Chapter 14
14
‘Oh, he’s adorable. You have to call him Wilbur – you know, like in Charlotte’s Web ?’
‘Aye, so long as you’re not comparing me to John Arable.’
The comparison had crossed her mind, but she’d kept that to herself, impressed that he knew the name of the farmer who’d wanted to off poor Wilbur initially in the famous children’s story, and she told him so.
‘Ah, well now, you couldn’t be a pig farmer and not know the story of Charlotte’s Web . It was one of Amy’s favourites.’
‘It was one of mine, too.’ She felt pleased to have found something in common with Amy and that Owen had been the one to bring her into the conversation.
‘Would you like to feed him?’ he asked.
‘Can I?’ Her eyes went wide, taking in the pink bundle whose plaintive squeak was nothing like the robust squealing of the piglets in the stall next door. It tugged at her heartstrings. She sat cross-legged in the old barn on a pile of straw.
‘Here, hold him like this.’ He placed Wilbur carefully in her arms, and she gazed down with adoration as he began to suck feebly at the bottle.
‘Is it cow’s milk?’ she asked.
Owen’s mouth did that twitchy thing at the corners again. ‘No, it’s a sow’s milk formula.’
She didn’t see his expression; she was too concerned about Wilbur. ‘What will happen to him?’
‘Ah, well now, runts don’t have a great survival rate, so I don’t know for sure, but if I manage to get the little bugger up to a decent size, I’ll put him back on his mother once her other piglets are weaned. That would catch him up to his brothers and sisters in no time and prevent his mother getting a bout of mastitis.’
Jess cringed, remembering the terrible time Brianna had had with the breast infection. She wouldn’t wish that on any mum.
‘I feed him every two to three hours.’
‘What? Even through the night?’ Her eyes were wide at his dedication, and her tummy did a little flip at the thought of this large, gruff man caring so tenderly for the tiny piglet trembling in her arms.
‘I put a drip bottle up at night. His last hand feed is at nine thirty; then he’s on his own until the morning. I go to bed early but I’m up at dawn.’
That shattered the picture she’d invoked of Owen trooping across the darkened fields in the wee hours with his heated bottle of milk, as did the frantic squealing of Wilbur’s healthy, hungry brothers and sisters as they vied for space, butting into their patient mother in the stall next to them. Owen had explained that Wilbur had to be taken away from his mother and siblings if he was to have any chance of survival. Overhead, a long heat lamp not unlike the old-school classroom fluorescent lights warmed the wooden box stuffed with straw in which the tiny piglet slept.
‘I try not to name the girls. I did it once when I was a kid, even though me da told me not to. Broke my heart the day Florence was taken away.’
‘Florence?’ Jess looked up at Owen and saw that twinkle in his eyes again; she wasn’t sure whether he was having her on or not. ‘I didn’t think farmers could afford to be sentimental about their animals?’
‘Hard not to be, but I like to think I give them a good life before I pack them off to meet their maker or Sean O’Flaherty – the local butcher I use.’
She flinched involuntarily at the mental image of Sean O’Flaherty with a big white apron and long carving knife that flashed before her eyes. Owen was right, though. Perhaps it could be said that she watched far too much television, but she’d once seen an undercover exposé on pigs being kept inhumanely by farmers who supplied well-known supermarket chains. Those poor animals hadn’t had much chance for wallowing or foraging, not like Owen’s fat, happy sows.
‘They’re amazingly intelligent animals – pigs, you know – more so than any other domestic animal.’
She didn’t know, but then it had turned out there was an awful lot about pigs she hadn’t known, like the fact they have very good memories and that the reason they wallow in mud isn’t because they’re dirty – they were, according to Owen, extremely clean animals – but because they can’t sweat and the mud cools their body temperature down.
She’d become a mine of information on all things swine, listening to Owen as he’d walked her around the first and closest of his paddocks. She’d watched him curiously out the corner of her eye as he became positively animated, pointing out the area where the pigs wallowed before showing her the little huts or kennels they used for shelter.
Initially, as he’d held open the gate at the bottom of the garden for her and she’d wandered out into the paddock, she’d felt slight trepidation at the sight of two hundred or so free-ranging pigs. However, once she realised she wasn’t going to be charged and trampled to death, she’d listened to Owen with interest. It was hard not to when he was so amazingly passionate about his animals. He was like a different person when he was amongst his pigs; it was as though he came to life. His enthusiasm for them was catching, and she’d known instinctively that she would never pick up a packet of budget pork sausies in the supermarket again.
‘Tickle his tum. They love that,’ Owen said as the little piglet finished the bottle.
He was right, Jess thought, delighted; if Wilbur could coo, he would be cooing.
She sat contentedly like that, rubbing his tummy until his eyes began to shut. Then she gently placed him back in his box, got up and brushed her jeans down. ‘You will let me know how he gets on, won’t you?’
Owen looked bemused for a moment before he nodded, and then their eyes met and locked for a split second in an unspoken agreement. It was time to head back to the cottage.
They couldn’t avoid Amy any longer.