Cherished (9 page)

Shortly after I graduated from high school, my father got into a huge financial mess and our yellow house had to be sold. Close to everything in our house was auctioned off on the front porch in four and a half hours. My dad explained to me that it might be best for Calico to stay with the house, where she had spent her whole life. She had become such a part of
the house and the land there. The new owners of our house agreed to sign a “cat clause” stating that they would keep Calico as long as we wanted — that we could come get her anytime. But my brothers and my father and I scattered like wildflower seeds after we lost the house. I don't think any of us really knew where we were headed. No one had a place suitable for Calico, who had slowed down considerably but still loved to hunt out in the field.

I pushed the guilt of leaving Calico as far down as it would go.

I had to believe that my dad was right, that she was meant to stay behind. How could I have left Calico? I now ask myself. I was eighteen and trying to figure out who I was. I somehow believed that, when I figured it all out, I would have the perfect place for Calico to live out her last days. A backyard with a field of tall grass, sunshine, and lizards.

I was living in Los Angeles and going to UCLA when my dad called to let me know Calico had died. I was rushing off to a midterm in my art history class and couldn't take the information in properly. I suppose I didn't want to take in the news at all, because I went on for a few days not thinking about Calico. I woke up one morning four days later, and I could have sworn I was sleeping in the brass bed I had slept in while growing up. I reached up to twist one of the brass knobs that was always loose, and found nothing. Then I caught the scent of a rubbery beige flea collar and the smell of Calico's black and tan fur. It was unmistakably Calico's scent that filled the room. I missed her terribly.

Until that moment, I had not cried over Calico. The loss had been lying dormant inside me. It was my pattern to go underground, where it is silent, and to keep my secrets and feelings safely tucked away. My best childhood friend has told me that I was always like a cat — the observer, the quiet thinker, the one who sits at the top of stairs and listens. But it was Calico who taught me to also be fearless. To run with wild abandon when the urge struck. To be grateful for mice tails and blue-belly lizards. To sit quietly in a window filled with sunlight. To be generous with leftover cereal milk. To stand naked and unflinching while being watched.

Perhaps it is the steadiness of an animal's presence that gives us comfort. Calico, a black, white, and tan cat, provided that steadiness for me. People could be unreliable. People could leave. But Calico stayed for eighteen years. I have to believe she had a purpose here, and it wasn't to report back to another planet on the naked human body. She was the mother who stayed. And although I hid my grief when she left, she surfaces so often now when I write. She is within arm's reach across the table. I can feel the stretch of her spine against the palm of my hand. She keeps showing up to tell me more. It is her indelible spirit that begs me to keep her alive for as long as I can here on the page.

G
rowing up on a farm, I wasn't a fool. I knew our animals were destined to become food. But the year I raised my pig, I hadn't expected to be the instrument of his death. Red wasn't even supposed to be mine to begin with.

“Pigs are ‘farm savers,' ” my brother insisted one night at dinner. “Everyone knows that.”

“We don't need any more animals,” I said, thinking of our seven hundred laying hens, two Holsteins, and three goats. I was seventeen and in my last year of high school, and I wanted no part in raising pigs.

“Please, Mom. Please,” my brother begged. “We'll just raise bottle pigs. You feed 'em until they're big enough to survive on their own, then you sell 'em. Jimmy knows all about it.” (Not his real name.)

“Jimmy's not going to be doing the work,” I argued.

“Sure he will! He promised. He's gonna help me. Please, Mom. Can we get a sow?”

My mother's brow wrinkled. Ever since we had moved to this town from the East Coast, we'd had trouble fitting in. My father was Chinese, my mother white. People in our town weren't used to seeing this kind of mixed-race family, and they'd told my brother and me to our faces that we were the Devil's Spawn. God didn't want the races to mix, that's why he put them on different continents.

My mother had tried hard to find a way for my younger brother to fit in, be accepted in a community where masculinity was defined by how many acres your family owned and farmed, by how many head of cattle you raised, and — unspoken by any of us but secretly acknowledged — by the color of your hair and eyes. Straw hair, blue eyes, trumped my brother every time.

Our father was working as a consultant, having left the teaching job that had brought us to this small community in South Dakota. He traveled constantly. That was a factor too. Boys in this town grew up knowing exactly where their fathers were, in the fields, in the barns, or in the local bar.

Hence our growing menagerie. Each addition was an attempt by my mother to find the right combination of animals that would help my brother to belong. And if the animals kept me busy too, my parents figured, then all the better.

“I'll ask around,” she said finally.

My brother turned to give me a triumphant smile.

And so in August, our newly acquired sow went into labor.

My brother and his friend were pulling the piglets from the grunting sow's uterus. My brother cleared the gunk off their faces and placed them near their mother's teats. When the placenta was finally expelled, he gave it to the sow to eat.

The sow had given birth to eleven piglets. More than expected.

“These'll bring in good money,” my brother crowed.

I watched the helpless, tiny piglets grunting at their mother's belly. They were cold despite the August heat and nestled closer to her for warmth. There was barely space for them all, and they tumbled over each other, snorting, their eyes closed tight. Despite myself, I had to laugh at their antics.

“Here, May-lee. Hold one.” And my brother put a piglet in my hand.

It was warm and squiggly, unable to hold still, only slightly longer than my hand, but heavier than I'd expected.

“They're cute,” I admitted.

Then my brother went to the pump to wash the after birth and blood from his arms.

The next day at dawn, I went out to do the morning chores with my brother as usual. The best thing about August was that the early mornings were still light but not as hot as July. Soon enough we'd be rising before the sun, and the mornings would be growing cooler, then cold, then bitter cold. But late summer was a perfect time of year. And for the first time in a long time, my brother seemed happy as we headed into the barn.

The piglets were nestled up to the sow's teats, pulling
frantically. Then the sow stood up, all four hundred pounds rising faster than I would've thought possible. The piglets dropped off, squeaking, and she shook her head, flapping her long ears. She trotted off to the far side of the barn to poop, leaving her piglets to huddle together, crying for her piteously. Then we saw them. Three piglets squashed flat on the concrete floor. Their mother must have rolled over on them during the night.

“Wow,” I said.

“She probably didn't know they were there behind her. They probably couldn't fit on the other side.” My brother was trying to sound tough, trying to sound like a farmer, but I could tell he was sad. He was the animal lover, not me. Now he grabbed a shovel. “They must have died instantly.”

“You'd think.” I turned away to start watering the chickens. I didn't want to watch him scrape the piglets' bodies from the floor.

By that afternoon there were more problems.

The sow couldn't drop her milk. We visited the veterinarian, who diagnosed mastitis and sold us syringes and oxytocin. “That should do the trick,” he said.

But it didn't. Two days later she still couldn't nurse. The piglets were visibly thinner. They squealed pitiably. A few tried to stand, but fell over, their heads too heavy for their ever-weakening legs.

By day three, the vet paid a call. It was worse than we thought. He recognized the sow when my brother said where he'd bought her. She was a dry sow, meaning she had incurable mastitis. She was unable to nurse her piglets.

My mother and I drove to the grain elevator and bought bags of Purina Pig Milk, chocolate-flavored formula for piglets, as well as giant plastic bottles and plastic nipples from the farm supply store. My brother and I mixed the formula, but most of the piglets were too weak to drink. We sat on the floor of the barn, piglets in our laps, dribbling the chocolate milk across their tongues, trying to encourage them to suckle.

By the end of the week, all but four of the piglets were dead. We sold the sow to pay for the vet bills and formula, all these added expenses my brother hadn't anticipated. His friend, the self-proclaimed pig expert, suddenly bowed out of the whole project, announcing his parents wanted him to run his own night crawler business out of their garage instead. And my brother, perhaps overtired from spending all his days and nights watching over the dying piglets, came down with a fever. He was bedridden now.

My brother begged me from his bed to take care of them. His room was right across the hall from mine, and even though I tried to ignore him, pretend I couldn't hear his raspy voice, he called to me, “Please, May-lee. Don't let them die.”

And so I became the caretaker of my brother's piglets.

I got used to mixing their formula after I'd fed and watered the chickens, the Holsteins, and goats. I crouched in the barn and held the piglets on my knee. They nudged each other, fighting to see who could feed first. I tried feeding two at a time, but when one pulled loose and sneezed, she spat up chocolate all over my overalls.

I didn't want to grow fond of these creatures. They were too fragile. The deaths of the seven others had shown me that. So I came to think of the pigs by their colors: Red, Spotted, Pinky, and Pink Lady (after the characters in
Grease
).They were non-names, I convinced myself. I wouldn't care about these pigs. They weren't even mine, after all.

Red grew the fastest. Soon he didn't want me to hold him. He was sturdy on his own four legs. He slurped down his milk, hiccupped, and trotted off, flapping his ears.

I had my mother take my senior picture with him for the yearbook. Red didn't like posing, and squealed and bucked in my arms. I felt as though I were trying to hold a Pacific salmon. But my mother got one good shot. I'm smiling, and Red is in focus, ears stiff and alert, matching my braids.

That fall the pigs became my full responsibility. After his illness, my brother grew depressed. The pigs were costing more than his friend had predicted; they were more like farm sinkers than savers. My brother no longer came into the barn but worked outside instead, moving the cows' grazing areas, checking the fencing, brooding.

Me, I watched the pigs grow up. There's a saying that pigs are smarter than dogs, but I found that stereotype didn't do either pigs or dogs justice. Pigs are different from dogs. These four had their own unique traits, their own way of interacting with the world — and me. To compare them to dogs would be to reduce their porcine personalities.

For example, if our dogs grew bored, they barked ceaselessly, trying to get our attention. When the pigs wanted entertainment, they waited for no one.

One Sunday after church I was making lunch with my mother when I heard a strange honking noise, almost like geese. Extremely large geese. “The pigs are out!” My mother
pointed at the window.

Indeed, the pigs had busted out of the barn and were now digging across the lawn with their powerful snouts, churning up the soil. Within minutes, they'd managed to dig a trench more than two feet deep.

I threw on my coat and ran outside.

“Pigs! Pigs!” I shouted, realizing that maybe it had been a bad idea not to name them. Then I tried snorting at them, honking from the depths of my throat, which is closer to the sound pigs make than
oink, oink
! Believe me.

Red looked up, flapped his ears, ran toward me, nuzzled my jeans with his snout, then happily returned to destroying the lawn.

I ran to the barn and grabbed a metal bucket, filled it with corn.

Clanging on the bucket with the grain scoop, I shouted, “Corn! Food! Corn!” Only then was I able to lure them back to the barn, walking backward, letting Red — the leader — sniff the corn every now and then, but not allowing him to eat until I got them inside.

At least this stereotype was true: pigs really did like to hog their food.

By the time snows blanketed our farm, and the wind-chill was well below zero, the pigs no longer wanted to go outside. They were content to play in the barn, eating rapidly, then shooting their empty metal feed dishes with their snouts across the concrete floor like hockey pucks. They were growing fast, and if I wasn't careful, they could easily knock me over. Red
tried to include me in their game, whacking a feed dish against my leg so hard that I had bruises for a month. After that, I learned to keep my distance while they played.