a day no pigs would die 5 .pdf - A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck 1972 1 To my father Haven Peck... a quiet and gentle man whose work

A Day No Pigs Would Dieby Robert Newton Peck, 19721 To my father, Haven Peck… a quiet and gentle man whose work was killing pigs Forward On a farm. Here’s where my boyhood began. Among an uproad clan of Pecks who could neither read nor write, had little to say and heavy hauling to handle.A boy must learn a farmer’s mission:how to turn grass into milk and field corn into hogs. How to aid birth.How to slaughter. At quieter moments, emptying a maple-sap bucket for sugar boiling, fishing through the thick lake ice in subzero weather, or carving a sumac whistle for a younger child. Milking at 5 and 5.Often in darkness.In between was our day’s work.The awesome burden of farming brutally arrived when, at age thirteen, I had to run it alone.Five acres of Vermont became a Sahara of raw responsibility. After a war, a timber camp, and slowly ripening to manhood, I made a simple man’s decision.To write.To sing memories of a farm, parents, and a pet pig.One by each, I lost them all.Yet recollection embraces them forever. A Day No Pigs Would Diewas written to honor all folks who do hard work, and make hard choices.Before it became a book, it was a hymn in my heart.Then, plainly written in earthy dirt by a boy’s fingertip. In a sense, its purpose is akin to that of tilling a crop - to raise your spirit by rain and sunlight, and to grow you green.

A Day No Pigs Would Dieby Robert Newton Peck, 19722 Chapter 1 I should of been in school that April day. But instead I was up on the ridge near the old spar mine above our farm, whipping the gray trunk of a rock maple with a dead stick, and hating Edward Thatcher.During recess, he’d pointed at my clothes and made sport of them.Instead of tying into him, I’d turned tail and run off.And when Miss Malcom rang the bell to call us back inside, I was halfway home. Picking up a stone, I threw it into some bracken ferns, hard as I could.Someday that was how hard I was going to light into Edward Thatcher, and make him bleed like a stuck pig.I’d kick him from one end of Vermont to the other, and sorry him good.I’d teach him not to make fun of Shaker ways.He’d never show his face in the town of Learning ever again.No, sir. A painful noise made me whip my head around and jump at the same time.When I saw her, I knew she was in bad trouble. It was the big Holstein cow, one of many, that belonged to our near neighbor, Mr. Tanner.This one he called “Apron” because she was mostly black, except for the white along her belly which went up her front and around her neck like a big clean apron.She was his biggest cow, Mr. Tanner told Papa, and his best milker.And he was fixing up to take her to Rutland Fair, come summer. As I ran toward her, she made her dreadful noise again.I got close up and saw why.Her big body was pumping up and down, trying to have her calf.She’d fell down and there was blood on her foreleg, and her mouth was all thick and foamy with yellow-green spit.I tried to reach my hand out and pat her head; but she was wild- eyed mean, and making this breezy noise almost every breath.