I'm Thinking of Ending Things(19)

“What will happen to the lambs?” I call to Jake, who’s walking ahead, away from the barn. He’s hungry now, I can tell, and wants to hurry up, get inside. The wind is picking up.

“What?” he yells over his shoulder. “You mean the dead ones?”

“Yeah.”

Jake doesn’t reply. He just keeps walking.

I’m not sure what else to say. Why didn’t he say anything about the dead lambs? I’m the one who saw them. I’d rather ignore them, but now that I’ve seen them, I can’t.

“Will anything happen to them?” I ask.

“I don’t know. What do you mean? They’re already dead.”

“Do they stay there, or get buried or anything?”

“Probably burn them at some point. In the bonfire. When it gets warmer, in the spring.” Jake continues walking ahead of me. “They’re frozen for now anyway.” They didn’t look all that different from lambs that are alive and healthy, at least in my mind. But they’re dead. There’s something so similar to living, healthy lambs, but also so different.

I jog to catch up, trying not to slip and fall. We’re far enough away from the barn now that when I turn back, the shape of the two lambs looks like a single inanimate form, a solid mass—a bag of grain resting against the wall.

“Come on,” he calls, “I’ll show you the old pen where they used to keep pigs. They don’t have pigs anymore; they were too much work.”

I follow him along the path until he stops. The pen looks abandoned, untouched for a few years. That’s my feeling. The pigs are gone, but the enclosure is still there.

“So what happened to the pigs?”

“The last two were quite old and weren’t moving around much anymore,” he says. “They had to be put down.”

“And they never got any new ones or baby pigs? Piglets. Is that how it usually works?”

“Sometimes. But I guess they never replaced them. They’re a lot of work and expensive to keep.”

I should probably know better, but I’m curious. “Why did they have to put the pigs down?”

“That’s what happens on a farm. It’s not always pleasant.”

“Yeah, but were they sick?”

He turns back and looks at me. “Forget it. I don’t think you’d like the truth.”

“Just tell me. I need to know.”

“Sometimes it’s hard, out here on a farm like this. It’s work. My parents hadn’t been inside the pen to check on the pigs for a few days. They just tossed their food into the pen. The pigs were lying in the same corner day after day, and after a while, Dad decided he’d better have a good look at them. When he went inside, the pigs didn’t look well. He could tell they were in some discomfort.

“He decided he better try to move them. Dad almost fell over backward when he lifted up the first pig. But he did it. He lifted and turned it. He found its belly was swarming with maggots. Thousands of them. It looked like its entire underside was covered in moving rice. The other one was even worse than the first. Both pigs were literally being eaten alive. From the inside out. And you’d never really know if you just looked at them from afar. From a distance, they seemed content, relaxed. Up close, it was a different story. I told you: life isn’t always pleasant.”

“Holy shit.”

“The pigs were old and their immune systems were probably shot. Infection set in. Rot. They’re pigs, after all. They live in filth. It probably started with a small cut on one of them, and some flies landed in the wound. Anyway, Dad had to put the pigs down. That was his only choice.”

Jake steers us out and starts walking again, crunching through the snow. I’m trying to use his same footsteps, where the snow’s been compressed a bit.

“Those poor creatures,” I say. But I get it. I do. They had to be put down and put out of their misery. Suffering like that is unendurable. Even if the solution is final. The two lambs. The pigs. It really is nonnegotiable, I think. There’s no going back. Maybe they were lucky, to go like that after what they’d been through. To at least be liberated from some of the suffering.

Unlike the frozen lambs, there’s nothing restful or humane about the image of those pigs Jake has planted in my mind. It makes me wonder: What if suffering doesn’t end with death? How can we know? What if it doesn’t get better? What if death isn’t an escape? What if the maggots continue to feed and feed and feed and continue to be felt? This possibility scares me.

“You have to see the hens,” says Jake.

We approach a coop. Jake unlatches the entrance and we duck inside. The chickens are already roosting, so we don’t stay in there long. Just long enough for me to step in some runny, unfrozen shit, of course, and to smell the unpleasant smells and see one of the last non-roosting hens eating one of its own eggs. It’s not just the barn—every area has a distinct smell. I find it eerie in here with all these chickens sitting up on thin rails, looking at us. They appear more disgruntled by our presence than the sheep were.

“They’ll do that sometimes, eat them, if the eggs aren’t collected,” says Jake.

“Gross,” is all I can think of to say. “You guys don’t have any neighbors, do you?”

“Not really. Depends on your definition of neighbor.”