We give him the deadline. He puffs. It’s perhaps for the best that we can’t see his face. In the spirit of negotiation we promise to have Little Pig ready when he arrives. All he’ll have to do is drive us to the abattoir in time for the 4.30 curfew. He can leave immediately after we’ve delivered Little Pig and be back in time for the evening milking.
Claude is a very nice man. He agrees to help us. He’ll come at four, he says.
We take a moment to savour our relief and then go outside to Little Pig. The afternoon is already dusky. There’s a chainsaw burring close by, a field or two distant; a harsh, lonely sound. We saunter up to Little Pig and pay him some attention, caress the flop of his ears and run a hand under his muddy stomach. We want to lull him: we have a plan.
There’s only one place we can think of in which we can secure him in anticipation of Claude’s arrival with the trailer. It’s not a place we usually keep animals. Under the stone steps that rise to the first storey – the main rooms – of the house, there’s a kind of cubbyhole, tall enough to stand up in, about the size of a small bathroom. It’s a cold, stony nook where Mo likes to lie in the heat of the summer. At the back of it, there’s a glass door that leads into the lower rooms of the house, old workshops and stores, animal byres in the past; at the front there’s a wire-mesh panel that can be pulled across to close it off. I’m not quite sure what purpose the mesh panel serves: it was a feature we inherited from the previous owner and never bothered to change. When Mo was a puppy it was sometimes useful for penning him in so that he couldn’t jump up and knock over elderly visitors. Now it’s our pig trap.
We need Mo’s help as bait. Ed takes him inside on the ground level, into the scruffy room behind the glass door, and closes him in. Predictably, he comes to press his nose hard against the pane and to whine in protest. We hope this will lure Little Pig, tempt him into the pen out of sympathy or curiosity; for extra enticement we scatter a good dollop of grain on the concrete floor. We open the mesh panel as wide as we can and stand back. Little Pig sniffs, listens. I turn my back on him; pretend it’s nothing; no trap here, nothing to worry about. He comes to the threshold. Mo is quiet now, looking at him through the glass, wagging. Can Little Pig’s small beady eyes see a dog behind glass in the dark recesses under the steps? He can smell the grain, though; his snout flicks and wiggles with delight. He takes a small step into the shadow, a slow, wary step, and then in a rush, nose to the ground, stumbles forward for the food. Mo shuffles on the other side of the glass door; Ed and I push the mesh across and slip the bolt to fasten it. Little Pig in his final enclosure.
We go inside and prepare the meat for supper: a joint of pork belly. A slab from Big Pig, heavy and hearty. We’ve set it aside to share with the visitors, dark red flashes of flesh buried deep in layers of lard. It will need long, slow cooking so the fat renders down and the meat pulls apart, soft and moist. Almost as soon as it’s in the oven it fills the house with the gorgeous rich smell of roast pork, making our stomachs rumble. It’s something to look forward to, after this is all over.
Claude comes at four, as he promised. I hear his van and trailer rattling along the lane to the house before I can see them and I’m full of relief, again, and gratitude, but also anxiety now – and something else, duller, a sadness. The trailer is backed across the front garden so that the rear of it is as close as possible to the wall and the mesh panel. The heavy tyres cut ruts in the wet lawn as Claude edges backwards and forwards trying to position the vehicle just right. In the end there’s a gap of a couple of paces between the back of the trailer and the wall. Ed and I make human barriers so that Little Pig can’t bolt through this space, this small portal to freedom – we stand either side with old doors, blocking any route except one: the one to the trailer.
But this leaves Claude to guide Little Pig and Little Pig doesn’t know Claude and doesn’t trust him. There’s a stand-off. Ed and I coax Little Pig from behind our barriers but he’s not listening to us – he’s glaring at Claude and, just beyond, the step up into the trailer. He doesn’t seem to like the look of either. This is all strange to him, and frightening. He’s on his own again, trapped. He can surely hear the impatience in our voices. The summer days on the oak wood slopes of La Graudie and playtimes under the hose, making sunny rainbows, have come to this: a man he doesn’t know shouting at him and yanking at him and a metal crate of some kind looming above him, huge and high, and nowhere to go. He doesn’t have to be a clever pig – a Sapient Pig – or an anthropomorphic Toby to realize that this is not a good situation. Animal instinct can tell him that at a sniff and a glance.
Claude hoists Little Pig’s front legs on to the step of the trailer, and in a flailing, kicking, puffing skirmish of pig and man manages to force Little Pig inside and close the back flap.
Snap – bolt. Done.
But I don’t watch.
The abattoir. From the French verb abattre, to beat down, to fell. One of the busiest municipal enterprises in an agricultural town such as ours, a much-valued local service. It hunkers down in the industrial estate in the valley, with the rubbish dump and vehicle workshops, a collection of low concrete-and-metal buildings in a very large car park that can accommodate cattle wagons and articulated lorries but this evening is deserted and bleak.
As night falls, we unload Little Pig into a corridor. It’s bare, dark in places, harshly lit in others, leading nowhere; stained greyish concrete walls sucking us inevitably into a place we can’t see. It’s the kind of place Kafka might have imagined. We slosh through a thin film of brownish water. Now he’s here, Little Pig trots on quite happily, following Ed and Claude; I can hardly keep up with them. The man in charge – the man we spoke to on the phone – emerges from somewhere dressed in full whites and a bloody apron, a net cap on his head and his feet in yellowish-white wellies. He welcomes us like old friends, with a broad smile and an enthusiastic handshake. He slaps Little Pig on the rump and eyes him up professionally. He’s admiring, fond even. ‘He’s a beauty,’ he says, ‘you’ve done a great job here.’ He runs a hand down Little Pig’s back, around his shoulder and down a leg: ‘This is fantastic meat, this is.’
He has to ink Little Pig with a number. He allows us to choose – anything from one to ten. Pick a number, any number … It might be the start of a conjuring trick but, of course, it’s not as magical as that: we choose 6, randomly, and he whacks a heavy stamp into Little Pig’s side. The noise of the blow makes me open my eyes wide. It feels as though it should be reverberating throughout the entire building. He’s hit Little Pig with a squarish paddle that’s spiked with thick wires like nails which drive the ink into the skin. He holds it to one side for a moment while he checks the mark; it looks brutal, a medieval weapon. But Little Pig hardly seems to notice. He’s truffling in Ed’s pocket, a thick-skinned, solid-sided pig that doesn’t seem to mind the tattooing.
We trot on again. The corridor spits us into a holding pen, large enough for perhaps six or eight good-sized cows. It’s the kind of pen you find at cattle markets: solid enough but with metal fencing that rattles and shifts. Little Pig is the only animal here. The entire abattoir seems empty; there are no noises or smells, no evidence of work or death or distress, just all of us standing around under a low ceiling with Little Pig bumping and barging from one to the other.
Through an opening at the end of the pen, I can see a couple of other men, dressed again in whites. One is slooshing the ground with a hose, the other is bent low and awkwardly over some kind of metal equipment as though he might be mending something. The abattoir was opened in 1960; thousands and thousands of animals have ended their lives here in the last half-century. What was once a state-of-the-art facility is now battered and draughty, grubby. For years there’s been talk of building a new slaughterhouse with modern equipment, a more pleasant place for workers and customers and beasts, but the finance has never quite been found and there’s been political squabbling, and for now we’re left with this unforgiving bunker. As we slip
out of the pen and head to the small office alongside, Ed nudges me: we can see another man now, manipulating a huge saw in place to cut a carcass in half. When he lines the saw along the backbone and presses the button to switch on the power he receives a shock: he starts back and the power cuts out. He swears loudly. Then he lines up the carcass and the saw again, presses the button, starts the power and gets another shock. He jumps back, swearing. Carcass, power, shock, expletive. Repeat over, as if it’s a joke in some sadistic children’s cartoon. What a place to work.
Claude goes home to see to the milking while we contend with the paperwork. The man senses our discomfort and tries to reassure us. ‘We’ll look after your pig,’ he says. We ask him to make sure Little Pig is killed as soon as possible in the morning, so that he doesn’t have to wait longer than is necessary, so that he doesn’t have to endure hours in the gloomy pen with the conveyor belts cranking and the saws screeching and whatever other things we can’t imagine here this evening in the calm of closing, a day before the Christmas holidays. ‘We’ll do him first thing,’ he says, ‘I promise.’
And that’s it. Nothing more to be done. Little Pig will spend the night here, in this hard-bitten, grisly place. A Little Pig in a large, empty barn designed for death. He will be further from home than he’s ever been; in the morning strangers will come and manhandle him, not bad men but ungentle ones with a job to do; they will kill him without thought, efficiently and anonymously. This is not a place for sympathy or sentiment. It’s a cold place. There’s no sign that Little Pig is anxious or discomforted, or in any way prescient of what the morning might bring. He seems settled. But perhaps he’s just bewildered and exhausted from a day crushing electric fences and trampling the garden in search of company; perhaps he’s got this far, to this, lost his companion and his freedom and his view of open land stretching away to sky, and simply given up. There’s no way of knowing. How much can a Little Pig feel? How much can it know? Here in the abattoir these questions are not asked. It’s an animal in a pen, that’s all. An animal inked with a number and ready for processing. Good meat.
The manager files the paperwork and shakes our hands. We make our way out through the concrete corridor. Earlier, I’d followed the trailer in the car, and we head without speaking to the corner by the entrance gate where I’ve parked. Above our heads a red plastic sign reads ‘Abattoir Municipal’ in plain capitals. It’s unlit, but in the pulse of the floodlights outside the building it seems bright and draws my attention. I wonder how I’ve come to this place, after all, how Little Pig has finished up here. It feels like a defeat.
This was not the end I imagined. It’s harder, much harder, to contemplate this abattoir slaughter for Little Pig than to face up to killing a pig at home. It’s far more upsetting to abandon him here than to help Ed drive a large knife into Big Pig’s throat. I understand that most people have to use abattoirs; I know that they’re not purposely cruel places. They’re practical, effective, accountable businesses. That doesn’t mean I have to like them. I feel we’ve been lucky: the pens are much quieter than usual; the men under less pressure to process the animals; the atmosphere calm, almost peaceful. Little Pig, as far as I know, is not stressed or suffering. But still I wish things had not fallen out this way. I wish Little Pig could have endured a stay in his grassy enclosure, learning to dig the soft soil under the pines, unearthing winter grubs and lolling in his straw for a week or two until Christmas was over and the visitors gone and we were able to give him a respectful death. But his animal fear and loneliness and confusion were too strong, too instinctive, for such compromises. He couldn’t be sensible – how could he be? – and so we brought him here, to this. As I start the car and take the turn towards the road home through the valley, there’s a lumpen stone of sadness lodged in the pit of my stomach. I remember Big Pig in his final minutes, contented and comfortable, dancing in the frosty sun, and I consider Little Pig abandoned in the dripping, shadowy purgatory of the abattoir holding-pen, and my thoughts cloud over, obscured by guilt and sadness, and I can’t find my way through to think clearly about what death should be, could be, because Little Pig is left behind and I have let him down.
7.
The roast pork belly that’s been in the oven for hours comes out on the table in a magnificent pile of crackling and soft-pulled threads of dark meat and puffs of white meat and sticky, crunchy nubs and rich, velvety dripping. We eat with our fingers and celebrate – celebrate Christmas, celebrate the sausages, Claude’s intervention, an end to the work with the pigs, the loaded freezer; we celebrate the conclusion of another year here and more months to come, eating the meat and tentatively rooting ourselves. After all, who knows what might happen by next summer? We might never have to give this life up, after all. And just now such a thought seems hazy and unreal, ungraspable.
After the trip to the abattoir I’m hungry and cold and giddy. I almost forget Little Pig in my greed for the hot tasty meat. And this time, there’s none of the doubt that niggled with the first fillet joint from Big Pig: this belly doesn’t taste tainted or strange, it tastes delicious. Something else to celebrate: we haven’t botched the butchery.
The next morning, Christmas Eve, we collect the carcass from the abattoir. It comes in two halves, wrapped in polythene, with pink papers which give us all kinds of detailed information about body weight, fat-to-meat ratio, fat thickness, the healthiness of the internal organs – and the time of death. 5.30 a.m.
The manager was as good as his word. Little Pig must have been the very first animal killed that day, long before it was light, before the noise and stench of other slaughters could distress him. This seems a very good thing. I think of the man’s kindness to us – his attempts to ease our fears and his admiration for our work with the pig – in such an environment of daily ugliness and physical discomfort, and I admire his fortitude and resilience. This is not the savage butcher of urban myth; this is a gentle man doing a brutal job. Little Pig’s death was perhaps not ideal. It wasn’t the fairy-tale ending imagined by the romantic smallholder. It wasn’t how I’d hoped it would be. But it was humane, at least, and prompt. This is a comfort.
We take the carcass in the boot of the car to Benoît’s farm. As we approach, black pigs run at us on both sides, charging to the fence and then galloping along with us, curious and noisy, hopeful for food, spraying mud and stones, nipping and barging in a flap of ears and tails. A racing drift of live pigs outside, a shrouded dead pig within.
Benoît and his butcher examine the carcass and the papers. Oh yes, a good pig. Well done. We leave it all with them. This pig will be different to the last: one pig butchered on a table in the garden for roasts and stews and barbecues; one processed here with more skill for delicate cuts, transformed into hams and saucissons and charcuterie treats.
And that’s it, for now. It’s done. Over. Two pigs, a big one and a little one, have lived well with us and died without pain. Is that all right? Is that enough?
We might as well have named them, of course. And I suppose we did – Big Pig; Little Pig. By those names we came to know them thoroughly, each of them, the same but different. Fond, friendly, curious animals with a taste for games and fruit, robust and wild and just a little fearful. Beautiful black pigs. Some days they were absorbing, and I spent long hours pottering with them in the woods; some weeks I just kept an eye on food and water and left them to themselves. They were independent in a way that a pet is not, and I liked that. But they responded, too, to attention and because I’ve grown close to them, they’ve changed my life: they’ve made me know this place and its pasts, really know it, as if instinctively; they’ve taught me new and practical skills and plunged me into the world of husbandry; they’ve shown me what it is to kill a living thing – and what it is not to kill it, but to delegate that task to a stranger to be done out of sight. They’ve been fun, frustrating, comforting, exhausting, provoking, and they’ve made me appreciate every single morsel of pork I eat, every time I eat it, because that�
��s their gift to us in the end. Pigs are fine animals, characterful and good-natured and sparky. I’m pleased I’ve got to know them, a little. I miss my pigs.
And so that leaves the meat. The produce. That’s what it’s all been about, after all. That was the point of it in the beginning, and the purpose we tried to keep in mind. We did all this, in principle at least, for the meat. So, was it worth it? We’ve raised two animals as humanely as we possibly could, in the best conditions we could provide. We now know what it means to commit without compromise to the welfare of our pigs, and the time and money this demands. Big Pig and Little Pig were agricultural animals, but we had the luxury of keeping them without the day-to-day worries and constraints of running a farm. All these factors should come together to provide us with the best meat ever. Good lives: good meat. We all know how this works; it’s a given, surely. But is that how it’s turned out?
One thing I’ve become certain of is that raising animals humanely, under free-range conditions, is not just a matter of food snobbery or one-upmanship. It’s not always possible for everyone, everywhere, I appreciate that, but I’ve seen pig lives and deaths up close, very close, and I’ve seen what it takes to produce a piece of meat on my plate. I know what pigs are. It would be a betrayal of all this, of the entire experiment, of Big Pig and Little Pig, to fall back on an industry that denies the nature and instincts of such beautiful and sensitive animals. High-quality, free-range meat is expensive, but our pigs cost a lot to raise. To all those struggling to make a living producing the best pork from pigs living under the best conditions, I raise my threadbare sun hat.
And our meat? When we return to Benoît’s butchery at the farm, the cuts are laid out for us on trays along the metal bench in the cool workroom. A jigsaw pig: head to tail, skin to innards. There are pieces missing. One of the large back legs has been salted for ham and is already hanging in the curing room where it will stay for just under two years, drying out. Most of the other leg, along with some portions of a shoulder and some pieces of breast, has been chopped and peppered and stuffed into cases for saucissons. These will hang alongside the ham for several months and come down in the summer, perfect for slow apéritifs and quick salads. There are a dozen of them: twelve fat saucissons hanging in a barn.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 25