A Day No Pigs Would Die (10 page)

“How’s the traveler?” I heard Papa ask.

“Back,” Mama said. “Back from a dream.”

During the night, there was noise outside in the hen coop. I heard the hens cackle and scold. I saw a lit lantern in the upstairs hall, and then all was quiet. I tried my holy best to wake up, but I just couldn’t.

Right after I shut my eyes it was chore time. Daisy had to be milked and watered and fed. Solomon the same. Except only a fool would put a pail under him. I was pouring the milk for separating (to get the cream off) when I saw Papa leaving the hen coop with a dead hen.

“Weasel,” Papa said. “And hardly no mark on her.”

“Chicken for supper, Papa?”

“Yup. Say, you want to see something?”

“Sure.”

Papa took me into the tackroom. Hanging on a peg was a burlap sack that moved around a bit. Quite a bit, the closer we got.

“What you got, Papa?”

“What I got is that weasel. First one I ever could corner and sack. He’s really got a mouthful of mean teeth.”

“Can I look?”

“Later. When I reason out what to do with him. He’s caused me too much grief to kill without a ceremony.”

“You aim to let that weasel go free?”

“Not likely.”

“Papa, I was at Mrs. Bascom’s last week.”

“So?”

“You know her hired man, Ira Long?”

“Heard his name.”

“Well, he’s got a bitch terrier. I seen her when I went to thank Mrs. Bascom for asking the Tanners to take me to Rutland.”

“Full growed?”

“I’d say so, Papa. But real young.”

“After we breakfast, boy, you run down there and tell Brother Long that we got a weasel to try his dog on. And he’s welcome to it.”

“Sure will. I never see a dog get weaseled.”

An hour later, a horse and rig pulled into our lane. On it was Ira Long and me and his dog, Hussy. She was a sweet little dog, and all the way home, as I was holding her, I wondered how well she’d fare against a weasel.

Papa was there to meet us, and he gave Ira his hand.

“Haven Peck,” he said. “We’re glad you could pay us call, Brother.”

“Ira Long. I already know your son.”

“Most folks do.” Both the men laughed. I don’t know why but I laughed, too.

“He’s a good ’un,” said Ira.

Papa looked at the small gray-and-white terrier that I was still holding in my arms. “You tried that bitch on weasel yet?”

“No. But I hear you got one.”

“A big one,” Papa said. “Mean as sin.”

“Papa,” I said, “why do folks weasel a dog? Is it for the sport of it?”

“No,” Papa said, “there’s earthy reason. ’Cause once you weasel that dog, that dog’ll hate weasels until her last breath. She’ll always know when there’s one around and she’ll track it to its hole, dig it out, and tear it up. A man who keeps a hen house got to have a good weasel dog.”

“That’s the truth of it,” Ira said. “Every weasel in the county will keep wide of my little Hussy.”

When the three of us walked into the tackroom I was still carrying Hussy. Soon as we got there, that burlap jumped around like it was loco. And I could feel Ira’s little terrier shaking in my arms. Just like she knew what was going to happen, and what she’d got to do to stay alive. She was whining, too. Just loud enough to hear.

“I got an idea she’ll make a good weasel dog,” Ira said.

“We’ll see,” said Papa.

He picked the sack off its peg. Inside, the weasel was hissing and spitting. He couldn’t see a dog, and she couldn’t see him. But they knew. They sure knew of each other.

“I’ll get a barrel,” I said. Handing the bitch to Ira, I ran up to the cellar where there was a good size apple barrel that was empty and waiting for this year’s orchard. It had a wooden lid on it which made it perfect for what we wanted it for. I set the barrel on its side. Holding the lid under one arm, I rolled the barrel down to where the men were waiting. Ira was holding his terrier, and Papa had the neck of the burlap bag tight in his hand. I stood the barrel up on its end, mouth open, and holding the lid ready.

“In you go, Hussy,” Ira said, placing his little bitch inside the barrel. “You give him what for.”

She sure was shaking, that dog. It made the whole barrel sort of tremble. Papa came forward with the sack.

“Is your lid ready?” he said to me.

“All set.”

“Soon’s I drop him from the sack, you lid that barrel and keep it lidded, hear?”

“Yes, Papa.”

Without more ado, Papa just emptied the sack. He poured the weasel right down inside the barrel
on top of the dog. I slammed the lid into place. I could hardly hold it on, and Ira come over to keep the barrel upright. Papa, too.

We heard a lot of scratching and chasing and biting inside the dark of that barrel. The dog was bigger, but the weasel sure had the darkness on his side. To be honest, I thought a fight between a dog and a weasel was going to be a real excitement. But I hated every second of it. The whole thing seemed senseless to me and I was mad at myself for standing there to hold down the barrel lid. I even felt the shame of being a part of it. From the look on Papa’s face I could see that maybe he wasn’t enjoying it so much either.

At last all the noise stopped. There wasn’t a sound. Papa nodded to me, and I slipped the lid a crack, just enough to let some light in so we could look down inside. Then we heard the dog cry. It was a whine that I will always remember, the kind of sound that you hear but never want to hear again.

Ira pulled the lid of the barrel away and looked inside. The weasel was dead. Torn apart into small pieces of fur, bones, and bloody meat. There was blood all over the inside of that barrel, from top to bottom. The dog was alive, but not much more. One of her ears was about tore off and she was wet with blood. She just danced her little feet, splattering the
pool of blood in the bottom of the barrel. And making that sound in her throat that almost begged someone to end her misery.

Ira reached down to lift her out of the barrel. As he picked her up, her teeth bared and she ripped open his hand. He gave out a yell and dropped her on the ground. One of her front paws was chewed up so bad, it wasn’t even a paw anymore. All of the bones in that foot must have been split to pieces. It was nothing but a raw stump.

“Kill her,” I said.

“What?” said Ira, his hand bleeding into the cuff of his shirt.

“She’s dying,” I said. “And if you got any mercy at all in you, Ira Long, you’ll do her in. Right now. She killed the weasel. Isn’t that what you wanted to have her do, with all its sport? She’s crazy with hurt. And if you don’t kill her, I will.”

“Mind your tongue, boy. You’re talking to your elders,” said Ira.

“The boy’s right,” Papa said. “I’ll get a gun.”

Until Papa come back with the rifle, little Hussy just lay on the ground and whimpered. Papa put a bullet in her, and her whole body jerked to a quivering stillness. Nobody said a word. The three of us just stood there, looking down into the dust at what once was a friendly little pet.

“I swear,” Papa said. “I swear by the Book of Shaker and all that’s holy, I will never again weasel a dog. Even if I lose every chicken I own.”

I got a spade out of the tool room, and dug a small hole, and buried her under the timothy grass, near an apple tree. I even got down on my knees and said her a prayer.

“Hussy,” I said, “you got more spunk in you than a lot of us menfolk got brains.”

Pinky came home.

I had her blue ribbon pinned up on the wall over my bed, and took it out to show it to her. She sniffed at it and that was about all.

“You can be a right proud pig, Pinky,” I said, scratching her back. “You’re the best-behaved pig in the whole state of Vermont.”

She just snorted to that, and I was glad she wasn’t getting too filled with herself. A swell-headed pig would be hard to live with. I ran into the house and put the blue ribbon back on its pin over my bed. When I got back outside, Papa was home from butchering. His clothes were a real mess.

“Papa,” I said, “after a whole day at rendering pork, don’t you start to hate your clothes?”

“Like I could burn ’em and bury ’em.”

“But you wear a leather apron when you kill pork. How come you still get so dirty?”

“Dying is dirty business. Like getting born.”

“I never thought of it that way. But I’m sure glad that nobody’ll kill Pinky. She’s going to be a brood sow, isn’t she Papa?”

He didn’t answer. He just walked over to the fence and looked at my pig. Swinging his leg over the rails, he knelt down beside her and run his hand along her back. He looked at her rump real close, smelled her, and felt her backside with his hand.

“What’s wrong, Papa? Is Pinky ailing?”

“No, not ailing. Just slow. She should of had her first heat by now. Weeks ago. We could a bred her to boar at the third. Maybe she’s barren.”

“Barren? You mean …”

“I don’t know for sure, boy. Just maybe she’s barren.”

“Like Aunt Matty?”

“Yes. But that’s not to talk of. You’d hurt Matty if’n you said barren to her face. The hurt’s inside her. No need to fester it.”

“And you think Pinky’s barren? Tell me true, Papa.”

“Yes, boy. I think she be.”

“No,” I said. “No! No!”

My fists were doubled and I hit the top rail of the fence, harder and harder. Until my hands started to hurt.

“Rob, that won’t change nothing. You got to face what is.”

He climbed over the fence and walked to the barn, his tall lean body moving as if it knew more work would be done that day, tired or no.

“Rob!” Mama called to me from the kitchen door, and I left Pinky and ran up the hill to where she was standing, drying her hands on her apron.

“Go get a squirrel,” she said, smiling.

Inside the house, I took the .22 rifle off the lintel over the fireplace, dropped some cartridges in my pocket, and went back outside. I should of been happy, going squirrel hunting, but I just wasn’t.

There was a stand of hickory trees up on the west end of the ridge, on the yonder side of the spar mine. Now that it was autumn, the walnuts would be ripe and eaten. As I climbed up the ridge, I started searching the trees for a gray, a big fat one with a full paunch.

High in a nearby pin oak, there was a round brown ball of dead leaves and twigs. There was no movement near it, but I stood soldier still and waited. My eyes rolled into the tops of the other trees, but saw nothing. There just wasn’t a gray squirrel to be had. I walked up and into the trees, and sat on a stump. Looking down across the valley, it was yellow with goldenrod. Like somebody broke eggs all over the hillside.

Then I heard him! He was just over my head, sitting flat on a branch, twitching his long gray brush of a tail. And making that scolding squirrel chip-chip-chip-chip-chip sort of a sound. Sassy as salt. A round was already in the chamber. Raising the gun, I put the black bead of the front sight deep in the V-notch of the rear sight. The bead was just behind his ear when I squeezed the trigger.

It was like he was yanked off the limb by a rope. He fell kicking into a mess of leaves and brush, and when I got to him he was still twisting. Holding his back legs, I swung his body against the trunk of a sweet gum tree. His spine cracked, and he was dead.

Back on the kitchen stoop, I took a knife and cut open his belly. I was right careful not to cut the paunch. Removing the warm wet sack, I brought it into the kitchen, and washed it under the sink pump. Mama had a clean white linen hanky ready. I lanced the paunch and we emptied all the chewed-up nutmeats on it, spreading them out so they’d dry. Mama put the hanky up in the warming oven above the stove.

I couldn’t see the chocolate cake, but it had to be around somewheres. If there was no cake, Mama wouldn’t of wanted a gray. Outside, I cut up the rest of the squirrel and threw it to the chickens. They fought over the big hunks, and the larger hens bulled the weaker ones away. The scrawny ones got
nothing. I was thinking about that, when Papa come up behind me. We watched the matron hens eat, while the runts just watched.

“It isn’t fair, is it, Papa?”

“Rob, it ain’t a fair world.”

“How are the apples doing? You think it’s time we picked?”

“Two more days,” Papa said. “They ain’t good this year, and we can’t let any drop. The spanner worms were so heavy last June, it ate up lots of the buds.”

“We smoked, Papa.”

“That we did. But maybe the mix was wrong. Tell me again, boy, what you did.”

“Just like you said, Pa. It was last May when I scraped all the black ash off the inside of the fireplace and the cookstove. I mixed in the quicklime, and split it up so’s I could put a pile of it under every apple tree in the orchard.”

“How many?”

“Eighteen. We lost one to winter.”

“You add the water to the mix like I told you?”

“Yes, Papa. I threw about a cup on each pile and the mix hissed up real good. It really smoked up proper.”

“Was it windy?”

“Come to think, it was. Some of the vapors got blowed away.”

“Boy, you got to put ash and lime always windward to the tree. Test the breeze for each tree. Currents are strange in an orchard.”