“How long before someone and then someone else steps over that line, crosses the gates and barriers, and strikes the fatal blows against the source of the stench skulking out of the east and drags it across the gutter and off into history?”
I wore dark gray coveralls, black rubber boots that came halfway up my calves, and a sweat-stained Lamberton Stockyards cap. I held a claw hammer in my left hand and with the right gripped the top of the steel gate as I swung one leg over and then the other. The long concrete alleyway that ran perpendicular to twelve pens, each leading to a small open-front barn, glared under the July sun. The stench of pig shit hung heavily in the dead air; feeder lids banged and echoed across the cement. Sprinklers hissed above the dark open front of each barn, a fine mist blooming over the hogs’ bristly backs and mixing in a stew of manure that crept down the cement grade, under the gates, and into the gutter in the alleyway.
I stopped in front of the third pen and crawled over the gate. Pigs nosed feeder lids, sprawled on their sides under the sprinklers, and grunted inside the dark shed where a wall fan hummed. Slowly I walked through the hogs and nudged those snuffling at my boots out of the way with the hammer handle. I rubbed a bare hand over a coarse red back. These had gotten a good start: they were run in here as forty-pounders and now weighed 100-110 pounds.
All but one.
He stood in the shade of the feeder: a gaunt, rangy Hamp, his spine a rough ridge protruding over the washboard of his ribs and his head drooping in the corner. He wasn’t gaining, wouldn’t no matter how much he ate. I stood behind him and then with a knee bumped him ahead. As he slowly wound past the thick hogs muscling for a spot at the feeder, a lid banged shut, and a solid white pig backed into my leg.
I eased the runt toward the gate fronting the alleyway and to the metal water trough. I straddled him as he drank and waited for him to stand still. Then, I lifted the hammer, held it overhead, and, as he raised his nose, slammed it into the bony spot right above his eyes. His knees buckled, his snout draining water, and he sank like an imploded shack. I bent down, grabbed him by a hind leg, swung him over the gate, and dropped him on the cement. Later, I’d carry him to the far end of the alleyway, lay him in the dirt beyond the last barn, and call the rendering truck.
I wasn’t then and still am not prone to violence. Even though that was a lifetime ago, I can’t help but wonder at my steady, businesslike execution of this and other similar tasks during the year I worked there. Like castrating boars, docking feeder pigs’ tails, dehorning steers, and moving livestock through a chute with the electric sizzle of a cattle prod, it seemed a normal, necessary part of the job. I saw these as the simple facts of life and death on the farm where I grew up and then at the stockyards where I worked as a nineteen-year-old yard hand.
These days, however, I concede bathroom corners to spiders. I scoop up the occasional box elder bug climbing a drape, carry it to the door, and toss it, fluttering away, outside. If I inadvertently vacuum up a ladybug, I mumble, “Sorry,” beneath the drone of the Hoover. On the driveway I sidestep ants. Last summer I dug a small hole beneath the cedars near the garage; scooped up a flattened, disemboweled squirrel from the street; slipped him into the cool ground; covered him; and tamped the soil smooth and firm. Maybe I’ve gotten soft, been too long off the farm, pumiced down that youthful callousness with books, keyboards, pencils, and parenting. Maybe it’s my age—I turned sixty a couple months ago—and the sense that I’ve no more right than anyone else to break up homes or cut lives short.
But these days kindness, compassion, and mercy have little currency. The civilized are criminalized, the lethality of deportation is ignored, and discriminatory force is applied indiscriminately. The mantra “rule of law” is more precisely “rule by law,” and passage is too often greased and politicized while enforcers take liberties with and by interpretation. The thin blue line, drawn ever thinner, is less and less transparent.
I can’t help but wonder at what point will the vulnerable and voiceless say, “Enough”? How much provocation will people endure before they’ve had their fill? What happens when we finally admit to ourselves that civility makes us targets, that concession is perceived as caving, that submission is an admission of complicity, that public commitments and promises are too often fake, farce, mere tops to be spun? If not vulgarity, greed, incompetence, and inhumanity, what will finally incite us? How long before someone and then someone else and someone else steps over that line, crosses the gates and barriers, and strikes the fatal blows against the source of the stench skulking out of the east and drags it across the gutter and off into history?
