Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [118]
We load the panels and head on down to Fall Creek. I have some dead trees that need felling, and Jed has brought his logging gear. I have a chain saw, but a couple of these trees are monsters. In my twenty years making ambulance calls I’ve found more than one squashed corpse whose last act on earth was to sink a saw blade into a tree trunk. Jed has been logging every winter for years (and is furthermore a graduate of logger safety school), so it makes sense to ask for his help and stay out of the way. It takes him less than two hours to fell, limb, and section up the trees; the same task would have taken me at least two days. While he logs, I run the tractor back and forth, dragging away limbs and pulling the larger sections out into a nearby field where I can cut them into firewood lengths later.
When we’re done and Jed has thrown his gear in the truck, Anneliese comes out. We talk about how he and Leanne are doing, knowing full well there’s no sufficient answer. We are talking for much the same reason we have been working together this morning: there are things that have to be done, and also we are finding reasons—quite literally minute by minute—to keep moving. The word closure is tissue paper over a tar pit. In these early days the best you can do is find ways to stop screaming while your psyche begins the sand-grain trickle of sorting the nightmare.
So we talk some. And then we say seeya like we always say seeya—no lingering, no look of meaningful intent, just seeya. As the truck and trailer rumble out of sight around a bend in the driveway, Anneliese and I hold hands and ache for the pain we cannot absorb on behalf of those we love.
I use the salvaged posts and panels to expand the pigpen. The pigs tear into the new sod, their tails spinning. I am watching Cocklebur snout through crab grass roots when she pauses, dipping her head up and down. When I look in closer I see she has teased an angleworm free from the dirt and is feeding it backward into her mouth with flicks of her almost prehensile lower lip.
The soybeans didn’t survive the weeds, but the sweet corn is thriving. Each day I cut and feed the pigs several stalks. They eat the cobs and chew the leaves. We have also come into another cheap pig-food bonus—our friends Kenneth and Virginia Smote have an excess of goat milk, and they have been saving it for us. Once a week we bring it home in buckets, and each day I mix it with the expired baked goods. Kenneth claims he has raised fine pork on goat milk alone, and I have promised him some pork chops in time. We don’t have enough refrigerator space to store all the buckets, and by the end of the week I am decanting some diabolically clotty fondue, but those pigs slurp it right down. On the downside the buckets don’t seal well and we have a bumpy driveway; I have noticed that on real warm days the inside of our van smells of curdled goat.
We have a number of apple trees on the property, and when the first windfalls dropped I happily gathered buckets of them for the pigs, but I have been frustrated. The first time I tipped them into the feeder, the sound of them tumbling against the plastic brought the pigs a-bounding. How disappointed I was when after a few nibbles they wandered disinterestedly away. I couldn’t bear the idea of free pig food going to waste, so for a few days I took to making worms-and-all apple smoothies in the blender and stirring them in with the bread and goat milk. The smoothie technique worked, but after several days of cleaning the blender, I settled for just lobbing a few over the fence now and then. I did come past the pen one afternoon to find