We Had Seen a Pig

1 One man held the huge pig down and the other stuck an ice pick into the jugular, which is when we started to pay attention. The blood rose ten feet with force while the sow swam on its back as if to cut its own neck. Its fatty back smacked the slippery cement while the assassins shuffled to keep their balance, and the bloody fountain rose and fell back and rose less and less high, until the red plume reentered the pig at the neck, and the belly collapsed and the pig face went dull. 2 I knew the pig was the butcher’s, whose game lived mainly behind our garage. Sometimes turkeys, always roosters and sheep. Once the windmill turned two days without stopping. The butcher would walk in his apron straight for the victim. The others would scratch and babble and get in the way. Then the butcher would lead the animal to the back door of his shop, stopping to kill it on a stump. It was always evening, after closing. The sea breeze would be rising, cloaking the hour in brine. 3 The pig we saw slaughtered was more than twice anything shut up in the patch we trespassed to make havoc. Since the butcher was Italian, not Jewish, that would be his pig. Like the barber who carried a cigar box of bets to the stationery store, like the Greek who made sweets and hid Greek illegals, immigrant “submarines,” the butcher had a business, his business, by which he took from our hands the cleaver and serrated knife for the guts, and gave us back in butcher paper and outer layers of brown wrapping our lives for their cries. 4 Hung up to drain, the great pig, hacked into portions, looked like a puzzle we could put together in the freezer to make a picture of a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things when we looked.