I must have been twelve that summer—the age when a boy is old enough to be handed a task but still too young to understand the shape of it. My mother sent me to Louisiana for July and August the way Houstonians send their kids anywhere that isn’t asphalt and heat shimmer. My uncle’s pig farm sat inland from Opelousas, humidity hanging from the trees like invisible fruit. The mornings came fog-thick, the evenings smelled of smoke and fat, and the days belonged to the men and their work.
Every summer before then, I’d watched from the edges. Swept the porch. Fed the dogs. Ran barefoot through the rows of cane behind the pens. But that year, the men called for me.
I remember the sound more than the words. My uncle’s voice—rough as burlap—cutting through the squeals and metallic clatter of the farm.
“Boy. Come here.”
I came because boys do that. And because there was something in his tone I’d never heard before—a seriousness shaped like invitation.
The sun was starting to lean west, thick gold pooling in the dust around their boots. The men stood in a loose circle near the hog pen. My father was there too, having driven up from Houston the night before. He stood a little apart, but not distant—his shoulders squared, his cigarette burning fast, his eyes bright in a way I’d never seen around me before. As if this moment were something he’d been waiting on, something he believed a son ought to meet head-on.
My uncle held a .38 revolver, dulled from use, the grip worn smooth. It looked strangely small in his hands—like a toy built for intimidation. He turned and held it out to me.
“For you,” he said.
No ceremony. No explanation. Just the offering, blunt as a command.
I took it because not taking it would’ve meant something I didn’t yet understand—cowardice, maybe, or disrespect. The metal felt warm from his palm, heavier than it had any right to be.
Behind us, near the shade of the pecan tree, the women were already preparing. My aunt filled the galvanized tub with water from the well, steam rising when she poured in boiling water from the kitchen. Another woman sharpened knives on a whetstone, long pulls making a hiss like breath through teeth. They weren’t watching us directly, but they knew. They always knew.
Only much later did I understand that the preparations themselves were a kind of language. The scalding water to loosen the bristles. Knives honed to peel back skin. The wooden table scrubbed but forever stained. A choreography rehearsed across generations, passed down without reflection, as instinctive as breath.
My uncle pointed into the pen. “That one.”
The hog stood broad-backed and pink, mud dried in patches along his flanks. Not the largest, but solid. His snout dark from rooting. He looked at us, not in fear but in the dull curiosity hogs reserve for anything that isn’t food.
“Right between the eyes,” my uncle said, tapping the barrel with one blunt finger.
I waited for the rest—a reason, a purpose, a joke maybe.
But the men just stared at me with faces set in the shape of expectation. My father’s gaze didn’t soften; it sharpened. He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled slowly, nodding to himself, as though this—this exact moment—was what he believed would prove something in me.
My mother wasn’t close enough to hear, but she must’ve sensed the shift in the air, the way women do when the world nudges a child toward a line they can’t uncross. Her anger—though I didn’t see it yet—was already forming, not at the hog’s fate but at the men choosing me for the task.
I’d never fired a gun. I didn’t know anything about pens or angles or ricochet. I didn’t know you were supposed to shoot from outside the fencing. I didn’t know that the rite was meant to be distant, not intimate.
So I did what seemed obvious.
I climbed over the fence.
The men cursed behind me, but none reached to stop me. Maybe they thought I knew what I was doing. Maybe they wanted to see what I’d do. Maybe they believed in a kind of trial by ignorance.
The hog watched me approach, snorting softly, tail twitching. Mud squelched under my bare feet. I raised the revolver the way I’d seen actors do on TV—two hands, arms straight, elbows locked.
But then the hog stepped closer.
Closer.
Close enough that I could smell him—sour, warm, alive. Close enough that when I touched his forehead with the barrel, his skin twitched under the cold metal.
I didn’t feel fear.
I didn’t feel pity.
I didn’t feel anything except the strange fact of being told to do something without knowing why.
I squeezed the trigger.
The crack rang through the pen, sending the other hogs into a frenzy. The hog collapsed instantly, legs folding like wet cloth. Blood sprayed in a fine arc, warm across my arms, my cheek, my shirt.
I stood there, gun lowered, ears buzzing.
Behind me, the men burst into laughter—big, rolling, incredulous laughter. My uncle slapped his thigh. A neighbor bent over wheezing, hands on his knees. And one of the men clapped my father firmly on the back—congratulations, approval, pride.
My father’s face flickered with something like triumph.
The women cried out—not screams, but the kind of sound that comes when something maps itself too easily onto a child.
My mother was already vaulting the fence.
She grabbed me hard by the shoulders, turning me toward her. Her hands shook. Her eyes scanned my face—searching for something that frightened her more than the blood.
“What did you do?” she asked, but her voice trembled on the edge of breaking. Her anger wasn’t for the hog. It was for the men who had decided I should carry this moment.
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even understand the question.
She twisted, glaring at my father. There was a storm in her face I’d seen only twice before. He looked down now, as if a judge had just dropped the gavel on him.
“Look at me,” she said, gripping my chin and lifting my gaze.
I looked. Her eyes were dark, fierce, pleading.
“Are you here?” she whispered. “Are you with me?”
I nodded because it was all I knew how to do.
The butchering took the rest of the afternoon. The women poured more boiling water into the tub until steam filled the yard like fog. They dipped the hog, rope tied around his hind legs, until the skin loosened and bristles came away in wet fistfuls. The smell was awful—wet hide and scalded hair—but no one commented. It was the smell of work.
Knives moved with practiced precision. Ears came off. Feet. The belly split open with a slow, decisive pull. Steam and blood rose together like some ancient offering.
I helped clean intestines, rinsing them under the pump while my aunt showed me how to check for tears. My hands worked automatically, though my mind clung to the image of the hog’s eyes just before the shot—small, wet, empty of any story except the one we forced onto him.
When evening came, we ate cracklings hot from the pan. Grease dripped down our wrists. Laughter rose again. The men drank beer and told stories about harvests and storms and tractors that refused to die.
No one mentioned the gun. Or the way the hog fell. Or my mother’s trembling hands.
That night, the box fan rattled in the window while I lay staring at the ceiling. I waited to feel something—guilt, pride, fear, sickness. But nothing came. I felt only the weight of the day settling into me like sediment.
When my mother came to check on me, she brushed back my hair and whispered:
“You were supposed to shoot from outside the pen.”
I nodded.
“Did anyone tell you that?”
I shook my head.
She sighed—long, tired, furious at the world, but grateful I was still reachable.
She kissed my forehead and turned off the light.
I didn’t speak of that day for years. Not out of shame. Not out of fear. But because I had no story to tell. No context. No explanation.
It was a task handed to me. A cruelty unframed by meaning. A door opened without warning and closed just as quickly.
Only as an adult did I realize what frightened my mother—how easily a child can step into violence when no one tells him what it is. How obedience can masquerade as bravery. How a body can act before the mind has caught up.
Sometimes I think back to the hog’s eyes. Not the moment before the shot, but the moment my mother forced me to look at her—her eyes anchoring mine, pulling me back into myself.
That, more than anything, kept something in me from drifting loose.
Even now, I don’t know why they chose me that day.
But I know this:
My mother didn’t save the hog.
She saved me.
