Postpartum Depression

A short story about parenthood

Craig didn’t usually drink with sows, but it seemed like a good time to take up the practice, with everything going to hell around him. Despite her occasional grunts, his petulant companion paid little attention to what he was telling her, as she was intent on sucking up to her beer as fast as she could. Priscilla peered over at them, her wide-spaced eyes were envious of Peggy’s good fortune in getting the beer, the disc of her nose angling to get the most of fumes reminiscent of ripe swill.

Things had been going to hell since before the baby was born. Leah was furious that Craig had attended Priscilla’s labour while she was in the hospital, giving birth to their own child; and now, here he was, back out the barn, drinking with sows all night while the baby was bawling his head off with no one but Leah to stay up with him. Then yesterday, while he was working on the house, he placed his metal hammer on the woodpile. His wife scooped it up, not looking, and threw it in the stove with an armload of firewood. He saw her do it, but couldn’t stop her. He pushed her aside and poked around in the fire for it. The fire was really going, it had a good bed of coals, and, by the time he fished it out, the rubber grip was pretty well gone. He threw it down on the floor where it scorched a hammer-shaped brand. He yelled at her for her carelessness. She said she wouldn’t stick around to be abused and flew out the front door, slipping on the ice at the front step and broke her ankle.

“Now we were really fucked,” he said to Peggy. “We spent six hours in the emergency room with a newborn baby to get her ankle set.”

Peggy, done with her beer, gave a couple of grunts. Seeing that she was still not sedated, Craig got up and poured her another forty-ouncer. This was too much for Priscilla, in the next pen, who wanted some, too. She hitched her front legs over the pen panel and protested. Her piglets oinked their support. She came down off the panel and knocked over the water trough, an old hot water tank cut in half lengthwise with an acetylene torch. The flood spilt over the piglets’ feet and they abandoned the protest to investigate the wetness. Peggy’s pigs, separated from their mother, called from a makeshift pen of straw bales. What was left of them, two days old, now more than eight hours without being fed? Peggy still was not sedated enough to get them back.

The floor by the stove had been his pride and joy. Red oak, toenailed, sanded smooth as a bowling alley, and varnished, it bore no sign of the work he put into it, no half-circle hammer marks, no nails poking up to catch socks. The floor might have been mistaken for a natural phenomenon, the work of God, and now it bore the brand of the tool of its construction like a scratchy tag on the neck of a new shirt.

The baby hasn’t stopped crying since they came home from the hospital. They rocked her, held her, passed her back and forth between them, and gave up, finally, leaving her to cry herself to sleep face down, her bottom bare, airing out her diaper rash, glowing like an over-heated stove.

Craig had gone out to check on the pigs. Priscilla’s pigs were six weeks old, active and playful, frolicking in the straw. Two, tired with the game, rooted at their mother’s belly and she flopped on her side, exposing the rows of teats. At this signal the brood scrambled to nurse, vying for a choice spot. When the pigs settled in, Priscilla gave a long sigh and began grunting the nursing song that every sow sings to her pigs, drowning out the subtle, moist noises of the barn.

Hogs are prolific creatures, having large litters and short gestation periods; three months, three weeks and three days after breeding they’ll give birth; at three o’clock in the morning. You’ll generally lose a few. The runt might die, for instance, another may get an infection from castration, and that sort of thing. Also, sows being large and their pigs being small, active and numerous, it’s not unusual to lose one or two by their mother laying on them and crushing them. Some hog breeders keep the sow in a crate that they can’t turn around in and must lie straight down instead of flopping over. Craig would never make a sow live in a crate. Instead, he built the young ones a triangular-shaped sanctuary in the corners of their mothers’ pens where they could get food and water and bask under the heat lamp.

In next the pen, Peggy’s one-day-old pigs were sleeping under the light, their eyes contentedly shut behind blond lashes. The sow, having recovered from birthing the eight pigs of her first litter, examined her trough to see if she had missed any food. Craig reached in to scratch her back. Flakes of dandruff lodged in his nails as he dug under the stiff, bristly hair. The sow barked, startled by the touch, and snapped at his hand.

“I’m sorry, girl. I didn’t know you were in a bad mood,” he said.

He watched the sow peevishly rearrange the straw in her pen. Hearing the nursing song from Priscilla, Peggy’s pigs awakened with the idea of a snack. Craig leaned on the pen panel and counted them. One was missing. He grabbed a pitchfork and poked through the straw, searching for the missing piglet while the litter set up a chorus of squeals, picketing for their dinner. Peggy seized the nearest pig in her mouth and killed it. Oblivious to the murder, the piglets continued to squeal for their dinner at her feet and under her belly. Craig quickly threw some corn into Peggy’s trough to distract her and jumped into the pen to save the pigs. His hand darted and seized their hind legs one by one. Each one tried to kick himself free, but he held on and threw them out. Just as Peggy finished her corn, he had the last one dangling from his hand. The sow snorted in the trough and wheeled around to face him, the intruder, as he vaulted out of the pen.

The live pigs safe, he turned his attention to the dead one, forgotten in a corner of the sow’s pen. Smelling blood, Peggy rooted through her straw to add the dead pig to her dinner. Craig drove her away with a small prick from the pitchfork. She jolted back, squealing, as he scooped up the corpse.

Farmers had told him of sows turning on their pigs, but he never experienced it before. Old-timers said that some new mothers are just too uptight and need to relax a bit before accepting their young. He knew just what would relax Peggy. As soon as he separated her from her newborns, he went back to town to pick up some beer.

Soon after he returned, Craig and Peggy were drinking together like two old friends. In no time she finished six forties to his four and they were out of beer. The empty bottles stood in a row like a line of empty teats. He picked up the weakest of her pigs and tossed it into her pen, as a test. At first, the sow seemed to accept it all right, but then the pig began to nuzzle her underside and grunt to be fed. The mother had no patience for her and moved away. The doomed pig kept up her grunting until Peggy spun around and seized it by its neck. She shook it until it died.

Craig needed to think about what he was going to do next. He knew he was in no condition to drive to town again for more beer. Maybe Priscilla would accept some foster pigs. He might be able to raise the surviving ones himself. He picked up a fork and began to clean Peggy’s ’s pen as he thought it out.

Then it occurred to him that the baby had stopped crying.

When he got to the house, Leah was sobbing in bed. No amount of beer could have prepared him for the most unspeakable horror he’d ever seen crumpled against the wall.

Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice. Read more of his fiction series, The Narrative Imperative and other stuff.