Letter From The Farm. Non-fiction.

Preface.  This short-short appeared in a four-hundred word version in the Summer 2010 issue of Meatpaper.  I submitted it to them at about that length, they waited seven weeks, during which time I increased it to one thousand--not necessarily improving it--and then they printed the original submission.  So, if you didn't read it in Meatpaper--as if anyone doesn't read Meatpaper--this is it, with all the trimmings. (This is the only thing I have submitted for publication.)  (Also, reading this as a personal update would be misleading.  I haven't worked on the farm since last November, and so was only visiting when this slaughter took place, January 2010.  Explaining the particular whereabouts and whyabouts of a peripatetic twenty-something's "emerging adulthood" (haha!) is punishingly cumbersome, and sometimes, seemingly no matter how many qualifications you add, still a bit of a lie.) 

Two Pigs

I would start right in with the first pig’s death if the story didn’t gain something with the questions that gave it context.

We farm in California’s Sierra foothills, amidst the diggins where the gold miners loosed water cannons upon the hillside, at the climatic juncture where the oaks of the valley reach up to meet the pines lumbering down.  Three years in, our best efforts were no longer yielding limp fences and flooded animal housing, but plumb gates and effective french drains.  We had wheat and lard for biscuits, and the goat’s milk to down them with.  Racks of lamb came out for special occasions, jars and buckets brimmed with seed, and we boasted enough cider and wine to help pretty girls smooch our bearded faces.  I want to say we were on the threshold of real beauty.  

Getting to this state, however, this state not just oriented towards “sustainability” but actually semi-sustainably productive, took causing real harm.  For example, we held notions about bloat, but couldn’t imagine that five minutes on wet, cold clover would kill Greta, our caprine matriarch.  We killed another goat—cleanly with a long knife—when her milk never tasted good, but the sour taste was probably caused by a curable mastitis.  We let piles of manure accumulate and putrefy, and then heavy rains connect them to the nearby stream.  We sowed more than we could reap.

We never caused harm intentionally, obviously, so, after the fact, we would take consolation in the faith that our knowledge was growing and the damage and harm was becoming less frequent.  We asserted that the sacrifices were necessary, no matter how lamentable, to bridge the chasm between our suburban upbringing and the competencies of our agrarian grandparents.  

This is the context within which Tim—the hub of our farm operation—and I invited twenty of our San Francisco friends up to the farm for a weekend of killing pigs, drinking whiskey and rendering lard.  Our experience with slaughtering counted twenty lambs, dozens of chickens, and the six or so male goats born to our milking does that we didn’t have the pasture for.  It was to be our fourth time sticking a pig, and our first unassisted by anyone with more experience or by anyone older than twenty-five. 

The morning of the slaughter a soaking January rain came down.  We would have postponed it if the arrival of our friends didn’t commit us.  We got the fire going to heat the scalding barrel, gathered tables, knives and heaters into the barn, and then all circled up dripping and expectant around the squirrelly, suspicious pigs.

With the first pig, the span of time from roaring indignance to silence was not more than a minute, so we felt good.  We rinsed and scalded her, and got her out of the rain and into the barn for scraping, and then set out to kill a second pig.  Our goal was two.

Like for the first, Tim took his eight-foot rope and made a slip-knot loop and cast it in the pen.  I sussed the pigs from their corner and after a couple missed passes, the now-fattest pig placed a foot directly in Tim's loop and he yanked it tight.  We moved to her and flipped her like the first and Tim stuck her like the first and we held her pinned to the ground as she cried to be leaving her life.  She cried and kept crying and five minutes later she was still crying—not that deafening human-like squeal, but a quiet, snorting lament.  

As the minutes passed, we looked to each other and felt awful as she persisted, head resting on her forelegs.  Our friends hesitantly asked, “Tim, did you get the main artery?”  “Tim, is there nothing we can do?”  “Tim, should we get a gun?”

We didn’t have a gun, so he went back in to make sure he had severed the main artery.  He extended her gash deeper and wider, and seeing nothing more to cut, concluded he must have severed it.  He stepped away at a loss for what else to do.  The pig also stood up.  She stumbled around before falling again, breathing heavily—she didn't want to die.  

Fifteen minutes on, we were stuck in the mud, still watching—she was quieting.  Someone suggested that maybe each pig suffered--was suffering--the same amount of pain in leaving their bodies: the first, sudden and complete like shattered ceramic, the second, gradual like evaporation.  It seemed plausible, given the burst of blood and terrified squeal of the first, and then, the almost patient, if still reluctant, subdued exit of the second.  

Eventually she fell silent completing the ordeal at twenty or thirty minutes.

We were ashamed in front of her, the uninvited profession of skilled slaughterers, and the confidences of our friends.  We couldn’t make head from tail, until later, when we had her chest open and we saw in her an anatomical anomaly doctors call situs inversus dextrocardia: her heart was on the wrong side.

People talk of small-scale production and process in various ways, and sometimes under the banner of “humane” treatment.  I do too, with conviction.  Was this a humane slaughter?  Surely not by its normal definition of minimal suffering and a quick death, sometimes conceived in a way as if all the pain could be lifted from killing and dying.  But were we not compassionate, given our understanding?  Should we have hired it out?  Scheduled it around an expert’s availability?  We’ll have a gun on hand next time.

“Humane” wants us in our perfection, but what of the limits to fully knowing and our need to learn by doing?  When is it proper to begin?   When is it proper to cease to defer and take the matter into your own hands, known-risks accounted for and the infinitude of contingencies be damned?  Could humane merely mean characteristically human?   That we pursue perfection, but embrace our suburban past and our current means, and presume the good will of a teacher faced with honest students?  Inadvertently but honestly bleeding a pig to death in front of all one’s friends is a terribly human-like thing to do.