The Delivery

by Rachael Peckham


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The Delivery
 
I had just reclaimed the white square of foam my cousins and I surfed atop when Dad's voice stopped our splashing: I need you kids' help. He stood at the patio’s perimeter (he didn't want to track in manure) in full coveralls he’d tailored for summer, cutting the sleeves off above the elbow but below the pale bicep. My dad has a tall and wiry kind of strength, the kind that burns on a diet of bacon every morning, ice cream every night; the kind honed from constant waking and walking, of pounding and pulling the land into shape, or pushing the boulder weight of livestock when instinct locks their legs. It is a quiet and patient strength that hogs will bend to more easily than with other means of force—that is, most of the time. I need your help, he repeated, with a dead sow. Funny that my first thought was not gross, but rather, right now? I glanced at my cousins, girls like me concerned with sharpening the tan lines formed by our first bikinis, lending our bodies at least a shadow of a shape. There's no one else around, Dad said, and I could tell from his tone that he was sorry for that; that he genuinely dreaded asking us as much as we dreaded stepping from the pool into his truck, a sauna of stink and hog dust that stuck to the seat of our suits. In the nursery barn, Dad told us to watch our step (the floors are slatted so that waste can slip into a pit below), but even so, the aisles were slick and our flip-flops squished. Dad chuckled, I didn't think about your feet. I stopped thinking of them too when we got to the sow, her blue belly taut as a balloon, the mouth an emptied bowl of sound. Dad caught my stare. Pneumonia. He bent down to tie a rope around her legs. If you all take hold and pull, he said, I'll take her back weight. We did as we were told. We pulled and as we did, her blood and bowels came too--keep going—painting the aisle behind. My feet were wet and my face was wet and with the last shove we pulled her from the barn so hard I fell back in the gravel. I began to laugh—what else can you do?—we sure as hell didn't go back to the pool. Dad delivered us to the house and thanked us again but we had already piled out, calling first dibs for the shower. Later, I would stand before the mirror reveling in feeling clean again, assessing my tan and the bruise beneath one cheek, already blooming a faint shade of blue, already tender to the touch.
 
 
Rachael Peckham holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University, where she specialized in the lyric essay and prose poem. Her chapbook of prose poems, Muck Fire, won the 2010 Robert Watson Poetry Award at Spring Garden Press. More recently, Peckham was a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; the National Poetry Series Open Competition; and the Pleiades Press Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Contest. Peckham teaches at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she lives with her husband, poet and essayist Joel Peckham, and their son, Darius.