Peg: Three-legged Pig
Harold “Buck” Fields’s car ran out of gas and drifted to a stop beside an oversized mailbox on Route 1743 outside Dungannon, Virginia. It was a handsome mailbox painted with pink pigs dressed in purple tutus dancing in what looked like a field of red poppies — Buck squinted but couldn’t tell for sure they weren’t tulips splayed open.
It was the fifth time in Buck’s life that he had run out of gas, four times in the last year. When he worked for USDA, as a specialist in poultry, he frequently overshot his subway stop because he was pondering the meanings of big words. Today he forgot to fill up his rental car with gas before he left Dungannon; he had been engaged in an hour long discussion with the owner of a paving company about the word centoculated. The owner, while trying to get a better price from Buck, used the word to describe how a paving company owner had to be “a veritable Argus, a centoculated fool, always looking for a better price for gravel.”
After the owner spoke another angry sentence or two about his rising costs, Buck complimented him on his vocabulary, “Not many road builders in the country who have such an erudite command of the language. Are you a writer?” Buck broke down — without being asked — the Latin roots of centoculated: centum (meaning 100) and oculus (eyes) and commented about Argus the hundred-eyed giant.
The owner settled into a happy place to describe his work-in-progress, a spy thriller. Buck said it sounded like a story written by John le Carré, better than Tom Clancy could ever hope for. The owner complimented Buck on his insight, and became animated, somewhere between agog and agig at Buck’s perspicacity as Buck agreed that they weren’t making literature these days like they did in the good old days. And then, he gave Buck the biggest order, Buck had ever had in his 4½ years as a traveling gravel salesman and told Buck to stop at his gas station just outside town and fill up on him.
When he passed the gas station on his way out of Dungannon, Buck was daydreaming about becoming a star author, dreams he’d put on hold since being downsized out of USDA.
A PUZZLING LITTLE SIGN NEXT to the oversized mailbox read: We dont rent pigs. ~ Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Buck noted the absence of an apostrophe in dont and wondered if it was McMurtry’s error or an artistic decision by the sign painter.
With no address or name on the mailbox, Buck became a little edgy. He wondered if postal regulations were being violated. Through all his anxiety, though, he smiled at his memory of Ike Andrews, a turkey farmer in Rockingham County, Virginia, who gave up raising turkeys to start not raising hogs. As interesting as selling gravel was, Buck wished he could get into not selling gravel long enough to finish his best-selling adventure story, and still put beans on the table.
The mailbox was anchored in cement about a Jeep and a half’s width off 1743. A well-maintained gravel lane — white, decorative gravel lane — set in a base of well-compacted Crusher Run 2 1 Type 4 teed into 1743. Buck looked to his left and right. For as far as he could see, this was the only mailbox.
At some distance from the paved road the white gravel lane — with trees planted in neat rows at an angle on each side — disappeared over the crest of a hillock. ¿Surely an apple orchard? ¿If an apple orchard, surely the white gravel led to a residence with a telephone? Better yet, if a farmhouse, a residence where he could buy a canister of high-test gasoline. Couldn’t be that far.
The well-maintained gravel lane did indeed run through a beautiful apple orchard on one side and a beautiful Bartlett pear orchard — really orchardettes — on the other. Signs on the 3-rail fences informed Buck that the apples were Arkansas Blacks; signs — announcing what the pears were — were copies of an 1822 print from the Horticultural Society of London overwritten with a long description assuring any interested reader that these trees were from seeds brought from France. No recent cultivar these; these were the old-fashioned Bon Chretiens (Good Christians) Bartletts.
By the time he descended the hillock on the other side, Buck had stopped several times to take white gravels out of his loafers and several more times to estimate (by guessing at the distance between the evenly spaced pear trees) just how far he’d come, and to guess how much farther he had to go. What drove him on was the chance to match wits with whoever lived at the end of the road. Buck hoped it was the same whoever who had commissioned the graveling of the lane, somebody he could learn something from.
Just when he’d decided to turn around and start back, he rounded a bend in the well-maintained white gravel lane and saw a beautifully maintained small house with a recently painted white picket fence surrounding a meticulously mown lawn with beds of black-eyed susans and purple coneflowers.
The time had gotten away from Buck. It was just a little more than an hour short of dusk when Buck finally stepped up on the porch to knock. There was no doorbell. The front door was open but no one answered his knock. Through the screen door, he could see straight through the house to a back door, also open. To let the really refreshing breeze flow through, Buck guessed. And he thought he could hear a man humming a hymn — “Amazing Grace” to be exact — somewhere close to the back door.
¿Humming, the man probably couldn’t hear him knocking?
Buck walked around the house and found an older fellow sitting on the back porch steps drinking a glass of what looked like lemonade. The older fellow’s work hat was back on the porch, dropped beside a rocking chair — like he’d decided against going out again that evening, just wanted to sit on the steps instead of in his rocker. His thinning hair had been recently swept back and his eyes were showing the kind of calm you see in a man just home from church.
After Buck introduced himself properly and apprised the older fellow of his plight and was reassured that he would be driven back to his car with a 2½ gallon can of high octane gasoline, he started in to complimenting the older fellow on his well-maintained white decorative gravel lane but was interrupted with the offer of his choice of lemonade or some of last year’s cold pear cider. The pear cider’d be better warmed, but the stove had been acting up and the older fellow personally didn’t like it microwaved. Buck chose lemonade — and guessed it wasn’t the older fellow’s practice to give out his name to strangers.
When the older fellow returned to the back steps with his glass full too, the men settled in, barely speaking for the joy of it all, and resumed watching a big pig, a sow with a wooden leg standing at the gate to the back yard. The older fellow said the pig’s name was Peg, and lapsed into a quiet smile.
Occasionally, Peg would jump in the direction of chickens sidling close to the gate to the yard. The hens stayed nervous. Between affectionate smiles in the direction of the peg-legged pig, the orchardist volunteered several reasons why this would be his orchardettes’ most productive year.
“You wouldn’t know it from all the signage my wife, Got rest her, installed on our fences, but the apples and pears we harvest ain’t fit to eat. Them trees are from the seeds instead of grafts. We learned after they started producing that the fruit was knotty and sour.
“It took me to learn that them kind of apples and pears make the best hard cider. I found out at the feed store, picking up some food for my hogs that Johnny Appleseed né Chapman was planting cider trees instead of apple trees for the settlers.”
“Well, why didn’t you get some grafted trees?”
“Easier said than done once they’re old enough to produce. Turns out I was lucky, though. Cider apples and pears are a lot easier to take care of — it don’t matter if they git worms — and they’s a long line to buy them.”
The orchadist wrote sçavoir vivre on his palm with a ball-point pen, circling the cedille, and explaining that it meant the word was pronounced with a soft c sound. Like façade.
“I’m not about to mess with my wife’s legacy, God rest her. I am what I am and this place is what it is because of her sçavoir vivre.”
And then went back to talking about Peg.
“You wouldn’t want to walk barefooted in the grass for the hen doo if Peg didn’t keep the chickens from coming into the back yard to catch the June bugs and scratch out the grubs in the flower beds,” said the orchardist. Given time to process the sow’s name, Buck had to smile at the name the orchardist had given his three-legged pig, but he turned his head so the orchardist wouldn’t think he was smirking at the joke Bill Jaudon used to tell at USDA about hen doo and Hindu.
Soon Peg left her position at the gate. She pushed shut the gate — with a gap underneath it big enough for a smart chicken to get in the yard — behind her and herded the chickens gently back into their pen, enclosed and covered with ½” X ½” galvanized wire hardware cloth, closed their gate behind them, and pulled a rope to drop the latch in place. Buck guessed it was a Suffolk latch, but wished he could see how the orchardist had rigged the draw rope so Peg had such a sure and easy time of latching the gate.
Buck said, “Do you need hardware cloth instead of chicken wire to keep your chickens from getting out?”
The orchardist said, “Cloth’s to keep the varmints out. That’s ½” X ½”, galvanized-after-welded, turned out and buried 4” deep. Raccoons haven’t been able to dig under it yet. You don’t have to lose many good laying hens before you either eat powdered eggs or set to tuh get smarter’n a raccoon.”
Buck thought ½” X ½” was overkill — ¾” X ¾” would have been plenty — but before he said so he remembered whose lemonade he was drinking and whose gasoline he was borrowing. He decided he’d wait until he came back by the orchardettes to return the gas to tell him about ¾” X ¾”. But, who knows, he could find out that a raccoon was smarter than ¾” X ¾”. Overkill or not, you had to admire how well-maintained the place was.
After putting the hens to bed, Peg sauntered down a winding pathway toward a lazy little creek with a powder blue, recently painted, arched wooden footbridge over it. Calling it a footbridge slighted the bridge to Buck’s way of thinking: Lovers, if they held each other tight, hip-to-hip, could walk side-by-side across it. Peg’s wooden leg sounded out a reassuring clop, clop, clop as she crossed the bridge.
On the other side of the footbridge, the path picked up and wound up a gentle hillock to the gate of a pasture in which grazed a brown and white cow Buck guessed was a Guernsey. Peg made short work of herding the brown and white cow back down the winding path and into the barn. When Peg came out, she pulled a drawrope to drop around the gatepost a heavier metal latch arm than Buck guessed was on the chicken yard gate. She pushed the door with her snout to reassure herself the door was secure. She paused for a long minute to look around at the place. She walked back into the yard where she looked around the place again. She sighed and it looked like she smiled.
“Peg, looks like she’s expecting serein to ease in and cool things off,” said the older fellow.
Buck thought the older fellow had said saran, but didn’t want to act dumb so didn’t question what Peg was expecting.
Buck wondered out loud why Peg didn’t stay in the barn for the night; the orchardist said she slept most nights under the front porch, “Sort of a guard pig, you could say.”
The orchardist seemed to get a little edgy, perhaps thinking he had a cow to milk now. To keep from getting too edgy Buck suspected, the older fellow turned his attention back to the laying hens. He said there wasn’t one pig in a hundred you could trust not to eat your chickens. He said she, Peg, was the primary reason — unless you counted the great market for cider fruit — that he converted to orcharding from hog-raising. Swineherding he called hog-raising, but defined the word for Buck: “Swineherding is hog-raising, more an old world term.”
Buck guessed his wife, God rest her, taught the orchardist the history. It caused him to think of Jane Andrews, Ike’s wife, and Ike. Buck wanted to tell him that Ike Andrews got out of swineherding without ever getting into it, but decided not to.
The men finished their lemonade and the orchardist got the high-test gasoline for Buck and they drove off in the orchardist’s truck down the well-maintained white gravel lane back toward 1743. Buck told the orchardist he thought the gravel lane was about the best constructed and maintained unpaved road he’d seen in his 4½ years in the gravel business. ¿He reckoned the orchardist must have gotten some counsel from a gravel expert to have laid it on a base of Crusher Run 2 1 Type 4? The orchardist nodded and said about all he ever needed to do to maintain the road was get a ton or two of white ever three years, or so, to top dress at the curves. He didn’t admit where he’d gotten his counsel from. Buck wondered if it was the paving company owner he’d just sold gravels to back in Dungannon, but didn’t say so.
“Peg’s some pig,” said Buck.
“Best I ever had for sure… or heard of when you get right down to it. I’ll meet her coming down the lane when I drive back up to the house. Most pigs would be asleep by then, but before Peg’ll lift a hoof to come get the mail, she waits until dark every evening to make sure the postman has come. Once two years ago during Christmas postal rush she had to wait half hour at the box for the mailman to deliver the mail. She was shivering something awful when she handed me the mail. She’s smartened up some considerable since that evening.”
“Shame you couldn’t’ve let her known that this evening you’d pick up the mail.”
“Oh, I could have. Some pigs you couldn’t have, but Peg’s a special pig. Convinced me not to go back to raising them as porkers.”
“¿Her getting the mail’d have to save you some gas?”
“For sure. And she comes down to the road early of a morning to get the paper just for exercise. Days I go out early, I let her know she can sleep in instead of getting the paper. But if I don’t let her come get the mail she’ll pout nearly all night. She’ll pout nearly all night when there’s no mail or when there’s nothing but junk mail, but to this day she still won’t discard junk mail. She leaves it to me to make all the decisions about what mail to keep and what to throw out.
“I showed her a hundred times — if I showed her once — how to test the mail and to drop the mail that feels slick to the tongue straight into the recycle bin on the back porch… but it still makes her nervous to make that decision. On the other hand, me reading mail from one of the grandkids to her will more likely than not set her dancing a jig.”
Buck thought the orchardist must have chosen Peg’s name so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed with junk mail, but said, “Shame about her missing leg.”
“It’s a fact now you mention it. Some things can’t be undone, though. But even with three legs she’s more pig than most. Pays for her upkeep with everything else she does around the place. Who could forget her banging her snout against the back door the night my wife — God rest her — left the pot on and forgot to turn the kitchen stove off and set the kitchen counter afar? If Peg hadn’t woke us up we’d both been dead now instead of just my wife. Way it was that far barely scorched the paint on the stove hood. My wife lived long enough after Peg saved us to die suddenly.”
“Peg’s some pig. I reckon she got her name from her wooden leg?”
“Well, yes… yes she did. When she was born and while she had all her legs, my wife — God rest her — called her Eunice. I changed her name after she lost the one leg.”
“What happened with the leg?”
“Looking back on it, I think our decision turned out to make her fulfill her potential. No doubt for me, trying harder because of missing the leg has made her what she is today. She proves herself every day without trying now.
“Me and the little woman — God rest her soul — could sense, but we wasn’t sure, that we’d come acrost a special pig. With the potential Eunice showed — even as a shoat — and even with as much as she was eating, we were right to decide against eating her all at once.”
