To Kill a Pig by John Bardes

Dr. William H. Feables always said that a man’s car was like an extension of that man, which is why he so deeply regretted bringing his 1983 Volvo. He brought the car to the Starkes’ annual fall BBQ not as a self-conscious effort to cast aside pretensions, and not because the dirt road’s dust blended in with the Volvo’s dirt and dents, but for no better reason than that his soon-to-be-ex wife had won the BMW. The route from the town of Almeek’s first ever condo development (as the development’s first resident, William had received balloons) to the Starke’s farm was circuitous. Almeek, it seemed, lacked either the money or the need to build a direct route through the pastures, crop fields, and 500 acres of robust, northern Michigan swamp. But with a slightly crumpled pie under his arm, William walked out from the rows of trucks and familiar “Tom Walker Construction” pick-ups and headed to the top of the driveway. Suddenly Mellie Starke ran up, hit William with a one-armed hug (from which William pulled back), thanked him very much for coming and told the family doctor that he was going to kill a pig.

William already needed to catch his breath (he hated how at his age even the briefest uphill walk left him short-winded), and at first didn’t know how to answer. William had never come to the BBQ before because he feared socializations violate necessary doctor-patient objectivity, but he had long heard of the event as a pillar of the Almeek farming social scene. As farming became less economically sufficient, the Starke’s dependency on the unpaid farm labor of friends grew. As payment, Mellie and Craig Starke offered (in addition to hunting rights) the Starke annual BBQ. At each BBQ, the Starkes killed and divided the prize specimen of each type of livestock they bred—one chicken, one cow, one lamb and so on. Whatever meat the guests didn’t eat at the BBQ, they could take home as well-earned informal payment for their work on the farm. While William appreciated such folksy rituals, he explained to Mellie that he wasn’t going to kill any pig. William knew that as a doctor, Vietnam draft dodger and member of the Democratic Party (he kept these last two facts to himself) killing ran against his very nature. He had never killed anything larger than an insect, certainly nothing mammalian. But Mellie was insistent, as the doctor had in his own way helped the farm more than anybody else this year and earned not only his place at the BBQ but also the right to kill an animal.

“By the way, how’s Craig feeling these days?” William asked, avoiding specifics and wary of the boundaries of doctor-patient confidentiality, particularly with patients (or their spouses) in social settings.

“Oh, much better, thanks to God and all our prayers.” Mellie smiled, “And of course, all thanks to you. His ribs have healed, and the tear across his chest is mostly cleared up. All the same,” Mellie leaned in close and grinned, “you’ll be happy to know that, even though he’s a breeding bull, we’re eating Barney tonight.”

William knew Barney’s story well. Barney, a beast with two horns, a dark grayish coat, and over two thousand pounds of fat and muscle, had gored Craig one day as he was changing the creature’s feed. After the first ram, Craig flipped over the feed trough. For nearly a mile, Craig crawled carrying a steel trough on his back as a shield. For William, whose worst injury had been a hernia and whose most threatening occupational hazard came from projectile muffins during heated staff meetings, the story inspired wonder, and for his own medical role, a healthy dose of pride.

Mellie shook her head. “When I think of Craig bleeding, clutching his broken ribs and crawling with that heavy steel on his back, I put my hands together and thank the Lord for letting me keep him.”

William disliked sentimentalities, finding them counterproductive. A doctor has to see the human body as a machine. His ex-wife had always represented this as “detachment,” but William knew that dealing with human flesh everyday, nothing is more important than maintaining safe emotional distance. Only rookie doctors open up with their patients; veterans know that sentimentality can be very dangerous to both patient and doctor alike. To change the topic, William decided to introduce his pie before it got any mushier.

“Oh, that’s just so kind of you, Willy,” Mellie surprised William with such diminutive use of his name. “Did you bake it?”

“No,” William lied, “I bought it.” He wasn’t about to admit any of his more effeminate hobbies. “It’s Blueberry-lime.”

“Why thank you so much.” Mellie’s face slid from blissful to sympathetically mournful in too few steps. “And how’s your new place?

“My condo? Very good.”

“And how have you been holding up?”

“I’m doing quite well. Just great.”

“What’s your teenager’s name? Brian? How’s Brian handling things?”

“Brian’s doing fine also.” In William’s experience women never understood his healthy distaste for emotionally probing questions. “Brian’s one of the better students in his class, his teacher tells me. He wanted to come, but unfortunately couldn’t make it.” In truth, Brian hadn’t returned his father’s phone invitation, and William was just socially intelligent enough to pick up on the signal.

“Doc, what are you doing up here with my wife?” Craig, thick and tall and tan, held out two Budweisers. “Keep away from the girls, Doc, you don’t know what talking to one of them will do to you. Come over here with the boys. We’ll protect you from them.” William smiled and followed after Craig, who walked with the subtlest of limps that only a man’s wife or his doctor would recognize.

After Barney gored Craig, Mellie’s first call wasn’t to the ER but to the family doctor, who unlike the ambulance could arrive within minutes. It was the first house call William had ever made. By the time the BMW pulled up, three other cars had already arrived. One look at Craig and William knew he was in bad shape. The long march back from the field had left him lifeless. He lay sprawled in the trough, limbs outstretched, moaning quietly and caked in red-stained grains. Three men ran into and out of the house on meaningless errands—fetching clean water, looking for aspirin, reminding Mellie how tough Craig was, dialing the ambulance, fetching more aspirin, redialing the ambulance to find out what was taking so God damned long.

Without raising his voice, William asked Mellie to fetch blankets and towels. Working calmly and precisely, William handed the towel to the closest man and asked him to apply pressure onto Craig’s chest. The man was tall and gangly. He didn’t look at the towel, but just stared at William with begging eyes. William told the man again to apply pressure. Craig cursed. “Jesus, Jessie, do like the doctor says!” Then closed his eyes and became silent. Mellie screamed, and asked William what had happened, but William ignored her. William told the man, Jessie, that he had to apply pressure. It wasn’t an order, just a statement of truth, but Jessie looked straight ahead, eyes wide, hands shaking. Finally, Jessie took the towel—then he turned around, lifted the towel to his face, and vomited. William stepped up, grabbed another towel and handed it to Mellie, who pushed it down hard onto her husband’s chest.

The ambulance arrived half an hour later and took Craig away. William stayed long enough to wash the blood off his hands and repeat some polite medical niceties to Mellie. Afterwards the skinny man may have tried to say something, but William pretended that he hadn’t noticed.

“This is the man that patched me up,” Craig introduced William. The men were built like they went around on Friday nights and beat up firemen, and Craig was the largest. They let out a round of laughs, “there he is,” “heard all about you,” “you missed a spot,” and “hell of a doc.” The men stood in wide formation around multiple grills, an inverse mirroring of their wives clustering around the playpen. “So Willy,” Craig pulled him into the circle of Budweisers and grass-stained jeans, “Mellie tells me you’re gonna kill us a pig.”

“Actually, no—not me.” William smiled, “I’d rather save that honor for somebody more deserving.”

“Nobody more deserving than you, Willy,” one of the men called. It was Jessie. Jessie wore a Walker Construction tee shirt; another of Tom’s employees.

“Craig and I put down Barney this morning.” Tom smiled. “Mean son of a bitch took a long time to die.” Tom, of Tom Walker Construction, employed half the men there. “I think I caught Craig tear up there a bit, out of the corner of my eye.” Everybody chuckled, and William joined in, perhaps a second too late.

Craig grinned. “Well, Tom, you know how I hate to see a worthy adversary go.” Everybody guffawed again and tipped back their beers. “Hey, you should kill that hog soon, Willy,” Craig got serious, “because it’s gonna take a while to grill.”

“Like I said earlier, I’m actually not going to kill it.”

“Come on, you’ve got it in you, doc,” Jessie called. “I’ve seen you work on a body.” The circle let out a unified laugh. “Or can you only patch up bodies?”

“Is that right, Willie?” One of the men chuckled. “Docs can save lives, they don’t teach you in med school how to take them?”

Quite right, William opened his mouth to say, but thought better of it when he realized that the man meant it as a joke. Instead, he said, “I’m just not sure I want to. I’m not dressed for it. I’d rather give somebody else a chance.”

“Hell, every man here’s killed something today,” Tom said. “Even Jessie here killed a chicken. Don’t worry, Willy, the pig won’t bite.”

“Yes, well, maybe some other time. I’d rather just enjoy this great beer.” William hadn’t touched a Budweiser since high school.

“You ever kill a pig before, doc?” Craig asked from across the circle.

“As a matter of fact no, I haven’t.” Strange, William instinctively almost let slip, “no sir,” like he was in school again, but caught himself. “To tell the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever killed any animal.” The circle turned to look right at him.

“You don’t say.” Jessie had a look of pained sympathy. “I can understand a city boy—such as yourself—not understanding much about hunting. . .”

“I’m actually from a community just outside Detroit, and not. . .”

Jessie continued, “but even a boy should know common skills for survival…”

“Aw, don’t worry, doc,” Tom, all smiles, eyed William’s caged expression and edged into the middle of the circle, standing directly between Jessie and William. “Jessie here’s just being a big meanie.” The circle released scattered chuckles.

“Jeez, I feel for you, doc.” Jessie snorted, but never broke eye contact with William. “Every man should know how to provide for his family.”

Some of the men in the circle edged back and forth and frowned. Craig let out a brief laugh, then looked down and away, sipping his beer. Tom gritted his teeth in Jessie’s direction.

“I am capable of killing a pig,” William, red in the face, broke the silence. “If you all want me to kill the pig, I’m ready. Let’s go kill the pig.”

“You really don’t have to if you don’t want to, Willy,” Tom said.

William exhaled gratefully, but then heard his voice continue to talk. “No, I’m ready. Take me to it.”

“Alright, boys,” Craig finished his can, “let’s go watch Willy kill his pig. Anybody want to come?”

“I know I want to see this,” Jessie laughed.

“Then I’m coming too,” Tom added, still glaring at Jessie.

The barn smelled of cut grass and sugary manure. William strutted into the barn like Gary Cooper, proud of a four-man posse. The second he spied the two pigs together in their bathroom-sized corner stall, his stomach dropped, his posture collapsed, and his breath chilled in his throat.

“This one’s Miller, and this one’s Miller Lite,” Craig pointed to the two large, mellow hogs. “I tell Mellie not to name the produce, but she never listens.”

“Which one do I kill?” William picked up a nearby axe and leaned on it cavalierly, like an exaggerated Paul Bunyan statue. He wished his family could see him.

“You’re not going to kill anything with that,” Jessie interrupted.

“Here,” Craig picked a knife off the wooden counter, “Use this.”

William examined the knife. It was very long and slightly rusted around its dull edge, the wood handle tanned with old dirt and hand prints, but the blade still looked sharp. The knife felt light in William’s hands after holding the axe, and more intimate.

“So, uh, which one do I kill?” The words sounded so foreign to William’s ears.

“Hell, they’re both the same size,” Craig scratched his chin. “They’ll taste the same and would sell for the same. You pick.”

William approached the pen. The two pigs looked up at him with large, dark eyes. Their skin was pink and silky, like fat, mud-caked babies. The two animals snorted. William rationally knew that their smiles were just an illusion resembling something human, that he was personifying—no, anthropomorphizing—something basically brainless. With an axe, at least William could maintain some basic level of distance. Why did these two dumb animals remind him so much of his patients?

“I’m sorry, Craig, I’m sorry,” William backed away, the knife quivering, “but I can’t do this.”

“It’s ok, Willy,” Tom took the knife from William’s hand, “we’re not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Anyway, it’d be a shame to waste a hog when you’ve only got two,” Jessie added. There was no longer any look of cockiness in Jessie’s eyes.

“Don’t worry about it, Willy,” Craig said, “Hell, what’s it matter. I hear girls like doctors either way, whether they can take care of business or not.”

It was an odd thing to say, and sounded innocuous. But even Jessie, a man who William figured got cocky after thumbing through a Reader’s Digest, a man who probably hadn’t voted in an election since high school prom queen, flinched, perhaps aware of how the air seemed to change from cool and light to dense as hot chalk dust.

Without a word, William approached the pen and opened the door. He stared the pigs in the eyes. The brothers stared back, but Miller Lite looked away first. Acting on primal instinct, William locked his arm around Miller Lite’s neck, hooked his fingers onto the outcropping of the pig’s throat, and led him out of the stall. Miller Lite consented, but still squealed gratefully when William finally let go. William glanced around the room.

“It’s back on the table,” Craig said.

William picked up the knife. He unbuttoned his blue Oxford shirt and stood bare in a sweaty white undershirt.

“There’s not going to be that much blood,” Craig said.

William ignored him and hung his clean shirt on a nail anyway. Kneeling alongside Miller Lite, William gripped the pig’s chin and craned its head upwards. Craig and Jessie moved to stand on either side of the pig, their arms outstretched. The pig rested in dumb passivity until he saw the knife out of the corner of his big brown eye. Miller Lite squealed and bucked. Against all rationality, William couldn’t help but think that somehow, the pig knew. Craig and Jessie placed firm hands onto Miller Lite’s sides and braced their weight against him. Over in the pen, his brother slammed and kicked against the wooden walls of the stall, while Tom cooed and whispered something inaudible to him.

With a quick pull William brought his arm upwards, almost as if he intended to put the knife away.

The pig’s legs quivered and sagged away under him, like old towers built on wet sand. William waited for the barbaric scream, but none came—just a hollow flop as the wet throat hit the dusty floor. And although William knew that Miller Lite’s last sounds were mute only because of his cut throat, William saw the look in the animal’s eyes and believed that the pig accepted his fate. His head jerked, but the eyes stayed steady, wide and knowing. William could see that Miller Lite felt great, vast pain. But he had completed whatever life fate deals a pig, and now would never breath or think or exist again. Craig was right, there was surprisingly little blood.

Tom left to wash his hands while Jessie and Craig moved the carcass to the cleaning table. William expected to cringe at the removal of the head, but the flesh had ceased to be an animal. It had become meat, no different than a medical school cadaver. And yet, William felt the sudden urge to remind himself that this flesh had once lived. William ordered himself that when he ate pork later that night, he remember that flesh’s lowly, silly name. William didn’t understand why, but he desperately wished that he had gotten to know Miller Lite. He wanted to talk to the pig, comfort his brother, reach out to him.

William never looked away, until Craig and Jessie finished cleaning the body. William put his shirt back on. He had trouble buttoning the shirt because of his shaking hands, but he stared at them and they cowered and steadied. William scratched his face—he needed to shave—and left the barn. He must have watched Miller Lite for quite some time, because it was very dark outside.