Cherished (10 page)

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, cer
tainly 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.

H
aving a good dog is the closest some of us will ever come to knowing the direct love of a mother, or God, so it's no wonder it knocked the stuffing out of Sam and me when Sadie died. I promised Sam we'd get another puppy someday, but privately I resolved to never get another dog. I didn't want to hurt that much again, if I could possibly avoid it. And I didn't want my child's heart and life to break like that again. But you don't always get what you want; you get what you get. This is a real problem for me. You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

We should never have gotten a dog to begin with — they all die. While it is subversive when artists make art that will pass away in the fullness of time, or later that day, it's not as ennobling when your heart breaks.

When Sam was two, and George Herbert Walker Bush was president, I noticed I was depressed and afraid a lot of the time. I figured that I needed to move, to marry an armed man, or to find a violent but well-behaved dog. I was determined, as I am now, to stay and fight, and the men I tended to love were not remotely well enough to carry guns, so I was stuck with the dog idea.

For a while I called people who were advertising dogs in the local paper. All of them said they had the perfect dog, but perfect for whom? Quentin Tarantino? One dog we auditioned belonged to a woman who said the dog adored children, but it lunged at Sam, snarling. Other dogs snapped at us. One ran to hide, peeing as she ran. I took the initiative and placed an ad for a mellow, low-energy guard dog, and soon got a call from a woman who said she had just the dog.

As it turned out, she did have a great dog, a gorgeous two-year-old named Sadie, half black Lab, half golden retriever. Sadie looked like a black Irish setter. I always told people she was like Jesus in a black fur coat, or Audrey Hepburn in Blackglama, elegant and loving and silly. Such a lady.

Sadie was shy at first. The vet said she might have been abused as a puppy, because she acted worried about not pleasing us. He taught us how to get on the floor with her and plow into her slowly, so that she would see that we meant her no harm — that we were, in fact, playing with her. She tried to look nonchalant, but you could see she was alarmed. She was so eager to please, though, that she learned to play, politely.

Sadie lived with us for more than ten years, and saw us
through great joy and great losses. She consoled us through friends' illnesses, through the deaths of Sam's grandparents. She and I walked Sam to school every day. She was mother, dad, psych nurse. She helped me survive my boyfriends and the sometimes metallic, percussive loneliness in between them. She helped Sam survive his first mean girlfriend. She'd let my mother stroke her head forever. She taught comfort.

But when she was about to turn thirteen, she developed lymphoma. The nodes in her neck were the size of golf balls. The vet said she would live a month if we didn't treat her. Part of me wanted to let her die, so we could get it over with, have the pain behind us. But Sam and I talked it over, and decided she would have half a dose of chemo: we wanted her to have one more good spring. She was better two days after the chemo. She must have had a great capacity for healing: she went in and out of remission for two years. Toward the end, when she got sick again and probably wasn't going to get well, the vet said he would walk us through her death. He said that even when a being is extremely sick, ninety-five percent of that being is still healthy and well — it's just that the other five percent feels so shitty. We would focus on the parts that were well, he said, the parts that brought her pleasure, like walks, being stroked, smelling things, and us.

Our vet does not like to put animals to sleep unless they are suffering, and Sadie did not seem to be in pain. He said that one day she would go under a bed and not come out, and when she did, he would give us sedatives to help her stay
calm. One day she crawled under my bed, just as he said she
would.

It was a cool, dark cave under my bed, with a soft moss green carpet. Sadie's breathing was labored. She looked apologetic.

I called the vet and asked if I should bring her in. He said she'd feel safer dying at home, with me, but I should come in to pick up the narcotics. He gave me three syringes full. I took them under the bed with me, along with the telephone, with the ringer off, and I thought about injecting them all into my arm so my heart would not hurt so much. I wonder whether this would be considered a relapse by the more rigid members of the recovery community. I lay beside Sadie and assured her that she was a good dog even though she could no longer take care of us. I prayed for her to die quickly and without pain, for her sake, but mostly because I wanted her to die before Sam got home from school. I didn't want him to see her dead body. She hung on. I gave her morphine, prayed, talked to her softly, and called the vet. He had me put the phone beside her head, and listened for a moment.

“She's really not in distress,” he assured me. “This is hard work, like labor. And she has you, Jesus, and narcotics. We should all be so lucky.”

I stayed beside her on the carpet under the bed. At one point Sadie raised her head to gaze around, looking like a black horse. Then she sighed, laid her head down, and died.

I couldn't believe that she was gone, even though she'd been sick for so long. I could feel that something huge, a tide, had washed in, and then washed out.

I cried and cried, and called my brother and sister-inlaw.
Jamie said Stevo wasn't home, but she would leave him a note and come right over. I prayed again for my brother to be there before Sam came home from school, so he could take Sadie's body away, to spare Sam, to spare me from Sam's loss.

I kept looking at the clock. School would be out in half an hour.

Jamie and their dog, Sasha, arrived seventeen minutes after Sadie died. I had pulled the carpet out from under the bed. Sadie looked as beautiful as ever. Jamie and I sat on the floor nearby. Sasha is a small white dog with tea-colored stains; she has perky ears and tender eyes and a bright, dancing quality — we call her the Czechoslovakian circus terrier — and we couldn't resist her charm. She licked us and ran up to Sadie and licked her, too, on her face. Then she ran back to us, as if to say, “I am life, and I am here! And my ears are up at this hilarious angle!”