brown puddings of shit from beneath each squeaking pig’s ass. Their faces are set into expressions of grim practicality, their mouths downturned, their noses quivering, their eyes squinting as they look down at the poop they’re scraping up. It’s a hard smell to get used to—every so often Bud goes Phew! and shakes his head with distaste.
My brother and I follow them with wheelbarrows into which every so often the big, slimy cakes of shit are shoved into, sliding off the shovels. At the end of each row we run the wheelbarrows outside and empty them onto the great big mountain of shit behind the barn, then go running back to follow behind Daddy Jack and Bud as they start the next row. Sometimes the pigs get in the way of the shovelling and Daddy Jack has to whack them on the ass with his shovel, crying, “Git on, ye!” and the pig trembling on his little, stubby legs shifts sideways squealing. And sometimes Daddy Jack whacks them for no reason.
“I’d like to know where that lazy sonofabitch Harley is!” Bud shouts out above the thundering grunts and whines and screams and yelps of the hogs as he lifts a particularly heavy brown deposit on the end of his shovel.
“Ah, it’s that mother a yers!” gripes Daddy Jack scraping, sweat streaming from beneath his John Deere tractor hat. “She gonna coddle and baby the little cocksucker till he’s an old man.”
Scrape, scrape, scrape, plopping thick and stickily with a smacking quirlppkkk sound off the end of the shovels, wheeled around and loaded off into the big mountain of shit, the ultimate destination of everything, drying and hardening and blackening into an ossified crustiness, a moat of puddles and rivers of liquified shit surrounding it, breeding place of maggots, humming and vibrating with every conceivable type of fly, buzzing black speckles jiggling in the sky, flies in your eyes, on your face, in your food, big fat flies that bite and when you kill them leave red blotches on your arms. Flies swarming the eyes of the pigs, squirrelling into their nostrils, into the flaps of their ears, flies buzzing impatiently around the buttocks of the pigs, flies, flies, flies.
And after many trips to the mountain of shit the last cakey, squishing dollop is consigned with the last plopping smack plastered into the overwhelming tingling stench. We go back and Daddy Jack and Bud sift the grain into the pigs’ feeders, the greedy, slopping big mouths of the hogs nuzzling and swilling it down their gorges, their squeals relenting and giving way to low, satisfied grunts and groans as they cram their heads into the steel feeders in pure orgiastic frenzy, gulp, gulp, gulp.
Daddy Jack removes his cap and wipes his wet forehead, watching them expressionlessly. Afterwards, it’s breeding time for a choice boar and sow. Father and son lead the hogs out of their stalls and into an aisle between the rows. “Come on, c’mon, there, git on, ye!” shouts Daddy Jack, slapping their rumps. The sow seems eager enough, but the boar hangs back, sniffing the ground, disinterested. “Bring ’im around here!” Daddy Jack orders Bud.
Bud grabs the pig by the head with both hands and tries to get him into position, shoving his snout into the crotch of the sow. The swine shakes his head away and looks dumbly off in the other direction. “I’m tryin’, dad!” Bud exclaims. “He jes’ ain’t interested!”
“Goddamn!” Daddy Jack yells, runs over and grabs the pig’s head and shoves it right up to the rump of the other pig. “Now, now, you check, Bud!” Daddy Jack gasps, his face red and sweating with the effort of holding the squirming pig’s face in the crotch of the sow.
“Check what ’is cock’s doin’. HURRY UP now, goddamnit!”
Bud bends down, squints his eyes, shakes his head. “Nothin’, Dad!”
“Well God-DAMN!” cries Daddy Jack, shoving the hog away. “Whatta we got—the bastard’s a goddamn faggot or somethin!” He shakes his head and spits angrily. “Well, only one thing we can do,” he mutters and begins to remove his gloves.
But just then we hear the barn door slam and turn to see Harley trudging sulkily up the aisle between the rows. Daddy Jack looks over at Bud and grins. “Hey! Harley! Git yer ass over here!” he shouts as Bud laughs. “We gotta JOB fer ya!”
Harley looks up in surprise for a moment, then scowls. “Ah, fuck, how come I always get stuck with that shit?” he snorts, pouting, kicking his boot against the wall.
“Git yer ass over here!” Daddy Jack shouts and chortles triumphantly with Bud as Harley strides over, angrily pulling off his gloves.
Momma Simpson at the kitchen table stares blinking over her empty bowl with her tongue inside her mouth vacantly swishing milky remnants of porridge. Her large white forearms rest upon the table right at the point where her dimpled elbows swell up into the meaty, milky vastness of her upper arms, the fat seemingly powerful to have once caused my brother to remark admiringly upon her “big muscles.” These very arms are speckled with black-red scabs caused by her inability to refrain from scratching her mosquito bites until they bleed.
Now Momma Simpson’s eyes narrow into squints as she stares in the quiet kitchen, the only sound being the white clock radio on top of the fridge humming country western music. She is cooking up a crisis—her particular philosophy being that since stumbling blocks are due to always come anyway, why the trick then is not to avoid them but to welcome them, in fact to perhaps create and foster them wherever possible, the idea being that once one has inured and reconciled oneself to the worst then there are really no problems in life (this not thought through in a conscious way in her mind but instinctively sought for at a lower subconscious level in her mechanism).
Thus every molehill mutates inflating into a troublesome mountain beneath her gaze and touch, and she like a bee gathering pollen flits from deathbed to deathbed and ministers to the weary sickly organisms, collecting and distilling their feverish misery, the wicked, white blow of death deep within her gullet—all the better to steel herself for the unspeakable tragedy which is always on its way, inevitable.
Likewise does she, with immaculate solicitude, shower care and compassion upon the mentally defective, the ones born simple, slow, their eyes set wide apart, innocent and uncomprehending, destined all alike to perish young and no further enlightened as to why this should be so—the utter explosive unfairness of this, it is, he is, you are, that’s all—all founded and predicated upon a reality which is unacceptable to mere mortal minds.
To Momma Simpson this is the Ultimate Backdrop of Reality before which we play our foolish Punch and Judy show of life: disease and misery are not aberrations but rather well-being and happiness are, mere brief intervals in the ongoing rush of death and decay—and as such, are to be savoured and prized, transient though they may be.
Never does she perceive a rose but that its oncoming blight and withering are immediately perceptible to her—and never even on the brightest day does the sun shine bright enough to erase the hungry black mist encroaching around its circumference—and never does the human form present itself but that she sees the oncoming ashiness of face, the grizzled limbs, the palsied hands, the hard bone of skeleton impatiently awaiting release.
It is for this reason her bleeding mosquito bites and scabs, her jabbering mouth never ceasing to detail the latest catastrophe, crisis, hectoring on into the deep night when the mood takes her, causing poor old Daddy Jack to clasp his head with trembling hands (he is a great sufferer of migraines) and with an almost-weeping expression on his wincing face cry, “Grace. Please, just STOP it. JESUS!”
For stumbling blocks must and will come with admirable efficiency and haste, while miracles are oft lost in the mail. It’s always something and if it isn’t it soon will be, and so it is in the grim comfort of imminent and utter devastation that Momma Simpson unreservedly and trustfully places the whole of her faith.
Now Momma Simpson rises from the table with her empty bowl, turns and rinses it out in the sink. She stands before the sink and looks out the little window above it, sees the misty cornfields and the Jacksons’ barn a half-mile away, sees the desolate highway and the little black sparrows on the drooping hydro lines.
Jack surely does ride that boy’s ass,