Day of the Pig

Normally at the household of Mama Happy, the first one to make a sound on a Sunday morning is Happy’s alarm clock at 5:30. She re-sets the alarm for another 15 minutes, after which there’s more silence until she realizes it’s Sunday morning and church starts at 7:00. On this Sunday in April, Mama Happy and her daughter Neema crashed around in the kitchen at 5:30, Mama Happy issuing orders.

By 6:00 when I went to shower, Mama Happy had a vat of water over the cooking fire outside. She poured some of it into my bucket which I then used for my own shower (my mother calls this a pour-bath, with a small plastic pitcher that one uses to pour water). By the time Happy and I were putting on clothes, one large pig was screaming in the raised wooden pen.

Usually in the evenings all of those pigs are screaming when they’re hungry. Mama Happy has to fight to lower a pan of pig slop from her tiptoes while I or someone else shines a flashlight. Sometimes they get too raucous and Mama Happy can’t lower the pan. I’ve learned to fool the pigs by shining the flashlight into a different corner where they scramble, giving just enough time for her to plop the pan down. By the time we walk away from the pen, my ears are ringing.

This morning, only one pig was screaming. The smaller pigs were huddled at the other end of the pen trembling. Two men outside the pen had poles that they were using to maneuver the pig into position to eventually slaughter it.

The pig would’ve been calm if Mama Happy had been right there. But today she watched from the hallway window. Normally she has guts of steel about these things. When it’s time to butcher a duck, she wanders casually near the flock and swoops down on one, grabbing the feathers on the back of the duck and marching with it to its final end. When the dog lingers too close to the food prepared outside, she’ll whip it or throw a rock at it. I usually wince at these things, but this morning, Mama Happy was wincing from the hallway window. The three-year old pig had given her 30 pigs.

Happy and I left conveniently for church at that moment. When we returned, walking through the metal gate two hours later, the pig had been butchered, now hanging in two lengthwise sections from a makeshift wooden scaffold. One butcher scraped off the pig’s hair with a razor blade.

From one of the bedrooms, Mama Happy had taken a wooden table and put it near the hanging pig sections. People had gathered to watch Mama Happy and the butcher take turns whacking away at the hanging parts of the pig, which meant chopping into the bones. All of us standing nearby soon learned to take cover from the showering bits of meat. When they weren’t whacking at the pig, the butcher and Mama Happy whacked at smaller sections on the table and plopped them onto the metal scale on the table.

Early on one boy had come to buy the head of the pig. The head had been placed on a gunny sack, steam rising from the neck. Later the boy returned with the head and asked to have it cut in two because the boy’s mother had arranged to buy the head with others.

At one point, the houseboy of Mama Kennedy staggered in through the gate. “Houseboy” is a job title that includes domestic outdoor chores, like digging a garden and fixing things. It has nothing to do with age Mama Kennedy’s houseboy appears to be 50. “Houseboy” also does not indicate sobriety, which he is not, frequenting Mama Happy’s garden to relieve his hangovers with a lime or two plucked from her trees. And usually he needs help with the plucking due to balance issues.

But today the houseboy of Mama Kennedy wanted meat. He was sober enough to help Mama Happy carry the pig’s stomach and intestines to the far back of the yard using a gunny sack as a litter, sliced off what he wanted and left the rest for the flies. The entrails seemed like something from a science fiction film, a gigantic worm larger than the pig, curled in upon itself. That evening, it was still there, but by morning, there was no sign that it had ever existed.

By 1:00, the pig was mostly gone. The metal gate was spotted with meat stains. So too was the notebook paper with names of customers. So too was the paper money in Mama Happy’s pouch tied at her waist. Within an hour, the Sunday returned to its usual self, with one less pig in the world.