The first and only time Lucien roasted a whole pig he had cranked the spit for hours. The pig barn had been his idea. The pig roast had been Catherine’s. She’d almost passed out from the smoke and the smell of hot grease, but all afternoon she’d stayed close to Lucien as he turned the carcass, the muscles in his arms ropey, shiny with pig fat, until the animal’s hide finally crackled and burst, the fat dripping and sizzling on the burning embers.
Gilbert and Raymond, ten and eleven, were racing around the spit, grunting like little pigs, when Catherine’s sister’s family arrived. Natalie’s four kids leapt out of the car and ran toward the boys.
“No running by the fire,” their father Henry yelled. Natalie’s husband had been a minor league pitcher for the Lakeland Bats in the States. He carried himself like he was being called to the mound in a heart-pounding ninth inning even though the Bats had let him go halfway through his first season.
“The check come in yet?” Henry said to Lucien.
Lucien shook his head and kept cranking the spit.
“Between the feed suppliers and brokers you’ll be in the hole before you know it.”
Natalie swatted Henry’s arm. Behave yourself.
Lucien stopped cranking. For an instant there was a flash of disbelief. “You dumb son-of-a-bitch,” he exploded into laughter. “Just you wait. That barn will pay for itself and then some.”
Catherine heard the challenge in Lucien’s voice. She felt the muscled movement start up again, the pig turning in its dizzying rotations. She didn’t doubt that what her husband said about the barn was true.
M. Berger moaned softly as Catherine straightened and lifted first his one leg and then the other, over to the side of the bed. She turned her head away when yeasty odors rose from the folds of old skin beneath the flannel nightshirt.
“Are you ready for your bath?” she asked.
Careful not to startle the old man, she moved his legs slowly then threaded her arm under his torso. He stared blankly, his cloudy blue eyes unsettling her. They seemed to be looking through her, as if the real M. Berger had already passed from this world into the next, leaving her to care for something he’d abandoned or forgotten.
“I’m going to lift you up now, OK?” Catherine’s talk was direct and in her normal voice. It was one of the reasons the families liked her.
Roger, her boss, poked his head into the room. After ten years, hope for the success of the hog barn had vanished. They needed money and it had been necessary for Catherine to get a job. She didn’t mind the work at the old folks’ home but she disliked Roger. He was half her age and one of those bosses who believes in making nonsense rules. Sometimes he floated in and out of rooms like a Zeppelin; other times, like today, he came lumbering in, dragging his body like a sack of stones.
“How is M. Berger?” His eyes scanned the room.
Catherine ignored him. She supported M. Berger as he managed a few shuffling steps toward his wheelchair, pausing for a small rest between each step. Her back ached but she would not rush him. When they reached the chair, she lowered him with a soft thump and, when he was settled, looked up at Roger and waited, her hand resting lightly on M. Berger’s shoulder. It was odd for Roger to make inquiries once he was in a resident’s room. Mostly he just observed.
“You came in today.” Roger pulled off his glasses, got busy polishing them with his tie.
“It’s Monday. I always work the day shift on Monday. You know that.”
There was a dizzying moment in which Catherine, following the lift and fall of the old man’s breath beneath her hand, began to feel herself disappear into the old man’s stillness.
“You’ll be staying all day?” Roger asked, addressing his tie.
“You’ve changed the hours on me?” Suddenly, Catherine felt like laughing. Something had happened to her. And to Lucien. And now everyone knew it. She felt light and wobbly, surprised too, at finding herself here.
“No, no,” Roger shook his head. “Nothing like that. It’s just…I’m just…well you know,” he mumbled as he backed out of the room.
At the end of the day Catherine sat in her car, waiting for the heater to kick in. Her back was sore and it was impossible for her to think through the cold. It was November and dark already even though it was only late afternoon. She rubbed her hands together and pressed her palms against her cheeks. She couldn’t explain why the darkness made her feel so cold.
To the left of the old folks’ home the street lights lit up the town cemetery, and to the right an empty lot where the Hospital Board planned to build the new hospital. Lucien had been on the committee, and had been against it.
“Too much like a factory. First they get you in the hospital, then they move you next door to the old folks’ home, and when that’s done, out you go to the cemetery. Efficient, I’ll give them that. More efficient than the Pork Board and the way their damned brokers moved our hogs to market, that’s for sure.”
Catherine drove down Main Street toward the gravel road on the far side of town that led to the farm. She disagreed with Lucien. The hospital. The old folks’ home. The graveyard. They belonged together, like chapters in a book or beads in a rosary. She’d seen it enough times, how, bit by bit, everything breaks down until nothing is left, not even an involuntary shit or a rasping rattle. Lucien was a romantic. She was practical. That’s the way the body went. What was the use of pretending?
At the edge of town, the Beaumont’s pickup truck came toward her. Catherine slowed down and raised her hand in greeting but Alice Beaumont stared straight ahead and kept on. What could Alice or any of them know? It had started yesterday after Sunday mass. Catherine had kept herself out of sight in the kitchen while cars and trucks drove by slowly, windows rolled all the way down. She didn’t blame them exactly. Something about sudden beginnings and endings drew people in like moths to light. They needed to see for themselves how a thing starts and how it comes apart. She couldn’t count the number of times Lucien had waved vehicles into the yard to show off the barn under construction, telling everyone the same story as if repetition would help make it come true.
“We’re starting small. The producer delivers the piglets. Six months later they send their trucks and the meat packing plant takes care of the rest. Door to door. All we do is feed the pigs to finishing weight and cash the checks.”
He chuckled after saying the thing about the checks.
When Catherine pulled into the farmyard, the high beams swept over her sister’s car, parked at a crazy angle next to the barn. In the house, the light was on in the kitchen. Catherine stayed in the car, adjusting the vents so the blast of hot air hit her squarely in the face. Her cheeks swelled with the heat. The yard light was on. It cast a pool of yellowish light that reminded her of a sad painting she’d once seen in a magazine. She turned on the radio to listen to the news.
“Police discovered hundreds of dead and decomposing pigs. The remaining pigs were near death from starvation and being kept in a barn without food, water, light, or heat. The animals were removed and Lucien Fradin, owner of the hog barn, was taken into custody. Charges under the province’s Animal Care Act are likely to be brought against him. Investigators are not yet sure if the owner’s wife …”
It was hopeless, really. Catherine turned off the radio and shut the engine. What now? She didn’t know. The yard was quiet. They’d taken the dogs too. The barn, silent and dark, loomed ahead of her like a dangerous beast that had suddenly dropped dead in its tracks.
“Catherine, why are you still here?” Natalie said. “There are signs outside saying it’s a hazard and it…it smells very bad.”
Catherine could smell pig and beneath pig a smell of decomposition different from the suffocating stench of the manure lagoon behind the barn. Lucien had promised that the chemicals would take away the stench but she hadn’t taken a clean breath since the first shipment of hogs; none of them had.
Natalie waved her hand toward the barn. “How did this happen?”
“Like an invasion, early Saturday, before we were even awake.”
Natalie lifted her thin shoulders in a small shrug and set about rearranging her hair. Catherine knew it wasn’t what her sister wanted to know.
“What about the boys?” Natalie spoke to Catherine with a bossy tone that grated. They weren’t twins exactly; Natalie was younger by eleven months, small but strong with a quick way of settling affairs.
“I told them not to come home.”
Gilbert was in Montreal studying something Catherine didn’t understand and Raymond was in Vancouver studying forestry at the University of British Columbia. At least she knew forestry was about trees. “I don’t want them to see any of this or their…”
Catherine panicked. The word father wouldn’t come out. It was a simple word but she wanted to hide it like a suddenly deformed limb. She was ashamed, and ashamed to be ashamed.
Dad’s looking for you. Dad’s in the barn. Go help your Dad.
It didn’t seem possible to say the word anymore, or it would take a special kind of effort to ever say it again.
“Why don’t you come home with me?” Natalie said. “I can bring you back tomorrow if you want.”
Catherine thought of Natalie’s husband Henry. He would try to be kind but the dark planes of his face would deepen and he’d slam the door shut after letting her in.
“I have to work tomorrow.”
Catherine leaned back in the chair and stretched out her legs. She plucked at her pants and gave Natalie a weak smile. Nerves, a breakdown of nerves. That’s how it happened.
On their honeymoon they’d made love with the windows open, to the thunder of Niagara Falls and the mist drifting in. She’d liked the height and weight of Lucien’s body, how she believed he could make its muscles do anything. Now he shuffled his feet like the residents; he smelled so bad she was sure he was lying with the pigs while she was at work; and he wouldn’t bathe unless she bathed him. No matter how much she scrubbed and rinsed she couldn’t get the pig smell out.
She thought she could take care of Lucien, that he’d get himself started up again but there was no use pretending. Everything had broken down.
“You know what I wanted to be?” she said.
“What?” Natalie said.
“A pilot and a doctor, a flying doctor, like in the TV show we used to watch.”
“I never knew that.”
“No one did. I never told anyone. And then I forgot about it.”
The cold carried the sound of Natalie’s car driving away clear through her chest. She’d always found it interesting, how cold changes sound, bending the waves to make it travel further. She sat for a long time. How had this happened? How did anything happen? The pigs hadn’t deserved what happened. Neither had Lucien. Eventually she put on one of the boy’s old woolen jackets, her yard boots, and Lucien’s stiff leather gloves. She didn’t bother with a hat.
Outside, the wind was coming in gusts, high up the clouds were breaking apart. The yard was dirty and cluttered. The Mounties and government officers had taken out all the live pigs and carcasses. They left behind everything else, bones and chunks of flesh, half-eaten or too rotten to pick up. Her cheeks burned. She had overheard one of the men say over two hundred pigs died, but she knew that wasn’t true. There had to be more.
The Northern Lights had taken over the sky with their ghostly dance. Catherine liked having them watch over her as she started to haul the junk into a pile close to the barn. Her body felt strong, clear. Broken posts, crumpled papers, frozen pieces of rotten flesh, bones, smashed fencing, abandoned tools, splintered pieces of plywood. Everything dragged into one pile. Gusts of wind caught at the plywood and spun her around as she lifted and carried the larger pieces, but she managed to haul them all. The last piece to go was the pink Bio Security STOP sign the police and government officials had put up outside the barn. She ripped the paper from its pole. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She splashed gasoline, crumpled the sign into a torch, lit one end, and tossed it. The fire roared to life.
She stood for a long time, roasting her face and front as her backside got colder. She didn’t think about the pig roast, but if she had, she would have remembered how that too had been her idea. When the smoke began to overwhelm her and the flames to die down a little, she turned away, abandoning the blaze to the lights in the sky. She went into the house and climbed the stairs to the bedroom where she lay down on the bed, fully clothed, smelling of gas and other fumes, but tomorrow there’d be time to wash her clothes, and the blankets, before work.
Rachel’s latest book of poetry is The Book of Skeletons by Pedlar Press. It’s available here.
Learn more about Rachel on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Travis Wiens/ flickr.com/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
- Pig Fire, by Rachel Vigier - September 16, 2021