The Pig Farmer

The Pig Farmer

The old black man who came for fish guts
wouldn’t step in the door
of my father‘s fish shop.
He parked his tattered truck, faded
to that gray color Death’s old clothes must be,
stood outside and waited while
my father hefted the gut tubs on his shoulder
one at a time, and handed them out.
Then the old man dumped them
in the back of his truck
with a look on his face
like we were living wrong.

It shamed me.
When my father passed the second tub
out to him,
I followed and took a good look
at the truck and the mass
of fish bones, heads, and fins.
There was no tailgate;
he had to pile the guts up right behind
the cab or they’d fall out.
Even then, I bet he had to drive real slow.

Inside the fish shop, there was blood.
The floor was worn a dirty lavender,
broken up by yellow dots of fly poison,
except for two perfect circles
of clean concrete
where the gut tubs had been.

The old man set the empty tub down.
My father handed him the third one.
After he’d emptied it,
the old man threw a nod at my father
and had to crank his truck four times
before it started. I stood outside
while my father washed blood off the floor
with a hose, letting the water drain outside
in a dirty stream.
He scrubbed until the concrete shone
like river mud,
and brought the tubs in,
the first two at once, then the third.

Pig-smell hung in the air from the old man
like Absalom in a tree. Soon, it would be
supplanted by the stink
of fish. I imagined it stuck to my clothes
and would linger
no matter how often they were washed.
Inside, my father sat down to read the paper.

C.D. Bledsoe

Posted over on his site, Murder Your Darlings
Cortney commented:
(Originally appeared in Nimrod, 2003)

Notes:

I think this poem also came from a workshop. I was trying to capture a scene, but also something about race relations that I'm not totally sure survived the subsequent drafts. The joke, here, as that to an outsider, the Pig Man and my father & I would've all appeared poor, dirty, etc., which we were. There's no real difference. Originally, the poem ended with the lines:

I wonder if my father knew the Pig-Man looked down on us.
I wonder if it mattered in the slightest.

I cut them because they seemed to labor the point.