About an hour after we set out the next day, the road left the ridgetop wood. Below us lay a huge valley blanketed in brilliant snow. On the right side of the valley, high on a hillside, a massive church stood alone. It looked old and imposing, its dark brick bell towers glowering over the snow below it.
On our left, high on the opposing hillside, a second church stared across the valley at the first one. This church was white, limestone or marble maybe, and if possible, even more ornate and imposing than the first. A small town nestled below the second church.
We skied down to where the road we were on teed into a highway. There were two road signs there: Highway 52 and Welcome to St. Donatus. Even from a distance, we could see footprints everywhere in the town’s snow-covered streets. A few of the sidewalks had even been shoveled. Darla and I skirted around the edge of the town. It seemed unlikely that anyone would want to share food with a couple of strangers. And if they couldn’t help us, there was no reason to run the risk that they might try to hurt us.
On the far side of St. Donatus we caught a small, unmarked road that continued east, passing near the white church. As I skied between the two churches, I had the feeling they were looking down on us, blessing our journey. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the night before, but I felt more hopeful than I had since we’d left Worthington.
By that afternoon, the hopeful feeling had left me. The road, which had been heading steadily east, began twisting unpredictably. Sometime after lunch, I completely lost track of which way we were going. Darla thought we were still heading east, but she also said we should have hit the Mississippi by then. We had only passed two farms, but both were obviously occupied, so we hadn’t found any food.
A bit before dark, Darla spotted a low structure near the road. She skied around it and found an open doorway at the far side.
It was too low to stand up inside the building. The ceiling was about three feet high at one side of the shed and five feet or so at the other. We had plenty of room though: the building was seven or eight feet wide and at least thirty feet long. It reeked of pig crap.
“Sleeping in a pigsty. That’s a new low,” I said.
“It’s a pig barn, not a sty. Pigsties are outdoor corrals. Anyway, it beats sleeping in the snow.”
“I guess. Where are the pigs?”
“I dunno. Dead or in a barn closer to the farmhouse, maybe.”
We ate our last two pancakes. Darla fed Jack from our dwindling supply of cornmeal.
We laid out our bedding in the cleanest-looking corner. I was hoping to fool around some more, but Darla just gave me a quick kiss and rolled over. Maybe she was tired, or maybe eau de pig crap didn’t turn her on. Couldn’t say I blamed her-much.
Only Jack got breakfast the next morning. I thought about suggesting we cook the last bit of cornmeal instead of saving it for the rabbit, but that would’ve made only one pancake.
The road ended in a T not far from where we’d spent the night. I wasn’t sure which way to turn. I asked Darla, but she was as lost as I was. Her mechanical skills didn’t include directional aptitude, apparently. We turned right, figuring that if we’d generally been heading east, that would turn us south, away from Dubuque.
By lunchtime, we’d been forced to make two more turns. We’d had to guess which way to go each time. The roads were getting narrower and the ditches at the side shallower. Where the road ran through trees, it was easy to follow. Where it ran through open fields, we had trouble. We’d seen no sign of the Mississippi, although Darla said the steep hills here meant we were close.
Lunch was a short rest break and some water. I struggled to think of anything other than food. But my mind returned over and over to corn pone, to the bags of cornmeal I’d left with Katie’s mom. I wondered what Darla was thinking. Giving our food to Katie’s mom seemed more boneheaded by the minute. I remembered desperately scrounging for Skittles in the gas station on Highway 20. How hungry and weak I had been. We needed to find food soon.
Less than an hour later, we came across another farmhouse. It was hidden at the back end of some twisty, no-name road. There was a small, ranch-style house and four big, low sheds, maybe ten feet wide by fifty feet long. Arrayed along the outside of the sheds was a series of big metal silos and tanks connected to the sheds by a system of pipes.
“Pig farm,” Darla said.
I sniffed. The air was cold and clean, with a hint of pinesap from the nearby woods. “How can you tell?”
“Low sheds with silos and water tanks connected to them by an automatic feeder system-it’s a pig farm.”
“No tracks I can see. Check it out?”
“Yeah.”
We skied up to the house. Everything was quiet and still-too quiet. It made me nervous. Darla popped the bindings on her skis. She tried the storm door-it was unlocked, but it wouldn’t open because too much snow had drifted up against it.
I helped her dig out the snow until the storm door would open enough for us to slip through. Darla tried the main door. It was also unlocked, opening with a creak as if it hadn’t been used in a while.
“Who leaves their front door unlocked?” I whispered.
“Lots of folks do. Or maybe whoever lived here wasn’t planning on being gone long.”
We stepped into a small entryway. Beyond, I saw a living room plainly furnished with a battered oak coffee table and a sofa upholstered in worn, striped cloth. A huge limestone fireplace dominated one side of the room.
“Should we call out?” Darla whispered.
“Might as well.”
“Anyone home?” she yelled.
No one answered. I thought I heard a distant thump from outside, but I might have imagined it.
We tiptoed through the living room into the kitchen. A dirty bowl rested in the sink. White fuzz covered it, like the stuff that grows on food left too long in the freezer. Neither the water nor the electric stove worked, of course.
We searched the refrigerator and cabinets. Our whole haul was a box of cream of wheat with about two inches left in the bottom, a three-quarter empty can of Crisco, and four packets of Sweet’N Low. Not much of a meal.
“Where’d the people go?” Darla said softly.
“Dunno. Out to get food? They didn’t have much, that’s for sure.”
“Let’s check the sheds.”
We left the house the same way we’d come in and skied to the closest pig barn. Darla found the entrance: a door so short we’d have to duck to get through. A yellow handle, leaning against the metal wall, protruded from the snow. I pulled it free-it was a full-sized ax with a fiberglass handle and rusted iron head. I looked a question at Darla. She shrugged, and I put the ax down.
I pushed down the lever-style doorknob. I’d only opened the door five or six inches when I heard a grunt, and the door was shoved closed violently from inside. I leapt back, holding my staff at the ready.
Everything was still for a minute. It was quiet, other than the blood rushing in my ears and my heart thumping in my chest. I yelled, “Hello? Who’s there?”
Nothing.
I tapped the metal door a few times with my staff.
No response.
I started to open the door again, cracking it a few inches. A bit of snow fell past the bottom of the door into the space inside. It was too dark inside to see through the narrow opening. I stood and listened for four or five seconds. I heard a grunt and the door slammed again.
“This is weird, let’s move on,” Darla said.
I agreed with her, it was strange. But my hunger was stronger than my fear. “We need food.”
“Maybe we’ll find another place farther on.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Look, whoever’s in there, if it comes to a fight, I need to be able to see.”
“What is it with you and fighting, anyway? Let’s just move on. We’ll find food someplace else.”
“There might not be anyplace else. And we need the food. Look, just give me a hand here.”
Darla gave me the evil eye for a few seconds. “Humph.” Then she dug a candle out of the pack on my back and lit it.
I unlatched the door, opening it a half inch, then stepped back and kicked it as hard as I could. It flew open about a quarter of the way and hit something solid. I heard a squealing noise and a series of thunks like wood hitting concrete, and then the door swung fully open. I ducked my head and charged in, holding my staff in front of me. Darla followed me with the candle.
Inside, the candlelight revealed an abattoir. There were partially chewed hog carcasses everywhere. The floor was slick with frozen blood. Two live pigs were in full flight away from the door, their hooves striking the concrete floor, their heads streaked with fresh blood.
Darla pointed. “Oh. My. God. What’s that?”
I looked. To one side of the room there was a row of pens built with metal pipes. They were all empty. Beside one of them, I saw what Darla was pointing to. A man, or what was left of him, lay alongside the fence. One of his legs was obviously broken: a large yellow-white bone stuck out of his torn jeans, pointing almost directly at us. Half his face and most of his torso had been chewed way. The gnawed white ends of his ribs protruded like skeletal fingers from his chest. “That’s disgusting,” I said, turning away.
“Yeah,” Darla replied. The two live pigs had moved around us, back to the door, while we looked at the corpse. They were lapping at the snow that had fallen into the barn, grunting and slamming into the door and each other in their haste to get fresh water.
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
“This guy ran out of food, came out here with his ax to butcher a pig, I guess. Usually people send their pigs to a processor for slaughter, even if they’re going to eat the meat themselves, so he might not have known what he was doing. Somehow he broke his leg. Maybe the pigs were starving, thirsty, or whatever and crushed him against that fence. Once he bled out, well, pigs will eat anything.”
“Gross,” I said. “Too bad there’s no food in here.”
“Hello? There’s enough food here for both of us to live on for weeks.”
“You want to eat-you can’t be serious.”
Darla kicked one of the pig carcasses. It was frozen solid. “The dead ones would probably be okay to eat. But I was thinking we should butcher one of those.” She pointed at the two pigs licking snow by the door.
“I don’t know-”
“What, you don’t like pork?”
“I like bacon, although it feels kind of slimy getting it out of the package.”
One side of her mouth wrinkled. “City people. Let me see your knife.”
I handed it to her. “You ever butcher a pig?”
“No. But how much worse can it be than cutting up a rabbit?”
It was way, way worse. Darla handed me the candle and retrieved the ax from where I’d left it outside the door. “Any idea what the best way to kill a pig is?”
“What, you don’t know?”
“Um, no. Maybe a whack on the back of the head? Like some people use for rabbits?”
“Gonna need to be a heck of a whack.” These pigs were huge-two hundred pounds or more. “I dunno if that will do it. Hitting a person on the back of the head doesn’t usually kill them-it knocks them out or stuns them.”
“Hmm, okay.”
Holding the ax in a two-handed grip, Darla got alongside one of the pigs. She reversed the ax so the blunt end aimed down and raised it high above her head. The pig kept lapping at the snow, oblivious to the doom poised above it.
The ax fell, thunking onto the back of the pig’s head. The pig went limp and slumped to the ground. The other pig let out a squeal and galloped away, seeking refuge at the far side of the shed.
Darla dropped the ax and grabbed the knife. She plunged it into the underside of the pig’s neck, just above its chest, and pulled the knife upward toward its snout. It woke and thrashed, all four legs churning the air as if it were trying to run away. One of its forelegs caught Darla on her shin and she yelled, “Ow! Crap!” and jumped back, pulling the knife out of the pig’s neck.
Blood fountained out, spraying her arm. The blood gleamed black in the candlelight. A few drops spotted Darla’s face. I felt suddenly ill and turned away. The pig began squealing nonstop, a sound that resembled nothing so much as a kid throwing a full-throated tantrum. We were forced to listen to that awful noise for at least five minutes before the pig finally bled out.
I hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before. Still, when I saw the carnage in the pig shed, I’d lost my appetite. Now I felt so sick, I wasn’t sure whether I ever wanted to eat again. “If we live through this, I’m going to become a vegetarian.”
“Not if I’m cooking for you,” Darla said.
“That’s okay, I’ll do the cooking. Hope you like tofu.”
“Tofu? Now that’s disgusting,” said the girl whose arm dripped with pig blood. “Give me a hand with this.”
Darla and I each grabbed one of the dead pig’s back legs and dragged the carcass outside. It left a wide, red smear in the snow.
I volunteered to build a fire, hoping to avoid butcher duty. By the time I got the fire done, Darla had gutted the pig and was trying to hack the hams free with the hatchet. Her arms and chest dripped with pig blood. I looked down for a moment, trying to get my stomach under control.
“That’s a lot of meat. Won’t it spoil?” I said.
“If we had time, we could smoke it. But I’m guessing you’d rather not hang around here.”
“Right.”
“So I figured we’d try to cook it all and freeze it. If the weather stays cold, it should be fine in our backpacks.”
“Okay. I’m afraid you’ll say yes, but is there anything I can help with?”
Of course there was. So I wound up getting almost as bloody as Darla. It seemed like we wasted a lot of that pig-I left tons of meat clinging to its bones and skin. Darla just shrugged. “Yeah, we’re wasting a ton. But we can’t possibly carry it all, anyway. And this is a lot different than butchering a rabbit. I’m doing the best I can.”
I was wrong about never eating again. The smell of roasting meat brought hunger surging back to my stomach. We ate a late lunch of very thick-cut bacon fried in our skillet over the open fire. Well, Darla said it wasn’t really bacon since it hadn’t been cured, but it tasted similar: juicier and much less salty.
As I reached for my third slice, a thought occurred to me that stopped my hand in midair and brought my nausea back. “Um, so we’re eating this pig…”
“Yeah?” Darla replied around a mouthful of pork.
“And this pig ate part of that farmer. Doesn’t that make us cannibals?”
Darla quit chewing. “Gross.” She thought a moment and then swallowed. “No. If a cow eats grass, and we eat the cow, then we aren’t grass eaters. In fact, we can’t eat grass. Cows have a special digestive system for that.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I thought about it for another second or so, then served myself another slab of side pork.
It took all afternoon and part of the evening to finish roasting the meat. We spitted all the different cuts over the fire, which worked okay. Some of the meat was a bit burnt, and some was tough and hard to eat, but it would keep us alive.
We buried the meat in a snow bank to freeze it. Darla worried about wild animals getting into it. I didn’t think that would be an issue because all the wild animals had probably died of silicosis. But it couldn’t hurt to be careful, so I spread the plastic tarp over our cache and weighed it down with three logs.
After a late dinner, I built a fire in the farmhouse’s living-room hearth. I poked around in one of the bedrooms and found two clean flannel shirts. We discarded the overshirts we’d been wearing, as they were both drenched in pig blood.
There were two bedrooms in the house, both with queen beds. They looked pretty inviting to me: plenty of room to spread out and, uh, do whatever. Darla said it was too cold in the bedrooms. She was right. We did just fine on the ratty old couch in front of the fire.