CHAPTER EIGHT

I’m thinking back to the piglets. The lessons I learned then, at nine and a half years old.

Those piglets are my most personal attempt. And yet I make mistakes, mistakes that still sting my soul even now.

Three months after the chicken debacle, I slaughter all three remaining piglets—Ferdinand’s brothers and sister—in a sort of frenzy, not pausing to savor the deaths, wanting so badly to recapture the excitement I felt when I killed Ferdinand. My knife-work is clumsy and rough. I hack at them to get the guts and organs out. I neglect to catch the blood in buckets. Not that we have enough buckets for such a massive quantity. I get a ringing backhand across the head for this, which rocks me back on my heels. Pa loves his fried black sausage with a couple of runny eggs and cornmeal mush in the morning.

He stares at the row of dead piglets hanging by the hind legs in a gently swaying curtain of flesh, the heaps of viscera, the thick pools on the dusty floor below their throats, my arms and torso spattered red. I scratch at some dried blood. It itches like crazy.

“How’d you get them all up there together?” he asks, his voice quieter now. I shoot him a quick look, tensed for another blow. Sometimes Pa shouts when he’s about to lash out, and sometimes his voice drops to a murmur just before the blow falls. It keeps me unbalanced. And always aware of where he is in relation to my body.

There will be a reckoning as always, but for now he is curious.

I show him the knots I tied, the pulleys hanging from the eaves: a complex web of support. My shoulders ache and my arm muscles throb with deep pain. Each piglet was hoisted into the air separately, but once they witnessed what happened to the first of them, they knew what was coming and they fought me. Later, I discover my shins are covered in bruises shaped like small cloven footprints. They remind me of purple cabbages.

“I took each one out of the pen separate,” I tell Pa, with my eyes fixed on the ground. “Hung it up. Slipknot around the hind leg.” I make a slashing gesture with the edge of my hand. “Knife.”

“Your ma won’t be pleased.” He eyes the carcasses. “Not to say you weren’t neat about it. Apart from wasting all that blood.”

“We can salt them.”

“It’s more meat than we need right now.” He points to the biggest of the piglets, Glinda (after the good witch). “Had plans for that one around Thanksgiving. Already spoke to Hank and James about helping out with raising the new barn, and hosting a pig roast in return.” He gestures at the next biggest, Wilbur, who swings slowly in a big circle, gore still dripping from the scarlet slash in his throat. “Promised ’em a couple of hams too, off of that one.”

Skilled hired hands were hard to come by, and often, for a big job, the local farmers got together and traded and bartered for help. Meat was as good as or better than money around here.

He sighs.

“Got nothing for them now. You’ll have to help with the barn. Salted meat ain’t nothing like good, fresh pork.”

I straighten my back and try not to wince as sore muscles protest.

“I can do it.” I thrust out my scrawny chest and lift my chin.

“You’re gonna have to. Can’t see any other way.”

He reaches out and places his hand on the nearest piglet. Its eyes are closed tight, fringed in white lashes. It looks touched by frost.

“Need to scald them still.”

Scalding takes the tough bristles off the pig skin. “I started the big pot boiling.”

“Those ropes you got hung, they gonna help you swing them all the way over there?”

I nod, showing him the special knots I’d come up with. They hold but they are also pretty easy to release and re-tie in a different way. As long as I have some leverage, like a strong support beam, I can manage the weight of each pig by myself.

Pa contemplates the ropes and then spits tobacco juice on the floor. “You’re not stupid,” he says finally. Though the expression on his face looks nothing like pride or approval.

I shift from foot to foot, and then freeze as he looks at me.

“Got to take care of this first.”

He unbuckles his belt and slowly pulls it from the loops. It’s good, thick leather with a big brass buckle in the shape of a horseshoe. He weighs it in his hand. I keep my spine straight as I can, though it threatens to bow under the pressure of dread. I know that buckle intimately, the snap and the whistle as it cuts through the air and then the sound of impact, a few seconds before the pain bites bone-deep. He’ll use the buckle first, chewing up the muscle beneath the skin, often leaving no visible marks, and then the strap against my buttocks, and for the next couple of weeks at school I’ll sit on the edge of my chair, and I’ll raise my hand for every question whether I know the answer or not. Just to get the chance to stand up off the hard wooden seat and go to the blackboard.