Eat the Onion// J.T. Ruiter

I remember taking the family Remington at night and shooting the farm pig in the side of
the head—just outside the barn light’s reach. I killed it any other way I would have killed a normal pig. And like a normal pig, I buried it the same way. But I wouldn’t cover its head, and I refused to place its face in the dirt away from me. Instead, one of life’s most perplexing creations lay there: its snout protruded from its forehead like a lock of curled hair, its eyes so merged together they spilled over in opposite directions like that of a fish. The open chasm of its mouth left it with the expression of witless exasperation—a frozen scream. As I buried it, staring at it was my courageous way to pay homage, despite how repulsive it seemed. Because I refused to treat it any differently, on good faith that its soul was just as pure as the normal pig’s soul.

I had looked up at Dad the previous night under the barn light like, What’s next? But he shrugged at it. Said he’d talk to the veterinarian in the morning but knew well enough that the pig was a dud, both to himself and to us, so we did what we thought was the merciful thing.

But while heaving dirt on it, staring at it with the best stoicism I could muster, I accidentally burned each and every facet of that pig’s face into my brain. In my life, with flowerson wallpaper, wooden cabinets, wrap-around porches and great vistas of land—a town down the way, too—nothing like that pig fit in anywhere I looked. It didn’t come even close to the pigs auctioned off our thousand-acre estate.

Deformed. A cripple. And why were its hooves and body all slippery and moist, like maggots?

The next Monday, I asked Dad at the dinner table if the pig really was in pain. He looked at me, lowered his head and raised a single eyebrow like, What do you think? I still wanted to pay it homage. It was some young man’s dream to throw himself at his fears, but I thought of maybe if I hadn’t shot the thing in the face it—but instead faced the face—it wouldn’t bother me any longer. That after a while, I could call it friend. That we would give it a name, like Sherwood, and simply give him his peace. That maybe the whole town would become a friend to this pig—that maybe even the town would become famous for loving that pig.

I say this because it was just six months later, after countless nights of remembering it while laying in bed, that I met an older woman who was introduced to the family, our farm business, and the community. She was a nice woman who had moved from Rockwell. She had a face you would call pretty and a demeanor that would draw you in.

I think she was in her 50s. Her hips were big and she was paunchy but her long hair was often pulled back in a ponytail, revealing pointed cheekbones, a fine, square jaw. You could tell she was a knockout in her younger years. When we met she was just a fine woman. She worked as our farm secretary out of the auction house, part-time, helping us keep the books, answer phone calls, write letters.

One day, feverishly, she stopped to eat an entire onion like it was an apple at work. My mother cooed and tried to set her straight. Fixed her with a meal. When my mother asked why she didn’t pack lunch, she said, “I didn’t have the time.”

“But sweetie, you live alone, what else could you possibly be doing?”

“Making dinner,” she said. She was cooking Turkish goulash, forgot to bring it, and had brought nothing but an onion. I guess it was in the frenzied and panicked way she would tell you. It seemed like such a cathartic process for her that I don’t think she could perceive anything else in the room. The type of person, I guess, who would have conversations to no one under their breath in front of you.

Everyone talks to themselves too, but this was different. Your friends felt it was different. The whole town could feel it was different. Something in there was just not our way, and it was not the curse of an outsider.

I attended university, joined a fraternity, had a brother who worked in the city. My life and the town’s life was not some bubble. Affable businessmen came to my town in their 50s, leaving the city life behind. They’d have amassed a small fortune and an admirable bit of experience, and, opting for a quieter life, would start a small business here in something or other not yet established. It was the way the future got to my town. But the woman, who I shall call Shana, if she was from any segment of time, surely wasn’t from the future and definitely not the past. But maybe, it was the deep, deep past.

Probably too slowly did we come to learn that she was divorced and had two grown kids. She didn’t talk to her daughter anymore and worried constantly about her son, who himself had two kids. She wore these worries on her shoulder. Now, every decent man and woman was willing to help, but only so much as he or she could.

In church, she buddied up with what I like to call our “Hippie in Residence.” Her name was Denise, and she was thin with long gray-and-white hair and fine wrinkles around the edges of her lips. She was always leisurely slouching. A lovely woman, really. Every country town has their hippie who is not in disharmony with the community. Denise would be our farmhand from time to time, too, and would playfully try to convince us to go vegetarian. “But damn, if I don’t want some steak from time to time,” she’d say.

Once, after having a swig of some bourbon with her at dusk while working, she told me about Shana’s attempts to reconcile with her family.

“Oh, she’s been trying for years,” Denise said, closing up the pen. “Her daughter Tara wants nothing to do with her anymore. And her son, Adam, is the same. That relationship is fraying, and she with it. Seems like it’s been this way for years, maybe decades. She just can’t seem to commit to them. She often talks about the depression that’s haunted her whole life. She calls it her ‘black salamander.’ ”

“Hasn’t she done anything?” I said.

“Tons. She’s seen every which doctor from here to the coast. Tried healthy eating and exercise, too. Meetings and medications.”

“Is she on anything now?”

Denise paused and heaved the grain atop the truck bed. “I think. But the depression, it always comes back. How’s she at work?”

“Good.”

In truth, she was unreliable. But my father didn’t really want to shove her off. Some days, she wouldn’t come in for hours and when she did it was with a patchy excuse. My uncle had no patience for it. “Can’t she pick up after her own damn self?!”

Dad and I tried to reach out. Asked her what we could do. She’d say nothing, and then talk about her problems. Talk about her son, who wouldn’t talk to her.

Once, it was just her and I, and I asked her, “Why won’t he talk to you anymore, Shana?”

“Because I’m crazy,” she sighed. “It’s always been that way.”

I decided to show up one afternoon at the house she rented on our family farm estate to see if there was more I could do. It was a small two-bedroom home that had all the amenities and a great deal of land around it. I brought some of the chocolate chip cookies my mother had baked.

Shana was on her back porch, looking agitated, maybe even shaking, but she invited me to sit down. No one was more effusive than she was at times. She made me tea and her interest in me was so genuine that I felt myself blushing. For a second there, I thought she wanted to sleep with me. Honest to God, I thought I could’ve had sex with her. But it wasn’t me she wanted to have sex with, it felt like. It was like it was the attention I was supposed to represent or something.

So Shana went off about her litany of problems.

“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “Instead of finding happiness, why don’t you let happiness find you? Just take a seat, relax. Enjoy life. You’re not supposed to be anywhere.

There are no ‘shoulds’ or ‘should-nots.’ Just come and be with us. With everyone in town.”

As far as I knew, besides Denise, I was the only one to visit her with the intentions of really rolling up their sleeves to help.

“Did you know this isn’t the first town I’ve been to?” she said. “I’ve been to others. I always keep hopping around. The last one I had a boyfriend at. I was happy, but he left me. You tell me to rest. I can’t rest. Not even finding my son will help me rest. Not even my daughter.”

“Maybe give it some time. A good deal of time.”

“He and I haven’t talked in 15 months.” she said, not listening.

I sighed on the inside. Everyone has problems. Like my cousin, and his drinking. Like that pig. My uncle had told me she was a hopeless case at the last Sunday dinner. And my Dad grunted, agreeing.

Shana looked out into the wild, uncut grass of her lawn. The gnats roamed furiously in the dimming sunlight and an unseen cow bayed in one long mooooo. It was like that for some time, and then I saw Shana smile. A real smile. And I thought I knew what it was, but it scared me. I never saw such happiness in my life.

“Would you like me to leave?”

“No,” she said.

So I sat there on the porch beside her—trying to stay quiet, trying to focus on the peaceful atmosphere around us—uncomfortable. Her ear-to-ear grin was radiating. Like, overflowing. I saw tears stream down her face.

Maybe, if we were pagans, we’d create a god with the face of that pig I killed, to pay honor to what’s execrable in existence. And that haunting specter could taunt us in our love. Could sober us in our joy. And to ensure it was never forgotten, we’d all get together and occasionally make sacrifices to it.

I guess the right to die doesn’t seem so unusual in today’s world.

Mary Lou Kayes, from in town, said she had heard from one of her highfalutin cousins in California that an acquaintance had ended their life when countless plastic surgeries left them looking beastly.

We held the funeral at St. Andrews Presbyterian. The place was so full, I was proud of my town. No one spoke anything about her impossibility to work with. The reception was held adjacent to the church in a linoleum tiled floor, where there was a kitchen and, I presumed, the daily meetings for alcoholics anonymous. There was no furniture except the metal fold-out chairs, and those were being put away. Most everyone had left. I was sitting down, spitting my tobacco dip in a Styrofoam cup, thinking about it all when I l saw a perfect little ant between my two feet. How far it was from its colony. And how did it know how to get back? Around it was nothing but linoleum—an endless sea of flat, white tile. How absurd. What a nightmare situation to be in.

I named it Jackson.

J.T. Ruiter is a Florida resident and former metropolitan journalist with bylines in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Sentinel. His fiction has appeared in The Metaworker, Dumbo and Idle Ink. While now settled with his wife in the Sunshine State, he fondly recalls his time as a journalist under the shadow of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and wonders on quiet nights how he’s ever going to get back to that happily unhappy time.