The Mountain and the Valley (29 page)

“What did you ask Steve for?” David said to his father. “There’s you and I and Chris …”

Joseph never counted him, as he did Chris, when he figured the number required for a job like this. It always annoyed David. Yet, in a way, he was glad of it. The spectator sense had a special freedom when no
specific
niche in the job was assigned to you alone.

Everything was ready but the water. The big barn doors were open. Nails had been partly drawn in the boards of the manure shed, at the place where the carcase would be dragged out. The pole was placed across the big beams of the barn. It was ready for the hoisting rope that would be tossed over it, to ease the pig up and down into the scalding barrel. The scalding barrel had been chocked with boards nailed to the floor about its base, so that it wouldn’t tip. Joseph had sloshed lime about its sides to staunch the cracks. The knives for scraping and the knife for sticking had been brought to razor-edge by the spat-on whetstones. The men had tested them gingerly on the calloused balls of their thumbs. They lay, by the whetstones, on the manger ledge. The .22 lay ready on top of the feedbox. Its three shells were placed carefully beside it.

Everything was ready but the water. The teakettle was boiling, but the water in the double boiler and in the great iron pot had only a wisp of steam over its surface.

The men waited. And the pig waited. It rooted its tough snout furiously into the manure because it had been given no breakfast. Its flaccid ears and jowls joggled peevishly. Its eyes were as stupid-looking from their cautious, veering line of vision as for their vacuity. It never lifted its head to glance at anything directly.

This was the part that David always hated: that lull between preparation and the shot. The pig was marked for slaughter, but it was still alive.

The instant the pig responded to the bark of the gun with collapse, the bottom would fall out of his tension, like a trap door opening. Everyone moved at once then. They shouted commands that were meaningless because each was already executing them as prearranged: Ben and Steve rolling her over, David and Chris grasping her hind legs, Joseph searching the jugular. At the spurt of blood they all stepped back again, like a kind of exhalation. They moved only when the automatic buckling, flabbering convulsions of the pig flopped her near their feet—while the trajectory of blood from the pimpled mouth in her throat spent itself lower and slower. Then it was all right.

Nor did he mind anything that came after. The manure on his hands, the blood on his overalls, even if it soaked through to his flesh; or the filthy toenails that must be shucked off before they set. He didn’t mind scraping the bristles from the blow-puffed eyelids above the open gelid eyes; or basting the bristles with water from the scalding barrel (roiled now with blood, flakes of skin, and the faeces which always evacuated itself automatically after death). Nor tying off the bladder canal with a piece of string, after the pig had been hung and its flesh had split back triangularly from the apex of Joseph’s knife as it pencilled down toward the navel.

It wasn’t that he minded the pig being
killed
, either. It was just this horrible lull. Did the pig have ten minutes left, or fifteen?

There was no tension in the others. It might have been any other job. With one difference. With work at the barn every single remark seemed to be watched for the possibility of ringing a sexual twist on it. David’s own ribaldry was not inhibited by his tension. The tension only sparked his ability to reshape and transcend their clumsy obscenities.

They leaned their elbows on the boards of the manure shed and surveyed the pig.

“What’ll she go?” Ben said.

“Oh I dunno. Two twenty-five’ll take every pound that’s in her, won’t it?” Joseph said. He underestimated her weight because she was his own.

“Look, Joe,” Ben said, because it was
not
his pig and because he was Ben, “if that pig don’t go two seventy-five, two ninety, I’m a fool.”

“She ain’t comin on, is she, Joe?” Steve said. “She looks kinda red back there.”

“Steve shouldn’t be looking at things like that,” Ben said. “He’s too young.”

“Steve’s been lookin so much at them things lately,” David said, “he’s sunburnt.”

They laughed. Steve didn’t say anything. A smirk shuffled around behind his eyes. It pleased him to let the inference stand, whether it was true or not.

“I’ll see if the water’s hot yet,” David said. He ran to the house. The water hadn’t come to a boil.

The men were in the barn floor when he got back.

“Well, sir,” Ben was saying, “here she was with her dress caught up in the door latch and all you could see was these big
letters on her drawers—
SUPERTEST LAYING MASH.”

It was one of his “stories.” They’d heard it before, but they all laughed.

David’s face was serious. “I don’t know how true it is,” he threw in, “but they said when she broke wind the first few days she had them drawers on you couldn’t see her for dust.”

“Ha,
haaaaaaa?”
Ben drew out the last ‘haaaa’ in a long inquisitive wail.

(Oh God, David thought, if that shot were only over …)

Steve looked up at the rafters. “You build this barn?” he said to Joseph.

“Well, it was Father’s,” Joseph said. “I made it over some. Or helped. Freem Lonas and Reuben, his brother Reuben, was the carpenters. They worked together.”

“I guess they worked together more ways’n one,” Ben said. “Half them kids o’ Freem’s was Reuben’s.”

“Did you hear about the time Freem caught Reuben warmin up the old woman on the kitchen lounge?” David said. (Would that damn water never boil!)

“No,” Steve said, “What?”

“Well, Freem flew off the handle and Reuben said, ‘Now, Freem, don’t be so goddam touchy! We never meant nothin by it’.”

“Ha, haaaaaa? Yes, sir, ‘don’t be so goddam
touchy’!”

Ben mimicked Freem’s voice. David had no gift of mimicry; but it was he who could twist Freem’s phrasing to make a story out of a fact.

The pig fretted the trough with her teeth because there was no food in it. He had a sudden impulse to give her some last bite; but there was no way of sneaking it to her, and if he did it openly his act would be impossible to explain.

“Dave, take another look at that water,” Joseph said.

He started to run, then stopped and walked. He always started to run when he was asked to look for something, and then stopped. The running made him feel like a child being sent on an errand.

The water was restless, but it wasn’t really boiling.

When he came back this time, Ben was pretending to Chris that he saw a handkerchief of Charlotte’s up in the haymow. Chris was grinning mildly, saying, “Oh, sure, sure …”

You couldn’t tease Chris. A joke just eddied around him. And no one ever thought of teasing Joseph. Fun wasn’t alien to him, obscenities came surely enough to his tongue in the composition of an oath. But he had no way of putting his shoulder to the wheel of a joke at all. His slow smile just followed around on the periphery.

The men sauntered about the barn. They examined a cow tie, or the hinge of a shutter, or the bent tine of a fork, with the spurious concentration of men waiting. David’s tension kept him immobile. Ben tested his knife once more on the ball of his thumb. He made a mock swipe at David’s crotch with it.

“Look out, look out …” he said.

“Go ahead,” David said. “There’s nothin there. Why don’t you slash a piece off that old gut-ranger of yours … it’s gonna slap your knee out one o’ these days.”

This routine of minimizing your own organs and positing enormity to someone else’s—he knew it like the back of his hand.

“I oughta cut that thing o’ yours off and send it down to Bess,” Ben said.

“She wouldn’t know what to do with it,” David said. “She might use it to cork up her iodine bottle.”

“She’d know what to do with it all right,” Ben said. He
turned to Chris. “D’ya think the old thing sneaks down there once in a while, Chris? I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Chris was sitting on a rung of the ladder to the hayloft.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said sheepishly.

There was a curious embarrassment in Chris and David both. It was always like that when a group’s general joking about women suddenly narrowed to the two of them. They never talked in front of each other about anything they did with girls. This odd constraint held, even more so, between David and his father. When
they
were alone (though it had nothing to do with modesty on either’s part), they couldn’t discuss even how the heifer made out with the bull. They couldn’t urinate in each other’s presence even, without embarrassment.

Steve picked up the .22. He sighted around the barn with it. (Don’t, Steve, for God’s sake. Put it down, put it down …)

“Moses and Aaron, Joe,” Ben said good-naturedly, “ain’t that water hot yit? Bring it up here and I’ll piss in it.”

“I’ll take it down and git Bess to piss in it,” David said. “That oughta start the bristles on anything.”

“Ha, haaaaaaaa?”

He felt a stab of betrayal, the minute he spoke about Bess like that. Suddenly he despised Ben’s sly smut. But he couldn’t help saying what he did—not if it made them laugh. His heart beat fast as he walked to the house. Surely this time …

“The water’s boiling,” his mother said when he came through the door. (Ellen wasn’t there. She always went down to the marsh the morning anything on the farm was killed.)

He lifted the cover off the double boiler. The water was turning itself inside out, as if with anger. He felt cold all over. He went to the door and beckoned for the men.

“Now dip some of that out before you lift it,” Martha said as David grasped one of the handles. “If them handles give way it’d scald you to
death.”

“Ohhhhh, it’s all right,” David said.

“Well, take a holder,” she said. “Them handles’s hot.”

“Take a holder, Dave,” Ben said. He grasped the other handle. “I got me cap.”

“It’s all right,” David said.

Now the water steamed in the scalding barrel, and Ben picked up the gun. He broke it down and slipped in a shell.

“You
better shoot her,” he said to Joseph.

“No, go ahead, you shoot her,” Joseph said.

“Maybe I’ll miss,” Ben said, winking.

“No, you shoot her.”

And now they were all standing by the boards outside the manure shed. This was the time that David could barely stand.

“Here, pig, pig, pig …” Ben coaxed.

The pig stopped rooting. She glanced at him, obliquely, out of her stupid pig’s eyes. He raised the gun and sighted along it to the spot just above the halfway point between her eyes. There was absolute stillness. David felt as if his own heart were contracting on the trigger.

(Pull, you damn fool, pull …)

But Ben waited too long to perfect his aim. The pig swung her head sidewise. He lowered the gun. “You gotta git em jist right, ya know,” he said, “their brain ain’t only that big.” He made a little circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“Take yer time,” Joseph said.

Ben raised the gun again. He followed the pig’s movements with it. He kept the spot in her head covered, waiting for her to hold steady. Several times she was still for a second.
David’s tension would knot. Then just before the shot would have come, she’d move.

“She ain’t facin me fair enough,” Ben said.

Joseph got into the pen with her. He took hold of her tail. He slapped her rump and roused her around facing the boards.

“There …” Ben said, “that’s good, that’s good …” Joseph stood back.

Ben raised the gun. Again there was that second when the pig’s head was still and the gun was still. David felt the tension would split him apart. But again she moved. She turned around and went toward a corner. Joseph tried to head her off, but she was completely stubborn.

“Don’t git her runnin, Joe,” Ben said. “Let
me
in there.” He climbed into the pen. “Here, pig, pig, pig …”

And then the gun began again that awful circling. It would stop long enough for David’s heart to contract on the trigger, then move again, because the pig’s head moved a fraction of a second before her brain could be found surely. Circling and stopping, circling and stopping …

“Hell,” Chris said, “let’s throw her and stick her. There’s enough of us here.”

“Yes,” David said, “let’s.” Anything but that goddam gun following her brain, circling and stopping …

“No … now jist take it easy,” Ben said. “I’ll git her … I’ll git her …”

“Take yer time,” Joseph said.

“There!” Ben exclaimed. “If she’d jist stay right there!

Pig, pig, pig, pig …”

But she moved. She began to root peevishly.

“She won’t raise her head enough,” Ben said. “It’s no good to shoot em low. She’s lookin fer something to eat, y’see.”

“I’ll go get her an apple,” David said eagerly. He’d walk slowly. He might hear the shot before he got to the house even.

Just as he turned, he heard Chris whisper to Steve, “Dave don’t like to see anything killed.”

It might have been Chris’s hand across his face. It wouldn’t have inflamed him so if Chris had said it in derision. It was that indulgence they always used. Their exposing a whim of his he’d thought secret left him as shameful for the whim’s transparency as for the whim itself. Making a goddam fool of him. As if it was
killing
the goddam pig he minded. He’d have struck Chris right in the face, but it was the kind of anger that striking anyone wouldn’t help.

“Shut
your damn …”

He never knew if Chris heard his shout or not. Just then the gun barked and everything happened at once. The moment erupted into other shouts and movements. The swirl of his anger mixed everything up.

Chris grabbed up the hammer. David tore the boards off the opening without waiting for it, and leapt inside. He was first at the pig’s hind legs. They were thick with dung at the feet, but he grasped them there. It was a gesture of derision at a daintiness in the others who even in their haste grasped a clean spot if possible. The pig began to buckle convulsively.