Did You Ever See A Hog Fly?

When I was attending high school, it was my job upon return from school to do chores. One of those chores was to feed hay from the hayloft. In 1939, my Dad, Charley J. Watson, built a 42'x60' barn. He did just as he had long discussed: Dad put in a flight of steps just like those over at the county courthouse.

Now these steps led from the ground floor into the hayloft. Another feature of the barn was a double door at the east end of the loft. These doors were each 6' wide and 8' high. The two doors side by side could open or close the 12' wide opening. The distance from the loft floor was about 8' straight down to the ground.

At first, before a door was installed at the bottom of the steps, animals could climb those steps into the loft. The first one to do so was a horse. We caught, bridled, blindfolded, and led the horse down the steps to safety.

A milk-cow belonging to Will Lockhart, a tenant farmer on the place, got up into that loft and fell through a hay feeding slot in the loft floor into a hay rack on the lower level. Will and I released the cow by taking the hay rack apart. The cow was skinned up rather badly, but she got over the fall.

One day when I came home from school and proceeded to feed hay, I climbed the stairs and saw about a dozen and a half hogs in the loft. They had found some shocked corn toward the back of the loft. The back being the end opposite the big double doors. If you should not know, shocked corn is corn stalks, with ears, chopped down and placed in a shock until dry. The hogs were into those ears of corn and having a feast.

Well, this shouldn’t be. A fifteen year old with mature judgement must do the responsible thing. And that thing was to get those greedy hogs out of that corn as quickly as possible. The method I reasoned out with my now grown-up savvy was to walk to the middle of the hayloft floor and yell, “Sooey!” The hogs had not seen me, but when I yelled they looked up truly startled.

If you think those hogs lined up single file and marched back down those steps, you know little about a hog. Those hogs reflected for just a moment and headed spellbound for the daylight which was at the 12' opened door at the opposite end of the loft. The one 8' above ground. With some fifty feet of running distance, the hogs left the threshold of that door opening with a speed of at least 25 MPH out into space. I could hear the hogs hitting the ground.

Did you ever see a hog fly? I ran to the door to see the last few as they left the threshold. Each hog would strike the ground, with a thud, after appearing to fly through the air for about thirty feet. Fortunately there was a six inch depth of mud mixed with old straw at the place where the hogs landed. All hobbled off except one larger male that drug off down the hill.

A few days later, Dad found the one male dead beside the wet-weather brook at the back of the small pasture. He noticed that other hogs had something wrong with them and wondered if cholera was invading his herd. I said nothing. That winter as we sat at the table eating a rib or other parts of the hog with the bone in it, Dad would observe that this year’s crop of hogs had the most broken bones that he had ever seen. I said nothing.

I went to fight WWII, served in the Army in Europe, and after about two years came home. Shortly after I came back, Dad and I were sitting before the fireplace talking. I said, “Dad I think it’s about time I told you about what happened to your hogs.” When I finished he replied, “I should yet get a stick and beat you.” I moved out of the room to a safer place.

This was written by Roy C. Watson on September 5, 1993 at Jackson, Mississippi.