homage to the pigs

When it came time this weekend for a toast – after I’d shot the pigs, after we’d scrubbed them, hung them, and skinned them, and after Alex, who had jumped into the pen to sever the jugular veins, poured us all generous shots of whiskey – all I could manage was, We had a lot of good times together.

How do you capture a whole life in a few words? We held our glasses.

And we’ll have many more good times together, Matt said. And he was right. The whole point of raising pigs was to have the meat. Or at least it had always been my plan to turn them into meat. So what if I’d loved pigs since childhood? So what if I’d come to love these pigs in particular? We drank.

They loved milk, Kate said. A few weeks before, I’d proposed that if Lily and Porkchop had a headstone, that would be their epitaph. But it didn’t seem funny now.

My sister, who knew my love of pigs, had warned me that it might be hard to kill them, even that my desire to have them, my pleasure in caring for them, might be a misplaced desire for children. But killing them wasn’t particularly hard. I’d spent time with them alone the night before, and again the morning of. By the time friends arrived to help, there was a job to do, and I probably didn’t afford myself the opportunity to be sad.

For a few weeks, when people asked I’d said I wanted to eat Porkchop, a castrated male, and sell Lily to someone who would breed her. (It seemed he would provide plenty of meat.) But when I decided, somewhat suddenly last week, to visit my mother across the country, I had no leads on a buyer.

Kate asked at Silver Gulch, where a waitress she knew raised pigs. The woman wasn’t there, but we sat at the bar and showed pictures of Lily to the bartender and a man at the bar who had raised pigs. (It had been our experience that about half the people we mentioned pigs to either had pigs or had raised them as children: the cook at Meals on Wheels, the foreman on Kate’s job, the sales clerk at AIH, my supervisor.) With the bartender, we joked about Lily living out her life as the restaurant’s mascot, eating spent brewing grains and scraps from the kitchen.

A day later, Kate got a nibble, but then the man never called back.

Two days before we planned to slaughter Porkchop, I posted an ad on Craigslist for a “well behaved, well cared for Russian/Duroc/Yorkshire gilt.” Comes with 150 pounds of pig food. I was excited for Lily to have another life, and I liked imagining the possibility of someday raising her piglets. But when I thought of her in a muddy lot, bullied by bigger pigs, I realized I didn’t wish for her what I might for myself – an interesting life. I wanted her life to be all fresh straw, apple slices, and milk. No one responded to the ad, and maybe it’s just as well. She and Porkchop had never been apart, and I wasn’t sure how she’d do without him.

I had not weighed the pigs in months, but was able to estimate their weight using a formula I’d found online (girth squared, times length, divided by 400). I figured Porkchop weighed a little over 200 pounds and Lily about 160. Porkchop had reached standard market weight in four and a half months, ahead of the six months I’d expected from my pig book.

Both of them grew quickly, tripling their weight in the first month we had them. When Kate and I brought them back in May from a farm across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, they lived first, quite comfortably, in a third of my small woodshed. I remember how little they looked when I transferred them – carrying both at once – to the pig patio.

But Porkchop especially seemed to grow at an unbelievable rate. Every few days I would look again and think, Really? You’re that big? When they were a few months old, I started giving them ground barley – the locally grown and cheapest feed – which I would sometimes mix into a slop with milk, water, and a high-protein concentrate. Even if they’d been eating all day (I free fed them the whole time), they could eat ten pounds of mush in a few minutes. They could drink a half-gallon of milk in maybe 30 seconds. For the last few weeks, it seemed I was opening a new 50-pound bag of feed every few days.

As Porkchop got bigger, he took longer to stand up, and sometimes he ate sitting down, which suggested a certain laziness. But they were also solid and strong. I remember at the farm how a piglet of 20 pounds had pushed me up from a squatting position. I could push Lily and Porkchop and they wouldn’t move, slap them and they wouldn’t flinch. I scratched their backs as forcefully as I could. Porkchop looked like he could play football. Lily, for a while, looked like a ballerina, her full weight balanced on four tiny hooves.

Recently they’d started to seem grown up. They no longer chased each other around the pen, sliding across the floorboards or jumping the water bowl.

Do pigs ever get sick? my German Couchsurfer asked one evening last week. I said they hadn’t, and wondered at it myself. I’ve never been able to keep a plant alive, and here were these guys, walking around in their own waste, in full health. When Kate and I brought them home – in a borrowed dog crate under a borrowed topper – I’d stopped often to check on them. We gave them goat milk from baby bottles and adjusted the windows for what we guessed was the right temperature for month-old pigs. Since then, I’d merely kept them fed and watered and mucked the pen as much as I could stand.

But the night Judith asked, I noticed Porkchop was limping. He wasn’t using his front right hoof at all. An infection? A splinter? By then I knew I’d have to slaughter him soon, so there was no question of hiring a vet. The next day, I washed his foot while Kate passed stalks of kale through the fence. The swelling and lack of tenderness made me think he’d just sprained his ankle, climbing onto the feeder for an apple or slipping on the wet floor. He could still get around, but he couldn’t shove Lily away from the feeder, and he generally seemed humbled. Lily had started out as the bully, making up for her smaller size with aggressiveness and smarts. But as Porkchop got bigger, he pushed and blocked his way to the lion’s share of food. We thought he was kind of a jerk. Now, with his handicap, we felt a tenderness toward him. 
They weren’t pets. They never approved of the harness that would have allowed walks. And if they knew their names, they didn’t respond to them. But they let me scratch them, and they usually came to us when we were there, either to say hello or because we often gave them food. When I cleaned the pen, Lily would tip over my bucket and shovel, stick her head between my legs. When I screwed boards around their sleeping area (to keep the straw in place), Porkchop took the end of the tape measure in his mouth. Lily tugged on my t-shirt.

They loved shoelaces, and spent hours chewing on a length of rope I tied in their pen. They liked chewing on the teeter-totter I made them. They loved the cheap swimming pool I got them – until I spooked Porkchop and he crushed it.

A few days ago, Mark and Annmarie brought their daughter to meet the pigs. I sliced an apple, a pluot, and a banana and tore off some chunks of baguette. Claire, who is one and a half, seemed scared at first, and didn’t want to feed them or even get close to the wire fence. Pig, she said. Mark and I fed them milk from baby bottles and stuck a few slices of apple through the fence. Eat, Claire said. She was smiling now.

I mixed the rest of the fruit and bread into a mushy bowl of barley and dropped the bowl into the pen. The pigs dug into the food, pushing each other out of the way with their snouts. Claire said, Pig eat, which was about all she could say and about all that needed to be said.

Like all of us, Claire had learned that pigs say oink. But I’m not sure I ever heard Lily and Porkchop oink. When we carried them by a hind leg from the pen at the farm, they squealed. And Porkchop squealed later, whenever I weighed him (I used a bathroom scale until they reached 60 pounds). They also whined, if they saw me through the fence pouring some milk, or if the fighting for food seemed unfair to one. But mostly they made a little grunt – what I suppose is the oink – that seemed to say, You there? Uh huh. When they were very little, the call and response was almost constant. You there? Uh huh. Later, it came and went. They were quite vocal the few times we let one pig out of the pen. When Lily was free, Porkchop whined for himself and grunted, we thought, out of concern for her. Where are you? Right here. Lily explored as far as the outhouse and the bottom of the driveway (digging holes in the packed rock), but when Porkchop called her back, she came at a sprint that reminded me of the pot-bellied pig races I’d seen as a kid at the fair. When Porkchop started frothing at the mouth, we put Lily back in the pen.

The one time I let Porkchop out, he seemed to have no concern for Lily and no sense that his good behavior might allow future forays. He stayed out as long as he could (tearing up chunks of wet moss), and might have slept under the pen all week if I hadn’t shooed him out. I trapped him in the dog crate, but when I tried to lift it, he jumped free. Kate came over to help. I built an enclosed ramp with pallets and plywood. A little after midnight, Porkchop ran right up the ramp and into the pen, skipping the trail of Cheerios.  

I had made them a raised pen because I knew that any amount of black spruce forest I gave them would turn into a mud pit. But they liked being outside so much that I fenced in a small area of forest next to the pen. When I let them out, they raced between the skinny trees and rooted in the ground. Lily started digging along the fence line, and then Porkchop, and by the time I caught them, they were probably five minutes from breaking out. I reinforced the fence. Maybe a week later, I came home to find a good-sized tree leaning against the roof of the patio, literally uprooted by their rooting. One by one, they brought down the rest of the trees. My sister joked that I should start a land clearing and stump removal business. When the outdoor pen became a squishy mess of mud and poop, I locked the door.

It felt lonely coming home the day after the slaughter. I’d had a habit, for months now, of getting out of the truck and asking, Are they any pigs here? Because the road side of the pen was plywood, I could often hear them before I could see them. They would grunt, Uh huh, and come greet me, Lily putting my fingers in her mouth as if to nurse, and Porkchop, always more wary, allowing a wet fist bump with his snout.

After we’d hauled the meat to the butcher, my hands still red with blood, I’d come home and torn apart the pen, I guess to remove the reminder. For months I’d enjoyed watching them settle into their sleeping corner, or catching them having a midnight snack if I stepped out to pee. I saw them yawn and sneeze, dream and pass gas. Sometimes Kate and I would stand on the ladder to the loft and watch them out the window. No matter how aggressively they’d fought over the milk or kale, they always slept side by side, often with heads or hooves intertwined. Lily was always a light sleeper. Now each time I stepped outside, I looked reflexively over to where they’d been. I thought how much they would have liked a soft banana or some sliced white bread or the last bit of milk. It might have been misplaced sadness over a dying parent.

On the pigs’ last night, it frosted hard, the first of the season. They didn’t seem to mind the cold, but were slower to get up than when the days were longer and warmer. I sliced a peach and brought it to them. Porkchop didn’t get up at first, so I fed him where he lay in the straw.

It had been a pleasure to watch them eat – to see how much they wanted the food and how much they enjoyed eating it. I gave them wild rhubarb from my lot and bruised fruit and cheap milk from the supermarket. Kate brought Swiss chard, kale, and kohlrabi greens from her garden. We gave them watermelon, cantaloupe, and jelly-filled cake. The noise of them chewing, mouths wide open, always made me smile.

Porkchop got up eventually, but by then I had run out of peach. Both pigs came to me and buried their snouts in my chest until they would have pushed me over. I scratched their backs and tugged on their ears, then went inside to make tapioca pudding. I hope their last thought was that this time I remembered to add the vanilla.