The Pig That Paid a Neighbor’s Bills

“My name is Owen Spurgeon. I raised this hog in my grandfather’s barn from February to July. I got up at five-thirty every morning and I am not complaining, because I liked it. I want to thank my grandpa and grandma, my mom and dad, my little sister Josie, and Dale Eckerle for the pig. I also want to thank everyone who is going to bid tonight, because it means a lot.

“I am not keeping the money from this hog. Every dollar of it is going to the Ferrell family. Mrs. Annette Ferrell has been sick since March and she has to go to Indianapolis every other week for her treatment. Her husband Pete is working double shifts. Their son Luke is my best friend and has been since we were five. Their bills are real big and I know that because Luke told me once and I don’t think he meant to.

“The check is going straight to the account at Mount Pleasant Church and nobody has to sign anything. I know Mr. Ferrell does not like to take things from people, so I would like to ask everybody not to make it weird.

“If you want to bid on Boone, you can. But if you want to help the Ferrells, you can do that too. Thank you.”

Bud lowered the paper.

You could have heard a staple hit the floor.

I looked across the barn. I’d been so busy watching Owen that I hadn’t looked for them yet, and I found them on the far side, near the aisle. Annette Ferrell was sitting in her folding chair with her hand over her mouth. Luke was standing beside her with his arms hanging, his mouth open, his chipped front tooth showing.

And Pete Ferrell, a man I had known since he was a freckled boy riding his bicycle down my route and tipping his cap to the mailman, had turned his face to the wall. His shoulders shook. He took off his cap and held it in front of him with both hands, and he did not seem to know what to do with it. A man standing next to him, someone from his shift at the plant, put a hand flat between his shoulder blades and kept it there.

Pete was the only one in the barn I saw cry. The rest of us just stood there. I think we were all afraid that if we made a sound, we would do it wrong.

Then Orrin Bascom stood up. He runs Bascom Feed and Grain, and he had bought the grand champion hog eleven years running.

He is not a quiet man. He stood up on the front bench with his bidder card in his fist, and he said in a voice that rattled the tin roof, “Bud, I’ll start it at five thousand.”

Somebody in the back said, “Fifty-five.”

“Sixty,” said the funeral director.

Bud found his voice and his chant, and I have heard that man call a thousand sales, and I have never heard him sound the way he did that night. The bids climbed. They went past what anybody expected. Seventy-two hundred. Seventy-four hundred. Orrin Bascom took it at $7,400 and sat back down with a grunt and said to no one in particular, “Best money I ever spent.”

I would have thought that was the end of it, and the barn would have stood and clapped, and Owen would have shaken a few hands.

But Bud lifted the microphone one more time.

“Folks,” he said, “the hog’s sold. But I believe there’s a boy in here whose family could use a little more than a hog’s worth. If you’d like to add on, hold up your card, call out a number, and Faye’s going to write it down.”

I could not give you the full list. I stopped counting. The Rotary put in a thousand. The VFW passed a ball cap down the benches. The funeral director added five hundred and said it was for the family’s mileage to Indianapolis. A woman I didn’t recognize, with a toddler on her hip, came to the rail and wrote a check for forty dollars and said, “I know it’s not much.” Faye Linnemeier took it from her and said, “It’s exactly enough.”

When the last bid was written down, Faye went to the clerk’s table, ran her pencil down the column, and went through it twice. Then she handed the sheet up to Bud.

The sale of Boone, plus what folks added on in the thirty minutes after, came to $13,550. The hog brought $7,400 of it. The barn brought the other $6,150.

I can tell you the number because I have it written on the inside of my billfold, in pencil, on a scrap of the program.