Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (77 page)

I never thought to say, or call this “God,” which even then sounded like shorthand, a refusal to be speechless in the face of occurrences, shapes, gestures happening daily, and daily reconstituting sight. “God,” the very attitude of the word — for the lives of words were also palpable to me — was pushy. Impatient. Quantifiable. A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly
here
.

And
here
— for we went out to see often — was once constituted by enormous, black, elegiac shapes closed between black gashes or bars. And in the same day,
here
was also curved, colored shapes, airborne and hung from wire, like, ah! muted, lobed organs, so that
here
could be at once a gesture of mourning and a gesture of ease.

I went home and showered, showered and scrubbed in hottest water and threw away the old shoes I’d worn. Later that day, at the grocery store among the other shoppers, I saw all the scalps turned over faces, everyone’s face made raw and meatlike, the sleek curves of skulls and bony plates exposed. I saw where to draw the knife down the chest to make the Y that would reveal.

I’d seen how easily we open, our skin not at all the boundary we’re convinced of as we bump into each other, excuse ourselves. I’d seen how small a thing gone wrong need be: one sip, just one too many, mere ounces of water in the lungs too much. And the woman in front of me on the checkout line, the pale tendons in her neck, the fibers of muscle wrapping bone below her wool collar, her kidneys backed against my cart — how her spleen, so unexpectedly high in the body, was marked precisely by the orange flower on her sweater! And after seeing the assistants gather the organs up in their arms and arrange them on the aluminum table, after seeing such an abundance in there — here, too, was abundance: pyramids of lemons, red-netted sacks of oranges and papery onions, bananas fitting curve to curve, the dusty skins of grapes, translucent greens, dark roses, heavy purples.

Then, stepping out into the street with my bags, everything fresh and washed in the cold March rain, there was that scent hanging in the air — a fine film of it lingered, and I knew it to be the milky blueness I saw, just hours ago, cut free and swaying, barest breath and tether. That scrim, an opacity, clung to everyone, though they kept walking to cars, lifting and buckling children in. Packing their trunks, returning their carts. Yes, everything looked as it always had — bright and pearly, lush and arterial after the rain.

Richard Rhodes

 

RICHARD RHODES
is the author or editor of twenty-two books, including
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
, which won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award;
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
, which was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in history; an investigation of the roots of private violence,
Why They Kill
; a personal memoir,
A Hole in the World
; a biography,
John James Audubon
; and four novels. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s
Frontline
and
American Experience
series. An affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, Rhodes lectures frequently to audiences in the United States and abroad.
The Inland Ground
, in which this essay appeared, was his first book.

The loves of flint and iron are naturally a little rougher than those of the nightingale and the rose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

I remembered today about this country lake in Kansas where I live: that it is artificial, built at the turn of the century, when Upton Sinclair was writing
The Jungle
, as an ice lake. The trains with their loads of fresh meat from the Kansas City stockyards would stop by the Kaw River, across the road, and ice the cars. “You have just dined,” Emerson once told what must have been a shocked Victorian audience, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races — race living at the expense of race….”

The I-D Packing Company of Des Moines, Iowa: a small outfit which subcontracts from Armour the production of fresh pork. Can handle about 450 pigs an hour. No beef or mutton. No smoked hams or hotdogs. Plain fresh pork. A well-run outfit, with federal inspectors alert on all the lines.

The kind of slaughterhouse Upton Sinclair was talking about doesn’t exist around here any more. The vast buildings still stand in Des Moines and Omaha and Kansas City, but most of the operations are gone. The big outfits used to operate on a profit margin of 1.5 percent, which didn’t give them much leeway, did it? Now they are defunct, and their buildings, which look like monolithic enlargements of concentration-camp barracks, sit empty, the hundreds of windows broken, dusty, jagged pieces of glass sticking out of the frames as if the animals heard the good news one day and leaped out the nearest exit. Even the stockyards, miles and miles of rotting weathered board pens, floors paved fifty years ago by hand with brick, look empty, though I am told cattle receipts are up compared to what they were a few years back. The new thing is small, specialized, efficient houses out where the cattle are, in Denver, in Phoenix, in Des Moines, especially in Texas, where the weather is more favorable to fattening cattle. In Iowa the cattle waste half their feed just keeping warm in the wintertime. But in Iowa or in Texas, the point of meatpacking today is refrigeration. It’s cheaper to ship cold meat than live animals. So the packing plants have gone out to the farms and ranches. Are even beginning to buy up the ranches themselves so that they won’t have to depend on the irregularities of farmers and cattlemen who bring their animals in only when the price is up or the ground too wet for plowing. Farmhouses stand empty all over America. Did you know that? The city has already won, never mind how many of our television shows still depict the hardy bucolic rural. I may regret the victory, but that’s my lookout. We are an urban race now; and meat is something you buy shrink-wrapped at the supermarket.

There are no stockyards outside the I-D Packing Company. The pigs arrive by trailer truck from Sioux City and other places. Sometimes a farmer brings in two or three in the back of his pickup. Unloads them into the holding pens where they are weighed and inspected, goes into the office, and picks up his check. The men, except on the killing floor, are working on the cooled carcasses of yesterday’s kill anyway, so there is time to even out the line. Almost everything in a packing house operates on a chainline, and for maximum profit that line must be full, 450 carcasses an hour at the I-D Packing Company, perhaps 300 heavies if today is heavies day — sows, overgrown hogs. Boars presumably escape the general fate. Their flesh is flavored with rut and tastes the way an unventilated gymnasium locker room smells.

Down goes the tailgate and out come the pigs, enthusiastic after their drive. Pigs are the most intelligent of all farm animals, by actual laboratory test. Learn the fastest, for example, to push a plunger with their foot to earn a reward of pelletized feed. And not as reliable in their instincts. You don’t have to call cattle to dinner. They are waiting outside the fence at 4:30 sharp, having arrived as silently as the Vietcong. But perhaps that is pig intelligence too: let you do the work, laze around until the last minute and then charge over and knock you down before you can slop the garbage into the trough. Cattle will stroll one by one into a row of stalls and usually fill them in serial order. Not pigs. They squeal and nip and shove. Each one wants the entire meal for itself. Won’t stick together in a herd, either. Shoot out all over the place, and you’d damned better have every gate closed or they’ll be in your garden and on your lawn and even in your living room, nodding by the fire.

They talk a lot, to each other, to you if you care to listen. I am not romanticizing pigs. They always scared me a little on the farm, which is probably why I watched them more closely than the other animals. They do talk: low grunts, quick squeals, a kind of burn sometimes, angry shrieks, high screams of fear.

I have great respect for the I-D Packing Company. They do a dirty job and do it as cleanly and humanely as possible, and do it well. They were nice enough to let me in the door, which is more than I can say for the Wilson people in Omaha, where I first tried to arrange a tour. What are you hiding, Wilson people?

Once into the holding pen, the pigs mill around, getting to know each other. The I-D holding pens are among the most modern in the nation, my spokesman told me. Tubular steel painted tinner’s red to keep it from rusting. Smooth concrete floors with drains so that the floors can be washed down hygienically after each lot of pigs is run through.

The pigs come out of the first holding pen through a gate that allows only one to pass at a time. Just beside the gate is a wooden door, and behind the door is the first worker the pigs encounter. He has a wooden box beside him filled with metal numbers, the shape of each number picked out with sharp needles. For each lot of pigs he selects a new set of numbers — 2473, say — and slots them into a device like a hammer and dips it in non-toxic purple dye. As a pig shoots out of the gate he hits the pig in the side with the numbers, making a tattoo. The pig gives a grunt — it doesn’t especially hurt, pigskin is thick, as you know — and moves on to one of several smaller pens where each lot is held until curtain time. The tattoo, my spokesman told me, will stay on the animal through all the killing and cleaning and cutting operations, to the very end. Its purpose is to identify any animal or lot of animals which might be diseased, so that the seller can be informed and the carcasses destroyed. Rather too proud of his tattooing process, I thought, but then, you know the tattoos I am thinking of, the Nazi ones.

It would be more dramatic, make a better story, if the killing came last, but it comes first. We crossed a driveway with more red steel fencing. Lined up behind it, pressing into it because they sensed by now that all was not well with them, were perhaps a hundred pigs. But still curious, watching us go by in our long white canvas coats. Everyone wore those, and hard plastic helmets, white helmets for the workers, yellow helmets for the foremen. I got to be a foreman.

Before they reach their end, the pigs get a shower, a real one. Water sprays from all angles to wash the farm off of them. Then they begin to feel crowded. The pen narrows like a funnel; the drivers behind urge the pigs forward, until one at a time they climb onto a moving ramp. The ramp’s sides move as well as its floor. The floor is cleated to give the pigs footing. The sides are made of blocks of wood so that they will not bruise, and they slant inward to wedge the pigs along. Now they scream, never having been on such a ramp, smelling the smells they smell ahead. I do not want to overdramatize, because you have read all this before. But it was a frightening experience, seeing their fear, seeing so many of them go by. It had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of any more, all mobs, all death marches, all mass murders and extinctions, the slaughter of the buffalo, the slaughter of the Indian, the Inferno, Judgment Day, complicity, expensive races, race living at the expense of race. That so gentle a religion as Christianity could end up in Judgment Day. That we are the most expensive of races, able in our affluence to hire others of our kind to do this terrible necessary work of killing another race of creatures so that we may feed our oxygen-rich brains. Feed our children, for that matter.

At the top of the ramp, one man. With rubber gloves on, holding two electrodes that looked like enlarged curling irons except that they sported more of those needles. As a pig reached the top, this man jabbed the electrodes into the pig’s butt and shoulder, and that was it. No more pain, no more fear, no more mudholes, no more sun in the lazy afternoon. Knocked instantly unconscious, the pig shuddered in a long spasm and fell onto a stainless-steel table a foot below the end of the ramp. Up came another pig, and the same result. And another, and another, 450 an hour, 3,600 a day, the belts returning below to coax another ride.

The pigs are not dead, merely unconscious. The electrodes are humane, my spokesman said, and, relatively speaking, that is true. They used to gas the pigs — put them on a conveyor belt that ran through a room filled with anesthetic gas. That was humane too. The electrodes are more efficient. Anesthesia relaxes the body and loosens the bowels. The gassed pigs must have been a mess. More efficient, then, to put their bodies in spasm.

They drop to the table, and here the endless chain begins. A worker takes the nearest dangling chain by its handle as it passes. The chain is attached at its top to a belt of links, like a large bicycle chain. At the bottom the dangling chain has a metal handle like the handle on a bicycle. The chain runs through the handle and then attaches to the end of the handle, so that by sliding the handle up the chain the worker forms a loop. Into the loop he hooks one of the pig’s hind feet. Another worker does the same with the other foot. Each has his own special foot to grab, or the pig would go down the line backwards, which would not be convenient. Once hooked into the line, the pig will stay in place by the force of its own weight.