A Pig in Provence by Georgeanne Brennan

love, you’ll be fine. What a lovely mother you are. Such lovely little babies you have. Yes, you’ve done a good job.” He stroked Lucretia as he gently repositioned her so he could remove the dead babies from beneath her and push the others to safety in the corner. He stood up.
    “She’ll become calm in a little bit. There girl, now, now. That’s my girl. Yes,
chérie,
good job, good job. Lovely little babies. Yes, that’s right,” he cooed as he guided her down on her side, teats exposed. The little pigs scurried over, and after much scrambling and confusion, each attached itself to a teat and settled into quiet sucking. M. Gos and I added fresh straw to Lucretia’s bed.
    “Don’t feed her quite yet. If she sees food in the trough she’ll want to get up and might step on one of the babies. Wait a few hours.” We talked a bit more, and he gave Ethel a Malabar bubblegum, her favorite because it had a little comic strip inside. When Donald came home that night, he went immediately to Lucretia to feed her and to see the babies. One more was dead. Of the litter of fourteen, eight survived, one more dying a few days later when Lucretia stepped on it.
    Lucretia rapidly became a pet, and she responded to us just as I had seen M. Gos’s pigs respond to him. I, too, began talking to her, calling her sweet names, and spoiled her with treats like fallen pears and almonds that I gathered from abandoned trees. She loved the whey we fed her, and the bran, and soon her littlepiglets were lapping it up as well. They quickly grew into handsome creatures, and Donald performed the necessary castration on the males.
    “Got to do it,” M. Gos told us on one of his friendly inspection tours. “Otherwise, no one wants them. Their meat gets too strong.” Donald had performed the procedure frequently at Davis, so he was perfectly at ease when the time came to castrate our five males. I, on the other hand, was not. I did manage to fulfill my role as assistant with dignity as well as trepidation, and our perfect little pigs were soon ready for sale as feeder pigs.
    M. Gos sent several of his regular buyers to us. “Old Gos says these are good pigs,” said our first customer, an elderly farmer dressed in layers of brown clothes. As he leaned over the rails to look at the pen of little pigs, he explained his confidence in us. “Gos told me you bought the sow from him, bred her with his boar, and that you feed them whey from that goat cheese you make. That true? Got any of that cheese?” We sold him some cheese and two piglets. The rest of the piglets were soon sold as well, and shortly thereafter Lucretia visited the boar again.
    As winter approached we began to hear more and more about the coming
jour du cochon,
the day when the family pig is killed,
pâtés
are made, hams and bacon are salted, and a big feast, attended by family and friends who helped with the work, is held in honor of the occasion. In Provence, the
jour de cochon
is associated with Saint Antoine, Saint Vincent, and Notre-Dame, because their feast days fall from the middle of January to the beginning of February, the coldest time of the year, when the pig must be killed and the meat given time to cure before the weather warms. If not, the meat will spoil.
    Marie and Marcel Palazolli, tenant farmers of Italian descent who lived just up the road from us, were well known for thequality of their pork provisions, which they made from the succession of pigs they fattened each year.
    Everyone liked to harvest grapes for Marie and Marcel because of the lunches Marie, one of the best cooks I have ever known, served to the crew. Marie was short, with golden olive skin, dark hair kept short, and a rumbling laugh that began as a deep chuckle. She always wore an assortment of sweaters, vests, and caps or scarves, the type depending on the weather, and her hands were as creased and worn from hard work as Marcel’s. She looks just the same today, only her hair has a reddish