We stopped running. We were a marvel.
We were weight and it was good. The slick of mud upon our stomach was a cool lick of blessedness. We wanted more. We wanted to loll in it, feel the wet bliss of earth against us. But the smells! We could smell it all. It was humus, fungi in dark places. It was eucalyptus burning spicy under cauldrons of puffing grain. The sun smelled like grass, smelled like living things. Skin and curdled milk – good things! Pap of soured vegetables, human breath, and castings from the worms below us. Smoke. Split rock and clay.
There was laughter and exclamation. Then hands grabbed us and elation rushed me. Hands, human hands! To be touched. It had been so long. And then, tears. Real tears, at the feel of muscled arms around us. I remembered what it was for skin to be addressed with skin, remembered the smallness of my hand in the sturdiness of my papa’s, Matthias’s shoulder against mine in the wagon. I was so happy to feel the life of another, pressing against our pig self, and I realised I had hungered for this, in death: to feel and be felt. How glorious, the press of flesh.
We looked into the faces of the people about us. They were all so beautiful. Foreheads shining in the soft afternoon light, chests heaving. Hands stroked our side, and pleasure was everywhere. There was Hans. He looked at Thea, smiled and shrugged. We had no reason to run from the touching. We wanted the moment to last forever. I had forgotten how wide men’s hands are, the strength in their hard palms. But they were gentle with us. They were glad to catch their breath. Hans took a rope and we felt him knot it about our leg and secure us to the fence. In that moment we believed he did not desire to hurt us.
‘Good pig.’
We felt his voice reverberating in his hands. He rubbed our ears and we leaned into him, felt his feet stumble under the surprise of our heft. There was laughter.
‘You have the knack, Hans.’ Friedrich’s voice. ‘He’s taken a liking to you.’
We were petted, stroked. Quick-bit nails scratched our glorious body. We closed our eyes. This was rapture. To be touched with love and our snout filled with all the livingness of earth. We felt a sudden yearning for milk.
And then something quick and grey. Our head. We were mute. Blur tumble and white-hot shock and quick and sharp at throat and the world swung upside down and our face was covered in hot and red. Iron and gush. Drip. Bucket. The pale flashing of Anna Maria’s arms as she began to whisk.
oblivion
I woke and it was night. The soil was damp beneath me. I was in the pen.
The last moment played through me like a dying note of music. Blood dripping over the tip of our snout, and panic. Wide-eyed fear, and then pounding light-headedness. Shallow breath. Then, immolation.
The pig and I, both. Not going, gone. A giving-in.
Such peace. Such absolute surrender.
Around me, in the darkness, my hands found little bristles. Scrapings of what I had felt upon us. Of what had been part of us.
I knew what had happened since I went into the black. I had seen it many times in my living years. Whipped blood, unstrung from clots, in a bowl. The halved head in water upon the kitchen table. Organs separated into wide-mouthed crocks, covered with cloths, protected from flies and dust. The runners lying between layers of salt, cleaned and ready to be used as casings. And the body, headless, gutted, watered. Dried and hung.
There was a creaking, and I turned and saw a large bag swinging from a tree by a rope. The hanging carcass.
The pig was cool and stiff beneath my hands under its covering. It was nothing like what it had felt to be inhabited, all life and smell and movement. I rested my head along the sway of its back, wrapped my arms around its ribs. I was in those ribs too, I thought. I moved them. And I was crying. Crying as if over my own body, and crying, too, for the fact that, for some hours, I had been truly dead, and I knew nothing about anything, and what a relief that had been.
I wanted to die again.
I said it aloud. ‘I want to die.’ I wanted that rush of death. With Thea wed, there would be nothing for me in a half-life. I should be as this pig, I thought. Dead, until the trumpet sounds and I claw my way back from the bottom of the sea to be judged.
The Eichenwalds returned the next day at dawn, Thea bleary-eyed, her parents excited for the work ahead. The rope was untied, the carcass hefted onto their shoulders. I followed them as they carried it into the house and placed it on the table like a body to be waked, amidst a scraping hymn of knives on whetstone.
Rosina was puffy-eyed, sleeves-rolled. ‘Strange creature,’ she said, scratching the mole on her arm.
‘I always say, nothing wasted but the squeal,’ Anna Maria observed.
‘Odd, wasn’t it? The way it ran up to Hans.’
‘No squeal to be wasted.’
‘Glad of it,’ Thea muttered. ‘I hope I never have to hear another pig squeal in my lifetime.’
I left them all to their ordinance of meat.
Outside, Georg and Hermann were lighting the smokehouse. The damp chips of red gum wept such sweet smoke; the tang of them upon the cool dawn air was consolation. The sky was already clear, high. But all I could think about was the moment of dying. And before it, that strange dissolution into the body of another. I could slip into the bark of a tree. Could I now slip into skin, also? And if a tree withered and sickened and perished, would an animal die, too?
The day was tranquil and I let my feet walk me out into the unspoiled bush, passing the Peramangk as they dug in a clearing of yellow flowers, gathering the same tubers Anna Maria had taken a liking to. Two women looked up in my direction, and I wondered if they sensed me there, and quickened my steps to move beyond their gaze. I walked from tree to tree, to rock to earth, placing my hands on the ground and letting the hum of the place soothe me. The longer I stayed still, the more life I saw around me. The tiny movement of leaves as ants trailed amongst them, and birds – birds everywhere. The sky was a chorus. The trees a low and pulsing metronome.