The Pork Chop Supper on the Lawn

The Whole Road at Six in the Morning

I am a rural mail carrier out of the Rushville post office.

I have driven the same seventy-one miles of county road six days a week for nine years, and I know every mailbox, every dog and every soft shoulder on it.

I also know that you do not catch three pigs in a bean field with one woman and a boy.

You need people. And at six in the morning, the people you need are still in their kitchens with the radio on.

“Blaine,” I hollered toward the shed. “Pigs are out. All three of them, and they’re in Cliff’s beans.”

Blaine had been backing the stock trailer up to the loading chute.

He came around the corner of the shed at a dead run, and when he saw his sister standing by the open gate with her coffee, he stopped for about half a second.

He did not yell at her. My husband is not a yeller.

He looked at the gate, looked at Sherri, looked at the beans, and I watched him put the whole thing in a box to open later.

“Get your phone out,” he said to me. “Call Conrad. Call the Hoffmans. Tell them to bring panels if they have them, and tell them not to run anything.”

You might ask why I did not just call the sheriff on her, or tell her to get off our place. I will answer that plainly.

Nobody on God’s earth ever caught a pig by calling the sheriff, she was Blaine’s only sister, and the clock was running.

So I called. I called Conrad Hoffman first, because he farms the ground east of us and he has hog panels stacked behind his grain bins from when his kids showed.

His wife Trisha answered on the second ring with her mouth full of toast.

“Our pigs are in Cliff’s beans,” I said. “All three. Weigh-in closes at nine and we haven’t loaded a single one.”

“We’re coming,” Trisha said, and she hung up before I could even say thank you.

Then I did something I have never done before or since. I texted every number I had saved from my route, about thirty households, with one line.

Show pigs loose in Miller beans on 300 North. Bring boots. Do not run them.

Within fifteen minutes there were eleven people standing at the edge of that bean field, and more pulling onto the shoulder.

Some of them were in pajama pants with their boots unlaced. Two of the Pruitt girls still had curlers in.

Conrad came down the lane with four hog panels strapped to the back of his side-by-side. Trisha came behind him on foot carrying two sorting boards, one under each arm, like she was hauling cafeteria trays.

And old Cliff Miller himself came down off his porch with his cane, eighty-one years old, in his good church slacks, because he said he could not find his work pants in the dark.

“Those are my beans,” Cliff said, looking out over the fog where three pig backs were moving through the rows like little boats. “Well. Nobody hurry. A pig that runs in July is a pig that quits on you.”

How You Catch a Pig in the Beans

If you have never done it, here is how it goes. You do not chase. You walk.

You spread out in a long, loose line, you carry something wide and flat in front of your knees, and you let the pig decide it would rather go your way.

The beans were about knee high. They were wet with dew, and within two minutes every one of us was soaked to the thigh.

The fog made it hard to see thirty feet, so we called to each other the whole time like geese.

“Got the red one headed west,” Conrad called out from somewhere off to my left in the fog.

“Turn him at the waterway,” Blaine called back. “Don’t crowd him. Give him room and let him think about it.”

Moose was the easy one. He had always been lazy, and once he had eaten enough bean leaves to remember he liked his feed better, he let Conrad and Blaine walk him back down the row and up the lane like an old dog going home.

Biscuit went the other direction, toward the county road, and that scared me worse than anything.

Conrad’s oldest boy and two of the Pruitt girls cut her off at the ditch with Trisha’s sorting boards, and she turned back toward the panels with a squeal that sounded downright offended.