American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  The woman spoke toward her dishes: “You’d better follow Russell out to the pen.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Jill backed toward the door, imagining that one of the men might suddenly come to life, awaken from his stupor to reach out and clasp a hand around her leg or arm in a grip strong enough to keep her there. Maybe the woman doing dishes was their prisoner, forced to clean house and to have the men’s children—except that she seemed to be in charge. In any case, why weren’t there any other women here? Jill pushed on the screen door, noticed at eye level a tear in the screen that had been repaired with black thread in a zigzag pattern. She and Ernie had repaired their screen with duct tape last week, and she had felt bad, thinking about how her father used to replace a porch screen when it had the tiniest hole. Her father couldn’t understand how Jill could choose a life where there was no time to relax and do things right. She had failed to convince him that the relaxing and the joy were in the hard work—something she believed most days.

  She descended the stairs, sinking into that broken step, but not quite snapping the wood.

  The air outside should have felt free and clean, but the mood of that kitchen followed her out into the humid evening.

  “Russell?” she shouted tentatively and then heard a clatter and a squeal from the direction of the barns. She whispered, “Where the hell are you?”

  She followed the trail, cut through burdock, ragweed, and pokeweed, felt the poisonous poke berries smash against her arms and face, to arrive at a pigpen built of old iron-and-wood cement forms wired together. As the pig-shit smell hit her, she saw the dim outline of a skinny, dark hog, up to its belly in mud. She switched on her flashlight and found the batteries were dead. The swampy twelve-by-twelve-foot pen didn’t appear to have a weed or a scrap of food in it, and there were no feed or water troughs visible above the soupy muck. By leaning over the west side of the pen, Russell had somehow dragged the pig against the side, gotten a rope around its torso, behind its front legs. The hog had its nose sunk in the mud, and in the dark, its visible eye looked as dull as the eyes of those men in the kitchen, whose presence she still felt like breath on her neck.

  She moved around to the back of the hog and saw that one testicle looked swollen. She absentmindedly aimed the dead flashlight and clicked the useless switch. Then she leaned in close to study the hind end of the hog as best she could in shadow. There appeared to be a dark gash on the swollen side of the scrotum. The pig’s front legs buckled, and he went to his knees. Mud splattered Jill’s chin and lips.

  “What happened to his goddamned balls?” Jill took off her handkerchief and wiped her mouth.

  “Uncle Roy tried to cut him.” The boy spoke in a nasal tone.

  “Your uncle tried to castrate a full-grown hog?” Jill should have waited to pay until she’d seen what she was buying, confirmed that this creature was going to do the job she needed done. If her whole pig-roast operation were going to depend on this dull-looking animal, maybe she should say screw it now before wasting any more energy. All along, she and the neighbor had assumed they’d be able to borrow somebody’s boar hog for breeding, until they discovered that everybody local was out of the pig business and that they would have to artificially inseminate at thirty bucks a pop. She had been a fool to think the solution would be as cheap and simple as buying this hog. She could still drive away, she thought, forget that twenty-five dollars and let these people and their pig and their house continue to collapse. She could still pour all her energy into corn and soybeans.

  “Ma says you can’t eat boar meat,” the boy said. “It’ll poison you.”

  “He seems awful weak,” Jill said.

  “We starved him, to make him weak for Uncle Roy to cut him. But he broke his rope, and Uncle Roy got bit, and he told ma he won’t try again.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t take off his testicles? Because I need him for breeding.”

  “Ma says if he was castrated we could fatten him and eat him. They’re fighting about it all week.”

  The pig needed only one good testicle to do the job, and Jill knew she was taking the damned pig no matter what the kid said. She supposed they didn’t use a veterinarian or anesthesia on the poor fellow. Worst-case scenario, the infection would resist treatment, and she would shoot him and bury the carcass. This is part of what Ernie feared, no doubt, her wasting her money, their money. She tried not to resent the way even small amounts of money had to be such a big deal for them.

  Early this year, Jill had sunk most of her grandmother’s inheritance into expanding and updating the small milking operation, and the rest of it into some experimental oil beans that were going to pay off big, and now she no longer had enough money to buy anything more than a candy bar on impulse. Ernie had only reluctantly gone along with displacing a hundred acres of soy with Jill’s experimental beans, which in the end had never sprouted because of a June freeze. When her parents sent her fifty bucks last week, she’d thought she’d use it to replace one of the milk-stall stanchions that was rusting through, but then the rumor started around that the dairy was going to stop buying milk from small producers in the coming year. When she’d proposed expanding the milk barn and herd this past spring, Ernie had initially resisted. When their neighbor reported the rumor, six months later, that they would soon be out of the dairy business, Ernie nodded and kept nodding. When Jill finally looked him in the eye, she saw he felt sorry for her. She looked away from him, went into the kitchen and ate the entire quart of blackcap raspberries she was planning to use for making jam. Later that day, her hands and mouth still purple, she decided they should be in the pig-roasting business.

  Jill had no intention of eating this particular hog at this time, but she had been doing a lot of reading on the subject of pork, and she thought this kid’s ma and a lot of people might be wrong about boar meat. Boar meat was usually fine—although the flavor might be slightly tainted in older boars, especially those with unhealthy diets—and some new-age farmers said the whole notion of boar taint was an old wives’ tale. On the other hand, some who had experienced the tainted flavor said it made them swear off pork forever.

  “Can you help me get him in the trailer?” Jill asked. She held out a five-dollar bill.

  The boy made an awful sound to clear his throat. She thought he was going to spit, but he swallowed and stared dully at the money. Jill wondered if she ought to check with the authorities, make sure the kid was going to school, as her sister the social worker would have. Reporting folks to the authorities was frowned upon in these parts, however, by Ernie as much as anybody. “It’s awful easy to make trouble for people,” Ernie had said on more than one occasion. Jill wondered how long people could survive being this poor, how many generations.

  She leaned close to the boy, pushed the five-dollar bill into his front overall pocket, saw how his tanned skin was streaked with dirt and sweat. He stared at her, open mouthed, as if waiting for directions.

  “Go on, get him out,” she said finally. “I’ll get the trailer up here.”

  The boy untwisted some wire and wiggled loose one of the heavy iron forms, showing he was stronger than he looked. Jill returned to her truck and backed the trailer in, relying on the taillights to get as close as she dared without taking a chance on running over something that would flatten her tires.

  It took them a while to maneuver the slow, muddy hog down the path and into the trailer in the dark, mostly pushing from behind, picking him up when he fell, feeling hip bones and ribs through rough skin, avoiding the swollen testicle. Both the boy and the hog stepped on Jill’s bruised foot, and when they got the hog up the ramp in the dark, he fell over onto his side. The two had to use all their strength to push him in the last few inches to close up the gate.

  “Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?” Jill asked, wiping her hands on her jeans. The boy shrugged, or maybe he didn’t respond at all. He was already walking away toward the house, disappearing into the tall weeds.

  Once
she got her wheels back in the two-track ruts, she was on automatic pilot. Neither speeding up nor slowing down diminished the violent bouncing of the stock trailer, and Jill supposed it didn’t matter if her eyes blurred. Although her mud-crusted hands smelled of pig shit, she picked up the chocolate bar from the seat beside her. She had meant to open it when she was clean and fed; she had meant to unfold the wrapper and foil carefully, to break off one piece each night. Then she would carefully refold the glossy paper and gold foil to retain the original shape and tuck the bar away in her dresser drawer, repeating the ritual until it was gone. Instead she tore away the wrapper with her fingers and teeth, undressed the top of the chocolate bar, spit out bits of foil.

  She bit into the heat-softened chocolate and chewed and swallowed wildly. The luxury of it made her feel drunk. She tore away the rest of the wrapper and devoured the whole damned thing.

  Despite the pig stink, it tasted better than anything she’d eaten lately, and it was gone way too soon.

  The memory of that taste then became an ache in her chest.

  When it began to rain, as it was apparently going to do every day for the rest of her life, Jill rolled up her window, trapped herself inside the cab with mosquitoes that buzzed around her face and ears. The hog still lay flat on its side in the trailer, its head and limbs bouncing like meat—it hadn’t moved since its collapse. Her family was right: just because she’d studied agriculture for six years didn’t mean she knew a damned thing about farming. All she’d ever wanted, from the time she was a kid, was to work with land and animals, to work beside a good man, but there was so much more to it. Her father had said that her marrying Ernie was proof positive she didn’t know a damned thing about real life. Her father couldn’t understand how Ernie’s calmness might be the antidote to everything uneasy about her; he didn’t see how the contours of the farm interlocked precisely with the contours of her mind. Her father might enjoy leaning back in his office chair about now and telling her she’d wasted twenty-five—no, thirty—dollars and a quarter-tank of gas. Until Jill had seen the Jentzen woman, she hadn’t understood what her family feared for her. She’d known that, like all the farmers in this downward spiral, she and Ernie could lose everything, but she’d hoped her ideas for extra income could postpone the end indefinitely. Maybe she was, instead, hurrying the end along.

  As she pulled into Ernie’s driveway, their driveway, she crumpled the chocolate bar wrapper so it would be unidentifiable as something fancy, except that no matter how small she crushed it, the foil glistened in the moonlight coming through the windshield. She finally shoved it into her pants pocket, although the effort caused her to swerve. When she turned off the engine, the boar was silent and still as a pork roast, beaten by the trailer’s bouncing and by the hard rain, which had started and stopped twice. At least the corpse would be clean, she told herself.

  Ernie was sitting at the porch picnic table with the Coleman lantern, moths fluttering and crashing against the glass. He and the neighbor were sorting through a box of old leather harness parts she’d dragged down the stairs yesterday. Atop the table sat the neighbor’s acne-studded son.

  All three kept looking at her and the trailer. The boy, sixteen this summer, was dressed in jeans and a rock-and-roll T-shirt. He was a helpful kid, although when Ernie wasn’t there he sometimes sighed at her and stood too close. Between taking sips of beer from the bottle in his left hand, the boy was swatting mosquitoes with his right. Ernie looked at her expectantly, but she didn’t want to get out of the truck. There was no point in getting out and showing Ernie the pig—he knew, had known all along, what folly this was.

  “So how’s your hog?” Ernie said. She was surprised she heard his voice from the porch so clearly, as though he were sitting in the truck beside her. He sounded almost enthusiastic.

  “Them Jentzens still living on woodchuck meat and dandy-lion greens?” the neighbor shouted good-humoredly. The neighbor had lost about everything except his house and garage in the last few years. His farm, once bigger than Ernie’s (although not as beautiful, with fewer stands of trees and no watering pond with turtles, no stream to rinse your face in, and too few blackcap raspberries), had been sold by the bank to a larger corporate farm. He now drove forty minutes each way to work at the new Tractor Supply store off the highway. But he had gotten the runt gilts as piglets for free somewhere, and he could butcher a pig like nobody’s business, she knew, and he still had a stainless steel pig smoker, presentable enough for any sort of graduation or anniversary party.

  “The hog’s dead,” Jill said, more harshly than she’d intended. Ernie nodded. The neighbor nodded, took a drink of beer. The son glanced at his father, took a drink of his own beer. Jill was grateful her sister the social worker wasn’t there to see it.

  Ernie approached, carrying the Coleman lantern, squatted down, and took a close look at the inert hog. After a minute or so, he came up and stood beside the driver’s door.

  “Looks like he’s been shot,” Ernie said. “But he isn’t dead.”

  “Shot?” Jill said. “He was starved and got an infection. I was too late—” She had almost added, to save him.

  “An old bullet wound in his chest, almost healed over. Do you suppose that’s how the Jentzens caught him?” Jill shrugged.

  Ernie didn’t swat at the mosquitoes, but let them draw out what blood they would from his exposed face and neck and arms. He lifted Jill’s hand off the edge of the window to hold it, and that sent energy through her arm, down into her belly and her legs—only she didn’t want to desire him now. She wanted to unhook the trailer, pull out of this driveway, and head south until she was far enough away that she could look back and see it all in miniature, see all her farm schemes as comic failures. Once she was far away, she would take a deep breath and ask herself if she belonged here at all—maybe her whole time with Ernie was nothing more than a crazy adventure.

  “Jentzens got a good crop of pokeweed this year?” Ernie asked and jiggled her hand. Jill glanced in the sideview mirror to see her face was smeared with purple. She felt him staring at her with the same fierce admiration he showed when she lifted the other end of something heavy or dressed a wound on a heifer or produced some compelling information about soy yields. But did he see her as a farmer? she wondered. What would her father say if he were here? Would he make clever remarks about failing farms and inbred families at the ends of dirt roads where everybody had six fingers on each hand? She pulled her hand out of Ernie’s to swipe at a mosquito on her forearm and smeared the blood across her skin. She wiped her forehead and cheeks to get rid of any mosquitoes she might not be feeling, and she smelled the pig shit on her hands.

  Ernie moved back to the trailer and squatted down to study the pig. He held his lantern near the animal’s face and spoke, or at least his mouth was moving, as he reached through the slats and felt the pig’s neck and chest.

  Jill couldn’t be sure from his reflection in the sideview mirror, but he seemed to be talking to the hog. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around and face him, but sat listening, resenting the scuffing and murmuring of the neighbor and his son. She adjusted the mirror for a better view.

  Ernie had a way of doing things; he made hooking up a cow to a milking machine or rebuilding a tractor carburetor seem as natural as letting water flow down a hill.

  From the trailer, there was a snort and a scraping sound. In the mirror, she saw the dark hog thrusting up its shoulders and dragging itself onto its knees, back legs, and finally its quivering front legs.

  “Holy motherfucker,” Jill shouted and stretched halfway out the truck window to see. Ernie laughed. For some reason he found it hilarious whenever Jill swore, as she sometimes did in bed.

  Once upright, the pig snorked a complaint, supported itself by leaning against the side of the trailer, and jammed its fist-sized snout between two boards.

  The neighbor raised his beer bottle, shouted, “Lazarus arises!” and stepped off the porch.

  T
he son raised his beer alongside. Jill slid out of the truck, left the door hanging open, but at her approach, her husband stood and stopped what he’d been doing.

  “Were you saying something to him?” Jill asked.

  “Nothing much.” Ernie shrugged.

  “He’s one ugly son of a bitch,” the neighbor said, sidling up to Jill. The son approached and stood right behind her. She felt him looming—how tall was that kid going to get?

  She had assumed the hog was black, but the rain had rinsed away the mud. In the lantern light he looked the color of dried blood, deeper toned than her Duroc gilts. His shoulders and head were bristled like a wild hog, and pointed tusks stuck out from his lower jaw. How could she not have noticed those tusks back at the Jentzen farm?

  The neighbor laughed and said, “He’s smelling those gilts now—that’s what’s got Lazarus arising. You’d better tell our sweet girl piggies to hold onto their piggy panties.”

  The men and the boy couldn’t stop staring at the hog, and the four male bodies boxed Jill in, put her a little closer to all of them than she wanted to be. Her foot was throbbing now.

  The pig had been dull at that farm, lifeless in that trailer. Was the smell of those gilts in the barn so strong as to drag him back from the dead?

  “Maybe this is something that got mixed up with one of those wild hogs they got down south in the state,” Ernie said. “Or maybe he got loose from the state fair—they got those big show pigs.”

  Jill didn’t know how the pig could have looked so much less formidable back in its mud pen.

  She’d had her hands all over this pig, pushing it into the trailer, and it had seemed smaller.

  “No telling how the Jentzens ended up with this thing,” the neighbor said. “Probably they just caught it up and put it in an old pen. Remember, they used to have pigs when we was kids.”