The latch on the middle pen made a sound I knew in my sleep, a flat steel clack. Then Sherri swung the gate all the way open and stepped back to watch.
It was a quarter to six on fair weigh-in morning in Rush County, Indiana. Fog lay over the soybean field across the lane like somebody had poured skim milk over it and let it settle.
My son Calvin was eleven. He had three show pigs in the pens behind our machine shed, a Spot gilt and two barrows, and he had fed, walked and washed them every single day since the first week of April.
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He was standing ten feet from the gate with a bucket of water in each hand. He did not drop the buckets.
I remember that part. He just stood there while the pigs figured out the world no longer had a fence in it.
“There,” Sherri said. She was forty-two, my husband Blaine’s older sister, in her barn boots and a sweatshirt, with her coffee cup still in her other hand. “Maybe now he’ll learn to latch it.”
“Sherri,” I said. That was all I got out before she kept going.
“I found that pin hanging loose last night when I came down to borrow the sorting board,” she said. “Looped, not dropped. One of these days it happens for real, Rhoda, and nobody is standing here to see it.”
Then Pepper, the Spot gilt, put her nose up, smelled whatever a pig smells at dawn in July, and went through that open gate like she had been waiting her whole life for it.
The two barrows went right behind her. Biscuit was the white Yorkshire cross. Moose was the big red Duroc that Calvin called his tank.
Close to seven hundred fifty pounds of pig between the three of them, headed straight into Cliff Miller’s beans.
The weigh-in window at the fairgrounds closed at nine. The fair’s floor for market hogs that year was two hundred twenty pounds.
On the co-op scale Saturday, Pepper had weighed two hundred twenty-nine. Nine pounds of cushion, on a pig that was now running.
I want to tell you I said something wise to Sherri right then. I did not. I set down the feed scoop, I looked at her one time, and I turned and went after my son’s pigs.