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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

On being Ken
I play him nice, but stupid.
By Tim Cornwell
[11/23/99]

To the diaper man, with love
Hamish was there for the thrills and the spills, a devoted d-man until the end.
By Carol Hall
[11/22/99]

Cult of the cloth
I thought I could quit any time, but the ladies of the Diapering Board had me in their thrall.
By Lisa Moricoli Latham
[11/22/99]

Three strikes
My parents tried and tried and tried, but neither marriage nor divorce could bring them together.
By Patt Blue
[11/19/99]

If at first ...
A marriage dies and is, after 35 years, resurrected.
By Diana O'Hehir
[11/19/99]

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My other sheep had names from novels (Celie, Lucy, Codi) and from public-radio newcasts (Nina, Cokie, Boutros), but I'd named this one Dinner and his twin brother Lunch. I treated the others like pets. I fed them dropped apples. I scratched Boutros' back until his eyes rolled in an ecstatic swoon. But I had barely handled Lunch and Dinner.

Unused to the halter, Dinner dug his hooves into the gravel. "Don't pull his wool or you'll bruise the meat," Jackson's daughter told me. He bucked, and I yanked him toward the pen. Once he was in, an enormous ram kept humping him. Dinner bleated continually.

"How do you want him cut up?" she asked.

"What are the choices?"

She pulled out a big piece of butcher's paper and scrawled my name and number. "Boned and rolled, steaks, chops. How do you eat?"

I didn't eat much meat. I wasn't sure I'd be able to eat this meat at all. I couldn't answer.

"Why don't we give you a variety? That way, when you come back next time, you'll know what you want."

I had arranged to sell the lamb's twin and a ewe to Jackson. The question of what to do with the ewe, Codi, had gnawed at me for months.

The previous spring she'd rejected her twin lambs. She'd butted them when they'd tried to nurse. She'd have killed them if I hadn't taken them away. I'd tried to get enough milk-replacement formula into them, but one had died the first night, in my bedroom. The other had struggled on, unable to stand. For a couple of weeks I had taken him out to the barn several times a day to force nursing. With furious tears, I'd tied Codi to a fence, held her head with one hand and tried to hook the lamb up with the other hand, mindful to keep my own baby upright in a backpack. I'd also tried rubbing him with a newborn lamb to fool its mother into adopting him, a technique I'd read about called "grafting." Nothing had worked.

I couldn't breed Codi again. I'd put up a few signs, but no one wanted a ewe who couldn't be bred. She infuriated me -- but she was like family, and she trusted me. I knew that any real farmer would "cull" her.

On the day, Codi stepped politely across the driveway in front of the slaughterhouse. It could have been a show ring. "Halter broke, hunh?" Jackson called over, smirking. It was plain that I was bringing to slaughter an animal that trusted me and was used to being handled. It also was obvious that I was feeling slightly ambivalent about the whole plan.

Jackson had told me he'd pay 15 to 50 cents per pound for an older ewe depending on how much was fat. He eyed her and pronounced that she was worth 28 cents on 130 pounds. His big fingers fumbled with a calculator. He did the multiplication twice -- $36.40.

"Can you make it $40?"

"No, that would be 31 cents a pound," he shot back. "I might lose money at that."

He pulled out two 20s. Neither of us had change. "Because you're so cute and young and vivacious, here's $40, but I don't do that all the time. I'll get it out of you next time."

I took the extra $3.60 -- not one of my prouder moments. I drove away, listening to Codi's distinctive deep bleat ringing out from the barnyard noise.

I didn't breed my ewes again. But my business with Jackson was unfinished.

Something didn't feel right about dropping off my animal, then picking him up in little packages. It was as though I had made a long journey to participate in a terrible but enlightening rite, to see and know what my forebears had seen and known, then turned tail and run.

I wanted to know how my animals were turned into meat. Jackson agreed to let me watch him work. I arrived on a Thursday afternoon when he was slaughtering hogs, many for pig roasts the following weekend.

Jackson killed two hogs before I could figure out how he did it. He herded another one from the maze of pens outside into a red steel chute. He wrapped a chain around the hog's right rear leg, then lifted the front wall of the chute enough to shove the hog into the room. He pushed a switch that hung from the ceiling. A hydraulic lift hoisted the big animal. Its free leg thrashed. He lowered her, slowly, head first, into a barrel. Then I saw: Just before her head disappeared, he stuck a knife in her throat. In and out.

I stood motionless in the only spot I could find where I wasn't in the way, behind a small pig carcass hanging next to the cooler door.

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