Each day he walks the thirty yards back and forth between his house and barn. You can see him, if you stop along the road and lean casually against his fence. His overalls and ballcap show him up a farmer like every other farmer in the valley. But don’t go close. He is a shy one, easily spooked. He will not be known. Watch him. You will see, as he walks, the sudden lifting of his very human hand to wipe the round, flattened snout through which he breathes the same barnyard air that reaches you at the fence. You will see the same hand scratching at the sharp bristled ears grown high on his hoggy head. You will never see him pick and bite into a crisp, sweet apple.
He will not be known because he does not know himself, as he crosses the worn path of his daily labor, which pole is home. He wonders, Is he the farmer or the farmed? It matters more than you, staring from the fence, can guess. You straddle nothing deeper than convictions.
It troubles him, pouring milk and slops into the trough, thinking of ham and bacon, to see himself looking up into his eyes. Will he find his end as ignominious as the one his snorting porcine herd will find? Or will he be laid out in glory, a necktie bound about his weathered neck and makeup plastered on his face, the food chain broken, the body torn only in the empty grave?
He knows himself as both and neither: half man, half pig, half god and beast. He longs, like you, to know himself: a pig risen into manhood or a man descending into pork, like some wild god risking everything to be his own creation.
John Leax is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College. His book Grace Is Where I Live: The Landscape of Faith & Writing has just been reissued in an expanded edition by Wordfarm.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
