The phone rang. My mom picked it up.

“Hello… Well… Wow… Yeah… We'll come pick him up in a few hours… Okay… Bye” she said in a one-sided conversation.

She left the coiled corded rotary phone that hung from the wall, and sat down at the kitchen table with her coffee.

“Niemeyer’s just called. They have a sick pig they want to get rid of. Marsha’s going to be here any time though.”

Marsha was the same age as my mom, had been a classmate, and had lived in the rural farmland of Round Butte when she was a kid. After high school, they had both gone to Tucson. My mom worked in horse stables. Marsha partied. Now Marsha was a paralegal in Missoula. They hadn’t seen each other in 20 years, but here she was, standing at the door, and we left her in, and exchange pleasantries.

The three of us got in the cab of the tiny pickup truck. Marsha was wearing nice clothes, a grey pantsuit and dress shoes. She had honey colored hair that was braided in a unique pattern. She seemed out of place as we walked into the long steel building that was full of pigs, shit and squeals.

“They said he would be in the end pen… and… that he’s a skinny pig… and that he is covered with blood… Well here he is” my mom said.

We got the pig into the back of the pickup truck, it had a canopy, and into his pen at home. We fed him, and watched him grow.

“Well he looks just about big enough, maybe a few more weeks, then we’ll call White’s Meats and have them come get him” said my mom as she was looking at him over the fence. The next morning, he was covered in blood. He quit eating, and we watched him get thin. After a few weeks, it seems that he forgot why he was fasting, and began to eat again. Just when my mom decided to call the butcher, we found him bloody and beaten up again. He began fasting again.

“We need to put him on a picket line, like a horse, so that he can’t beat himself up” said my mom. I climbed over the fence with a large horse halter in my hand. I scratched his course haired back and talked to him. He gave mellow grunts back in reply. It took some time to get the halter over his neck and body like a harness, but once that was done he seemed happy to be led outside. The harness was attached to a cable that was attached to a long steel peg that I used a sledgehammer to drive into the hard ground.

“I want to turn this area into garden, and it’s hard to get the quack grassroots out. The pig will eat them” she said. We carried garbage can lids with ground grain out to him. We moved the peg frequently, giving him new circles of garden to till. We began calling him “Tiller.”

The doorbell rang. I went and looked out the front door, but no one was there. The doorbell rang again. I went to the back door, and Tiller was there. We fed our dogs their dog food from one of the metal bins that pigs are fed grain from. Tiller had gotten loose, and eaten the dog food, and now he was ringing the doorbell. This became a habit with him.

Tiller continued to starve himself whenever he figured he was getting too fat. Once we quit keeping him in a pen, he quit beating himself up though. He seemed to be happier living more like a dog, with a doghouse. We kept him for a couple years, but with time he grew angrier and meaner, and eventually he wasn’t safe to keep. He was never large enough to butcher, so he’s buried under the trees where he was tethered, where his house was.

I’m glad I didn’t have to eat him; I don’t like being on a first name basis with my food. It also bothers me to eat someone that’s intelligent enough to know what’s happening to him.