble fitting in. My father was Chinese, my mother white. People in our town weren’t used to seeing this kind of mixed-race family, and they’d told my brother and me to our faces that we were the Devil’s Spawn. God didn’t want the races to mix, that’s why he put them on different continents.
My mother had tried hard to find a way for my younger brother to fit in, be accepted in a community where masculinity was defined by how many acres your family owned and farmed, by how many head of cattle you raised, and — unspoken by any of us but secretly acknowledged — by the color of your hair and eyes. Straw hair, blue eyes, trumped my brother every time.
Our father was working as a consultant, having left the teaching job that had brought us to this small community in South Dakota. He traveled constantly. That was a factor too. Boys in this town grew up knowing exactly where their fathers were, in the fields, in the barns, or in the local bar.
Hence our growing menagerie. Each addition was an attempt by my mother to find the right combination of animals that would help my brother to belong. And if the animals kept me busy too, my parents figured, then all the better.
“I’ll ask around,” she said finally.
My brother turned to give me a triumphant smile.
And so in August, our newly acquired sow went into labor.
My brother and his friend were pulling the piglets from the grunting sow’s uterus. My brother cleared the gunk off their faces and placed them near their mother’s teats. When the placenta was finally expelled, he gave it to the sow to eat.
The sow had given birth to eleven piglets. More than expected.
“These’ll bring in good money,” my brother crowed.
I watched the helpless, tiny piglets grunting at their mother’s belly. They were cold despite the August heat and nestled closer to her for warmth. There was barely space for them all, and they tumbled over each other, snorting, their eyes closed tight. Despite myself, I had to laugh at their antics.
“Here, May-lee. Hold one.” And my brother put a piglet in my hand.
It was warm and squiggly, unable to hold still, only slightly longer than my hand, but heavier than I’d expected.
“They’re cute,” I admitted.
Then my brother went to the pump to wash the after birth and blood from his arms.
The next day at dawn, I went out to do the morning chores with my brother as usual. The best thing about August was that the early mornings were still light but not as hot as July. Soon enough we’d be rising before the sun, and the mornings would be growing cooler, then cold, then bitter cold. But late summer was a perfect time of year. And for the first time in a long time, my brother seemed happy as we headed into the barn.
The piglets were nestled up to the sow’s teats, pulling frantically. Then the sow stood up, all four hundred pounds rising faster than I would’ve thought possible. The piglets dropped off, squeaking, and she shook her head, flapping her long ears. She trotted off to the far side of the barn to poop, leaving her piglets to huddle together, crying for her piteously. Then we saw them. Three piglets squashed flat on the concrete floor. Their mother must have rolled over on them during the night.
“She probably didn’t know they were there behind her. They probably couldn’t fit on the other side.” My brother was trying to sound tough, trying to sound like a farmer, but I could tell he was sad. He was the animal lover, not me. Now he grabbed a shovel. “They must have died instantly.”
“You’d think.” I turned away to start watering the chickens. I didn’t want to watch him scrape the piglets’ bodies from the floor.
By that afternoon there were more problems.
The sow couldn’t drop her milk. We visited the veterinarian, who diagnosed mastitis and sold us syringes and oxytocin. “That should do the trick,” he said.
But it didn’t. Two days later she still couldn’t nurse. The piglets were visibly thinner. They squealed pitiably. A few tried to stand, but fell over, their heads too heavy for their ever-weakening legs.
By day three, the vet paid a call. It was worse than we thought. He recognized the sow when my brother said where he’d bought her. She was a dry sow, meaning she had incurable mastitis. She was unable to nurse her piglets.
My mother and I drove to the grain elevator and bought bags of Purina Pig Milk, chocolate-flavored formula for piglets, as well as giant plastic bottles and plastic nipples from the farm supply store. My brother and I mixed the formula, but most of the piglets were too weak to drink. We sat on the floor of the barn, piglets in our laps, dribbling the chocolate milk across their tongues, trying to encourage them to suckle.
By the end of the week, all but four of the piglets were dead. We sold the sow to pay for the vet bills and formula, all these added expenses my brother hadn’t anticipated. His friend, the self-proclaimed pig expert, suddenly bowed out of the whole project, announcing his parents wanted him to run his own night crawler business out of their garage instead. And my brother, perhaps overtired from spending all his days and nights watching over the dying piglets, came down with a fever. He was bedridden now.
My brother begged me from his bed to take care of them. His room was right across the hall from mine, and even though I tried to ignore him, pretend I couldn’t hear his raspy voice, he called to me, “Please, May-lee. Don’t let them die.”
And so I became the caretaker of my brother’s piglets.
I got used to mixing their formula after I’d fed and watered the chickens, the Holsteins, and goats. I crouched in the barn and held the piglets on my knee. They nudged each other, fighting to see who could feed first. I tried feeding two at a time, but when one pulled loose and sneezed, she spat up chocolate all over my overalls.
I didn’t want to grow fond of these creatures. They were too fragile. The deaths of the seven others had shown me that. So I came to think of the pigs by their colors: Red, Spotted, Pinky, and Pink Lady (after the characters in Grease).They were non-names, I convinced myself. I wouldn’t care about these pigs. They weren’t even mine, after all.
Red grew the fastest. Soon he didn’t want me to hold him. He was sturdy on his own four legs. He slurped down his milk, hiccupped, and trotted off, flapping his ears.
I had my mother take my senior picture with him for the yearbook. Red didn’t like posing, and squealed and bucked in my arms. I felt as though I were trying to hold a Pacific salmon. But my mother got one good shot. I’m smiling, and Red is in focus, ears stiff and alert, matching my braids.
That fall the pigs became my full responsibility. After his illness, my brother grew depressed. The pigs were costing more than his friend had predicted; they were more like farm sinkers than savers. My brother no longer came into the barn but worked outside instead, moving the cows’ grazing areas, checking the fencing, brooding.
Me, I watched the pigs grow up. There’s a saying that pigs are smarter than dogs, but I found that stereotype didn’t do either pigs or dogs justice. Pigs are different from dogs. These four had their own unique traits, their own way of interacting with the world — and me. To compare them to dogs would be to reduce their porcine personalities.
For example, if our dogs grew bored, they barked ceaselessly, trying to get our attention. When the pigs wanted entertainment, they waited for no one.
One Sunday after church I was making lunch with my mother when I heard a strange honking noise, almost like geese. Extremely large geese. “The pigs are out!” My mother pointed at the window.
Indeed, the pigs had busted out of the barn and were now digging across the lawn with their powerful snouts, churning up the soil. Within minutes, they’d managed to dig a trench more than two feet deep.
I threw on my coat and ran outside.
“Pigs! Pigs!” I shouted, realizing that maybe it had been a bad idea not to name them. Then I tried snorting at them, honking from the depths of my throat, which is closer to the sound pigs make than oink, oink! Believe me.
Red looked up, flapped his ears, ran toward me, nuzzled my jeans with his snout, then happily returned to destroying the lawn.
I ran to the barn and grabbed a metal bucket, filled it with corn.
Clanging on the bucket with the grain scoop, I shouted, “Corn! Food! Corn!” Only then was I able to lure them back to the barn, walking backward, letting Red — the leader — sniff the corn every now and then, but not allowing him to eat until I got them inside.
At least this stereotype was true: pigs really did like to hog their food.
By the time snows blanketed our farm, and the wind-chill was well below zero, the pigs no longer wanted to go outside. They were content to play in the barn, eating rapidly, then shooting their empty metal feed dishes with their snouts across the concrete floor like hockey pucks. They were growing fast, and if I wasn’t careful, they could easily knock me over. Red tried to include me in their game, whacking a feed dish against my leg so hard that I had bruises for a month. After that, I learned to keep my distance while they played.
I liked to climb the vertical ladder to our loft, where we kept the Holsteins’ bales of alfalfa. I sat with my legs dangling down, watching them. The pigs resembled small whales from above, I thought. They even seemed to move as if in a pod.
Of all the animals I fed, the pigs were the only ones who appeared to look at me, really notice me. Red genuinely liked to rub up against me. He seemed grateful for the food and fresh water I brought him. Even my family didn’t show me as much gratitude.
My mother told me God could see me working hard, and that I would be rewarded in heaven. I loved my mother dearly, but her words weren’t much consolation. Farm work was hard, I was tired, and my back ached day and night.
However, the pigs always grunted in joy when I opened the barn doors, carrying a fresh bucket of water for them. They seemed pleased after I scraped up their poop with a snow shovel and took it out of the barn. Unlike the chickens or cows, who treated me like a slow waiter, the pigs jumped up at my very appearance, happy that I had come to feed them no matter how terrible the weather outside.
By February, they were as tall as my hipbones, and heavy. When I brought them their corn and they pressed up against me, I felt genuine fear. Red’s affectionate nudges could knock me over. He didn’t know his own strength, but I knew the pigs could crush me now, as easily as their mother had crushed their siblings, should I lose my footing and fall in their path.
At dinner, I mentioned to my brother sadly that it might be time to sell them to a real hog farm. “They seem big enough. They’re up to my hips.”
“They can’t have grown that fast,” my brother said.
But the next morning he came out to the barn to check.
“Holy!” he said. “How’d they get so big?”
“It’s been six months.”
“I’ll get Jimmy to come up this weekend,” my brother said. “We can use his pickup to take them to market. He’ll know how to sell them to a hog farm.”
That weekend, Jimmy showed up late, midafternoon, and he insisted on parking near the road so his pickup wouldn’t get muddy, as it would if he pulled up closer to the barn. He wanted to herd the pigs to his truck, he said.
“That’s not gonna work,” I said.
But Jimmy laughed at me, a girl trying to tell them what to do, and my brother laughed too because he wanted a friend.
I wanted no part of this disaster. They weren’t even my pigs, I told myself, so I turned my back and started walking through the snowdrifts back to our house.
Behind me, I could hear the barn doors sliding open and the squealing of the pigs. Then more squealing. Swearing from Jimmy, from my brother.
I turned around and saw the pigs taking off through the grove, heading behind the barn, running everywhere in the snow except toward the pickup truck.
“No!” I shouted. “They’ll catch cold and get sick!”
Jimmy was smiling, his fallback reaction when things went wrong.
“Goddammit!” I swore, running back to the barn to fill the feeders. Then I brought out a bucket of corn. Red ran past me into the barn. His instincts were good, and he was seeking familiar shelter. Spotted and Pink Lady followed Red.
But Pinky was missing. My brother and I found her behind the barn, lying on her side in a snowdrift, panting heavily, her eyes wild. She didn’t even try to sniff the corn in my bucket. I knelt down beside her. “It’s okay,” I said. I tried to offer her a handful of corn.
“Pigs’ll get pneumonia in this weather,” my brother said.
“Ya think?” I was furious. “Jimmy’s an idiot. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, sadly.
“You back the truck up and set up the ramp at the barn door, and I’ll get them into the truck. Okay?”
“Okay,” my brother said. And he walked off.
Pinky calmed down and started sniffing the corn in the bucket. She followed me to the barn.
The other pigs were agitated. Red was running back and forth. I brought them a fresh bucket of water from the pump outside.
I could hear the pickup truck coming up the gravel, but the pigs were calming now. Everything was familiar; I was there, feeding them. What was there to fear?
I’d have to trick them to get them into that truck now. I’d have to get them to trust me. One last time.
Red was guzzling water. He was not used to exercise, certainly not used to running through snow. He panted heavily.
My brother knocked on the door, but the smell of exhaust filling the barn had already warned me the truck was in place.
I filled another bucket with corn.
“You guys hungry?” I kept my voice light. I grunted at the pigs in my best pig voice. Red trotted over to me, then put his snout in the bucket. Pigs’ fatal flaw is their appetite.
“Okay. Let’s go,” I said, and I pulled open the barn doors. My brother let down the ramp and I ducked under the topper and climbed up into the bed of the pickup, leading Red with the bucket of corn. Maybe he thought this was a new game. Why not? He had no reason not to trust me.
The other pigs followed him. Then my brother closed the pickup’s back door and I jumped out the window, which he then closed before the pigs tried to follow suit.
“Those pigs aren’t feeders anymore. They’re market weight,” Jimmy announced, coming round the side. “Bet you’ll get a good price.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and I walked back to the house.
Indeed, when my brother returned from the stockyards in Sioux City, Iowa, that evening, he reported the pigs were more than two hundred pounds a piece. He’d been able to sell them straight for slaughter, no middleman needed.
I sat at the kitchen table. There was nothing to say. I knew the pigs had been destined to die some day. They were pork. But it didn’t feel good having led my Red to his own slaughter. The only thing worse would have been to let my brother’s friend continue to ineptly chase the pigs through the snow, until they fell, got sick, were injured, or died of a heart attack from the exertion.
There was no point being squeamish on a farm, I told myself.
But then I went to my room, slammed the door, and cried.
I wanted to believe I’d done the right thing, that I’d given my pig some joy while he was alive. But I wondered, when he reached the slaughterhouse did he figure out that I had betrayed him? Did he blame me? Or did he still hope that I might show up and save him in the moments before his terrifying and undoubtedly painful death?
I knew then that I could never come back to this farm. Once I left home for college, I’d have to find a place for me in the world where I could be happy, where my work would be appreciated, and where my values would be shared. I loved my family, but I never wanted to live on a farm again.