The Big Red Barn--Part I

I believe the big red barn preceded the building of our house. It had always been there from the time I was small, and it had been built for a farmer, with a loft for hay, a corner for a pig pen, and two stalls for horses or cows. I loved the hay smell of it. Dad kept a cow in it during the winter, and usually one pig in the pen. When summer came, the cow and pig went down to the little farm Dad owned south of town.


On the little farm, there was a shack (for want of a better term). At some point, Dad had allowed Billy Wilkins to take up residence in return for keeping a watch over the animals in summer, to prevent them from being rustled (Oh, yes, we had rustlers, believe it or not! And later we knew them by name.). Billy was a homeless man, with several disabilities. He dressed strangely, with a little red cap and a heavy mackinaw jacket, apparently year round. He wore big bottle-type glasses and a constant smile, and he had a pronounced lisp with a very limited vocabulary. Billy knew me, because of Dad. Whenever I would cross his path in town, he would wave at me and say, "Hi, dirl."

One late fall, after Dad had installed the cow and pig back in the barn, Billy appeared at our kitchen door. Mom was not at home. I opened the door, and Billy stood there grinning at me.

"Cal til pid et?" he said. I had no idea what he was saying, but I told him I'd tell my father he had stopped by. When I reported the visit, Mom explained that every time Dad slaughtered a pig, Billy came to pick up the pig's head. He apparently had his own special recipe for head cheese. What he had tried to say was, "Has Carol killed the pig yet?"

It was probably a week later that Dad, with a couple helpful neighbors, killed the pig--right in our back yard, between the house and the barn. It was a Saturday, and we children were sent to Grandma Bertha's for the day--apparently to spare us the trauma of all the squealing. Grandma's house wasn't that far away, so we heard it anyway, as we had our ears peeled for it. And when we went back home, there was the pig, hanging from a huge frame in the back yard, ready for quartering.

Mom hadn't really needed to protect us from the trauma. We were already used to seeing the life and death of animals. In that time we already connected it to our need to eat. Dad was hunting deer every year, and we knew the cow would be gone, too, when she could no longer give milk. We accepted this as a fact of life, like breathing. Perhaps that is why we never tried to make pets of the pig and cow.

The pig and cow were not the only occupants of the barn, at times. But more about that later.