The Silence of the Pigs

Since the Catholic grade schools that had I attended in the 1960’s did not have science, my freshman year in public high school was the first time I experienced any kind of science class.   I don’t think that the Pope wanted his students to know about science, but it was a losing battle since the Vatican's encounter with Galileo and I don’t think they solved the problem of man’s unending quest for truth by killing him.  

I went to a rural school fifty miles west of Chicago.  All of my classrooms in high school looked identical to all the classrooms I had seen throughout my education, except for the science room.  Our desks had black waxy tabletops built on heavy, closed platforms with sinks, gas spigots, lacerations from some sharp tools and thousands of pin punctures and burn marks.   Over by the window there were fish tanks filled with tadpoles, fish, turtles, white mice and a couple of rats.   The room had a smell of it’s own and it was the only room that felt like home because of all the plants.   The teachers had nurtured a giant homemade glass bug farm into a thriving community of ants, beetles and centipedes.  It was a little eerie peering into the ant tunnels and seeing the maggots, webs and cocoons, but it was undeniably interesting.

The room was filled with charts and tables.   Some of the charts showed the complete, step-by-step anatomy of a crawfish, a bullfrog or a bird.   The most colorful, complex and frightening chart was above the blackboard in the front of the room.   It was the “Table of Elements”.    We even had a greenhouse that was built outside our classroom.  To our delight, our teachers grew three major families of insect-eating plants.   There were quite a few flower varieties, but they were not very interesting to me, or any of the other students.   In the center of the greenhouse was a pond with carp and water lilies.   The greenhouse was too hot.   The only reason we went out there was when we caught a fly, a cricket or a spider and we wanted to feed it to the killer plants.

We sat three to a table and I became lab partners with two girls who were my former Catholic junior high classmates.   Carol and Mary learned to love me because I could cut up anything living or dead and I was a pretty good intestine artist.   Back in those days, we had to pith our live frogs.  The girls, and many of the other boys, did not have the stomach for the deadly science of disection.   Most kids had their frogs jumping all over the place, but our live frog was in the clutches of the skillful Argentinean torture master, me.    I achieved my “degree” in the clubhouse that I had built in my backyard when I was seven.    My friends and I had created a torture table for the living creatures that had the unfortunate luck to cross one of our paths.   We would pin a daddy longlegs to the table and pull off all of its legs with a tweaser.  Grasshoppers died from the “Revel” death.   Revel was the model glue that we used to glop onto the insect before we lit it on fire with a match.  The deep brown tobacco spit from the grasshopper could not save it now.   We never tortured animals.   They were too real.   Pigeons, ducks, cats, dogs and even mice had too much perceived awareness for us to consider exploring them on our torture table.  Even snakes were not included in our repertoire.   Besides, we learned in catechism class that the devil took that form long ago and we didn’t want to make any enemies just in case the snake had any ancient connections to Beelzebub.

One day my class, including myself as the great Argentinean torture master, had a very traumatic experience.   We came to class one day and we found our teacher, Mrs. Conifil, outside the greenhouse with a man who was wearing some pretty ragged and dirty coveralls.   The side of his pickup truck had a poorly hand-painted sign that said, “Virgil Macalister, Huntley, Illinoise”.    He had backed up his pickup truck to the outside door of the greenhouse.   We were all in our seats and we were all causing mischief (as you always do when the authority is not there to control you).    Mrs. Conifil came into the room from the greenhouse and she told us to put on our goggles and get our dissecting trays ready and then she went back out to the truck.    We could hear screaming that sounded like babies crying coming from the truck.  She went out to Virgil and he reached into one of the open-topped crates and he pulled out a squirming little pink baby pig.   He had an awl in his hand and he firmly held the pig on the tailgate of the pickup truck.   He turned the pig on it’s back and he pushed the point of the awl into the head of the pig and the pig stopped fighting, and crying.   It laid limp and the farmer handed the lifeless pig to Mrs. Conifil.   She carried that pig to the first desk and she laid it in the students dissecting tray.   She went back to the farmer who was busy with his executioner tasks and he handed her two more freshly killed baby pigs.   She came back into the classroom and she gently laid one of the pigs into our tray.   Here was this warm little pink pig laying in our tray.   It had just died and it had a little blood coming out of its eye, and it was lying in front of us.   Carol left the room.   I don’t know where she went, but she was gone.   Mary and the many of the other girls were crying.   Most of the boys were in shock except for the morons who found some twisted humor in this massacre.   By the time each tray had it’s own pig, the crying from the pickup truck was silent but the crying from the classroom continued.    Mrs. Conifil paid the man and he drove his truck out to the parking lot and he disappeared down the dirt road.   I was pretty close to the window and it looked like she gave him three bucks.   Mrs. Conifil came back and told the class which included the crying girls, that these pigs could have suffered on a cramped farm while they were fattened up for someone’s dinner, or they could contribute to the development of our room full of future doctors, scientists and biologists.   We were to treat their sacrificed bodies with respect.   She handed out the instructions for the first cuts of the day and we began our dissection.   We named our pig Virgil and we began our undertaking.

This assignment to write about our own experience in a high school science class has a very ironic timing.   The evening that Sean brought home this assignment for the parents, his mom and I had just returned from Animal Feeds and Needs where we had gone to buy some dog food.   Someone had brought in a little baby pig that was found abandoned in Busse woods.  It squealed, cried and pouted as it ranted around in it’s little confinement.   The little baby pig was very upset.   When I saw that little pig, the first thing I thought about was the day I heard twenty crying baby pigs become silent in my high school science class.   I found out the other day that this little guy was sent to a children's petting farm.    

[Home] [Professional] [Family] [Drawings] [Stories] [The Man of the Ward] [Uncle Chuck's Plucks] [Chicken Rats] [Jimmy Two-pants] [My Vasectomy] [Homeless Man] [My Colonoscopy] [The Zen Master and Afondasia] [Who Moved My Toilet] [The Silence of the Pigs] [Contact] [Personal] [Events]