There are some more God-awful pictures of me somewhere that show exactly how hapless I was in every way imaginable until I blossomed into the erudite, accomplished, and altogether classy lady I am today. But they’re over in the corner of the room, and I’ve already settled into my chair. So you’re going to have to make do with plain old imagination for this set of stories. I call them my Dead Animal Stories, and I usually whip them out as party tricks. The last time I told a series of them, I believe we said our goodbyes and thank-you’s to hosts whose jaws still hadn’t quite hinged closed, hours later. They’re just that good. Or that disturbing, take your pick. I suggest you don’t read if you’re squeamish about dead animals.
First, some context. Most of you know I grew up on a farm. Beasley used to say I grew up on a “play farm,” not a “real farm,” I suppose because I showed up at college with a nose ring instead of overalls. But on the eighty-odd acres where I grew up, there were horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, the occasional goat, cow, duck, and guinea, not to mention fields of tobacco, corn, soybeans, and hay. I figure if your summers are spent perfecting a farmer’s tan tending tobacco during the day and canning an endless supply of tomatoes, green beans, or whatever else your mom has decided must be preserved in the evening, and there are more than three different kinds of animals pooping in your backyard, and your dad has to go to the top of the hill and whistle to call you back to the house when you’ve gone out to play, you get to say you grew up on a farm.
Now, about those animals. I wouldn’t even try to count how many of what kind we had. Besides most of the horses, they generally had pretty short life spans. Most of the time that was intentional. You’d get a couple feeder pigs, feed them until they reached a certain weight, then load them up in the truck for a scenic trip to the McLean County Meat Locker, where you’d coax the pigs down the chute and go in to the wood-paneled office to give instructions as to processing and retrieve a handwritten receipt from the woman with a wispy bouffant, blue-tinted glasses, a good coat of iridescent makeup, and surrounded by a cloud of powdery rose perfume. She’d give you a pick-up date, on which you’d return with coolers and ice to retrieve what remained of your pigs, which was a collection of packages with labels that must have been designed to give only the appearance of stickiness, so dinner planning for the rest of the year was basically a crap shoot. Circle of life.
Sometimes the circle gets interrupted.
Like when you finally invest some money in your own bred sows, so you can raise and sell feeder pigs to someone else. And the piglets are born when it’s pretty cold out, so you put a heat lamp in the corner of the pig house to keep them from freezing. And it’s certainly not warm enough to ignite the straw or anything else, but in spite of your attention to detail, there’s a short somewhere in the wiring. And, well, things burn. The whole pig house burns down, with both sows and all the piglets. And it happens when you’re at school, so when you round the last curve on the highway home, you see a wisp of smoke emanating from somewhere north of your house. And there’s a smell in the air…of delicious barbecue. It’s tremendously sad, and disappointing when you discover the source of the smoke, of course. But I challenge you to concentrate on the sadness and disappointment when you’re simultaneously seized with a sudden and urgent hunger for pork barbecue.
And then sometimes, those long-lived horses I mentioned aren’t so long-lived. Like when you get a horse that hasn’t been quite broken yet. It’s a project you’ve decided to take on, because this is what people do when they’ve had horses for a while and want to take the next step. But there’s something a little off about this horse that can’t be chalked up to youth and ill temper. You don’t get a chance to figure out exactly what it is, because one day she bolts from the top of the hill and heads straight for the fence at the bottom. Maybe she doesn’t see the fence, and maybe she tries to jump it but doesn’t clear it; either way, she ends up flipping over the fence, breaks her neck, and dies on the spot. This, too, is a tragic tale, but consider for a moment: how on earth do you deal with a thousand pounds of dead horse? A goldfish or a cat, you can bury in the backyard with little fuss. A dead horse, on the other hand, requires making phone calls to people who might have a front end loader and/or a backhoe you can borrow, and trying to figure out the least troublesome place to dispose of the thing; and in the meantime, discovering the particulars of decomposition you usually only glimpse on the side of the road as you zoom by at 60 miles per hour. This is when you find out that the part of the circle of life that’s usually hidden from view is pretty spectacular, in the literal sense.
And then there are the stories that are no less absurd, but are thankfully heavier on the freude than the schaden. I give you the horse that lived a long life, and met a one-in-a-million sort of end. Although I suppose it’s not terribly uncommon for horses and other pasture animals to get struck by lightning. I guess there’s no need to tell that story, since it begins and ends in a fraction of a second. The aftermath, again, was tricky, but having gone through it once gives you the sort of experience that makes a repeat performance that much easier. Implements were procured, a hole was dug, and the horse gently lowered into the hole. Until she slipped off the bucket and landed on her hindquarters, with her head poking up above ground. There was some talk of having Sugar’s head preserved and the hole filled in around it so perambulators through the pasture might say hello and scratch between her ears now and again, but that idea got shot down. But only after a good fit of hysterical giggling.
It’s not that I/we’ve been insensitive to animals’ death. It’s that perspective means everything. Growing up, I’m sure I cried over the death of various animals, especially the dogs that were there just to be there. But death was a regular enough feature in our lives that routine, and getting on with it, was never really disrupted. Now, the only life cycles I have to deal with are those of the plants in the yard, and I’m severely out of practice. The one time I’ve had to deal with a dying animal in the past several years, it wasn’t pretty. I guarantee I never cried for any animal the way I did for Leonard. I absolutely wailed over that cat.
Until, of course, the vet sent back a ceramic disk containing an impression of his dead little cat paw. At which point the hysterical giggling commenced again. I mean, come on.
