Another thing that made it hard for Ham to think of the pigs in the same way he thought of the vegetables from the garden was that the pigs made noises, grunts and loud, high squeals, which Ham thought he understood. One time the pigs broke loose from the pen and were very hard to find and catch because, once loose, they remained silent and out of sight. But when Ham’s mother discovered one of them rummaging noiselessly through her geranium bed over on the shady side of the house, the pig had started squealing loudly and had headed straight for the pigpen. The other pig, the older one, had wandered out behind the barn and had fallen through the wooden platform that covered an old unused well back there. Twelve foot down, standing in a foot of water in total darkness, the pig remained silent until Ham and his father, seeing that the cover had been broken, walked over to the well and peered down, and only then did the pig begin to squeal for help.
Also, the pigs liked Ham. Or at least it seemed to him that they did. They let him scratch their dry, scaly backs and smooth foreheads and often came to the fence when they saw him there. In calm silence the beasts would poke their snouts between the slats, and he would scratch them. One pig would even let Ham place two fingertips of one hand a short ways into its nostrils, dime-sized openings, as long as with his other hand the boy kept scratching the bony ridge of the snout.
They tried not to name the pigs. His father had pointed out that if they didn’t give them names, it would help Ham avoid becoming too fond of them. “They’re not pets. Remember that. No more reason to name a pig you’re going to eat in a year or two than name a damn apple tree,” he had explained.
Ham’s mother had agreed, but later, when Ham accidentally revealed to her that on his own he had secretly continued naming the pigs year after year, she had merely smiled. Because he had referred to only one of the pigs by name, Anne, she asked him the name of the other.
“Tricksie. I named her that because she looks like the one we had two years ago, and her name was Tricksie too,” he told her, pointing out the pig’s unusually long snout and small ears.
“Tricksie and Anne. Why Anne?”
“I don’t know. It just seemed to fit her,” he said. Then he asked her not to tell his father that he had named the pigs, and she assured him that she wouldn’t.
THE SEPTEMBER THAT Tricksie began her final season as a pig and Anne was more than half-grown, Ham and his mother harvested an unusually large crop of grapes. They were Concord grapes, large and purple and darkly sweet, that grew from several clusters of vines in front of the garden and along the south-facing side of the road.
For a week, every afternoon when school was out Ham would step down from the school bus and walk to the grapevines and work alongside his mother until suppertime. These were warm, pleasant afternoons for him, picking the dusky grapes in the golden September sunlight, talking quietly with his mother as they worked, chatting of school, his friends, his new teacher. He also liked asking her about what he was like when he was a baby, and she apparently enjoyed telling him. He asked her why she didn’t have another baby, and she said, “Maybe I will,” in such a way that he figured it was a decision. And that turned out to be the year before his sister Jody was born.
When he and his mother had finally picked all the grapes, having stored them each night in close-woven baskets in the cellar, his mother started making jelly with them. She’d never made grape jelly before, had never gathered a large enough crop, and she was excited at the prospect. She washed the grapes, and squashed them, and separated the skins and seeds from the pulp, the pulp from the juice. She saved the juice in Mason jars and used the cleaned pulp for the jelly. The skins and seeds, sloshing thickly in a five-gallon tub like a purple stew, she decided to feed to the pigs.
That afternoon when Ham got home from school, she asked him to carry the tub out to the pigpen and leave it for them. He dipped his fingers into the gooey mass and tasted it: sweet, and a little bit sour at the edges. But he was sure that the pigs, after a daily diet of grain mash and water, would consider it a treat.
Eagerly, he dragged the heavy tub across the back yard to the end of the barn where the pigpen was located, swung back the gate, and slid the tub inside. Closing the gate, he climbed up on the fence and watched Tricksie and Anne hungrily shove their snouts into the mushy substance.
After a few moments, the animals’ rapid eating began to slow, and Ham, bored, left them alone and returned to the house. He wondered if, after such a huge afternoon meal, they’d be hungry again in the morning, and he decided yes, because, after all, they were pigs, weren’t they?
The next morning, as he always did, Ham got up, dressed, came downstairs, and while his mother made breakfast, he went out to feed and water the hens, his father’s fighting cocks, and the pigs. These were his daily chores. It was a sparkling clear morning, cloudless and dry, with a light frost that silvered the grass and made it crackle under his feet as he walked. He went to the henhouse first, completed his tasks there, and went on to the pigpen, lugging the bucket of watery grain mash he had made up in the barn.
As he rounded the corner of the barn and neared the pen, he started to call, “Soo-ee! Soo-ee! Here, pig-pig-pig!” Then he saw them. Tricksie, the larger of the two, was lying on her side near the fence, facing away from it. Anne was also lying down, a few feet beyond Tricksie. Ham thought they were sleeping, so he called again, expecting them to scramble awkwardly to their feet and rush to the trough. When they failed to respond to his second call, he thought, They must be full from yesterday’s extra meal.
But then, coming closer to the fence, he realized that both pigs, though still the same size in relation to each other, in fact had nearly doubled in size. They both seemed as large and as round as hills, and as inert.
He put the bucket on the ground, reached around for a stick, and after a few seconds found the long, pointed maple branch he sometimes used to prod the pigs away from the trough while he filled it. Reaching through the slats of the fence with the stick, he poked Tricksie on the back, but got no result. She lay there as if she were a huge pile of sand.
Again he poked her. Nothing.
He then saw a purple trickle, like a string, from the pig’s fig-shaped anus, and he knew that she was dead. He looked over at Anne and saw the same purple string dribbling down the inside of one of her hams, and he knew that both pigs were dead.
Grabbing the stick firmly, he started whacking it against Tricksie’s hindquarters, her back, her swollen belly, swinging the stick in as long an arc as he could, whacking the pig’s body all the way up to the head, which he couldn’t quite reach, so he pitched the stick into the pen, climbed over the fence and jumped down into the muck, where he picked up the stick and resumed beating the carcass, swinging the stick from over his head, bringing it down hard against the pig’s ears, eyes, and snout.
He moved to the other pig and began to thrash its belly and head, too, again and again, when at last the stick broke off in his hand. He threw the piece of wood away and stood there in the deep, dark mud, weeping, and through his clenched teeth brokenly cursing his mother, calling her stupid, stupid, stupid.
The Erotic Mouse
The winter that Ham’s sister Jody was born, his mother asked him from then on when he was playing in the house to please play in the front room. He was nine that year, and because he liked building things, he took up a lot of room when he was playing and usually left a great clutter behind him. This was why his mother, still tired from having the baby and too busy with feeding and caring for her to cope with Ham’s expansive play and the resulting mess, had insisted. “You never pick up after yourself, so from now on all your puzzles and model planes, all of it, gets done in the front room!”