Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  I got out the shovel and began the archaeology project of unearthing the corner of the gate. As I dug further the lovely smell of ancient mudflat drifted up. Bill walked over, the other gates open, to assist. That’s when Little Girl, with all her might, that deep hunger giving her super-pig strength, pushed the gate open, knocking me over. Big Guy followed her. I threw down the shovel and yelled to Bill, “Run!” He took off in front of the pigs, sprinting down the concrete pathway. I’d never seen him run so fast.

  The pigs, sensing a fun game, chased Bill. Their pig hooves clattered against the sidewalk as their tremendous buttocks thundered along our walkway—past the garbage cans, the turned-over ladder, up into the trailer. Just like that—that easy. Little Girl paused for a minute, but I prodded her butt and she shrugged and got in. Big Guy jumped into the nest I had constructed in the back of the rig and began feasting on the peaches. We shut and latched the heavy door, then put on a padlock as extra insurance.

  I felt like a real farmer with my trailer stuffed with two real hogs. Bill rode off on his bike, and I pulled away from the homestead, the fence to the garden newly tagged with fresh graffiti, the chickens watching me from behind the chain-link fence. The truck pulled against the weight of the pigs in the trailer. Here I come, country!

  The drive was unremarkable. To pass time and soothe my nerves. I did calculations of how much I had spent on the pigs: $300 to buy them, $150 to kill them, $80 to rent the trailer, $60 in fuel. Almost $600 in all. Like most things, what that tab didn’t include was the time we had spent Dumpster diving and taking care of them. Toward the end, between the two of them, they were eating seven fifteen-gallon bucketfuls every night. Also not included was the time I spent worrying about pig smells and pig escapes.

  Organic, hormone-free pork, the last time I had looked, cost about $5 a pound. We were going to get about three hundred to four hundred pounds of pork, and much of that would be turned into even higher value by virtue of curing and preserving it. Almost $2,000 worth of pork, say. Not bad.

  I followed the directions to the slaughterhouse over country roads, past stacks of straw and hay and dried-up hillsides. It was Indian summer in the Bay Area—still hot during the day, a little cold at night, incredibly dry because it hadn’t rained in months.

  I pulled up to the slaughterhouse, where three guys sat at a picnic table drinking Cokes.

  “Sheila here?” I asked.

  “In there.” They pointed.

  I walked into a small room that I recognized as the kill room, where my pigs would meet their end. It was concrete with little gates where the pigs got locked in. It smelled a little bloody with some hints of bleach. A man wearing rubber boots sprayed a hose.

  I walked outside and saw a woman walking away.

  “Sheila?!” I yelled.

  “What do you want!” the woman spun around and yelled. “I’ve got a ranch to run here.” Maybe she thought I was an animal liberationist.

  “I brought two pigs to get killed,” I shouted. “I’m Novella,” I said lamely as she walked toward me.

  I had been imagining a country woman, wearing her hair in braids and a calico shirt with jeans and boots. Like a butch Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  But Sheila was about four-foot-ten, with a tremendous geyser of blond hair caught up in—was that really? yes—a banana clip. She puffed on a slim cigarette, and her quick hands were adorned with a bevy of gold-and-diamond rings. A smear of lipstick traced along her lips. This was not a butch Laura Ingalls Wilder. She in fact resembled a prostitute.

  I wore a T-shirt that read CARPE DIEM. I was sweat-soaked from the drive—and the stress of driving a trailer packed with two animals in which I had invested a lot of time.

  “I’m Novella from Oakland,” I repeated, feeling very country and pastoral and of a place.

  “Oh god, you’re the girl with all those questions,” Sheila said. “I thought, I’m going to kill her, with all her questions.”

  I laughed nervously, caught off guard. She had never called me back to answer any of my questions, which seemed dangerous. But I had thought that, once I arrived in this woman’s place, she would take me in hand and help me. I thought it was like making travel arrangements in a foreign country—it’s really best to simply show up.

  “OK, bring your trailer up to there,” she said, and pointed at a green fence with two white posts that looked to be three feet apart. “And don’t hit the post.”

  I would now have to do something that I had thus far avoided: back up the trailer.

  There’s some upside-down physics to doing it, some steering-a-boat logic that I simply cannot comprehend. If I turned the wheel to the direction opposite I wanted to go in, the trailer would go that way. After five attempts at backing up, then pulling forward, I somehow got the trailer through the gates.

  The Latino guys watched silently, sipping their Cokes.

  I opened the trailer doors. While driving, I imagined the pigs in the back, swaying along with the curves, endlessly jostled and bumped by every canker in the California highway system. But there they were, curled up together, deeply asleep in the bed of burlap and straw.

  “Hi, guys,” I said.

  Shelia arrived on her four-wheeler, platinum hair blowing in the wind.

  “Get the pigs out,” she said.

  “They’re just starting to wake up,” I said.

  “Get in there and get them out,” she ordered.

  I jumped in the trailer and pushed them up and out. I felt like a clumsy kid, a newbie 4-H-er. The pigs grunted a little in protest, then unfolded and clambered out of the trailer.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t done this before.”

  “Well, at least you got them here, that’s something,” she said.

  Then she saw the pigs. “Oh, no, they’re red pigs,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, astonished that she hadn’t thought to talk about anything before I brought these pigs to her. It had been one of those “millions of questions” (question number 156,478: Do you scald and scrape the hair from the pigs?) that Shelia never answered when I called her.

  The bristle machine was down, she told me, and wouldn’t be fixed until tomorrow.

  Sensing what a lovely person Sheila was, perhaps, the pigs followed her into their new quarters: a spacious concrete pen. A pink pig snorted nearby. I was glad to note that my pigs were bigger than hers.

  While we filled out the “paperwork,” a slip of pink paper with my name and phone number, Shelia told me she used to run a beauty store—that explained the nails. “This is what can happen,” she said, and showed me her thumbnail—a green shriveled nail bed. Since quitting the beauty store, she’d been ranching now for twenty-two years.

  “Sheila, I really want to see the pigs die,” I said. “I need to be there. So I’ll come up tomorrow morning and watch the whole thing,” I said, feeling a little tearful.

  Sheila didn’t seem able to focus on anything, though, and vaguely nodded. When I started to ask her more questions, she brushed me off, jumped on her four-wheeler, and roared away.

  My last view of the pigs: They were in the concrete stall, looking optimistic, sniffing a trough on the floor. They smelled other pigs, and perhaps they thought this was a real farm visit. Like an exchange program for city pigs.

  “Bye, guys,” I said, and they just looked at me out of the corner of their eyes.

  I pulled away from the Wild Rose feeling vaguely uneasy but also vastly relieved. I had successfully raised the pigs without poisoning them, having them escape (permanently), or—my worst fear—seeing them get mangled on I-80. And now I had successfully unloaded them at the slaughterhouse. But the slaughterer didn’t seem to be taking me very seriously. And why should she? A city slicker with two pigs—big deal.

  For me, though, the pigs were a twice-a-day (at least) interaction, and I had wanted their death to be as respectful as possible. Sheila was not going to be a good killer, I could tell. But I drove away because I had no other choic
e. I had rented the trailer and delivered the pigs, and she was my only hope.

  My suspicions deepened when, at the local feed store, I stopped to get twelve bales of straw (how often do I get the chance to buy a trailer full of straw for the chickens and the garden?). Talk turned to pork.

  “Oh, you are going to be shocked how good it tastes,” he said. “It’s nothing like that stuff you buy at the store.”

  I mentioned that I had fed the pigs fruit.

  “That’s going to taste so good,” he encouraged. “It might even be a little sweet.” I thought I detected a little drool coming out of his mouth.

  “Where’re you getting them done?” the guy asked.

  “Sheila’s,” I duly answered.

  “Oh, yes, she’s a real one-of-a-kind character,” he said.

  “She seems insane,” I said, desolate, kicking my legs on a bale of straw. The worker threw tightly bound straw into the trailer. I thought I heard him mutter in agreement.

  That night, while at a poetry reading for a friend in the city, I got a voice mail from Sheila: “Novella, your pigs are ready,” she singsonged. “I need to get them off the box tomorrow, so call me.” Left at 8:10 p.m.

  When I called her, she said she had to call me back—some piece of equipment had broken. “OK,” I said, hung up the phone, and in the middle of the bookstore I shouted, “Cunt!”

  They were dead. And I hadn’t been there. Not that I was looking forward to seeing them killed, but I wanted to be there as a way to close the door on what had turned into a massive task—feeding and caring for the pigs. I had also wanted to make sure they hadn’t been scared in their last moments. I had hoped that maybe having me there would have made their death easier. People were staring at me in the bookstore, so I wandered outside. I hated her attitude, too. I had told her that I wanted to watch, to help, to be a part of these pigs’ death as fully as I had been involved in their life, but that hadn’t registered with her.

  After I let that go, I worried about the other details. The blood, which I had hoped to collect to make blood sausage. The heads. The intestines! I dialed Sheila again. No answer.

  An hour later, she called. Now I was going to get some questions answered. “I’m covered in muck,” she started off, “but I wanted to let you know your pigs are ready.”

  “Where are you keeping them?” I asked, unsure whether I could even trust this woman to have the common sense to put the pig carcasses in a cool place.

  “They’re in the walk-in,” she said in her best placating tone.

  “Now, Sheila,” I said, “I told you I wanted to be there. I’m going to let that go. But I want the intestines and the heads.”

  “OK,” she said. “We’ll get the heads. And the insides, we have those in a bag for you.”

  “What about the blood?” I asked, knowing this would be impossible.

  “Yuck,” she said. “No, we don’t keep that. Novella”—she said my name with a Spanish accent—“I have to go take a shower. Can I answer all these questions later?”

  I had to face facts: I had entrusted my pigs to a bitch from hell.

  “Well, if we had talked about any of this even for ten minutes,” I said, madly pacing between people trickling out of the poetry reading, “we wouldn’t be having these problems right now.”

  “OK, so we’ll see you tomorrow, honey. Drive safe.”

  One time in Seattle, while I was riding my bike home from work, uphill, a stranger started to follow me on foot. He grabbed at me, and I had to ride faster to get away. Then he ran faster. I pedaled fast and finally got away from him, but an hour later, I found myself in my car, cruising the streets for the man. I had a piece of lumber in the backseat. I can’t explain what I was planning to do, but now I had that same feeling of rage. Directed at this ’80s nightmare turned pig murderer.

  It was the same feeling of cosmic unfairness that I had felt when the ducks were slaughtered by the dogs, or by the opossum. Injustice. Life gone bad. Grace- lessness. And worst of all: It was my fault. Again. Because I had been slightly desperate, because I didn’t have very much experience, because I had lost control.

  In the end, I wanted to blame America. This is how we do everything: we rush around because time is money, even at the folksy slaughterhouse. And the tradition of not using everything—of throwing all that good stuff away just to deliver me the muscle meat on a hook—made me feel sick. The fact that I was culpable in this fiasco made it suck even more.

  Swirling with rage, I drove up with Bill the next day to pick up the carcasses. They were cut in half and hung by their back legs from hooks connected to a pulley system. I couldn’t even look at Sheila, I was so pissed off. I wrestled the pig halves off the hooks, and laid them on some burlap sacks in the back of the same station wagon that had ferried them from Mendocino to our home as shoats. Their bodies lay in supplication, stretched out and hairless. I scattered bags of ice over them.

  The pigs were pale and cold. Their skin was intact. Since they were cut in half, I could see that both of them had two inches of glorious fat all over their bodies. Big Guy was going to make some terrific prosciutto—what a great big ass. I carefully put their heads—which I was glad to see had expressions of hope on them—into buckets of ice I had brought. Sheila handed me a grocery bag—about five pounds of offal. I glanced inside: a gloppy combo of dark liver and some greenish stuff. It took everything in my power not to pour the contents over Sheila’s frizzy head.

  We drove away, then stopped and got some peaches at a roadside stand. The pigs already smelled like jamón ibérico in the car. I fretted about why I was still so enraged. Here I was, I had the pigs, they looked great, I could relax after six months of hard work. Why wasn’t I celebrating? Why couldn’t I let it go that I’d missed their death and most of their organs?

  With the juice of a September peach dribbling down my chin and the man I loved so deeply beside me, I sifted through my thoughts of anger. Around exit 56 for Vacaville, it suddenly became clear: I had spent almost half a year devoted to making these pigs happy, to truly knowing them, yet in the most important moment of their lives (to a farmer, at least), I hadn’t been able to bear witness. Margaret Visser writes in The Rituals of Dinner, “When the meal includes meat and especially if the animal is ‘known’ to us, death can be dramatic. In order to affect people, such a death must be witnessed by them, and not suffered out of sight as we now arrange matters; attention is deliberately drawn, by means of ritual and ceremony, to the performance of killing. This is what is meant by ‘sacrifice,’ literally, the ‘making sacred’ of an animal consumed for dinner.” Sheila hadn’t allowed me to make my pigs sacred, and that was why I was so angry.

  I dropped Little Girl off at the butcher shop near Sheila’s and made plans to pick up the wrapped meat later in the week. Big Guy I took to the restaurant.

  When Chris saw the pig, he said, “Nice pig.” His brown eyes ran along the haunches of Big Guy with respect.

  His admiration snapped me out of my rage. We had a lot of high-quality pig meat to process. I could mourn later. For now, my days would be all about curing, preserving, and eating meat.

  The deconstruction of the pig, Italian style, began.

  The difference between English- and Italian-style butchering is one of finesse versus sheer strength. Once we had wrestled Big Guy onto the cutting table, Chris ran his hand over the pig’s back. With a small knife, he pressed into the haunches and made a few graceful incisions. The back leg came off easily. I watched in awe-filled happiness. Meanwhile, my American butcher was firing up the band saw.

  Suddenly, Chris held what looked like a regular store-bought hacksaw. He crouched into position and began lightly sawing the shoulder and front leg. This came off, and with the side that was left, Chris expertly disassembled them down to recognizable cuts—a hunk of ribs, a rack of loin chops, a chunk of back fat, which I knew we’d need to make salami, a slab of pork belly about two inches thick.

  Chris paused every n
ow and then to hit his knife with a sharpening steel. I had the sensation of watching a dance performance. A light shone on him as he performed, a white-haired meat maestro, dancing around my fallen pig.

  He picked up a section of the loin chops. “This,” he said, “is the most expensive piece of meat.” He ran his blade along a squishy pink part of the meat above the loin. Chris sliced his boning knife in and extracted the tenderloin, a three-foot-long tube-shaped piece of meat. “It’s tender because it isn’t used much. But it’s overrated,” he said.

  On that note, I told him that Sheila hadn’t saved most of the offal. There would be no weird lung terrines, no boudin noir.

  Chris seemed almost as devastated as I had been. He grasped the butcher table, as if to steady himself.

  “It does look like there was a little trauma here,” Chris said, and pointed a knife blade at a reddish spot on the muscle part of the shoulder.

  “Oh god,” I said, and told him about what had happened—how I had missed the actual death of the pigs.

  He just shook his head in sympathy. Then, as if to make up for it, he put the pig’s back leg on the table, trimmed off a bit of skin, and told me to rub it with salt. We would turn this into prosciutto.

  “Is this big enough?” I asked. I remembered Chris’s saying the Parma pigs in Italy grew to be seven hundred pounds.

  “It could be a little bit bigger, but it will do,” he said.

  Samin laughed when she came in and Chris told her that I had a complex about the size of my pigs. One of the prep cooks poked his head in and, when he saw my pig leg, said, “That’s huge!” I beamed.

  “What do Italians do when they’re doing this?” I asked Chris as I sprinkled salt onto the leg.

  “They talk about women,” he said dryly.

  I cackled. I could see why. I was essentially massaging the pig’s butt. I ran my hands down the skin, pressing, pressing. I finessed the salt into crevices and folds in the skin. The salt rubbed against my skin like sand. After a few minutes of rubbing, the salt drew out water, and my hands were wet. This, Chris told me, was how you knew you were done. I did the same with the other leg.