Basil, Beans, Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho pepper, Radicchio, Squash, Tomatoes
I shot my pig. Last fall I took down a piece of the fence around his pen and lured him out with food. While he munched contentedly on his last meal I retrieved my rifle, put in a round, and when he glanced up at me offered a brief apology and shot him between the eyes at point blank range. And then in the head a second time. And finally in the heart. Killing a big old pig is hard. Harder than makes sense when you stop and think about our relationship.
Eleven years ago Alan Brown gave us an eight-week-old piglet called Mickey Boy’s Goody Wagon. Alan brought him over to the farm in a small cat carrier and I quickly discovered that he could squeeze between the bars of the metal gate in his pen. He was black with a sporty white stripe around his chest and he made happy little grunting noises when we fed him. We fed him a lot. He got the piles of weeds I hauled out of the vegetable rows. He got oversized zucchini and wilted greens and kitchen scraps and, to his great delight, overripe tomatoes and melons. He spent that summer eating and grunting, and quite soon he did not fit through the gate.
I don’t know if Alan thought we would eat Mickey Boy. I suppose he did. Why else would you fatten up a castrated boar? As a pet? Of course, Alan knew Mickey Boy was our first pig ever, and delivering him already named--allbeit after the least appetizing lunch wagon ever seen—may have been Alan’s way of acknowledging the possibility that we had not lived in the country long enough to get over urban prohibitions against eating one’s animals.
We probably should have eaten him. We have raised 24 pigs since we got Mickey Boy (named One, Two, Three, Four, Five and so on in recognition of their fate). None of them have grown like Mickey Boy grew that first summer. By late fall, when he should have been headed to the slaughterhouse, he probably weighed around 400 pounds, and not because he was fat. I would not describe him as having been svelte. He was a pig, after all. But he was not a fat pig, just a big one. More or less the size of a dining room table by the time he was full grown.
Of course we could not bring ourselves to eat Mickey Boy. It was not precisely a matter of our being overly fond of him. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he wanted affection. He certainly offered none himself. He enjoyed a good scratch and responded to every meal he ever had with some enthusiasm (one might even have described his mood as elated when we gave him melons), but gratitude was beyond him. If someone else or one of the dogs or the duck had put the food in his pen it would have made no difference to him. An emperor could hardly have shown greater indifference towards his servants.
It would have been nice to have an affectionate pig—well, up to a point; there’s a limit to how much affection you want from an extraordinarily large pig. It would have been nice, anyway, to have the effort—taking out buckets of water all winter, tossing in piles of hay for his bedding, providing all that food—acknowledged. We don’t generally keep pets purely for their own sake. That is what animals in zoos are for. You don’t need the hippos to pay any attention to you, to thank you for coming. They just have to be hippos.
Of course, once you have admired the hippos you get to head for the gift shop, not clean up after them. If you had to muck out the hippo stall you might decide they weren’t really worth seeing after all. You would just stay home, sitting in a comfortable chair with a soft, warm, purring cat curled up on your lap. But our hippo-sized pig needed tending, and on a cold January day it was all too easy to wonder what the point was of having this pointless beast on the farm. Sure, people liked to see him when they visited the farm, and it was mildly amusing to tell stories about our giant pig. Mostly, though, we seemed simply, like some ancient Greek lord, to have taken on a sacred obligation to provide hospitality to any peaceful traveler seeking shelter, no matter how inconvenient or irritating that might prove. Someone had to look after Mickey Boy, and the job and fallen to us like some monstrous test imposed by one of the more vindictive gods.
I thought about shooting him many times: on the various occasions he got out and tipped over all the feed barrels, when he bit Liz, each time he flipped over his freshly filled water bucket without even taking a drink, when he destroyed his shed. But for ten year I resisted the urge. And in the end I finished him off not out of frustration or anger, but because he had gone lame and could not stand up any longer. Even then I waited weeks, hoping for some reason that he might recover, unwilling to do him in though I had a perfectly good excuse and, as One through Twenty-four would testify, no qualms about killing pigs. And when it was clear he would not get better and could not go on pulling himself pathetically through the mud with his front hooves, even then and with no evidence to the last that our years together had made any impression on him at all, it was still hard to kill him. I guess I have not gotten rid of all my urban ways yet.
Fortunately, doing in the crops causes me no such angst. We have been tending those onions diligently since early March, giving them shelter, feeding them, cleaning up around them. Yet I feel no distress ripping them from their life-sustaining soil. I might if they had not grown so well, but I enjoy pulling a good crop of onions. If their vigor is not actually a sign of their appreciation for our work, it is at least a sort of testament to it. Sometimes (far more often than I would like), even when we have done our work, a crop does not prosper. The deer prove too voracious, the bugs too numerous, the rain storms too far apart, the weeds too relentless. You look at the crop and you see your efforts wasted. You cannot rewrite a patch of arugula destroyed by flea beetles or find another use for blighted cucumber vines. So it is particularly satisfying when crops succeed and you can pick tubs of verdant basil and flat after flat of ripe tomatoes and a pile of shiny Ancho peppers. And if the thought of all this produce slaughter causes you distress, take comfort from the fact that we do in the vegetables as quickly and humanely as possible and only when their time has come.
Well, from that and the fact that they taste good. I don’t know that there is a better summer meal than a tomato salad and some good bread. I could eat that every day. In fact, I think I do. But if you have started to tire of it you could use the same ingredients in a salsa and spice it up with the Ancho (the dark green, slightly pointed, thin walled pepper). Just how much you will spice it up is hard to say. The hotness varies pretty significantly from one Ancho to the next. Some are barely hotter than a sweet pepper, some as spicy as a Jalapeno. However hot yours is, I strongly recommend you roast and peel it before using it. It improves the texture and the flavor, and it will keep in the refrigerator for days. Not that there is any good reason to keep it for long. It has too many uses. If you don’t put it in a salsa you could puree it with sour cream, onion, basil, salt, pepper and a little lime juice and put the resulting sauce on grilled meat and fish or chili, or use it as a dip, or swirl it into a gazpacho, or add a little to salad dressing (it would be good on coleslaw), or spread it on a sandwich.
