Feisty Fern #8

The smell of hogs filled my nose, and I didn’t care. I was a kid, after all, and was used to smelling bad.

I didn’t really know what we were trying to do, except that we got to run around in a pen with about a hundred hogs that were all way bigger than I was. The mud (and probably some other brownish stuff) was caked to our shoes.

I asked my dad if he had a tissue, which was a stupid question, but, like I said, I was only a kid. He taught me to hold one nostril shut and shoot the snot out the other one onto the ground. A snot rocket, he called it. For weeks after that I hoped for another stuffy nose.

Our goal seemed to be to separate this one really big hog from the rest of them and get it to run down a chute off the main pen. My dad told me to stand kind of far away, since those hogs were so much bigger than me, and he said they could be mean. I had thought that hogs and pigs and stuff were nice, like the ones in the movies, but I wasn’t going to argue. They were really big.

He gave me a stick to hit the hogs with if they got too close to me. I didn’t use it much because I made sure they didn’t get that close.

My uncle, whose farm we were at, had a stick that looked like my Louisville slugger bat, and he hit the big hog we were after with it so hard it snapped it two. That got the hog to run down the little chute and into a really small wooden cage. It looked like the little cages they keep bulls in before they bust out and start bucking at the rodeo. They shut a wooden gate to keep the hog from running back down the chute into the main pen.

Our part of the job was done, so I looked back for my mom and sister who were standing out of the mud just on the other side of the wire fence. I waved at them. My sister had super blond hair and chubby cheeks and didn’t want to get dirty in the pen with the hogs.

Atlas, my uncle, climbed the wooden fence of the little cage, and he had a hammer and a chisel. When he got near the top, the whole cage started rocking because the hog was going crazy inside it.

My dad and I got out of the pen and climbed up a big stack of tires. Atlas’s farm had a big mound of tired that was at least ten feet high and so wide it had probably ten thousand tires in it. Well, we climbed up that stack of tires and sat down to watch what Atlas did next. We couldn’t quite see down inside the wooden cage, but at least we had a place to sit down.

My mom and sister stood next to us, but didn’t sit on the tires. My sister was wearing turquoise cloth shorts, and she said the black stuff would wipe off the tires onto them. I looked at my jeans where I had been sitting on the tires. She probably had a point, but I didn’t care because I was already dirty from being in the hog pen.

I picked at the mud on my shoes, and my dad wiped sweat from his pink forehead. We had been outside all day and he forgot his sunscreen, even after my mom reminded him. This was really bad for him since his forehead was really big.

Well, the cage thing was shaking so hard I thought Atlas would fall off it, but he managed to climb down inside with the hog. I asked my dad if he would get hurt, because those hogs were supposed to be dangerous. He said he thought that Atlas would not be the one getting hurt.

When Atlas got down in there, the hog started screaming, which I didn’t even know they could do. It sounded worse than my sister after I pulled her pigtails or pushed her in some mud. The cage was rocking so hard I thought it would bust apart or come out of the ground or something, but it stayed in place. After a few seconds of the awful screaming and tremendous swaying and rocking, Atlas climbed back over the fence. He threw down the hammer and chisel to the ground and then jumped after them.

Atlas brushed his sleeves off, and I knew that we were done with work for the day. He opened the little wooden gate and the big hog ran down the chute to rejoin the others. It was quiet now and moved pretty fast for being so big.

We went back to the house and sat at the table outside next to a couple broken down old cars. My favorite part of the farm was the broken down old stuff, especially the combines. The big pile of tires was pretty cool, too. Anything that I could climb on was well-received with me.

Wanda Lee, who was Atlas’s wife, brought out a big wooden box with a handle on it. Inside was about two gallons of fresh ice cream, which was quickly dispensed to everyone.

As we ate the ice cream, my sister and I watched the cats climbing on the corrugated metal shed. They jumped from the roof of the shed, down onto the old Ford Galaxie and then to the ground. I didn’t know why there were so many cats at the farm, but I guess they were all related, because they were all gray and looked about the same. My mom told me that they didn’t even have names. There were so many similar looking cats that no one could tell them apart.

My sister reached out to pet one of them, and it crouched down and then in a flash it bit her hand.

The scream she let loose rivaled the hogs, but it didn’t last as long because she started crying right after. My mom dropped her spoon and bowl onto the wooden table and ran over to my sister. Everyone crowded around her to try to stop the bleeding and make her shut up, I guess. All her crying got on my nerves a little bit. It was just a cat. It wasn’t like one of those hogs had rammed her into a fence post or something.

I kept eating my ice cream. I didn’t know how to stop bleeding, and my sister usually cried when I was around anyway, so I figured I wouldn’t be of much use. I saw that Atlas hadn’t rushed over to her either, so I went to sit by him. He said he figured Wanda Lee’s ice cream was about the best he had ever had. I figured that I agreed with him, because it sure did taste good.

I asked what he did to that hog to make it fuss that way. He smiled at me with a crooked smile, the stubble on his face pointing in all directions as the skin stretched out in new ways. It seemed to hang loose on his face, but not in a weird or scary way. He said he cut out its tusk using that hammer and chisel. I had seen my dad use a hammer and chisel to chip away wood before, and I thought that somebody using that to hit at my gums would make me scream and try to get away too. No wonder that hog was going so crazy.

He reached in the pocket of his overalls and handed me to tusk, which looked to me like just a bigger version of one of my baby teeth. Except that it still had a big chunk of pink, bleedy flesh attached to it. I put the tusk in my pocket. I thought I could scare my sister pretty good with it when we got in the car to go home.

By this time, everyone was done tending to her and went back to eating their ice cream. All the adults talked and talked until it was dark outside. When my sister and I had just about filled a jar with lightning bugs, we loaded our stuff into the car.

I fell right asleep and forgot about scaring her, but when we got home, I cleaned off the gross blood and stuff from the tusk and put it on my shelf with the cow skull and raccoon jawbone that I had found on other trips to the farm.