I. 1
I worked on farms throughout high school. We lived in an outer suburb of Atlanta, a mile off the highway that connected city to country. Travel thirty minutes west and you were in Midtown; travel thirty minutes east and you lost cell service.
These were the burgeoning years of the localvore movement, when farmer’s markets were beginning to set up Saturday hours in walkable middle-class downtowns and words like “organic” and “carbon footprint” were beginning to be heard on laypeople’s tongues. Everybody read Michael Pollan (for the liberals) and Joel Salatin (for the libertarians). My parents installed a chest freezer in the garage and bought a quarter of a cow at a time from a local homesteader and his theater-professor partner.
Like our semi-rural suburb, the farms, too, straddled lines. I worked first at the barn where I took horseback riding lessons, mucking stalls and feeding horses in exchange for a discount. The sport was bourgie and the lessons were expensive, but the barn showed sky through dozens of rotten places in the ceiling and there were no railings in the hayloft.
Every Saturday and Sunday I arrived at 7:00 am and 7:00 pm and fed twenty-four horses, each with its own combination of pellets and hay and mash to be administered in specific order, with or without medication. I had them all memorized. I watered them, or broke the ice on their water, or fished dead or living rats out of the water. I mucked twelve stalls in the morning and twelve in the evening.
I was always the only one there. I remember best what it was like in winter – the sparkling pasture, my melted footprints on the gravel, the breath of twenty-four horses rising in steam in the sunbeams lancing through the holes in the ceiling. I never owned a winter coat through all of high school, preferring to bundle myself in four layers of sweatshirts and two of pants instead. The skinny barn cats sometimes climbed me to drape themselves like scarves around my neck while I worked, nestling between the stacked hoods and digging in warning claws when I moved too suddenly.
In the barn in the early morning I learned what teenagers know about solitude and its necessity. My suburban life was full of the promise of distant success; everything I did was groundwork for some year in the future I could not imagine. In the barn I healed from abstraction. I fed the horses, because if I did not feed the horses they would not eat. I poured pellets and mash into bottomless horses and went into the hayloft when I was done to sit with my feet dangling, to pet the cats, and to listen to them all ignore me.
II.
Later, my parents became close friends with the homesteader from whom they bought their beef and pork. He began to let me watch his farm when he and his partner traveled. For two weeks at a time I moved alone into their house and cared for fifty pigs, thirty chickens, four sheep, a sheepdog puppy, a small crowd of pigeons, and a hutch of rabbits.
A lot of what animals did, it seemed, was die.
The sheepdog puppy killed chickens with an ecstatic compulsion and a Catholic’s guilt. I learned quickly not to be squeamish: When I found the worried corpse I would carry it around the farm, head and feet swinging, until I found the puppy in her shame and dragged her to it by the collar. I shoved her face into it while she yelped and tore the earth with her paws, trying to escape the occasion of her sin. Once I found three dead chickens in a single morning and had to grit my teeth to make myself gather the stiff, scaly legs like a bouquet and carry them all at once to the compost heap.
The pigs bred and roamed, and the boars broke the piglets’ necks with snaps of their teeth or stove their heads in with a kick when they came too close. There was no sequestered litter that did not lose some of its number to the sleeping mother, who did not notice the suffocating bodies under her when she rolled over in the night and walked placidly away from their broken, flattened corpses in the morning. These, too, I picked up and carried when necessary.
Once the farmer and his partner came back from vacation just as one of the new mother pigs collapsed of an infection that had been invisibly festering in her for days. The farmer raced to pick up a penicillin prescription while I knelt alone in the pigpen with the dying sow, slapping her in the face and the teats with a Ziploc bag full of ice water as her piglets climbed over my legs and screamed. It was summer twilight, and raining; the soggy mix of shit and mud under my knees was warm from the heat of the pig. When she climbed to her feet to vomit, a crushed piglet lay under her, cold pink tongue protruding.
The pigs cared little for me and cared very much about the rattle of the tractor coming down the hill to the pen. The noise before feeding time was audible from the house; the silence when feeding time had commenced was like an exam room full of college students, deep in fevered concentration.
Once, the farmer heard me call one of the pigs by name. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry—I should have asked if you’d named them,” he said. “If an intern names a pig, we try to keep track, so we don’t send them to slaughter until the intern’s moved on. Just one time, somebody came in and said, ‘Where’s Ruby? She’s my favorite!’ and was just heartbroken when he found out.”
I took care not to call any pigs by name in front of him again. Part of it was an adolescent desire to set myself apart from the interns – I didn’t want him to think of me as some suburban kid appending “eco-” to random words in conversation, looking for a grant to start a community garden. I was a different kind of suburban kid, wasn’t I? I was a farmer like him.
Part of it was that by asking, he’d exposed the gap between two truths I didn’t yet understand I’d been carrying within me: That I liked the pigs, enjoyed caring for them, felt invested in their well-being, and also that I felt no particular emotion about what would eventually happen to them. I would kneel in the shit and mud for as many hours as necessary to keep a dying sow conscious while help arrived; and I would feel neither pride nor especial relief when the farmer called me three days later to tell me she had recovered. Just a sense that a page had turned in the story, not especially interesting to tell, that the pig and I had shared in our weeks alone together. Twice a week, after the pigs were fed, I went to the saltbox and turned the cured pork.
III.
Like everyone else, we got pets during the pandemic. They were a pre-pandemic plan, though – as a wedding present, my in-laws had promised to cover the cost of materials for a backyard chicken coop. We built it over six weekends in October and November of 2020, while four chicks grew feathers in a U-Haul wardrobe box in our TV room.
My employer had closed our offices two weeks into March. My wife never had the option to work from home. And so for six weeks I spent the days alone in the house with our four baby birds, who as they grew scuffled and screeched and shat in a room covered in newspaper and old bedsheets.
It was a dull, claustrophobic year. I let the grass grow waist-high in 2020, simultaneously unable to stir myself to mow and unwilling to halt the uncontrolled growth, to cut the wildflowers off at the knees. The lilacs bloomed, and then the lupines, and then the roses, and then the foxgloves, and then the nasturtiums and the dahlias, and I know this because I changed my Twitter display name whenever a new flower appeared — I felt a sense of urgency about making this known, about painting a picture of my house, my days, that indicated time was passing.
Some days I would lie on the couch for hours at a time staring at my work computer on the desk six feet away, watching emails come in and wondering how many days I would have to go not answering them before someone noticed I wasn’t there. Some days my concentration fractured early and I ran out into the yard as though chased, throwing myself into spontaneous, pointless yard projects, making myself real by the paths I cut through the tall grass.
Sometimes during a Zoom call I held a baby chicken in my lap until her stubby wings relaxed, her head tipped forward, and she slept. Sometimes during a Zoom call, when the air in the house was hot and dead and I couldn’t remember the purpose of any effort and I felt like I was standing behind myself at the computer manipulating my own hands and eyes on rods, I turned off my camera and fell asleep on the couch with a chick sitting on my chest, cupped under my hand.
In the spring of 2021 we got three more chicks, the final additions to the flock. We named them Diana, Sunflower, and Butternut. When they were a month old, Diana began to die.
We’ll never know what she had. I found her in a corner of her U-Haul box one morning, eyes squeezed shut in pain, too weak to move. The vet prescribed an antibiotic and a probiotic and told me not to expect too much.
The next morning, she began to have fits—suddenly there would come a thumping noise from inside her crate and a gasping, gagging noise as she flung herself back and forth, clearing some unknown gunk out of her throat with anatomy made to move only one direction. When the fits came I couldn’t work, couldn’t read, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but clench my fists and wait for the horrible uncontrolled motion to stop, half-hoping that this would be the one that killed her.
The days exhaled stale, clammy heat. An infestation of tiny flies took over a houseplant, and I felt a surge of dull, desperate loathing every time one stumbled through the air into my face. The dishes gathered in the sink and the house stank of wet grain. Outside the clouds hung thick and black and low, pinning the air to the earth, caging me with rain.
Three days into her sickness, Diana had a fit that lasted so many unbearable minutes it left her in a spent heap, wings and legs sprawled out on the towel, breathing raggedly. I told her, aloud, that I was going to find someone to euthanize her. (I saw a lot of animals die; I never killed one.) I picked her up and rested her on my chest as I had when she was small (she was still small) and cupped a hand over her as she trembled and wheezed.
This was 2021, not 2010, and so I took pictures of her in the moments I thought might be her last. Why? I don’t know now and I didn’t know then. I think it may be simply that I no longer knew how to live a moment I didn’t record in some way. I didn’t share the pictures, but I had them—so that if need be, they could be shared.
I think sometimes there are kinds of solitude I will never access again, that I will never again have the willpower to enjoy. And even if I did have the willpower—I remember what it was like, when the possibility of anything else could not have occurred to me. The solitude of the hayloft belongs to a version of the world, a version of myself, who no longer exists. There was a time in my life I could sit alone in my car and stretch the solitude of it out a moment longer than strictly necessary – be alone, and not just one kind of alone.
In 2021, I took pictures of Diana curled up on me and, eventually, sleeping.
After that, she rallied. We squeezed pureed boiled egg down her throat that night and she swallowed it, and again in the morning. She sought out sunbeams and slept long hours in them. I dragged towels around the room as the days crawled forward, offering her any bed she wanted. She moved between them with increasing impatience.
A week after the terrible moment in which I had decided she should die, I found her standing with her face pressed to the door that separated her from Sunflower and Butternut, calling urgently to them and listening to their replies. In the evening, as they began to make the sweet trilling sounds they make as they settle onto the roost together, a blind, comfortable here I am, here you are, she screamed for them from her crate until she exhausted herself. Chickens alone become strange and neurotic; they forget what other chickens are. If you leave them alone too long they re-emerge into a world of only enemies.
We weighed her every morning on a cling-wrapped kitchen scale. When she surpassed half a kilogram we let her back in with her little flock, who, after a few suspicious days forgot that she had ever been gone, just as they had forgotten she had ever been there.
IV.
There were ten baby rabbits on the farm. They lived with their mother in a hutch designed to be dragged to a fresh spot on the lawn every day. A rabbit can escape through any space large enough to fit three fingers through, so the rabbits escaped nearly every single day. No feat of engineering could contain them.
One of my chores, then, was to make the rounds of the farm with a butterfly net, sneaking up Elmer Fudd-like to catch them one at a time and return them to the hutch, there to box them in with more concrete blocks, more planks, more leaning cardboard. It was in the nineties and humid. "At this point I don't care if they all die," I snarled to a friend on the phone. “I’ll kill them myself.”
The next day I went out with the butterfly net again and trampled the nettles finding them. I brought them back one at a time, each a little soft handful with a wildly beating heart.
Lyric in the subtitle is Pink Floyd - Pigs (Three Different Ones)
I loved reading this, on my sunny terrasse, with a tired contented post-walk dog snuggled in her basket in the shade. The bit about real things pushing the abstract out of mind is a keeper. Thanks for such lovely writing.
By god, you've done it again. Excellence.