The Pig That Paid a Neighbor’s Bills

The pig from the Eckerle place

Pauline and I live on eleven acres south of Greensburg, on the same gravel road where I used to put mail in boxes. The house is small. The barn is not. My father built it in 1961 to hold sows, and I kept the front half of it going as a hog barn long after the money in hogs had moved to the big confinement operations. These days it holds a lawn tractor, a chest freezer, and four pens that I swept out and limed every January for Owen.

He started showing in 4-H at nine. First it was a rabbit, then a lamb that nearly took his arm off, and when he turned twelve he asked if he could try a market hog. His parents live in town. They have a nice house with a postage stamp yard and no room for anything with a tail. So the hogs were mine to house and his to raise, and from the first year it was understood between us that I would provide the barn and the grandfatherly nagging, and he would provide everything else.

That February we drove out to the Eckerle farm over by St. Paul. Dale Eckerle raised show pigs the old way, outside when he could, with a good boar and a good eye. Owen walked down the row of pens with his hands in his jacket pockets and said nothing for twenty minutes. He leaned on the gate of one pen, then another, then another.

“What are you looking for?” Dale asked him.

“Something that stands on its toes,” Owen said. “And walks like it’s not in a hurry.”

He picked a barrow with a white belt around its shoulders and a black rump with a rooster tail of hair at the end of its spine, and he paid Dale $310 out of the jar on his dresser. He had been saving that jar since Christmas of the year before. It held lawn mowing money and birthday money and the forty dollars I paid him every spring to help me clean gutters.

He named the pig Boone, after Boone County, because Dale had bought the sow from a family up there. I told him that experienced showmen do not name their animals because the animals go to sale. He said, “Grandpa, I know where he’s going. I’m just not going to call him ‘Number 14’ for five months.”

That was the whole argument. I lost it, and I am glad I did.

Five-thirty every morning

People who have never raised a show hog do not know what it asks of a kid. It is not the fair. The fair is a week. It is the hundred and thirty-some mornings before it.

He walked that pig. Up the gravel drive, down the gravel drive, up the drive again. A show pig has to learn to move with a stick tapping at his shoulder, and he has to learn not to mind the noise of strangers. Owen would put a radio on a fence post and turn it to the farm report just so the pig would get used to men talking. He brushed him down. He scratched his belly. He washed his ears with a baby washcloth.

I watched all of it from the porch swing, and I will tell you what it did to me. I carried the mail in every kind of weather for thirty-one years. I know what it is to be up before the world and out in it. I never thought I would see that kind of steadiness in a boy who also owned a phone.