In the Country of Women by Susan Straight

Author:Susan Straight
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226233
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

When we were teenagers, I told Dwayne the story of my dad’s junkyard dog, which once bit my brother. He countered with his Rubidoux cousins’ junkyard, where cars were kept for parts to sell. One cousin had a fierce hungry guard pig. “A junkyard dog might bite you, but it probably wouldn’t kill you,” Dwayne said, laughing. “That pig? She weighed four hundred pounds. She’d kill you, stomp you into pieces, and eat your sorry ass. Bones and all. No one would even know you tried to steal something.”

That junkyard was just across the river, near Floyd’s leased land, which was adjacent to a long narrow one-third acre owned by General II. When Gaila and Delphine were small, we’d collect excess apricots from the old tree in our yard, and shovel heaps of fallen carob pods from the city tree at our sidewalk, and take trash barrels full to Floyd and his pigs. We’d lean on the plywood fences, the girls holding tight while the pigs gleefully rooted into the soft rotting apricots, crunching the pits. They crushed the carob pods with their hooves, sweet brown powder the pigs licked up like tinted dust from Pixy Stix. Floyd threw overripe avocados into the mud, and he laughed and pointed to one very large male pig, alone in a big pen. He said, “Watch that one—he spit out the pits like a natural man.”

Floyd spent every day out there with his pigs because he loved them; they were his piece of South Carolina under the California sun. No pines or oaks, but pepper trees, with their feathery branches and red berries, and eucalyptus windbreaks with bark shedding under our feet.

But at night I thought, Those pigs would kill us if they could. I remembered my father, Richard, talking about the ranch near Purcell, Colorado, on the prairie where they lived when he was only two. He fell into the pig enclosure and the animals tried to kill him, but his sister Beverly rescued him, though one pig broke her arm. She was nine.

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