Hogzayden
by Christopher Stevenson
Author's Note: We’re reading A Manual for Cleaning Women for my library’s book club. I read “Macadam” and was struck by what the story said with so few words. One can unpack that story for centuries. Explicate like a poem. So many emotions. I’m not as talented as Berlin, but I wanted to try something similar. "Hogzayden" is creative nonfiction. This is A Manual for Grieving Sons.
At five years of age, I cried for Dad and I heard him say “Dad died in a bog’s haven.” So I imagined a place in marsh grass like Millais’ Ophelia, but made of green cornflake candy with trees of mallowbark. Harvested to make fluff spread on bread by knife.
Think of me eating sugar cereal with poppy garlands in my daydreams.
“No,” he insisted. And when he spoke again, I heard, “Hogzayden.”
So, I dreamt of gated pens full of swine oinking ballistic bleats, hiding from him as he woke in a coal bin in a cellar, for his teenage job at a local store, to pull pork from a roasted Duroc fit to feed a wedding party for centuries. Dreamt of his other job, delivering cream and butter for Linger Light, putting smiles on wives faces at six in the morning. And after punching out, stealing watermelons from people's yards and catching lightning bugs. Hair slicked into a ducktail impressing girls with an ear wiggle and saying, “How do you find a blind man at the beach? It’s not hard.”
Think of me wanting to be a buckaroo sow-boy riding into the hills of my imagination on my dad's youthful hopes.
On my sweet sixteen I finally asked him “What the fuck’s a hogzayden?” and he said he haven't a clue, repeating the phrase thrice. His eyes lit from my aural plight and his voice burped laughter, “Dad DIED and the hogs ATE him! Chopped him all up into little pieces and fed him chunk a chunk to starving piggies with long tusks whetted by a barber's strap.”
Think of me as more frightened than young me ever knew.
I say the phrase now in my middle age, and sometimes I alternate by growling, “There is no Chris, only Zuul,” answered by “Then whoever the hell it is in your body let him know someone wants him.”
And like my dad, to be wanted is my only wish in this short life.
Perhaps that’s why we say the murder-by-piggy phrase. To make people remind us we’re not alone. For me, it was a nasty habit I picked up at age thirty-two when on a drive across the Magnolia State, a lady heard me say the words my father taught me with my mother’s Southern drawl. She forced me to pull the car over, she took off my pants, and then she lost her own clothes.
“Chris died and the hawg’s ate’m!”
Think of me as my father’s son.
I turned forty-one and Dad invited me to hunt wild boars with my uncles in a Texas bog.
Cancer immobilized him so he canceled, but I still went and discovered my family’s worst fears in that Brazos River Basin swamp water: other men with guns.
We mostly posed with assault rifles as we all recovered up from a night of heavy drinking. When shots rang out, I grabbed my hair and pulled my scalp to hide the headache. A guide with a golf cart drove me to a sounder of razorbacks. I shot at one with my cousin’s 300 Blackout and missed and said, “No worries.” The guide panicked, pulled out a .45 and ran after it, scared to let it flee, leaving me alone in feral rooter cacophony.
Seconds later, a hog tried to eat me. I shot at the charging grunt with the AR but the weapon jammed, which I then called a useless piece of shit and threw on the ground. With seconds to spare, I picked up a blue Remington 700 an uncle left on the cart, prayed “May God have mercy on your soul,” squeezed the trigger and hit the critter between the eyes before it could maul my legs.
Think of me as the murderer of an innocent piglet protecting himself from an invasive species.
Think of me laughing and saying you absolutely cannot kill 30-50 feral hogs with an AR-15.
Think of me standing with ten men over wasted corpses.
Before my 48th birthday, Dad passed away and as far as I know, no swine devoured him. No sharp tusks broke his skin and crushed his bones.
He died of esophageal cancer.
Still, I’ve never forgotten Bog's Haven, that Elysium of my glacé childhood yearn and Hogzayden, the idyllic vision of my father's youth.
If I could make a wish, it’s that on the other side, he’s in the pig place playing with besties in West Pittsburg. Never going to Vietnam, never coming back wrecked and mean, never meeting mom, never marrying twice again, and never pulling a pistol on his last wife.
Forgoing life as a hermit.
Instead, let him work his days as a milkman or as a stock boy at his great grandpa's grocery.
Let him live a simple life and love the girl who enjoys his corny dirty jokes.
Think of me unborn but smiling as a stuck soul in The Guf Treasury binge-watching my father love his life.
Christopher Stevenson splits his time between DC and WV. He once won a ghost pepper eating contest. He is hard at work on a novel. He has two cats: Sacco and Vanzetti. Sometimes he makes horror movies with his sweetheart.
by Christopher Stevenson
Author's Note: We’re reading A Manual for Cleaning Women for my library’s book club. I read “Macadam” and was struck by what the story said with so few words. One can unpack that story for centuries. Explicate like a poem. So many emotions. I’m not as talented as Berlin, but I wanted to try something similar. "Hogzayden" is creative nonfiction. This is A Manual for Grieving Sons.
At five years of age, I cried for Dad and I heard him say “Dad died in a bog’s haven.” So I imagined a place in marsh grass like Millais’ Ophelia, but made of green cornflake candy with trees of mallowbark. Harvested to make fluff spread on bread by knife.
Think of me eating sugar cereal with poppy garlands in my daydreams.
“No,” he insisted. And when he spoke again, I heard, “Hogzayden.”
So, I dreamt of gated pens full of swine oinking ballistic bleats, hiding from him as he woke in a coal bin in a cellar, for his teenage job at a local store, to pull pork from a roasted Duroc fit to feed a wedding party for centuries. Dreamt of his other job, delivering cream and butter for Linger Light, putting smiles on wives faces at six in the morning. And after punching out, stealing watermelons from people's yards and catching lightning bugs. Hair slicked into a ducktail impressing girls with an ear wiggle and saying, “How do you find a blind man at the beach? It’s not hard.”
Think of me wanting to be a buckaroo sow-boy riding into the hills of my imagination on my dad's youthful hopes.
On my sweet sixteen I finally asked him “What the fuck’s a hogzayden?” and he said he haven't a clue, repeating the phrase thrice. His eyes lit from my aural plight and his voice burped laughter, “Dad DIED and the hogs ATE him! Chopped him all up into little pieces and fed him chunk a chunk to starving piggies with long tusks whetted by a barber's strap.”
Think of me as more frightened than young me ever knew.
I say the phrase now in my middle age, and sometimes I alternate by growling, “There is no Chris, only Zuul,” answered by “Then whoever the hell it is in your body let him know someone wants him.”
And like my dad, to be wanted is my only wish in this short life.
Perhaps that’s why we say the murder-by-piggy phrase. To make people remind us we’re not alone. For me, it was a nasty habit I picked up at age thirty-two when on a drive across the Magnolia State, a lady heard me say the words my father taught me with my mother’s Southern drawl. She forced me to pull the car over, she took off my pants, and then she lost her own clothes.
“Chris died and the hawg’s ate’m!”
Think of me as my father’s son.
I turned forty-one and Dad invited me to hunt wild boars with my uncles in a Texas bog.
Cancer immobilized him so he canceled, but I still went and discovered my family’s worst fears in that Brazos River Basin swamp water: other men with guns.
We mostly posed with assault rifles as we all recovered up from a night of heavy drinking. When shots rang out, I grabbed my hair and pulled my scalp to hide the headache. A guide with a golf cart drove me to a sounder of razorbacks. I shot at one with my cousin’s 300 Blackout and missed and said, “No worries.” The guide panicked, pulled out a .45 and ran after it, scared to let it flee, leaving me alone in feral rooter cacophony.
Seconds later, a hog tried to eat me. I shot at the charging grunt with the AR but the weapon jammed, which I then called a useless piece of shit and threw on the ground. With seconds to spare, I picked up a blue Remington 700 an uncle left on the cart, prayed “May God have mercy on your soul,” squeezed the trigger and hit the critter between the eyes before it could maul my legs.
Think of me as the murderer of an innocent piglet protecting himself from an invasive species.
Think of me laughing and saying you absolutely cannot kill 30-50 feral hogs with an AR-15.
Think of me standing with ten men over wasted corpses.
Before my 48th birthday, Dad passed away and as far as I know, no swine devoured him. No sharp tusks broke his skin and crushed his bones.
He died of esophageal cancer.
Still, I’ve never forgotten Bog's Haven, that Elysium of my glacé childhood yearn and Hogzayden, the idyllic vision of my father's youth.
If I could make a wish, it’s that on the other side, he’s in the pig place playing with besties in West Pittsburg. Never going to Vietnam, never coming back wrecked and mean, never meeting mom, never marrying twice again, and never pulling a pistol on his last wife.
Forgoing life as a hermit.
Instead, let him work his days as a milkman or as a stock boy at his great grandpa's grocery.
Let him live a simple life and love the girl who enjoys his corny dirty jokes.
Think of me unborn but smiling as a stuck soul in The Guf Treasury binge-watching my father love his life.
Christopher Stevenson splits his time between DC and WV. He once won a ghost pepper eating contest. He is hard at work on a novel. He has two cats: Sacco and Vanzetti. Sometimes he makes horror movies with his sweetheart.