Authors: Kelly Milner Halls
“Wow. Thanks.” Rafi grinned.
I let out my breath in relief. We wouldn’t have to wake up the Thompsons after all. Mrs. Thompson wouldn’t tell half the county that Rafi and I had gotten stuck parking.
“Want to ride?” the guy asked.
Rafi eyed the ladder and then looked at my short skirt. “Maybe we’d better walk.”
“Joe, third one back there, has a cab. Maybe you can get in with him.” The guy picked up some sort of walkie-talkie and held the button. Through some static, he said, “Joe? Can you give these two kids a lift? Their car is stuck right where we’re headed.”
So Rafi and I waited, holding hands, and then we scrambled up into the cab of the earthmover third in line.
“Name’s Joe,” the guy said. Rafi and I nodded. That was the only thing we already knew. He looked considerably less dirty than the first guy, even if his eyes weren’t quite as bright.
“Nice to meet you. Thanks for the ride,” Rafi said. I was grateful he didn’t volunteer our names.
“Nice night,” the Joe guy said. “Stars and all. Good night for a deserted road.” He winked at Rafi. I saw it and felt myself get hot in the face.
It also pissed me off, that guys could have this instant camaraderie if sex was involved, so I said, “What are you guys doing? I mean, what are you building? Way out here, deserted road and all. Why are you sneaking in here at midnight?”
“Hog barn. Big operation. Something like twenty thousand hogs. I’m not really sure of any more than that.”
“Hogs?” I felt my jaw slagging open. “
Twenty thousand hogs?
Who’s building it?”
“Smithville Pork,” the guy said. “We just go in and clear the place and get it ready and lay the foundation, and then somebody else comes in to do the rest.”
“Hogs?” I felt pinched in the middle, sick, as if somebody had put a vise grip on my stomach. I had heard about big hog factories that came bulldozing into a nice quiet farming community, putting local little pig farmers right out of business and pouring thousands of gallons of waste into the rivers, instead of using manure spreaders to put it back on the fields like family farmers always did. Here was a hog factory two miles from my house. Two miles from my own pigs and from my dad’s hog barn, where we had maybe 180 baby pigs in a season. Twenty thousand hogs. I looked at Rafi. He was reading my face, and we were quiet.
The whole army plowed up the dirt road and parked. The first one nosed up to the Jeep. Another worker extracted a long chain from a toolbox on his Caterpillar, hooked it under the Jeep and to the Cat. “Jump in,” he said, so Rafi jumped, turned on the motor, and the Jeep sprayed some mud and popped free in less than three seconds.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” Rafi said while I stood there in the weeds, swatting mosquitoes.
“You kids be good now,” the lead driver said. He winked at Rafi in the headlights.
I jumped in and we drove down the dirt road toward the gravel. I watched behind me as one by one, the monsters shut down their lights and their motors. The next-to-last vehicle in the caravan was a cement truck, and the last was a big SUV. All the drivers piled into it. After the roar of the caravan, the motors of only the Jeep and the SUV in the darkness seemed like silence.
I stepped into the house, trying to be noiseless. I’d missed my midnight curfew by ten minutes, but that was pretty good considering all that had happened. Nobody woke up, or at least nobody got up to yell at me, so I stripped off my clothes, pulled on a T-shirt and boxers, and fell into bed.
I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there, feeling Rafi’s hands on me, his mouth, his fingers, and aching, and getting interrupted by blinding diesel headlights. A hog factory. A hog factory. When I finally slept, I dreamed of a giant hog on wheels with its huge mouth wide open, creeping closer and closer to our hog barn. I came awake and when I slept again, the giant pig was creeping up on my 4-H pigs, ravenous mouth open to consume them.
Dad woke me at five thirty, and I guess I sat up crying, “Get away!” The sound of my own voice brought me to my senses. Dad teased me about yelling in my sleep.
“I was dreaming … “ I started to tell him about the dream, but when I got fully conscious, I realized that if I told him about the hog factory, he would know Rafi and I were parking. There would be no other reason for us to be on the Thompsons’ road. So I shut
my mouth and just looked at his face. He had already shaved, and he was still grinning at me. I took my pillow and swung it at him.
“Dad?” He needed to know about the hog factory. Today. Before they got the foundation laid. But there was no way to tell him without talking about where Rafi and I had been.
“Yeah?” He stopped, waited.
I looked at him, and I couldn’t do it. “Nothing. I’m nervous.”
He nodded and disappeared down the steps.
Yesterday, we had washed my three market hogs, two barrows (male pigs who were castrated to be raised for meat, not breeding) and a gilt (a young sow, called a gilt until her first litter), and had bedded them down in an overabundance of clean straw so they would be clean for this morning. Dad already had the pickup and trailer backed to the hog house. My little brother Dean’s single barrow was ready, too. This was Dean’s first year in 4-H, and he was so excited he was bobbing up and down at the breakfast table. At five thirty-five in the morning, going on too little sleep and the near nausea that came with it, I wanted to bop him in the head. Much to my credit, I didn’t.
Mom was silent while we ate. Dean skipped out of the house after gulping his eggs and orange juice.
“Kerry.” Mom stopped me while I was trying to dodge out the door after Dean. “What time did you get home last night?”
I took a deep breath. “Twelve ten,” I said. “Sorry.” Lying was pointless. Mom set such traps. If you tried to lie yourself into good favor by pretending you hadn’t broken a rule, you’d get double-whammied because she already knew the answer before she asked the question. Mom looked me in the eye, guilt barbs in full force. “I’m disappointed in you.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“No late nights at the fair for you.”
I wanted to tell her about the hog factory. Mom and Dad needed to know. Plus, it would get me out of hot water for being late, but it would get me into the fire for parking, so being late was the better of the two evils. I’d stay in the hot water. I kept my mouth shut.
“Kerry. You have to be careful with that boy. I didn’t want to forbid you to see him, but I’m afraid I’ll have to.”
“Mom.
We’re not … “
doing anything,
I wanted to say but couldn’t. I didn’t know if that was true. We were, after all,
doing something,
just not as much as we could be or wanted to. Not as much as some of my friends were doing with their boyfriends. Sally, for instance, who had just started birth control pills.
I didn’t have to finish my sentence. Mom turned her back on me, silent, busying herself with dishes. The famous silent treatment.
“I’d better go, Mom.” I kissed her cheek. Mom nodded but didn’t kiss back, didn’t lift her face.
We loaded the pigs into the stock trailer. Doing familiar labor with Dad and Dean was a comfort, and I was glad I wouldn’t have to face Mom again until evening.
As we drove, the smell of summer filled the pickup cab. “Smell that corn growing,” Dad said. “Do you know anything as sweet?” I took a deep whiff. It was a rich, earthy, green and moist smell that indeed did smell like growing.
“Hay smells even better,” Dean volunteered.
Dad grinned at him. “Well, for today, the corn is the best smell in the world. On baling day, hay is the best smell.”
“Dad,” I started, “is there a hog factory going in around here?”
“
That
would stink things up. Wouldn’t be able to smell summer anymore. No, there’s not. Why?”
“I—heard there was.”
“Nope. Farm Bureau meeting in March, remember? Gordon Smith promised us that the lobbyists had been so powerful that the Zoning Commission ruled to keep hog factories out of Story County. Remember?”
I nodded, and the knot in my stomach twisted back in place. Dad deserved to know. “Dad, there’s … “ Dad was smart, and if I said anything, he would know instantly that I had been parking at the end of the dirt road with Rafi’s hand under my bra. And if he knew, then Mom would know, and Mom made her rules based on Grandma’s rules. And I might not get to see Rafi at all.
“Yeah, Ker?”
“Nothing. Just that this is the best smell in the world.”
I could mesmerize myself, watching the fields. Watching perfectly even, straight rows of corn zip past my eyes was the same sensation as running a thumbnail over the teeth of a comb.
We drove to Nevada to the fairgrounds, signed in our hog projects at the registration building, received our official white and green fair T-shirts to wear while showing our animals, found our pen assignments, and unloaded the four pigs into two pens with fresh wood chip bedding. We put the bags of Supersweet hog feed inside their white wooden box stenciled with green four-leaf clovers and our names. I padlocked the box. Dean filled a bucket at the hydrant outside the barn and poured water into a trough in each pen, and then he took off to find his buddies.
I sat on the fence under our 4-H club name sign—PALESTINE PEPPY PUSHERS—trying to get the pigs to calm down a little. They were so wound up, it was as if a giant hungry pig really was after
them. Dad put his hand on the small of my back. “They’re lookin’ good, Ker. You’ve done really well. Could be, should be, your year to take some prizes. Can’t imagine a better gilt than you’ve got there. Wait and see.”
“Thanks, Dad. Hey?” I had to tell him. The knot in my stomach might twist the ability to breathe right out of my body.
“Yup?”
But I still couldn’t say it. “When will you be back?”
“By chore time. I’ll chore at home early and come back up to check on you—and see the horse show. Call if you think of anything we forgot.”
I nodded.
Dad guided the truck and trailer back toward the road.
I sat, unable to quit thinking about the army of earthmovers and the hog factory moving in.
Gerbert and Herbert, the barrows, came nosing over to the toes of my tennis shoes. Helga, the gilt, flopped down where she could keep her beady little pig eyes on me. I had to admit, she was more than a little spoiled.
Dean’s barrow, Buster, walked around and around and around, looking for a way out. He would have been happier in the same pen with the other three, but each exhibitor was supposed to have his or her own pen, so poor Buster was destined for a lonely week.
Pigs are amazingly smart. People don’t know that if they’ve never known any pigs. I sat on the fence, thinking about creatures like these, who knew and loved me and trusted me—mostly because I fed them, but nevertheless, they loved me—being kept in a giant factory where their entire short, destined-for-pork lives would be confined to a space smaller than these 4-H fair
pens, so small they could barely turn around. No fresh air or nosing in mud or jumping and squealing in play would ever be theirs. They would breathe, eat, sleep, drink, and poop in a tiny space until they were big enough to be cut up into pork chops and bacon. It made me sick.
These three buddies of mine would end up in the meat market. Even Helga, after she was done having some litters of piglets, would eventually be transformed into sausage. I had no illusions about that. But up until the point of sausage making, I would make sure her life was happy. These were animals for food and money, not pets. But, as Dad always taught me, they live so we can eat, so the least we can do is make their short lives of sacrifice as comfortable and pleasant as possible in appreciation. That’s respect for life, he said. Sort of like the Indians, I always thought. I rubbed each of my pigs’ bristly ears. They had finally all settled down for naps in the clean wood chip bedding. I gave Buster a pat, too, and then I headed out to see the fair.
The county fair smelled and sounded the way it had every summer for as long as I could remember; the mixture of animal smells—cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, chickens, and off-beat animals like goats and rabbits, with their distinct body and manure smells—all blended around their bleating, mooing, and neighing. Busy kids pitched out stalls, spread clean bedding, walked horses, and washed cattle in the sprayer area. The scents of hot dogs, hamburgers, and cotton candy drifted over it all and were inviting in spite of the tight knot in my stomach.
The Story County Fair had no midway. It was a 4-H fair, a farm kid’s paradise, and everybody here came because they loved farming or some part of it. I walked, swinging my hands, drinking it in, past the snow cone booth by the show pavilion where I
would show my pigs on Tuesday, and ran smack into the Thompson boys at the door of the dairy cattle barn.
“Got your porkers installed?” Hank asked.
“Yup. Your milk bags?”
The boys nodded.
I turned with them. We ambled around the grounds, talking, greeting other friends, soaking it in.
“Your camel jockey gonna come watch you show your pigs?” Hank finally asked.
“You bigot!” I punched him in the shoulder.
“Just wondered if a Muslim can attend a pork event, is all. You know I like Rafi. Everybody likes Rafi.”
“He can’t
eat
pork, you idiot. He can look at it. He’s coming to watch me in the show, yes.”
We reached the display area. Here some farm implement dealers brought displays of the newest tractors, innovative planters and attachments for combines, and information about farm programs, progressive ideas, and the like. On election years, the candidates used all the remaining available space to promote their own causes from every angle they could think to appear agriculturally minded. “Gordon Smith for Iowa,” blazed in bright blue with red and white trim. “The man for Iowa’s times.” His movie-star-like face smiled down at them from a billboard-sized banner. Hard to miss. “Your future governor will be here at the story county fair, Sunday night at 6:00 P.M., prior to the 4-H horseshow,” the sign read.
“Do you know who that is?” Hank asked.
“Of course. He’s running for governor.”