Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [113]
When I get back out to the yard, the pastor has arrived. All my usual reluctances are in place, but I have been watching this man, and he is doing good work. I shake his hand and leave grateful, knowing my brother is about to sit down and take counsel. As I drive away, I turn on the radio and learn the stock market has fallen 300 points, and very clearly I think, Whatever. The drive to Madison is long, and the hotel room when I get there seems a cube of unreality.
It is a blasting hot day when I return home—the dried clay around the hog wallow is bleached white in the sun—and the dang pigs have destroyed their only source of shade. The hutch I put together several months ago is ripped to bits, flat as the secondhand particleboard I used to build it.
I’m not sure why they chose today. Perhaps they were just bored, or perhaps overnight one of them gained the quarter pound necessary to collapse the wall during the afternoon butt-scratching session. I was working up in the yard when I heard the rending sound of the tarp being torn in two. When I got down there, the wall I had wired to the steel posts was still standing, but the other had collapsed. My first reaction was, Hey, I’m surprised it lasted this long. It was hardly built to code, and that’s what I get for roofing it with a blue plastic tarp. And pigs by nature root and push and bull against everything. It was bound to happen. But my equanimity got a little thin as I drew nearer the pen and realized: rather than running off to some neutral corner and staring back like some kid who swears it wasn’t him who broke the sugar bowl, the pigs were actively—no, joyfully—finishing the job. Cocklebur is gnawing on a section of two-by-four. As I approach, she takes it in her jaws and, with a toss of her head, flips it across the pen like a puppy flinging a chew toy. Wilbur is snuffling around the one collapsed wall, looking to find purchase for the rim of his snout. When he finally hooks it beneath a section of particleboard, he bulldozes forward to the sounds of more tarp tearing and screws being stripped from the wood. Wilbur circles around again and pokes his nose through the tear in the tarp, then his entire head. He stands there blinking for a minute, then plunges his body forward, the tarp ripping and popping loose from its staples. Not wanting to be left out, Cocklebur sprints around in a tight half circle and low-hurdles through the hole Wilbur has left.
Worried they’ll cut themselves on exposed screws and also hoping to salvage as much of the material as I can, I climb in the pen and start trying to chuck remnants over the fence, but this only seems to excite the pigs more. They’re on a full-bore happy rampage now, gallivanting and woofing excitedly, standing on boards I’m trying to lift, gnawing on the tarp, and generally wreaking happy havoc. Every time I try to pick up a board, they run over and put their front hooves on it, or take bites at the wood so close I can feel their breath and get slobber on my fingers. Frustrated and not interested in feeding my digits to pigs, I ball up my fist and smack Cocklebur right on her wet snoot and she gives out a high-pitched grunt and jumps back a foot, but then comes boring right back in. By the time I get the last shred of the shelter thrown over the fence I’m tickled rather than upset. They are absolutely single-minded in their dedication to destroying what I had built, but they are just so playful about