Milo lived with another person, called “Mommy.” They lived in a trailer on a farm. Mommy (whose name was Joyce) worked for the Smoker family, who owned the farm. She helped with the cows. There were a hundred cows, and Joyce was always busy.
One morning when he was three, Milo was left to wander in the barn during milking time, within sight of his mother. He heard something scratching in the corner, behind a rusted manure spreader, and discovered a giant, nasty-looking silverfish.
The insect stared up at him through glossy, awful eyes. In its last life, it had been a pimp.
Milo picked a rusty nail out of the dust. With a look of mild concentration, he stuck the nail through the silverfish and pinned it to the boards beneath.
The insect spasmed, like a dry leaf throwing a fit.
All kids do things like that. Then they feel bad. Milo’s OFF switch kicked in, preventing the bad feelings. (It did not prevent a hard-to-breathe feeling he often got when he was frightened or excited. His mother called it “asthma.”) Five minutes later, the milking was done, and Mom was ready to move the cows out for the day. “Milo!” she called.
“Coming, Joyce!” he answered, and ran to meet her, to take her hand.
He left behind a systematically dismembered silverfish: Wingless, wings arranged in a row. Legless, legs arranged in a row. Headless, the head in his pocket.
—
In fifth grade, a girl named Jodi Putterbaugh moved to Covington. Her parents, like Joyce, worked on a farm. She got on the bus the first day, walked straight to Milo’s seat, and said, “You look like you might be in fifth grade.”
Milo nodded. He was busy reading a science-fiction book.
“Do you mind if I sit here, so I’ll know when to get off the bus? My mom says this bus stops at three different schools, and I’d hate to accidentally get off at the high school. My name’s Jodi Putterbaugh.”
“Milo Wood.”
She sat down next to him and left him alone with his book.
Milo couldn’t focus on his book, after that. He thought about Jodi Putterbaugh sitting next to him, with her long brown hair and cow eyes. New switches started opening all over his brain. The hard-to-breathe feeling raised its head, just a little.
The OFF switch stayed quiet, studying the situation.
—
On the playground later, after a long September rain, Milo was stomping on worms when he heard a sharp “Oh!” behind him.
Jodi Putterbaugh, looking stricken.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re killing worms. Why?”
Milo didn’t have an answer. He didn’t like the way Jodi was looking at him.
“Maybe I won’t do it anymore,” he said.
She nodded but kept walking away. Milo started having a tiny little heartbreak feeling, but the OFF switch shut it right down.
—
Jodi’s family started an organic farm on the north side of Covington, raising food that was chemical-free. They raised pigs for pork but were very nice to the pigs while they were alive. Jodi invited Milo and some other fifth-graders to her birthday party in June.
“That’s Henry,” Jodi’s dad told Milo, when a loose pig nuzzled his leg and began chewing on his jean cuffs. They were all sitting at a picnic table, eating yellow cake.
“You name your animals?” Milo asked. “But—”
“We’re going to kill them, yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show respect. Lookee here.” And he got down on his knees and took Henry’s head in his hands.
“Look in his eyes,” said Jodi’s dad. “There’s somebody in there. Henry’s alive in his head, just like you and me. He appreciates kindness.” (Mr. Putterbaugh was right. Just a year ago, Henry’s soul had been a retired painter in Buenos Aires. His kindness to his neighbors had been legendary. His short, happy pig life at the Putterbaugh farm was a reward, not a punishment.)
“I’m going to change the way the world treats animals,” Jodi told Milo.
It’s funny, the things that cause people to fall in love. In Milo’s case, it was Jodi reaching over and squeezing his hand. Later, under an apple tree, at that perfect moment of dusk when the lightning bugs are coming out, they said, “One, two, three,” and kissed each other on the lips.
Milo heard a whispering deep inside his head just then, as if, say, there were ten thousand old souls trying to be heard and offer advice. The voices seemed to approve of the kissing.
It’s going to be all right, said the old souls.
—
The old souls were wrong. The dead switch knew how to wait.
Years passed. Fred Smoker, the owner of the farm, took Milo hunting with his own sons. For Milo’s first kill, Smoker marked his forehead with blood. When the blood touched his skin, Milo moaned a little. He couldn’t help it. And he didn’t tell Jodi.
The Putterbaugh family moved away, pushed out of business by a gigantic new Dinner Bell meatpacking factory over by Casstown. Milo’s heart split wide open, but the OFF switch came out of hiding to squelch the pain.
Something was wrong, his old soul sensed, in a sleepy, overconfident way, but didn’t know what.
Milo learned farm chores from his mom, and these developed into paid work as he grew and filled out. He lost his virginity to one of his mom’s friends, Debbie Fair, out in the woods one night.
Then, suddenly, he had a high school diploma and an apartment of his own—a room over the Lucky Mart Gas and Sundries, right on the edge of Covington. He was a person. He planned to save money and go to college before long. The plans made him feel good and made his soul feel good. His soul reminded him that you had to make money in order to save money, so he needed some kind of job.
Fair enough, agreed Milo. He got drunk with a meatpacker named Tom Littlejohn one night at Walt’s, and Tom got Milo a job at the Dinner Bell plant, killing cows. (Ah, shit, said his ancient soul.) He carried a stunner, a kind of air hammer, and a hundred times a day he held the muzzle between a cow’s eyes and— SsssssPOP!
—a steel slug punched through the cow’s skull and stunned its brain. Sometimes this killed the cow outright. Other times the cow might just tremble and roll its eyes at you. Milo’s dead switch engaged automatically during work hours; he could kill an animal no matter how it looked at him.
One time they had a three-hundred-fifty-pound Duroc hog named Orlando, to be specially butchered for a charity dinner at the Cincinnati Oktoberfest. Don Sweeney, the senior hand on the killing floor, tried to knock Orlando out with the air hammer, but Orlando bounced back up, squealing with rage. Sweeney came vaulting out of the pen, laughing, “That’s enough for me, boys!”
Milo grabbed the hammer from Sweeney and hoisted himself over the wall. Before Milo could even get balanced right, Orlando came grunting at him, pig feet flying, jaws agape (he had been a pig for six lives in a row and was really good at it).
Milo was focused, fearless.
SsssssPOP!
Pig and pig-slayer went down together.
Milo got up first and gave Orlando another slug (SsssssPOP!), right in the eye.
Gore jetted all over his smock.
Still the mighty pig whined and kicked and looked as if he might make it back to his feet. Milo leaped up as high as he could and came down on the pig’s ribs with both feet, driving his heels down.