Do you recall the two or three women who stand out in the middle of the field—a field not planted in the winter rye grass that has just begun to peek from the stiff earth? They stand about the hole the men dug the day before, a hole as deep and as wide as a grave. The women stand there at its edge: one holds a huge intestine that looks more like a monstrous, hairless caterpillar. She squeezes the thing from top to bottom, time after time, forcing all the foul matter down and out, into the hole; and when the bulk is through the second woman pours steaming hot water dipped from a bucket into one end of the fleshy sac as the other woman holds it steady. She sloshes the gut gently back and forth, back and forth like a balloon full of water, until she finally slings the nasty grey water into the reeking hole in the ground. All the while they talk, their faces placid, their fingers deft, their aprons splattered with fecal matter, the hole sending steam up into the air like a huge cooking pot, reeking, stinking.

Surely someone told you of the huge vat of water over the fire, the blue-red flames licking the sides. Here they will dunk the fat corpses, to scald the skin and hair. Four men, two on either end of two chains, will roll, heave-ho, the thing over into the vat and then round and round and round in the boiling water, until you can reach down and yank out hair by the handfuls. They will roll the creature out and scrape it clean of hair and skin, and it will be pinkish white like the bellies of dead fish. They will bind and skewer its hind feet with a thick wooden peg, drag it over by the old smokehouse, and then hoist it up onto a pole braced high, higher than a man.

Then someone will take a great silver knife and make a thin true line down the belly of the beast, from the rectum to the top of its throat. He will make a deep incision at the top and with a wet and ripping sound like the bursting of a watermelon, the creature will be split clear in two, its delicate organs spilling down like vomit, the fine, shiny sacs waiting there to be cut loose, one by one. The blood left in the hog will drip from its snout, in slow, long drips, dripping, staining the brown winter grass a deep maroon. But I’m certain you’ve witnessed all this, of course . . .