The Farm

We sold it. To a man who would be a patriarch. I told John we were closed in, subdivisions and trailers all around, complaints of the smell (though there was none), Ira came out and told me to keep them fenced (though none broke out), the neighbors frightened because someone’s cousin’s friend heard of a hog that ate a child who fell in the pen (though their children rode my sows at feeding time), because I was tired, because Jan carried our child and could no longer help, because she wanted a home. And the patriarch lost his first crop to weeds, threw a rod in the tractor, dug a basement and moved the trailer on for extra bedrooms, cut the water lines for a ditch, subdivided the farm and sold the pigs for sausage. I told John they were his, they were no longer mine, I couldn’t be responsible. The wire connecting our voices was silent for a moment. “You stupid sonofabitch,” was all he finally said. “You poor stupid bastard.”