“Oooooooooh” or “eeeeeeee.” A keening vowel. Sometimes they make a high-pitched noise to underline their discomfort. It’s a small crisis every time, every face. When I say, “We’re going to eat him,” their mouths stretch horizontally and their eyes stretch vertically. If I had to send Big Pig to slaughter today, the day Cody built him a house that won’t blow down, it would seem nearly fair and I could do it. Happy pig! Jungle pig! He will have, says Cody, just one bad day. “He likes to root and wallow,” says Cody. He snorts in his sleep and rolls in the mud under his newly reinforced piggy house. Whole trout, long as my forearm, fresh from the crick. Anyhow, what would the revenge be for? We feed him well and he loves to eat. Will the chain link hold him? Will he stomp down the gravel lane, past Matt and Anna’s spot in the old farmhouse, across the lawn, up the stairs, and into our converted mill loft to take his revenge while we sleep? Surely, no matter how clever, he cannot work a lock and key with only hooves for hands. I watch Nomnom rip through the weeds and think of him at 200, 300 pounds. Is he showing off? Is he “being cute”? Is he “self-conscious”? Our friends say when he gets bigger he’ll slow down, but the farmer who sold Cody the pig says that’s not the case. He kicks up his legs and runs circles when people watch him. I mean, he’s pretty fast,” is what Cody says.īig Pig (not a name) is quick as hell. “My god, did it fall on him? That would be too tragic.” I say that. Cody leans a plywood board against the side of the chicken house and the pig hides under there. If I had to “process” no-name Nomnom today-this, our first day together-I could not. We regard the small pig, now pushing through the weeds of the dog run, oinking softly. “That’s what suckling pig is, after all.” “If he gets really smelly and people complain we’ll just harvest him early,” says Cody. We are afraid of what we’ve just done here, what we’ve just committed to do. Both of us very edgy and maximally annoying because, because, we are afraid of Nomnom’s knowing eyes. “Nomnom, do you like your name name? Do you? O, Nomnom. “Oh Nomnom, who’s a cute man?” I stick my fingers through the dog crate and the pig squeals away. “Nomnom’s not a name, it’s a post-mortem description.”
“But what about Nomnom’s shelter? What if it rains?” I ask. The dog run: a chain-link enclosure running half the length of the 100-yard chicken house, overgrown with every thigh-high plant that overgrows the Virginia backwoods. Also, it’s looking like a lot of work to make the pigpen pen a pig and I have to teach a poetry class in two hours.Ĭody grows testy, the way he does before he gets a good idea. I think of the pig’s feet, sorry, hooves, and wonder if the pallet thing isn’t a bit mean, a bit ankle-breaky. “Look how they’ve placed the pallets to keep the mud down.” “This definitely used to be a pigpen,” says Cody. We stomp around the compound’s falling-down chicken house, tick grass tickling our knees, examining one of the stalls not in use by our friends’ three sheep, ten ducks, and sixteen chickens. “Woof, the whole neighborhood is gonna complain about that smell,” I say. The pig, copper-colored, with black belly spots.
The pig is roughly the same size as our six-month-old puppy, but somehow lighter, just 25 pounds. The pig has a sweet nose, though, just like a drawing of a pig snout. The pig has shat and vomited and smells like the wind in some parts of Kansas. PIG, he mouths, eyebrows shooting all the way up.Īn hour and a half later Cody pulls up to the millhouse with a piglet in the dog’s crate in the bed of his truck. Is that soon enough?” He sees me watching him. It’ll take ten minutes to get downtown to an ATM and then thirty to you, so let’s say an hour. Cody comes in already on the phone, saying, “Forty in cash, that’s fine.
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