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By Root 381 0

but as I work around the garage—bagging the garbage, sorting the recycling, wrangling plastic pails for the morning’s bloody work—I keep catching the pigs in my peripheral vision, and I’m surprised at the leaden patch of dread in my gut. This day was booked the second I wrote the check for those pigs, and when I brought them home I was bringing them home to be butchered. It has ever been the intent, and that won’t change, but until the sun rose this morning the concept existed in the abstract. The pigs are not pets. They have taken just enough nips at me that I know they would afford me no courtesy given the chance, and I watched them crunch up that rabbit, but still: I liked having them around. They were genial in their grunty, hoggy ways. I’m musing along like this when I hear the truck coming, and once Muzzy hits the yard, all introspection ceases. He roars right past me, straight down to where the hog pen is, and by the time I’m down there he’s already backed around and is stripping out cable from his hoist. The pistol is holstered on his belt. “Let me know what I can do to help,” I say. “I could use a bucket of water,” he says. I jog back up to the house, the young kid eager to please. I’m waiting for the bucket to fill when I hear the pop! of the first shot.

I’ve told Amy it can be up to her if she wants to help with the butchering, but I didn’t think she should be out there for the killing. I’m not sure why—she loves to go hunting with me, and last year she was at my side in the tree stand when I shot a deer. She tromped through the swamp and then sat there patiently in the cold for two hours without sound or complaint, and when I shot the deer, I put her on the blood trail and she followed it right up to the carcass, at which point she exclaimed, “Oh! A nice plump doe!” But these pigs—I don’t know.

When I return with the water, both pigs are down and bleeding out. The thing with pigs is you have to lance the carotid as soon as they hit the ground, or they flop around horribly. They’re back in the paddock a ways, so I get the tractor and a chain to move them out to the truck to save Muzzy the trouble of threading the cable down through the gate and fence posts. Muzzy has hooked the hocks on a length of steel with a large eyelet at the center. While I feather the hydraulics, he hooks the chain to the eyelet, then takes a couple of wraps around the loader, and I back out of the paddock, the pig swinging head down until I lower it to the grass beside the truck, where Muzzy dives in with his knife, severing the front legs.

“Where’s your daughter?” he asks.

“In the house,” I say. “I figured that was best.”

He pauses with the knife in midair, looks straight at me. “Well, I’m going to tell you I think that’s a mistake.” He lets the statement hang there a bit. “She should see this. Kids can learn a lot from this. Pig’s very similar to a human. Sometimes I take the guts and eyeballs into the science class at the school, so they can study ’em.”

He goes back to cutting, and I go to the house. Amy and Anneliese are working on a homeschool lesson. It turns out Amy has watched the slaughtering from the upstairs window anyway. They are both a little unnerved. I ask Amy if she wants to come out. She looks at her mother. Then she looks at me, a little hesitant. “It’s up to you,” I say, “but the man thinks you might learn some things.”

“OK,” says Amy, and so we all trek out. Jane is sleeping, so Anneliese takes the portable monitor.

Almost immediately Amy is engrossed. “What’s that?” she says, pointing to the rumpled skin of one pig already flopped in the loader bucket. Muzzy works fast. “That’s the skin,” I say. “See the bristles?” “Oh,” says Amy, then, “Ooo, look at the eyeballs.” And then it is full-bore biology lab. Muzzy’s knife flashes as he circles the pig, the skin falling in a drape as he works. When he gets ready to split the belly, he stops and gives us a serious look. “Who’s the shortest one here?” Amy raises her hand. “OK!” says Muzzy. “You get the job!”

“What job?” says Amy.

“I need someone to crawl in there