by Garrison Keillor
This is the time of the year when people would slaughter, back when people did--Rollie and Eunice Hochstetter, I think, were in the last in Lake Wobegone. They kept pigs, and they'd slaughter them in the fall when the weather got cold and the meat would keep. I went out to see them slaughter hogs once when I was a kid...
Today if you are going to slaughter an animal for meat, you send it to the locker plant and pay to have the guys there do it. When you slaughter pigs, it takes your appetite for pork fow a while. Because the pigs let you know they don't care for it. They don't care to be grabbed and dragged over to where the other pigs didn't come back.
It is quite a thing for a kid to see. To see living flesh, and the living insides of another creature.
... I was fascinated. I got as close as I could....I got sort of carried away in the excitement of it all and went down to the pigpen with my cousin and started throwing little stones at the pigs to watch them jump and squeal and run. And all of a sudden I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and I was spun around, and my uncle's face was three inches away from mine. He said, "If I ever see you do that again I'll beat you 'till you can't stand up, you hear?" And we heard.
I knew the anger had to do with the slaughter, that it was a ritual that had to be done as a Ritual. It was done swiftly, and there was no foolishness. No joking around. ... With respect for the animals that would become our food. The throwing stones at a pif violated the ceremony, and this ritual, which they went through.
Rollie was the last to slaughter his own hogs. One year he had a accident; the knife slipped, and the animal was only wounded got loose and ran across the yard before it fell. He never kept pigs after that. He didn't feel he was worthy of it.
It's all gone. Children growing up in Lake Wobegon will never have a chance to see it.
It was a powerful experience, life and death hung in the balance.
A life in which people made do, made their own, lived off the land,
lived between the ground and God. It's lost, not only to this world:
but also to memory.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
