I don’t like hogs. I like bacon and ham and pork chops, but I don’t like the animal they come from. Hogs stink. And they’re mean. Uncle Owen spent the first evening we were there showing us his hog scars by candlelight. His left calf looked like a piece of weathered driftwood where an angry sow had chomped a large portion of it off years before, and his right hand was missing half of his pinkie and ring finger from a ravenous boar. Most of the time though, Uncle Owen told us, his hogs were pretty nice. In fact, some of them were like pets to him; he had names for each of his favorites, the breeders who weren’t going to slaughter anytime soon. They were nice enough as long as they were fed and watered on a regular basis, which was getting harder and harder for him to do, both because of his age and health, but also because PF Day meant he couldn’t use his tractor to haul the feed, and water didn’t pour forth from the taps anymore—it had to be pumped from the old well and carried in buckets. But I didn’t trust the hogs anyway. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to make them pets. I called them names like Chitlin, Sausage, and Pork Chop, just to let them know what I really thought of them.
As I lay on my bed, inhaling memories of Grammy, I watched spiders crawl across my ceiling. Grammy was never afraid of spiders and neither am I. She always said that they were good for eating all the annoying bugs like flies and mosquitoes. I named my spiders Boris and Wolfie and I-Spy. I watched as they spun their webs and waited for some unsuspecting insect to fly into them, the wait stretching out longer and longer as autumn turned to winter. They were quiet, unassuming companions that I could talk to and marvel at. The best thing of all was that Mom, Dad, and even Irv were afraid of them and would usually leave my room when they saw one. When that happened, I’d wink at the spider and whisper, “Good job, Boris.”
The first few days at Uncle Owen’s were not bad for Mom and Dad. They had been able to score some “ice” immediately after they’d left the jail, so they were okay. They had to ration it somewhat, but Uncle Owen had plenty of booze to make up for it. Poor Irv, though. My parents wouldn’t share their stash and repeatedly denied even having any, so Irv was faced with the agony of withdrawal soon after PF Day. Whenever I felt sorry for myself, I thought about what my poor brother was going through and transferred my pity to him. At barely fifteen, he began to look like an old man, withered and hollow inside. I suppose that’s what he was. Isn’t that why people start using in the first place? Dad had his voices, Mom had her life-crushing sadness, but what did Irv have at such a young age that made him want to be someone or something else through the escape of a temporary high?
When Irv and I were younger, before the ice took ahold of his heart too, I used to ask him why Mom and Dad seemed to care about their drugs more than us. He told me I thought too much. He said it didn’t matter, it was what it was, and that was that. Not much of an answer, I thought. But that was the major difference between Irv and me then, besides the sixteen months difference in our ages—I thought too much, he not enough. Maybe if he had thought more, he’d have realized how destructive drugs and alcohol are and decided to stay away from them like I did. Now the major difference between us is that the only ice I like is in a glass of Dr. Pepper.
And oh, how I yearn for a nice cold glass of that sweet ambrosia! I haven’t had one since the day before PF Day. That spewing, churning, conquering, life-altering day.
Chapter 3
Types of Survival
What exactly constitutes survival? I feel like I’ve been barely surviving my whole life. At a very young age, I was left alone to forage for food while my brother got himself up and off to kindergarten and my parents lay catatonic on the bed, couch, or floor—wherever they had passed out. I learned how to make a breakfast of stale chips and moldy bread while I watched cartoons over their near-lifeless bodies. That is until the TV got repossessed. After that, I taught myself to read the books that Irv brought home from school. I’d often hide them between the couch cushions so he wouldn’t take them back to school before I had memorized them.
I figured out how to melt into the background when Mom and Dad were awake, so they wouldn’t take out the pain of their hang-overs on me. I also learned how to hang onto very few possessions and to keep them with a change of clothing in a backpack, so I’d be ready to move at a moment’s notice, either when my parents were running from the police or when the cops caught up to them and hauled them to jail. It was easier to grab that small bag when the lady from Child Protective Services came to get Irv and me than to frantically try to pack a bunch of things and risk forgetting something special. Usually, when we finally were able to return home, it was to a different house, empty of any of the possessions we had amassed at the previous one.
But not long after PF Day, survival became so much harder. We had it easy at Uncle Owen’s farm compared to a lot of people. We had food to eat, water to pump, and wood to burn in the old Buck stove, which heated the downstairs where everyone else slept. I didn’t mind being cold upstairs though. The colder it was, the less the hogs reeked and the less often my parents visited my room, so being cold was fine with me.
Many people in town didn’t have any way to heat their homes or to cook their food, if they even had any to cook. Water was hard to come by too. I felt bad for the people in town, but I also envied them because they had normal families to take care of each other. I have always envied everyone else. That’s why I never had any real friends. Sure, it was hard to make friends when everyone else’s parents knew about my parents’ drug use and wouldn’t let their kids come over to my house. But it was more than that. When I was younger, I was so jealous of their normal childhoods that I hated them. As I got older I realized that it wasn’t their fault and I forgave them for their familial serendipity. I like that word—serendipity. It’s a word that belongs in their world though, not mine. It used to belong to the world of the glass unicorn too, before his flight that made him a mere-horse. Words like serendipity, normal, and family describe why I couldn’t get close to anyone; Irv and Grammy were my only true friends.
Uncle Owen gave me a wall calendar and I carefully marked off each day, not because I cared at all what day it was, but just because it was something to do. Even though I helped with the everyday chores of hauling water to the house, cooking meals, and keeping things tidy—I flat-out refused to do anything with the hogs—I spent a large part of every day in my room alone. Luckily, Uncle Owen’s late wife, Aunt Helen, loved to read, and he had kept all her books, so besides the spiders, I had plenty of book-friends to keep me company. I wasn’t really lonely; I was used to being alone. At this point, life and survival wasn’t too bad. But that was about to change.
In mid November, roughly two weeks after PF Day, the ice and booze ran out. We were about to embark on an experience worthy of The Hunger Games, a fight to the death for the inhabitants of our malodorous arena. I wasn’t too keen on entering the fray—well, who is anyway? Like Katniss, my strategy was to lie low and wait the others out, which worked to some extent. The only problem though was that unlike Katniss’s situation, I was related to all the other contestants in the game and I didn’t want to see any of them hurt.
The first casualty was Uncle Owen, al-though it was due more to his previous bad health and the absence of his heart medication than the combative atmosphere of his once peaceful home. That morning he was trying to talk Dad into helping him kill and butcher a hog. In his calm, patient manner, he was explaining that it would provide meat as well as tallow for candles to last through the winter in case the electricity didn’t come back on soon, which it was beginning to look like it wasn’t. I listened at the top of the stairs, hidden from the conversation below, testing the temperature of their moods before plunging in. Dad, in the throes of his withdrawal and under the influence of the phantom voices in his head, was hard to convince. It was only after Uncle Owen promised to do most of the work, having Dad there just for safety, that Dad agreed. The conversation sounded like Dad was being lazy or squeamish about the killing, but
I suspected the real reason was that he was afraid that the blood and gore of slaughter would excite the demons that were beginning to take control of him.
Mom and I were cleaning up the kitchen after the men went out to perform their gruesome task. After half an hour or so, we both jumped when we heard a single gunshot, then laughed nervously, thinking that it was just the demise of the hog. Several minutes later however, Dad and Irv came in alone, both white-faced and visibly shaken. Irv made a beeline for his room without saying anything, but Dad sat in Uncle Owen’s chair with his head in his hands. After a few tense seconds, he said in a leaden voice, “Owen’s dead.” Then he jumped up and went to his room, with Mom trailing behind like a lost child.
I stood frozen for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what he’d said but failing that, I decided to ask Irv and went to his room, where he lay on his bed, looking up at the ceiling.
“So… Uncle Owen’s really dead?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?” I asked timidly, half afraid the answer would be that Dad had killed him.
“I don’t know. His heart, I guess.”
I sat on the bed next to Irv. He sighed and sat up beside me, knowing I wasn’t going to leave until he told me the whole story.
“He was in the hog pen trying to separate the one we were going to slaughter from the rest of them,” he explained. “Suddenly he clutched at his chest, looked at us like he was pleading for our help, and then he fell to the ground. Dad and I tried to get to him, but the hogs surrounded him for some reason and acted like they wanted to kill us. So we got out of the pen and Dad picked up the shotgun and shot it over their heads to scare them off.”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything else as he stared at his shaking hands in his lap.
“So… Was he already dead when you went in there?”
“Yeah.”
His verbal reluctance was getting tedious. I tried to be patient as I mentally opened his mouth, reached down his throat, and pulled out the words. “So what did you do?”
“I tried to pull him out of there, but I couldn’t budge him.”
“You just left him there?” I asked, incredulously. “How do you know he was dead?”
“I could tell… He died with his eyes open.”
“Oh, you mean ‘windows of the soul’ and all.”
“Yeah, except there was no soul in those eyes. There was nothing at all in those eyes.”
I thought about that for a few seconds, the image of lifeless eyes beginning to spook me. “Were you scared?”
Irv was trying to summon some bravado, but in the end he told me the truth, like always. His shoulders sagged as he admitted, “Hell yes, I was scared. I don’t know if I was more scared of the hogs or those dead eyes.”
I shuddered and put my arm around my big brother. I wanted to shield him from the pain and the memories, but I really didn’t know how.
Chapter 4
Ghosts
The next morning, Irv had to go out and feed the hogs because Dad wouldn’t get up. I know my brother was terrified of encountering Uncle Owen’s lifeless body again, but he was also scared of facing Dad’s anger if he didn’t do it. So out he went. I stood by the back door, waiting for him, worried about him but not enough to go out there with him.
After a half an hour or so, he came back in, his face white as a ghost. I again followed him to his bedroom where he divulged his experience in the hog pen.
“Uncle Owen’s body is gone,” he said un-evenly.
“What?” My voice was as high as my eyebrows.
“There were a few pieces of his clothing lying around, but no body.” He looked at me with round spooked eyes.
“The hogs?” I was disgusted and anguished at the same time.
“I don’t know. The hogs were locked in another pen. I don’t know how they would have got in there. Maybe Dad…”
“You think he did it? Buried him, I mean?”
“Maybe…”
As creeped out as I was, thinking about how Uncle Owen’s body had disappeared, I couldn’t help wondering about it all day long. When Dad finally got up late in the afternoon, he merely said he had taken care of the body. His exact words were, “I took care of it. Can’t have his body around inviting his ghost to stay here.”
He must have done it during one of his midnight haunts, as none of us heard or saw him do it during the day. That left me to speculate about the various ways Dad could have taken care of it. #1 Dad could have chased the hogs into the other pen then buried the body, but that would have been so much work for one man and there was no evidence of disturbed earth where he would have been buried. #2 Dad burned the body, but we couldn’t see any place where the ground was charred. #3 The hogs ate the body, and then Dad chased them into the other pen. The latter option seemed the most likely in my mind, even though it made me squeamish to think about it. I made a pact with myself to never eat the meat from those hogs, just in case. I wouldn’t want to have a piece of Uncle Owen’s spirit floating around in me.
Which made me start to think about ghosts. The idea of ghosts has always intrigued me. Do we all have a ghost of ourselves that lives inside us until we die? The preachers at the churches we’d go to when Mom and Dad would miraculously find God after a stint in rehab, before they would find God in their drugs again, called it our spirit. They made it sound like our spirit was a good thing, loving and beautiful. But everywhere else, you hear that spirits or ghosts are bad and hang around to haunt you and make your life miserable. It made me wonder if Dad’s mind was full of ghosts or spirits other than his own. Did Grammy’s ghost inhabit his head? Would Uncle Owen’s be rattling around in there now too? Or were Dad’s ghosts all bad ghosts, little devils telling him to do bad things? I wasn't afraid of Dad, but I was a little spooked by the ghosts haunting him. Poor Dad. He really must be a good man to have kept all those ghosts at bay for so long.
A few days later, Dad decided that a hog needed to be slaughtered. We had plenty of jars of fruits and vegetables that Aunt Helen had canned before she died, but Dad wanted meat, and the meat from Uncle Owen’s big freezer had run out or gone bad. So Dad made Irv single out a fat hog and shoot it. Then Dad took over, hacking it to pieces while Irv carted it off to the smokehouse a few pieces at a time. Apparently, Dad had gotten over his fear of violence because he tore into that carcass like it was everyone who’d ever done him wrong. I watched from the kitchen window, at once horrified and fascinated; I couldn’t tear my eyes away until the last bloody piece was loaded into the wheelbarrow. Irv looked pale and old. His hands shook while he picked up the chunks of meat and waited for the next piece to load. I should have gone out to help him, but I couldn’t force myself to move. I still watched as he frantically pumped frigid water to wash his hands when his gruesome task was complete. Or maybe it wasn’t he who was frantic, but my own mind, which wanted him to be rid of the evidence before the ghost of Uncle Owen could find him and inhabit his fragile mind.
Dad came in with a big chunk of pork, hollering for Mom to cook it for him. Mom was taking one of her frequent naps and couldn’t be awoken even though Dad shook her, so the task of cooking defaulted to me. When I showed reluctance to cut the chunk into manageable pork chops, Dad impatiently sliced it up, his hands flying so fast I was sure he’d cut off one of his fingers. I didn’t find any spare digits in the meat as I cooked it, so I guess he was okay. As the meat cooked in the big cast iron skillet atop the Buck stove, I had a vision of Uncle Owen’s ephemeral form floating up from the chops like a genie from a bottle, my nose inhaling him as I breathed in the enticing aroma. I held my breath and tied a towel around the lower part of my face. Just in case.
After a quick lunch of home-canned green beans and peaches, I decided to take a cleansing walk. I thought if I walked far enough away from the farm, the chilly air might expunge the odor of hogs and death from my nostrils and my psyche. I loaded a backpack with some items I thought
I might need: a pocketknife, some wooden matches, a bottle of fresh well water, a field guide to native flora and fauna from Aunt Helen’s library, etc. At the last minute, I threw in a small store-bought can of deviled ham—ironic, I know, since I had sworn off pork, but I figured the intense processing of this pork product would dispel any ghosts hanging around and the sealed can would keep them out. Try as I might to avoid temptation, the memory of the aroma of those pork chops cooking was like an invisible finger poking at my brain, beckoning me to try a little. I tried not to believe it could be Uncle Owen knocking at my subconscious.
Chapter 5
Foraging
The first time I walked into the woods, an inexplicable feeling of peace blanketed my mind. I purposely chose the woods to the west of the farm so that the prevailing winds would blow the stench of the hogs away, but I was filled with trepidation as I crept along the length of the hog pen nearest the house to get to the tree line. The hogs in that pen eyed me suspiciously—or was it voraciously?—especially one beady-eyed black one who walked sideways along the fence in order to always be facing me, glaring at me the entire way. It gave me a queasy feeling. Was this the one that had eaten Uncle Owen? Was Uncle Owen’s ghost angry with me or just trying to communicate?
At any rate, my frenzied mind suddenly relaxed in the shadows of the trees as if they stood as guardians against the ghosts that trailed me and I could be relieved of that duty. I inhaled the fresh earthy aromas as my frantic pace slowed to a stroll. I felt at home for the first time since Grammy died.
After almost an hour of wandering, I found a huge fallen tree and sat on its rotting trunk to rest and take in my surroundings. I had not thought of the possibility of getting lost—or maybe I had, subconsciously, and followed my hidden desire. But now, sitting on the log and taking stock of my odds of survival all alone in an unfamiliar woods at the start of winter, I realized that the odds were not in my favor. Besides, I needed to stay around the farm to watch over my family, even though I really didn’t know at all how to help them.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 31
