In the summer, he tells me, he slept in the barn. It was cooler there than in the house, and the pig often came over to sleep beside him, asking fondly to have her belly rubbed, which he was glad to do.
There was a pond on their property, he goes on, and he liked to swim in it when the weather was hot, but one of the dogs always got excited when he did and ruined things, jumping into the water and swimming up on top of him, scratching him with her paws and making things miserable for him. He was about to give up on swimming, but then, as fate would have it, the pig, of all creatures, stepped in and saved the day.
Evidently the pig could swim, for she plopped herself into the water, swam out to where the dog was bothering him, and inserted herself between them. She stayed between the dog and the boy, keeping the dog at bay. She was, as best I could make out, functioning in the situation something like a lifeguard—or in this case, perhaps more of a life-pig.
As I listen to this hog farmer tell me these stories about his pet pig, I'm thoroughly enjoying both myself and him, and am rather astounded at how things are transpiring. Then, it happens again—a look of defeat sweeps across the man's face and I sense the presence of something very sad. Something in him, I know, is struggling to make its way toward life through anguish and pain, but I don't know what it is or how, indeed, to help him.
“What happened to your pig?” I ask.
He sighs, and it's as if the whole world's pain is contained in that sigh. Then, slowly, he speaks. “My father made me butcher it.”
“Did you?” I ask.
“I ran away, but I couldn't hide. They found me.”
“What happened?”
“My father gave me a choice.”
“What was that?”
“He told me, ‘You either slaughter that animal or you're no longer my son.’”
Some choice, I think, feeling the weight of how fathers have so often trained their sons not to care, to be what they call brave and strong, but what so often turns out to be callous and closed-hearted.
“So I did it,” he says, and now his tears begin to flow, making their way down his cheeks. I am touched and humbled. This man, whom I had judged to be without human feeling, is weeping in front of me, a stranger. This man, whom I had seen as callous and even heartless, is actually someone who cares, and deeply. How wrong, how profoundly and terribly wrong, I had been.
In the minutes that follow, it becomes clear to me what has been happening. The pig farmer has remembered something that was so painful, that was such a profound trauma, that he had not been able to cope with it when it happened. Something had shut down then. It was just too much to bear.
Somewhere in his young, formative psyche, he made a resolution never to be that hurt again, never to be that vulnerable again. And he built a wall around the place where the pain had occurred, the place where his love and attachment to that pig was located—his heart. And now here he was, slaughtering pigs for a living—still, I imagined, seeking his father's approval. God, what we men will do, I thought, to get our fathers’ acceptance.
I had thought he was a cold and closed human being, but now I saw the truth. His rigidity was not the result of a lack of feeling, as I had thought it was. Quite the opposite: it was a sign of how sensitive he was underneath. For if he had not been so sensitive, he would not have been that hurt, and he would not have needed to put up so massive a wall. The tension in his body that had been so apparent to me upon first meeting him, the body armor that he carried, bespoke how hurt he had been and how much capacity for feeling he carried still, beneath it all.
I had judged him, and had done so, to be honest, mercilessly. But for the rest of the evening I sat with him, humbled and grateful for whatever it was in him that had been strong enough to force this long-buried and deeply painful memory to the surface. And I was glad, too, that I had not stayed stuck in my judgments of him; for if I had, I would not have provided an environment in which his remembering could have occurred.
We talked that night, for hours, about many things. I was, after all that had happened, concerned for him. The gap between his feelings and his lifestyle seemed so tragically vast. What could he do? This was all he knew. He did not have a high school diploma. He was only partially literate. Who would hire him if he tried to do something else? Who would invest in him and train him at his age?
When finally I left that evening, these questions were very much on my mind, and I had no answers to them. Somewhat flippantly, I tried to joke about it. “Maybe,” I said, “you'll grow broccoli or something.” He stared at me, clearly not comprehending what I could be talking about. It occurred to me, briefly, that possibly he might not know what broccoli was.
We parted that night as friends and, although we rarely saw each other, we remained friends as the years passed. I carry him in my heart and think of him, in fact, as a hero. Because, as you will soon see, impressed as I was by the courage it had taken for him to allow such painful memories to come to the surface, I had not yet seen the extent of his bravery.
When I wrote Diet for a New America, I quoted him and summarized what he had told me, but I was quite brief and did not mention his name. I thought that, living as he did among other pig farmers in Iowa, it would not be to his benefit to be associated with me.
When the book came out, I sent him a copy, saying I hoped he was comfortable with how I wrote of the evening we had shared, and directing him to the pages that contained my discussion of our time together.
Several weeks later, I received a letter from him. “Dear Mr. Robbins,” it began. “Thank you for the book. When I saw it, I got a migraine headache.”
Now, as an author, you do want to have an impact on your readers. This, however, was not what I had had in mind.
He went on, however, to explain that the headaches had gotten so bad that, as he put it, “the wife” suggested that perhaps he should read the book. She thought there might be some kind of connection between the headaches and the book. He told me that this hadn't made much sense to him, but that he had done it because “the wife” was often right about these things.
“You write good,” he told me, and I can tell you that these three words of his meant more to me than when the New York Times praised the book profusely. He then went on to say that reading the book was very hard for him, because the light it shone on what he was doing made it clear to him that it was wrong to continue. The headaches, meanwhile, kept getting worse. Then that very morning, when he had finished the book after having stayed up all night reading, he went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. “I decided, right then,” he said, “that I would sell my herd and get out of this business. I don't know what I will do, though. Maybe I will, like you said, grow broccoli.”
As it happened, he did sell his operation in Iowa and move back to Missouri, where he bought a small farm. He began growing vegetables organically—including, I am sure, broccoli—and selling them at a local farmers’ market. He still had pigs, all right, but only about ten of them, and he didn't cage or kill them. Instead, he signed a contract with local schools; they brought children out in buses on field trips to his farm for his “Pet-a-Pig” program. He showed them how intelligent pigs are and how friendly they can be if you treat them right, which he was now doing. He arranged it so that each child got a chance to give a pig a belly rub. He became nearly a vegetarian himself, lost most of his excess weight, and improved his health substantially. And, thank goodness, he actually did better financially than he had been doing before.
He and I corresponded every so often after that. I was very sad to learn, a few years ago, that he had passed away.
Do you see why I still carry this man with me in my heart? Do you see why he is such a hero to me? He