Esther the Wonder Pig

by Steve Jenkins

  Just after the storm first hit, Derek and I went for a walk. The landscape was truly breathtaking: Everything looked like it was made of crystal. But then a tree cracked and fell. Out in the distance, there was a pop and a flash of incredible blue light. That was a power line going down… and our power going out with it.

  In the morning after an ice storm, you can walk around and see the damage it did. This time, it was a disaster area. We didn’t have access to broadcast television (we mostly just watched things on Netflix), so we hadn’t seen any news coverage and didn’t realize how bad the situation was. We woke up expecting the power to be back on, but it wasn’t, and our place was freezing. At its coldest point, it was two degrees Fahrenheit. It was brutal. And we knew why it was so cold, that we had no control over the lack of heat inside, but our poor animals didn’t understand. We had five sad, freezing faces looking up at us like, What’s going on? Can you turn the heat back on please? We felt terrible. I remember looking at the dogs that morning, and I could see their breath. Inside the house. (Dog breath smells bad enough in the first place. We don’t actually need to see it.)

  All things considered, the first night went okay. The following day was when it got bad. And by that night, it was complete chaos. Trees were falling—big trees—through people’s houses. Ceilings caved in. When we stepped outside to get power from running our cars (we had to get it from somewhere), we could see the devastation around the community. It was terrifying. And of course, by necessity, every business was closed. It also continued to rain the entire second day. We could hear trees falling everywhere, smashing cars, dropping power lines. I’ll admit it was pretty exciting in one sense, but it was also frightening.

  The second night, we still had no power. It was tough enough on Derek and me, but we also felt guilty and helpless about the animals. They’re our family—our children, in a very real way. Imagine how you’d feel knowing your children were suffering and there was terribly little you could do to help them.

  This time we all slept together, huddled around Esther on the floor. We were quite the menagerie. One upside is that Esther is like a furnace—she’s always radiating heat. (Imagine the body heat coming off an average-sized person and multiply that by four. And it’s actually even higher, because a pig’s typical body temperature ranges from about 101 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Derek and I wrapped ourselves in our winter hats, gloves, and coats and swaddled Shelby and Reuben in the blankets, and we all snuggled up with Esther. The cats rested on top of us, using us for body heat, but not coming under the covers—I guess that notion was just a little too Kumbaya for those two. We survived the night and woke up to… no power. Still.

  Meanwhile, it was getting dangerously close to Christmas—it was December 23, and Derek’s mother was calling us every few hours to see when we were coming. We told her we’d keep her posted, but time passed and the power still didn’t come back on, and things were just getting worse.

  I didn’t want to be the one to say it to Derek. He already knew there was likely no way we would make it to Christmas with his family. Still, we were packing up our things and planning to make the four-hour drive, even though our lives had become somewhat of a cross between A Christmas Carol and All Creatures Great and Small.

  We did our best to function and create makeshift utilities while we figured out what we were going to do if this kept up. Our improvised stove was a bunch of tealight candles in a pot with a metal grate. We’d heat soup in a second pot atop the grate. We were literally cooking by candlelight, and as romantic as that sounds, it just plain sucked in practice. It took about an hour to heat a can of soup, so if you suddenly got hungry you were basically out of luck. (Unless you’re really into cold condensed soup. I am not into cold condensed soup.) Everything had to be planned ahead, and it just got exhausting.

  And let’s face it: I’m a bitch when it comes to this stuff. I want my TV shows. I want my Internet. This is the twenty-first century. If we want something, we want it now. Thanks to gadgets, we have it now. And suddenly we were dependent on battery life for our devices. We used our cars to charge the phones and our candles to heat water and to “cook” to the best of our ability, but people were lining up for three hours at a Tim Hortons restaurant for a cup of coffee. The town was at a standstill. We took turns charging our phones and using tethering apps to provide online access to our computers. We still had to keep up with Esther’s Facebook page, along with communicating with our families, but the novelty quickly wore off and the fear of disappointing Derek’s mom (and thus Derek) was stressing me out most of all.

  It’s crazy how something so beautiful—outside our windows it looked like everything was coated in crystal—could be so destructive. It went from Cool. We’ll probably never see anything like this again to Fuck this ice storm, fuck my life, I am over this! Whenever we got a glimpse outside, we would be reminded it was worse than we thought. The sturdy trees were bent over, begging for the ice to be gone. We finally realized we were going to be without power longer than we’d expected and that we needed a generator. Which would be fine, except the only generator available to us was $5,000—not something we could afford. We finally told Derek’s parents we wouldn’t be able to come and why. They were disappointed, of course, but they came up with their own plan: They’d come to us for Christmas. Even better: They’d bring a generator.

  That must seem like a piece of really good news, and of course it was, but honestly, it didn’t do much to lift our spirits. You could have told us we’d won the lottery and it would sound to us like we’d just gotten called for jury duty. By Christmas Eve, we were completely hating life. We had been without power for four days and wanted nothing to do with Christmas. We wanted nothing to do with the company of other people. We just wanted to wallow in our misery.

  And right in the middle of this bitter cold, Esther went into heat.

  Not that we knew what it was at first. It was her first heat. We hadn’t ever dealt with her cycles before, and it took a while to realize she was having her period. And this would not bode well for the family visit. Derek and I already were stressed out and close to snapping. The other animals were freaked out over the disruption the ice storm had caused in the home. And Derek’s mom was already terrified of Esther. Now add that Esther (understandably) was being a terrible bitch, and this was a recipe for disaster.

  This is where I’d love to say that everything turned out fine regardless. That would be cool, right? Just like a movie. Everything’s darkest before the dawn. Our scrappy team of also-rans is down three runs, it’s two outs in the last inning, and the kid who struck out all season is at the plate. But then he hits a homer and wins the big game!

  Nope, it didn’t go like that. It was just as crappy as you would expect.

  Derek’s family arrived midday on Christmas Eve. It was Derek’s parents (Brad and Janice), his sister, Nicole, and her boyfriend, Justin. Our place, of course, was a mess. It was dark and ice cold, we obviously hadn’t planned on hosting Christmas, and we hadn’t really cleaned up in four days. I just wanted to climb into a hole and die, but Derek and I tried to put on our happy faces. We did our best to act like we were thrilled to have four guests in our dark, Arctic home for a spontaneous party.

  One upside to the sudden change of plans was that Brad and Janice got to actually see how bad it was. If they hadn’t visited, they might have thought we were exaggerating just to get out of going to their place. Even they were shocked to see the devastation throughout our town.

  In retrospect, we actually got pretty lucky in the storm damage department. Our only permanent loss was one tree. But at that time, we weren’t feeling lucky at all. We felt like crap, and somehow we now had to prepare a Christmas meal. I was moody, Derek was stressed, and Esther was being nasty. (In fairness, she’d never had her period before, so it was probably scary for her in addition to everything else.)

  And Janice, no shocker, was already freaking out.

  It became clear almost immediate
ly that Esther and Janice had as much chance of getting along as Bill Maher and Sean Hannity. Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Paula Deen and a salad.

  From the very first moment the family arrived, everything went to hell. (Well, even more to hell. It was pretty damn hellish before they got there.) Esther immediately got very pushy, not letting Janice stand anywhere. When Esther wants to get a point across, she uses her head, giving new meaning to the word headstrong. She uses her head to push you around, and that can be a problem for anyone, much less someone the size of Derek’s mom.

  Janice will tell you she’s five feet tall, much like a five-foot-eleven man will tell you he’s six feet and Steven Seagal will tell you he’s a police officer. In reality, Janice is four eleven, which isn’t demonstrably more vulnerable than five feet, but either way you’re kinda screwed when a 500-pound pig decides to take issue with you. We’re used to Esther’s size, but Janice is not used to contending with this type of thing. This type of thing specifically meaning Esther continually banging her head into poor Janice like they were at a Metallica concert.

  This obviously did not endear Esther to Brad any more than it did to Janice. He wanted to protect his wife, like any good spouse would, so he was getting uneasy and telling us to put Esther away. It wasn’t helping the whole “Brad and Janice hate Esther” narrative. I couldn’t blame Brad or Janice for feeling that way under the circumstances, but I’d so hoped things would go well. I’d hoped they would come to see her the way Derek and I did: the love, the loyalty, the companionship.

  Unfortunately, all they could see was Esther being an asshole. Mostly because she was being an asshole.

  Esther is typically so sweet, but this situation was anything but typical. She wasn’t behaving at all. Derek’s family had only been there a few minutes, and in addition to the head-butting, Esther started parading up and down the halls, screeching her displeasure. And Derek’s mom was running in the other direction, slamming doors behind her.

  Janice doesn’t like to start off on the offensive. If she’s displeased with something, she’ll usually make her point known via another person (or several other people). Ideally, she builds a team of people with the same opinion she has before launching an attack. For example, she told Derek’s sister to let us know she was terrified and would appreciate it if we’d lock Esther up and not let her out until their visit was over. She had already complained to Derek several times since her arrival, and Derek hadn’t responded the way she wanted, so she sent Nicole after us. There were also tears and arms flailing as she stood in the background and watched people do her bidding. And if something didn’t immediately happen the way she wanted it to in this situation, it would escalate and get very dramatic. Trying to figure out how best to have Janice and Esther peacefully coexist in the same house resulted in a tearful You love her more than me! Janice is not what you’d call subtle, but few things are in our life.

  We’re pretty much immune to the sounds that come out of Esther. If it’s just Derek and me in the house, it’s no big deal. We love her. But with someone else, it’s basically like putting up with a screaming baby. Specifically someone else’s screaming baby. Because your own screaming baby pretty much doesn’t bother you after a while. Someone else’s screaming baby is the Antichrist. And then when someone points out your baby’s behavior, it makes you feel bad.

  Look, it’s not like I don’t get it. Not everyone is equipped—emotionally and/or physically—to share space with a massive pig. It’s a lot to handle, and we were asking Janice and Brad to accept conditions that would freak out lots of people. If you were visiting a home and kept being pushed around by a 500-pound animal, you’d probably want the creature (and it’s certainly a creature, not a loved one, in your mind) to be locked up too. I can empathize with that perspective. They saw Esther in an entirely different light than we did.

  But it still hurt, largely because I knew they already had massive concerns about Esther. They were always saying we should get rid of her and that pigs should be outside. They’d never known any different. As far as they were concerned, pigs were just food. To them, it made as much sense treating a cantaloupe as a pet as a pig. (More sense, really, because cantaloupes don’t grow to several hundred pounds and go around head-butting people.)

  I felt they still thought Derek was only going along with the whole Esther thing because I wanted him to. I knew that wasn’t true and that Derek loved her too, but they remembered how upset he’d been at first when Esther showed up. That’s what stuck in their minds. And again, I take responsibility for how that played out, but things had changed a lot since then.

  Not that such things mattered much when Esther started ramming Janice around the house until Janice started to cry and literally locked herself in a bedroom. Again, the family had only been there for a few minutes. We hadn’t had a chance to set up the generator yet and get the power on, so the whole scene was cold, dark, and ugly.

  It’s understandable to wonder whether we should have just put Esther outside when the family arrived. The problem was that outside really wasn’t a place for an animal (or anyone) right then. It was slippery and freezing and dangerous for her.

  Regardless, even I knew she had to go outside at that point, even if it was only while we dealt with the top priority of cranking up the generator. I played chaperone to Esther in the backyard so she wouldn’t be alone. Derek and Brad dealt with the generator. The plan was to start by getting the furnace going (finally) and then get the refrigerator back up so the food wouldn’t go bad.

  Derek’s dad is great at this kind of stuff. He’s the one you want when the ship’s going down. He has patience for days (a really important trait in this sort of situation), and he’s also a great planner. He and Janice had planned this dinner since October. The dinner they were no longer hosting.

  Not ten minutes after Derek and his dad began rewiring the sockets, the lights came back on! Finally, we had heat and light! Derek was pretty stoked, but then he realized that the whole town’s electricity just happened to come back on at that moment. It had nothing to do with their handiwork. (Not that they wouldn’t have gotten it working—it was just a funny fluke of timing.) Ultimately, no one at the time really cared why we had power, because we finally had power! We could live like human beings again. And if it sounds like there’s no way I would have survived in the Middle Ages or any other era before electricity, you’re damn right.

  The fact that Derek’s parents were no longer hosting did not mean they planned to alter the menu, which meant they were going to deep-fry a turkey. They didn’t tend to be sensitive to things like us being vegan (or that the reason we became vegan was just outside, five feet from the deep fryer).

  I walked past the kitchen and actually did a double-take when I saw Brad setting up the deep fryer, readying it to be taken outside. Esther was right there. In the backyard. Where they made me move her. This was twenty-six kinds of wrong.

  “Brad,” I said. “Really? Are you really doing this?”

  Of course I could see that yes, he was doing it, but I was at an immediate loss for words. Then I looked at Esther. I was now moving past the fact that he was about to deep-fry an animal and working toward having it happen in the least offensive way possible.

  “Can you at least move the fryer to the side of the house?” I asked. “Esther is right here.”

  He looked at Esther and then back to me. “And?”

  He wasn’t getting it. “Can you just move to the side of the house? There’s actually a perfect place on the driveway where you can cook.”

  “It’s just easier to do it here,” he said. “You can see Janice is doing all the prep in the kitchen right there.”

  Yes. I could see that inside the door, up the stairs, and a few steps to the left, Janice was doing the prep. I knew the layout of my house. What I did not know was why moving just twenty feet was such an issue. Cooking the turkey by the side of the house would’ve meant having to walk out the front door, aro
und the side, and up the driveway. That’s a total of maybe thirty-five steps, easily accomplished in under a minute. But Brad wasn’t having it.

  Two minutes later, Nicole came to me as a full-fledged member of Team Deep-Fry. She said, “Dad really wants to cook the turkey out back.”

  Yes, I’m aware.

  “The front stairs are really icy still.”

  She started to say something else, but I interrupted her.

  “There’s salt and a shovel,” I said, pointing them out. “Right there. You know what gets rid of ice on stairs? Salt and a shovel. It’s really easy.”

  Then Derek was suddenly standing behind me.

  “Maybe we could put Esther downstairs so Dad can cook his turkey out here,” Derek said. “He won’t let it go.”

  “No!” I said. I’d already stuck her outside when I didn’t want to, and now they wanted me to put her in the icebox basement? No way!

  It felt like I was being pressured to do everything to keep the Walters happy with no regard for myself or Esther. And I know it put Derek in an awkward position too. But our standstill didn’t matter anyway. A few minutes later, I saw the side gate open and Brad come in with his fryer.

  “It’s too windy out there,” he said.

  I was livid. It clearly didn’t matter where I wanted them to cook the turkey (not to mention if). It was happening at the back door and that was that. So in the spirit of just getting through this somehow, I relented.

  I ended up putting Esther in the basement so they could fry their turkey in our backyard. Meanwhile Esther was completely out of sorts from being freezing for four days plus having her period, and now I was locking her in a cage? She was not happy. So I wasn’t happy. I stayed with her as long as I could, but eventually I had to go upstairs.