An excerpt from Deliver Thy Pigs, a novel by Joey Hedger
Chapter one of Deliver Thy Pigs, published April 2022 by Malarkey Books
I
Nobody could avoid the stench—the putrid, fermenting odor—that J. Lowell’s Meat Factory discharged in copious amounts over the suburbs and corn fields that surrounded it. The air felt stained, in those days, by the reek of slaughter days and factory exhaust.
In Prairie Ridge, Illinois, the Mile River ran like a dull paintbrush in bends and curves throughout the land just west of Lake Michigan. Its colors transformed and shifted with their own seasons. Brown when rain overturned the soil upstream. A pulpy gray when the sunlight whipped through it, illuminating its silky strands of fluid hair. Decorated by dots of reds and yellows, when autumn shook the unripe trees of their colorful foliage. Then it all flowed through again: brown and gray and brown and gray. So also did the tree flowers in spring sail into the tide, snake around each bend in the shallow river valley, pass the slaughterhouse, collect for a moment in the crossing posts of the old wooden footbridge, then slip into the quaint downtown of Prairie Ridge, where they would slide beneath another bridge before disappearing on the other end.
On a thin footbridge crossing over the Mile River, Marco Polo Woodridge removed a single-shot air rifle from where it protruded out of his backpack and pumped its action four times past the recommended pressure point. His gaze drifted upriver, as he lifted the simulation war weapon to his cheek and aligned the crosshairs with the side of a building on the other shore, a fenced-in factory with an office space perched on its corner, overlooking the river. From behind its façade, a red chimney spit out a thin, steady wisp of white cloud skyward. If he stood about thirty feet closer, Marco Polo might have been better able to read the fence sign bearing this company’s name: J. Lowell’s Meat Factory. But he did not need to read this. He had been bicycling to this footbridge for months now, had been packing extra BBs, letting the size of his jackets wane as the icy winter faded, practicing on targets, measuring distances, gazing upriver at the monstrous slaughterhouse. He knew it well, knew its employees, too. Knew its shipping schedule from cross-country semitrucks delivering live pigs, or the long hours worked by weary employees. He knew the local grocery stores that, with a good bit of pride, stocked only J. Lowell pork, and he knew which days mass slaughters would occur, when the pigs were grounded into something entirely unlike themselves. And he hated all of it.
More folks than just Marco Polo Woodridge despised this fenced-in factory. A structure erected just north of the township in 1963, this branch of J. Lowell’s—a staple, some might say, for meat-eaters in the Midwest because of its brats and pork chops—could only be described as an unpleasant neighbor. Because of its position upriver, and for the most part, upwind, from the main downtown, few days passed when the reek of rotten sausage, pig droppings, and animal corpses did not permeate into the very bricks and stones that made up Prairie Ridge. The odor hovered in the air like a plague, leaving the name “J. Lowell’s” as something like a curse on many local tongues—a curse they, for the most part, were forced to bear. Another shoe always dropped. Over half of the residents in Prairie Ridge worked for J. Lowell in some way or another, and nearly everyone else relied on it at least indirectly.
Long ago, this town became a slaughterhouse town, which meant the stink was there to stay. Inevitably, people got used to it. Mostly. Except for every now and then when a sudden storm would come through, backing up pipes and flooding the murky river until the whole factory seemingly got flushed out. Or when a gust of wind would strike at the wrong moment, and some sorry fellow would get hit by the stench of a freshly diced pig rump as he checked his mail. So everybody took a bit of pride in their town’s sole source of Midwestern fame, while simultaneously hating its guts—which, coincidentally, is how many people feel about their hometowns.
For a moment, just a flickering second, Marco Polo Woodridge metamorphosed into a hunter while standing there, his bright pink trucker’s hat pulled down over an already receding hairline. He resembled a statue, a rotund gut leaning slightly over his belt like a stone. A knight in shining armor, with corduroy pants tucked into shin-high wool socks, still breathless from the half-mile hike from where he had abandoned his bicycle by a patch of kudzu. And then he pulled the trigger.
It’s a good deed, to harass them so, thought the youngish man. A good deed to make them pay for their malodorous sins in one way or another.
The shattering of glass in the manager’s office one-point-two football fields away rang out the soldier’s success, and in the next moment he was high-kneeing it through a blackberry bramble on the end of the bridge, cutting corners to get back to his bike sooner. Dave Hughes, managing director at J. Lowell’s Meat Factory—Prairie Ridge, exposed his head in the little broken window, peering through the spiderweb of cracked glass to ascertain the vagrant foe’s whereabouts and identity. But, to his dismay, the perpetrator had disappeared; he looked too late. Sure, it was no surprise. He understood why folks targeted his window with fast-flying BBs; he also had a nose. But this funny little town’s fury needed to be considerate of how much success they owed to his parent company. Maybe they weren’t the most affluent town in Illinois, but without this slaughterhouse, they would be nothing.
After adjusting the tissues bunched up in his nostrils—because even he could not get over the rotten stink—Dave Hughes dialed 911 from the phone on his desk, looking unnaturally large at the too-small desk that he inherited just a couple years earlier upon moving to this new job and new place. A plump, wiry mustache helped hold the tissue scraps in his nostrils, and as he listened to the dial-back tone he rolled his round shoulders back until they erupted in a satisfying pop. A miniature pot of mint sat beside his computer desktop, an attempt at fragrant disguising, and the ceiling fan whirled oddly, unbalanced, in its overworked, useless rotations overhead. He often prayed that one day, when he would move someplace far away, the odor of this town would leave him. But for now, he would bear this burden.
***
On that same hazy afternoon, Susan Banks and her daughter Margaret slumped lower into the musty cabin of their gray Ford F-150, shifting uncomfortably on the bucket seat. They had pulled onto the bare shoulder of a thin back road, parked conspicuously beside a pair of black oaks, and from the curve of dust and trees behind them a police squad car emerged, slowing down through a puddle of gravel before picking up once again to throw a cloud of white dust over the F-150 and its lumpy, tarp-covered cargo.
The pair peered over the dashboard, then, and watched as the police vehicle entered through an unlocked front gate and rounded a bend in the thick layer of American elms and buckthorns, disappearing down the skinny roadway leading into the property. A signpost on the right of the gate read, “Property of J. Lowell’s Meat Factory. No trespassing.”
Gathering herself, Susan wondered whether the dense beating of her heart would subside, because it had apparently stopped for a moment, when the flickering siren lights appeared behind them, then it returned in full—stronger than full—as the car disappeared into the property. She did not exactly trust her heart anymore. Trusting one’s heart is for younger people who go on runs and lift weights, eat whatever they want. Eventually, her heartbeat normalized. The cops were not supposed to be here. Susan and Margaret had anticipated a few vehicles leaving the factory as the workday ended, maybe, in a worst-case scenario, one of them stopping to ask if the pair needed anything, but she did not expect the cops.
“No—it’s not for us,” she muttered slowly to her daughter, as if straining to conquer each word.
Aside from her heart issues, Susan also struggled getting her words out fast enough—an old vice of hers. It started before her husband even left. Before her hair turned white and frizzy. Possibly back far enough to the point where she was pregnant with Margaret, spending her days waiting eagerly to meet her child. In her late twenties. Due to complications, she spent most of her time enclosed in the solitude of her little shared townhouse, and the social need for nuanced dialogues slowly left her as she spent her days monologuing to the form in her belly. Telling it nice words at her own pace. Singing slow songs. Reading aloud the takeout menus on the doorstep, almost like she was both teaching and relearning how to speak one line at a time. She learned that when you don’t talk to people for long enough, you begin to forget how, and eventually she transitioned out of her job at the county library to begin growing and selling native Illinois trees on a homestead just outside Prairie Ridge that she had inherited from an older family member. Trees and Margaret easily became the most, and possibly only, important things in Susan’s life.
“Should we bail on our plan then?” asked Margaret, distracted by a circle of jays overhead.
“Well, no,” said Susan. “Just delay it. For some time. An hour. Maybe two.”
“Coffee, then?”
“A little late for that. But okay.”
Susan turned the key, bringing the truck back to life, and considered her daughter’s long scraggly hair that littered the seat and dashboard of this vehicle. As the truck folded into a U-turn, Margaret’s long loose hair waved, flag-like, with the putrid breeze that broke in through cracked windows. Margaret always kept her brown hair long—even before she got sick and moved back home. Throughout her life, she combed it religiously, watered and washed it, and watched it grow like a field of tulips.
Beneath a gray tarp bungeed tight over the truck bed, a tiny forest of white oak sprouts tumbled back and forth with each bump on the road. This was precious cargo, grown at the Banks’s own farmhouse, for the purpose of planting a bit of native tree life into the surrounding ruinous landscape, such as that of the slaughterhouse. Susan referred to these saplings and this repetitious task as ethics, saying things like, “Let’s gather up some ethics and head out,” and “Today’s our scheduled ethics day.”
They returned to the slaughterhouse gate at nearly 8:45 p.m. All the employees had evidently left by then, from what they could make out of the empty parking lot and unlit factory windows. Nobody locked the gate, as Susan and Margaret already knew. Though that might not have mattered, since it could barely close in the first place. Like most things in Prairie Ridge, the gate only represented security, represented the notion that they cared about their properties, marking them, maintaining them, but not fretting much over whether or not they would stay. A small town like Prairie Ridge had small-town ideals. Whatever crime that existed tends to be symbolic crime, symbolic offenses to the symbolic measures of safety and security. All little semantics dealt with quietly by one of the friendly, small-town police officers. You know, the kind that remembers everybody’s names, goes to the church by the river. Thinks long and hard about whether this or that person—often sharing their own skin color—really deserves a speeding ticket.
Susan remembered to press the parking brake before exiting the vehicle, then ambled over to slide the gate open. Margaret shifted to the driver’s seat, dragging her forearm crutch to the left side with her. With the gate open, she put the truck back into gear and eased forward, onto the property of J. Lowell’s Meat Factory, to smuggle ethics onto that private land.
***
The next morning, Dave drove up to the factory early enough to find the sun rising on a minefield of white oak saplings pricking up from the square patches of grass beside the parking lot. It looked almost pretty, the tiny pencils poking out from the ground. In high school, kids did similar pranks with plastic forks, or toothpicks. Someone from first period had orchestrated the same thing to be done to him, and it was all in good fun, said the parents when his own parents complained. All in good fun, like lawn decorations.
He knew these white oak saplings, anyway. He expected them now. Almost monthly they appeared like this, sticking out of his soil, leaving behind clumps of dirt and pock marks across the landscaping. The recurrence of this event had a huge impact on the grass, since it happened too often for regrowth, but Dave himself never really minded. Nor did he immediately think about the forks in his childhood lawn when he arrived in the morning. Maybe this time meant something different.
Dave did not call the cops on the new plant life. Once or twice, he complained about the minor level of vandalism to some of his employees, but he had no reason to invoke a law enforcement response. In truth, he almost appreciated the monthly ritual of bending down to weed the grounds of J. Lowell’s of the stubby trees. He could heighten security, add new locks to the gate, do any number of things to subdue this tradition, but he sometimes considered it a gift, even though it interfered with the clean landscaping—J. Lowell’s first public priority. Cleanliness.
“I don’t know what they expect,” he said when he got home later that evening. “Say I don’t pull up the trees. They keep growing and growing. Then what? Are they supposed to knock over the factory or something?”
Though he normally lived alone, his sister had recently moved into the spare bedroom on his second floor—on a temporary basis. She had just divorced—or, rather, had just been divorced by—her husband of two years, a guy who impulsively purchased taxidermy birds, showered with socks on, and ultimately cheated on her with a woman who liked to go hunting with a bow, to bring down deer with arrows. Like Athena.
She moved in with her brother in an attempt to reconstruct herself following this divorce. To regain her own identity and, as they say, find herself.
“They might not mean it poorly,” she told her brother, searching the kitchen for the phone number of Prairie Ridge’s only takeout Chinese restaurant. “It might not be anybody at all. Just some birds flying over the property with seeds in their poop.”
But Dave knew it was not a good-natured coincidence. He could see the patterns of the saplings as he pulled them—the intentionality, the spade marks. Yet he also loved those patterns, in his own way. The zigzags and loops and labyrinthine shapes only became evident a few months in, seen from his office windows. On tiptoes, he had to strain to peer over the risen pane of glass. Nobody else really noticed—or cared. But Dave spent a good deal one morning a couple weeks earlier trying to determine what the trees resembled as he dug them out of the dusty soil. A hurricane? Ancient patterns in caves or on pottery? The earth? This ritual became his exercise, changed the way he operated, the way he woke up early once a week to pick them before staff arrived, to see the sunrise, to go to bed on time.
When all this started nearly a year prior, he left one tree to keep growing, one strong-looking white oak. And it did, reaching nearly a foot and a half. Some of the workers began watering it with leftover iced tea during their lunch breaks, designating it as a sacred place for fresh air during their extended breaks on slaughter days. Corporate frowned upon breaking for more than fifteen minutes at a time, but Dave considered himself a very kind and considerate boss. Let them take breaks, he thought. And give them time for walks, time to watch an episode of something on their phones, time to relax. Let them wash their hands of the blood that stains the cracks in their palms and the space beneath their fingernails. They soak in death so we don’t have to. So let them relax for ten or fifteen minutes longer. It was the least he could do, the good, kind boss that he was.
Joey Hedger is author of the chapbook, In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait (Red Bird Chapbooks). A former Floridian, avid nature lover, and amateur birder, he currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. You can find his writing at joeyhedger.com.
