by Kristen Stone

This fall we all raised pigs on the farm where we live near Gainesville, Florida. On November 7, Brandon Sheard of Farmstead Meatsmith came and spent three days teaching us how to slaughter and butcher the animals. Below are notes from my journal and photographs from the slaughter.

11/7 – The day before

In preparation for the slaughter, listen to Cotton by the Mountain Goats on repeat:

this song is for the soil
that’s toxic clear down to the bedrock
where no thing of consequence can grow
drop your seeds there
let them go, let them all go…

the butcher is here
life takes life
we must rejoice

11/8 – Before we begin

I wake up every hour, hot and achy. Thought it would be cold, but it isn’t.
You feel like you’ve been in an oven, Nic says when I hug her good morning, sleep still in my face.

Wake up to the sound of knives being sharpened: metal sliding over wet stone. The butcher is standing in the kitchen in his socks and t-shirt, lanky with hairy forearms. The butcher wears a wedding band and has fingernails like nuts or spoons. Smooth ovals I think about eating, pressing to the roof of my mouth, like a Pablo Neruda poem.
I want to watch people do things with their hands forever.
(this is not an occupation)

As soon as I met him I felt better. Dread dissipates when you can give it up to a professional: someone else will hold the gun. He is so nice and makes us feel like we’ve done a good job. That our pigs are: Very friendly. Good size. Nice pigs.

The night before the slaughter I have a sex dream. I have a dream about going back to my grade school. In the dream I lean my face against a girl’s soft belly. Do that again, she says, or maybe she sends me a text message.

11/9 – Morning

Where did he go, Maureen asks, after the first pig is shot. We drag the limp body.

Scurf is the layer of hair, dirt, and outermost skin. scald for five minutes at 145°F and then scrape off. You need a chain hoist, a 55 gallon drum with the top cut out, and a large propane burner, Brandon’s wife had written in her email to us, telling us how to get ready. Suburban girls try to walk tough, look like they know stuff, when they go to Home Depot. Cable sling, cable sling, I repeat over and over in my head, until I find it.

We eat liver in the barn, standing around the cast iron skillet. Tastes like it came out of a body, pasty and rich. The tiny slices of hanger steak and skirt steak, thin soft muscle with a puff of white fat. We eat the trotters: bony and greasy. Slippery tails with tiny tiny bones inside. Ears which crisp to bubbly skin on either side of a sheet of white cartilage. We are hungry and filthy, animals eating animals.

Before dinner I read the hog killing scene from Little House in the Big Woods:

“It doesn’t hurt him, Laura,” Pa said. “We do it so quickly.” . . .  It was such a busy day, with so much to see and do. Uncle Henry and Pa were jolly, and there would be spare-ribs for dinner, and Pa had promised Laura and Mary the bladder and the pig’s tail.

11/9 – Evening

Brandon is the midwife of death, Jasmine whispers to me as we hold each other
Brandon is the midwife of death, Jasmine says to the side of my face, as Brandon crosses himself and kneels on our dead pig, still convulsing, to bleed it out.
Helping the heart. Its last beats.

11/10 – After

I will never write about the slaughter. I will never write about the slaughter. I will never finish writing about the slaughter. When we eat the meat, I have to tell myself: This is the body of our pigs. The debt that can never be repaid.

After, we parse out the details, we make a story:
Pigs aren’t afraid of dying the way we are. Even after they hear one shot they aren’t afraid of the rifle, or the next shot. They do not mourn their fallen brothers.
They are not afraid of the same things we are: Dying or missing our loved ones.

The pigs are dead. We killed them, strung them up by the strong tendons in their trotters, scalded in a barrel and scraped all their hair off, and the outside layer of dirty skin.

waiting for the first shot/waiting for the last shot
waiting for the first shot/waiting for the last shot

::

For a closer look at the butchering process, as well a little history, take a moment to watch On the Anatomy of Thrift, a beautiful instructional film done by Farmstead Meatsmith (the butcher who Kristen mentions in this article), and Farmrun, an agricultural media company based in the Pacific Northwest.