Nobody Named the Hog

8:15 a.m. too late. it was always going to be too late.

The parish paper keeps telling us that the boucherie hog was found and that nobody named it. It said so before Feu Follet Weekend. It will, I am sure, say it again when it writes up the boucherie, which happened Saturday morning, which I did not cover, and which I attended for reasons of cracklins.

I asked about the hog. Here is everything I learned.

Nobody names a boucherie hog. Not here, and not anywhere in this part of the state that I could find. Three readers wrote in to say so before I had finished asking. One said her daddy raised a hog every year, and every year her little brother named it, and every year her daddy un-named it, out loud, at supper, in front of everybody. One said you do not name what you are going to thank. One said, and I am quoting exactly, you name it and then you have to go to its funeral.

DocFenwick says this is a well documented farm practice, that naming an animal makes it harder to butcher, and that it is the same reason Doc's grandfather called every cow on the place Cow. Doc is right, and Doc's grandfather sounds like a practical person.

Here is my read. In this basin the rule is not that the hog has no name. The rule is that nobody says it. Those are different, and the difference is the whole boucherie: a hundred and some people standing in the cold before sunup, saying thank you to something without once saying what it was called.

The cracklins were gone by nine. I got there at eight fifteen. I am not sorry.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau