This is a true story from my childhood, growing up on a farm in the hills and hollers of Kentucky. I love pigs.

Where I come from, the cool November air makes a hog antsy. They quit eating. They stalk the pen like a prisoner, pacing, snorting, searching for a sniff of freedom. A hog can sense what’s coming. It took several Novembers for me to figure out what a doomed hog knows by nature. I was 9. My sister was 6.

“We have a problem,“ I said. “Men are coming to kill our hogs.”

“Let’s tell Daddy,” Donna said.

“That’s the problem,” I said. “He’s in on it.”

Like he’d done every year as far back as I can remember, Dad bought a couple of shoats in the spring.

Maybe he called them meat hogs from the start, or maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter. We were in the pen playing with those little pigs from the get-go. They were our pets, just like the dogs.

When they got too big to trust — hogs will eat a young ‘un, we were told — we would stand outside the pen and scratch their backs with a garden hoe. Later in the year, usually around Thanksgiving, those big hogs would up and disappear. Poof! Next spring, we would have two new pigs to play with. We named them, slopped them and used them as props for made-up adventures. We had gotten pretty attached to Smoky and Snout.

The Plan

“Dad might kill a meat hog, but he wouldn’t kill a mama,” I said. “We have to make him think they have babies.”

Real baby pigs would be hard to come by, but we had plenty of stray dogs and dropped-off puppies in our rural neck of the woods. On average, we kept and fed about half a dozen dogs. At one point we had 12 grown dogs, a fact I boasted about the way a Texas rancher brags about his cattle. We may have been dirt poor at times, but we were always dirty dog rich.

Looking back, I don’t see how we kept so many bellies full. There were seven people in our five-room house, a bunch of dogs and at least two hogs, all fed from the same table. After we ate firsts and seconds, Mom made extra gravy and splattered it on the sidewalk by the backdoor step for the dogs, and they licked it up with leftover biscuits, potatoes and bones. In those days, dogs didn’t choke on chicken bones, and they didn’t die from chocolate. Dogs didn’t start suffering from these things until the communists tricked liberals into buying dogs at the mall — in the mid 80’s, I think.

The hogs got everything else, mixed up in delicious sour milk slop. I loved listening to them eat. Hogs have their own music, you know. With their bodies thumping at the trough and their teeth grinding up corncobs, apple cores and melon rinds, their grunting lays down a steady, funky bass line that builds to a crescendo of squealing solos that could have inspired Jimi Hendrix, B.B.King and Stevie Ray Vaughan to shred and wail. Hogs know the blues.

If we didn’t act soon, these hogs may have played their last concert. The plan was to go on a neighborhood small dog and puppy sweeping spree. We would disguise the dogs as pigs and plant ‘em in the pen with the hogs. The plan would work, I assured Donna. My loyal little sister nodded, reluctantly, but reckoned it would. It had to. It was a brilliant plan!

It didn’t matter that both hogs were male. It didn’t matter that, even with construction paper pig ears, puppies still look like puppies. We were too desperate for details. If nothing else, when our dad sees the effort we put into saving these hogs, that would be enough for him to stop this madness.

We marched across the pasture on a mission.

Hog killers

“David! Donna! You kids get in the house!” Mom was calling. It was too late. A beat-up red pickup truck pulled into our driveway. Two burly, beastly figures climbed out. The hog killers were here.

From this point on, memory has turned these events into a surreal slow-motion film, in shades of black, white and red.

If you’ve never seen hog killers, you’ll know exactly what they are when you do. They’re fearsome men, caked in mud and blood from their beards to their boots. They wear overalls soaked with the stains of their business. One man carries a big rifle, the other a large knife. From the looks of things, these two had already met several deadlines by the time they got to our place.

Mom was at the stove, old country ham sizzling in the skillet. Donna and I looked out a kitchen window. We watched the killers disappear through the trees that shielded our view of the shed where our hogs awaited their fate. I don’t remember breathing. But Donna and I were praying awfully hard for a miracle – a stay of execution – for our hogs.

It was deathly quiet for the longest time.

And then a commotion.

One hog emerged from the trees — then two. Smoky and Snout were loose and running for their lives! I wish they had headed for the woods. Instead, the hogs ran around and around the house, the killers chugging along behind in their mud-bloody boots, waving their weapons. There was a lot of hollering and squealing.

Donna and I raced from window to window cheering our heroes on at the top of our lungs. I don’t know how long the chase lasted. Two minutes. Maybe twenty. It seemed like a long time. But it wasn’t long enough.

The cheering stopped with a gun blast. Then two. At our back door. From the kitchen sink window, Donna and I were perched for a great view of the horror. On the sidewalk between the doorstep and the old water pump — right where we fed the dogs — our hogs were shot dead, their throats slit to bleed out. There was enough blood to drown all the dogs we’ve ever owned.

The crimson stain on that sidewalk never washed away. To this day, you can still see flecks of it in what’s left of that old sidewalk. When the wind’s right, you can still hear the squeal of two hogs and two kids who cheered them on to the finish line.

If hog killers ever show up at your house, God help you. I hope you have hogs.

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix. Give him a holler @[email protected].