By the time I was old enough to saddle up, Dad had replaced our original rake (a rusty monster with oversize steel carriage wheels and a fixed hitch in front and wobbly trailing wheels to the rear) with a New Holland Model 256 fresh off the lot. Just like the old rake, it was a ground-driven side-delivery edition, but it ran on small rubber tires and was painted deep red and bright yellow. After pulling the rake into the field, I would stand on the hitch that joined the tractor to the rake and spin the plastic-handled cranks that raised and lowered either end of the reel—the key was to run the teeth low enough so that they combed up all the hay but not so low that they were gouging dirt, in which case you were alerted by little clots of sod smacking the back of your head.
When you got everything set right and got to rolling, the rake reel was a marvelous thing to watch as it spun counter to the direction of travel, the polished steel tine tips dancing in staccato flashes along the stubble line before swooping up and away around their oval orbit. Just ahead of the flickering blur the flat swath of dried hay rose and curled into itself like a wave angling for the beach, rolled over several times, then tumbled out to lie still in a fat unbroken rope. Sometimes a gust of wind would unroll the windrow and lay it flat again. Mostly you just went round and round and round. Jerry had mounted a suicide knob on the steering wheel, so when you got to a tight corner you could cramp that front end around right tight, then just turn loose and pull your chin back clear of the knob while the wheel spun back to straightaway. When I raked the back swath (we’d often wait an extra day or two as it was shaded and dried more slowly) I had to keep an eye out for tree limbs overhead because the John Deere rode so much higher than the Massey and the exhaust pipe stuck straight up in the air. (When the tractor wasn’t in use, we capped the exhaust with a tin can—if the engine fired just right on start-up, the can would pop ten feet high.)
When the raking was done, it was home for lunch, and then the baling.
Still no chickens, but we’ve had the pigs for about a month. The passage of time has been marked by the daily evolution of the stunning subcutaneous rainbow chewed into my gluteus maximus by the frenzied coon dog. Lately the colors have moderated so it appears a thundercloud has parked on my butt. Like a remarkable version of Tom Sawyer’s toe, this butt-bite is the sort of thing you just itch to show someone. I maintain my propriety, but have held the photographs in reserve and will make them available at auction should archivists of the proper caliber express interest and promise to keep everything high-tone.
Morning now breaks with the lids of the pig feeder banging. The racket reminds me the farm is alive, if only in that little corner. And it’s nice to know they’re down there fattening themselves up. Still, with each bang I realize it’s a meter ticking on the feed bill, so we’ve been throwing everything we can at them food-wise. All of our table scraps, of course, but also green apples, dandelions, venison trimmings, and cleaned fish.
There is a profusion of wild grapes on our little farm. The vines wrap themselves around anything that stands still. The pigs are currently penned at the far end of an old overgrown paddock and concrete bunk feeder remaining from the days when this place was a going concern of a dairy farm. I’d like to expand the pigpen boundaries into the paddock later in the year, so I’ve been cutting back the grapevines a little each day. Having seen how they went for the nettles, I thought it worth a try to sling some of the vines in with the pigs. They went nuts, stripping the leaves off and chomping them down. So now every day I throw big armfuls in their pen and they snuffle right in there, ripping the leaves free and chomping happily, stopping only to fight with each other. The little female pig is forever nipping the boy pig on the ear and running him off from the best leaves and slop. I’d feel sorry for him except he’s bigger than she is.
The only thing the pigs like better than grape leaves is pigweed (I grew up calling it lamb’s quarters). It grows big and is easy to pull if the ground is moist, so it doesn’t take long to collect a good bundle. They devour the stuff. We throw all our garden weeds in the pigpen. They snuffle through the quack and ignore the foxtail, but pouting their lower lips delicately, they worry out every last leaf of pigweed.
We got the idea to graze our pigs from reading Gene Logsdon’s excellent All Flesh Is Grass. Gene makes the point that pigs were meant to grub and forage, and we’re gonna test him on it. I do not know how he feels about feeding pigs grape leaves. In short, they will eat pretty much anything, but can be capriciously finicky. After weeks of gobbling every nettle I pitched across the fence, they’ve stopped cold. They give them a snuffle and move on. Perhaps the nettles reached a certain maturity and the taste changed, or they got too dry. It was always a marvel to watch them in the first place, with my legs stinging from wading amongst the nettles, only to see the pigs rummaging through them nose first.
I wander down there several times a day, often under the pretense of checking their feed, or to toss them a handful of dandelion leaves—on these they have never wavered, they fight over them—but mainly I just want to watch them. For all my talk about chickens being better than TV, the pigs hold their own. Already their personalities are emerging, and I find that Amy isn’t the only one who will have to be reminded that they are not pets. But perhaps my concerns are ill-founded: some of our city cousins come to visit, and they all run down to look at the pigs. I follow them down and arrive to find Amy standing on the fourth rung of the panels, pointing first at one pig and then the other as she explains, “That one’s Wilbur, and that one’s Cocklebur…but in October, that one’s ham, and that one’s bacon!”
“Let’s go check and see if the hay is dry,” Dad would say after he kissed Mom and thanked her for lunch. Put your hay up too wet and it will overheat and you will wake up in the morning to find a giant smoldering briquette where your barn used to be. Reaching beneath the windrow down close to the earth where the hay was most likely to be moist, Dad would grab a shock of stems and twist it in his hands. If he felt the right lightness and crackle, the hay was cured and safe to bale.
We started on the hay wagons young. I remember standing beside the oldest Baalrud boy when I was still too small to do anything more than drag the bales from the chute to the back of the wagon. I watched how he stood sideways at the mouth of the chute, one hand hanging and the other resting on the emerging bale, and when it was my turn I stood just the same. Thus we accumulate the stances of manhood. I learned to ride the pitch and lurch of the wagon, knees slightly flexed to absorb the topography. I learned to wait until just before the bale reached the tipping point on the chute before hooking my fingers beneath the twin strands of twine, and how to walk with the bale to one side until I reached the stack and swung it round to boost it with my thigh. When I grew older and stronger I used a motion similar to a weight lifter’s clean and jerk to get the hay bale above my head, where I would balance it on my forearms for a moment before bending at the knees and tossing it free-throw style atop the stack. My brothers and I marked our development as men by how high we could pile bales on a wagon. The day I pitched one nine high, I felt my shoulders broaden. Sometimes you’d rear back to pitch one and the twine would snap. The bale exploded in midair and dropped chaff on your head and down the neck of your shirt.
The hay wagon was towed behind a baler operating on a combination of forces ranging from the deft touch of the rake-like teeth that skimmed the hay from the stubble, the brute force of the knife-edged plunger chopping and stuffing the hay into the bale chamber, and the Rube Goldberg complexity of the knotter. In short, you fed a loose windrow in one end, and neatly bound bales came out the other. The speed of their delivery varied with the thickness of the hay—in thin cuttings the plunger had little to work with, and the bales moved in nearly invisible increments; if the windrow was the diameter of a grizzly bear, the bales lurched outward several inches at a time. A large flywheel kept the rhythm steady for the most part, but now and then—and especially on the backswath, where much of the hay lay in shade—you�
�d hear the baler bog on a chunk of wet clover, and then you’d keep an eye on the chute for the bright green slug packed between the paler dry hay. If there were two of you on the wagon it was fun to try to time out the bales so the other guy got the wet one, which would lift like a bag of bricks compared to the rest. After every few bales a soft pile of chaff would accumulate on the wagon below the up-tipped chute lip. I picked up the habit of kicking this pile away, but sometimes I would grab a pinch of the chaff and put it in my mouth like chew, drawing out the toasted sweetness of the dried alfalfa by squeezing it between my cheek and gum.
In between loads we dug the water jug out from where it was stored in the twine box beside the rolls of sisal that smelled of oil and Brazilian sun and unspooled from the center. We’d set the cooler on the edge of the empty wagon, unspin the plastic top and turn it over to catch the water from the miniature spigot, then pass it around. I remember raising the water to my lips and seeing bits of chaff skating the surface tension of the water. Our neighbor Jerry would always swirl water in the cap after the last drink, then sling the water to the ground before screwing the cap back on. A little ceremony before we went back to work.
As the day wore on and we circled ever tighter toward the middle of the field, mice would dart from windrow to windrow at the sound of the baler. By the time we were down to the last couple of rounds, they would pop out with regularity, and if one of the farm dogs was along we would leap from the wagon and sic the dog on the mouse. If there was no dog sometimes we just launched ourselves feetfirst and squashed the mouse with our boots. Often by the time we were passing back in the opposite direction, a hawk or crows were pulling at the carcass.
It was sometimes my duty to shuttle wagons back and forth across the field. If I got back early and the baler was on the far side of the field, I would turn off the tractor and lie beneath the wagon in the shade, and to this day I best remember haying as sounds from a distance—the up-and-down groan of the tractor engine as it lugged against the plunger, the delicate clink-a-chunk of the needles threading the knotter, the rumble of the power takeoff knuckles flexing on a tight turn. The days were vast and sunny, the school year was decisively over and the new one still unimaginable weeks off, and here we were in the country, putting up hay.
When the last windrow was consumed, we scrambled to the very tip-top of the load and rode home. The hay moved with a ponderous pitch and sway, as you imagined it might be to ride an elephant. It was quiet atop the bales, elevated above the tractor noise, and the ride home was relaxing. You could look out over the country. But the work was not done—the last of the hay still had to be stowed.
Unloading was the easiest job. You simply unpacked the pile and dropped the bales to the elevator, where hooks on the chain caught the bale and slid it up the rails and into the mow. The haymow was hot duty, and especially so if you were stacking in a steel shed. One summer we took a thermometer to the peak of the pole barn and it read 113 degrees. The person on the wagon was at the advantage over the mow crew, who had to carry bales across the uneven face of the stack. You were forever sticking your foot between two bales and going in up to your knee, the hay scratching along your shins. Every now and then the unloader would start dropping bales on the elevator faster and faster in a good-natured attempt to founder the folks in the mow. It was fun to see how long it took before a face popped out the haymow window and shot a dirty look.
When the last bale was stacked, I’d pull off my haying gloves. Dad bought them in stapled packs at Farm & Fleet. They were yellow and made from material something like felt. They were stiff the first time you drew them on but before long they went soft and balloony from all the sweat and the constant pull of the twine. If you wore a hole in a finger, the tip soon became packed with a solid knob of chaff. When you pulled your gloves off after a long day of haying in hot weather—especially if you were working the unventilated mow—your hands were wet and moist, almost dishpanny, and your wrists were matted with bracelets of sodden chaff where the cuffs had clung. It felt good, though, the cool air on your skin.
I take great satisfaction from watching the pigs strip nettles and eat grapevines, or churn through the quack in their pen, nibbling out the tender white shoots so that next year the soil has half a shot at growing something more useful. I like to think some of that chlorophyll is somehow working its way into the protein. One begins to understand the cachet of “grass-fed beef.” Beyond the poetics, the stuff really does taste better, and regularly commands a premium price. That said, in the interest of stretching the food dollar, we happily feed the pigs whatever they’ll devour, which is pretty much anything. When Anneliese heard that a local bread distributorship made its expired goods available for sale as animal feed, she called and got on the list. Basically you pay ten bucks and take whatever’s on the shelves that day. I figured we’d get a few loaves, and that’d be good. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the back room and saw rack on rack. Now I’m pulling into the yard, and the rear of our thousand-dollar mini-van (refusing to utter the m-word aloud, I call it the fambulance) is full from the floor to the windows. The variety is astounding: white bread, whole wheat, cinnamon raisin bagels, English muffins, hamburger buns, frosted cinnamon rolls, and bags of mini-doughnuts. I park the van in front of the garage, where it is visible from the kitchen window, and go into the house, looking for Amy.
I find her at her schoolwork. “Hey, snort-burger, when I went to town I bought some bread. I forgot to bring it in. Would you please do that?”
“Sure!” she says innocently. She is a sweet child, and therefore vulnerable.
“It’s in the back of the van,” I say. The minute she is out the door I wave Anneliese over to the window. “Watch this!”
The poor kid. Happily she trips up the sidewalk and across the drive. At the rear of the van she pulls the handle, and as the hatch rises to release the smell of yeast and reveal a stack of baked goods the size of a refrigerator, her jaw drops just as I hoped it might. For a full three seconds she just stands there gobsmacked. Then a bag of hot dog buns slithers off the pile and lands at her feet and she turns back toward the house, fists on her hips and a squinchy smile-frown on her face. I rush out to meet her, and by the time I get there she is laughing.
It will take us weeks to feed all of this and we don’t want it to mold, so we jam as much of it as we can into our chest freezer, which is about half empty this time of the year. I cram it down (fascinated by store-bought bread after years of Mom’s homemade, my brothers dubbed it “Kleenex bread” because you could take a whole loaf and scrunch it into a tiny wad), but even so we have quite a bit that won’t fit. Anneliese keeps out several loaves of whole wheat and two bags of cinnamon-raisin bagels. Because they are technically expired, every single bag has been slashed with a razor—here in the land of overregulated plenty, people food becomes pig food at the stroke of midnight—but we trust our noses and are not picky. I make a mental note of which corner I stashed the doughnuts (those, I was careful not to crush) and liberate a tray of the cinnamon rolls.
Amy and I take two bags of bread down to the pigpen. They bite a few slices, then drift back disinterestedly to the wallow. When we come back later, most of the bread has been eaten, but a few slices remain. This is not typical piggishness. The following day we put the bread in a bucket, add water from the garden hose, and stir the whole works into a doughy mush. As soon as it splatters into the feeder they dive into it, smacking and snuffling and blowing bubbles, and in three minutes it is all gone. From then on, we always add the water.
I enjoy making trips to the feed mill in Fall Creek, and I enjoy lugging the bags down to the feeder, and I enjoy the sound of the feed slipping from the bag and the feel of the feed dust on my forearms, and when I replace the feeder cover and walk away I enjoy feeling that I have provided for my animals and that when they stick their snout in there, supper will be waiting. But all this doesn’t come close to the feeling I get when I throw in a batch of grape leaves or a pail
of scraps or a tray of expired cinnamon buns. Free, I think as the pigs gorge. Free or cheap, and circling right back to the table.
There is one limiting factor to the free-for-all buffet: my own queasiness. With the progression of summer, we have found ourselves overrun with cottontail rabbits. To quantify: when I step from the office on a recent warm evening, I count sixteen rabbits in the front yard alone. These are too many rabbits. Anneliese has been asking me to trim the herd for several weeks now, but I have resisted. I was raised never to shoot an animal unless the end result is bound for the table. And although I happily hunt and eat cottontails in winter, I was also raised to believe you should never eat a rabbit killed when the ground isn’t frozen. Tularemia, the old-timers said. But when I saw those sixteen rabbits in one spot, I prepared to yield the point. Then a night later I went to fetch something from the pole barn and found a rabbit pulling itself weakly around the corner of the barn. It was obviously ill, all hunched up and blinking at me as I approached. I loaded the .22 and killed the poor miserable thing. When you have that many rabbits and they start showing up sick, it’s time to cull. I went back up to the yard and shot the first rabbit I saw.
When I picked it up by the hind legs and walked to the weedy edge of the yard, I was just about to give it a fling when the old “shoot-it-you-eat-it” pang returned. I looked at it again. It was full-grown and to all appearances very healthy. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea that you don’t eat warm-weather rabbit. Then from down the ridge, I heard a querulous porcine grunt. Of course…Pigs are omnivorous. Rabbits are free. Waste not, want not. It seemed a little creepy, though. I waffled. Then I hiked on down there and slung that rabbit over the fence.
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