This story was named notable by Best American Short Stories in 2012.  The story originally appeared in Santa Monica Review.

Slaughter

We owned the orchards, one hundred acres plus, Hammond and Son, ten miles east of Modesto, California. My father had inherited the fertile acreage from his father, and our family pretty much defined what it was to be a grower in the era just past, twenty-year-old Pinto Noir on the table but a dusty Chevy pick-up under the shade tree.

Blue Diamond, the packing company, sent out the irrigation specialist. He carried a magnetic rod he stuck into the furrowed land between the trees, and he used a caliper and Sony notebook computer to test the moisture content of the green, downy almonds as they matured in the Central Valley heat.

The packing giant also sent out the broker, a buxom woman named Danielle Richter, with a taste for tight fitting khakis. Dad liked talking to her, mom five years dead and nothing but satellite TV to go along with the diet root beer he preferred to drink. We both wore cowboy hats, my dad and I. I had been too slothful at my studies to do more than barely graduate from Waterford High, and Dad was permanently if gently disappointed in me..

But we both liked western hats. Mine was a Resistol rabbit felt, my dad’s was a Stetson, wide brim, double-XX. He looked good in it, and Danielle gave him a smile, liking the Stetson, and liking him along with it. Even I had a reluctant admiration for the way the way he put one finger to the brim in a lazy-on-purpose salute as the khaki-tailed broker made her way to the back porch. She said she wouldn’t mind a diet A & W, if that’s what he was pouring just then.

“Hugh,” he told me with a smile, “get the lady what she wants.”

I smiled right back, but I thought: I had to get out of there. Danielle was about my dad’s age, but she had one of those serene looks, no-makeup sexy.

“I got to get me a hat,” she said.

They agreed on a price based on demand for cocktail almonds, almond butter and world wide famine in general. Dad thought he was rounding out my education, watching him talk about Iranian pistachio nuts and medjool dates, but the truth was I was deeply disenchanted watching him slowly, and in my opinion prosaically, seduce the woman from the agro-business headquarters, with me wanting to get out of the farmland so badly I could feel the ache.

Plus, I was jealous. I had developed a crush on Danielle since her first visit to our orchard the year before, and I needed to make a move.

One of several interesting truths about almonds is that they are peaches without knowing it. The almond trees are sometimes grafted right onto vigorous peach stock. Sometimes an almond tree will produce slender offshoots that bear peaches, like alternate lives the tree seeks out.

The last months of that year hit me the hardest.

I was just those few months out of high school and feeling the fact that I was stuck, with no college in the future for me. I was right hand man to a man who did not need any more hands.

He and Danielle were getting serious, texting each other hourly by the looks of it, and calling each other at night. He was getting his hair cut in town every two or three weeks, and washing the pickup, and telling me to wax it up, so it would show the starlight when he parked by the American Canal with his sweetheart.

I was impressed but appalled, too, with me as celibate as a sea caption in the middle of arboreal plenty. Although even then Dad had that cough, the one that would take him, although we didn’t know it yet.

One day in November a high school buddy named Kevin dropped by in his Dodge Ram, the big sturdy van rumbling and hollow sounding, carrying a load of fence post for his uncle’s acreage down near Planada. He said he could not stand working for his uncle, a guy who believed that these were the End Times. Kevin had a connection to a meat packing plant in Oakland, and he said he was pretty sure he would finesse me a job, too.

“What does that mean?” I asked, “Meat packing?”

“They kill things,” he said.

Kevin was about as ill suited to post-high-school life as I was, but he had a no-nonsense quality I liked.

“Things?” I asked.

The slaughter house was on Oakland’s San Leandro Street, just south of the Fruitvale BART station. There was no sign on the outside of the business, just a railroad spur and a long row of shipping docks for the livestock trucks to unload.

The first thing that struck me was the speed of the place, pigs on the move. And the noise, men calling the livestock names and the swine sending out querying, desperate squeals. The first thing I decided was than none of it was going to bother me a bit.

And for a long time it didn’t

Hygiene did not seem to matter very much. All of us wore blue overalls, yellow waterproof aprons, and white hard hats. Blood got over everything--our hands, our arms, our faces, even the laptop that Ogee Santos, the shop steward and foreman, brought around. He used the computer to monitor the labor expense, among other factors, how well our piece rate fit in with the cost per hour it took to pay us. Everything got misted with red that dried fast and was hard to wash off.

When Kevin got fired, for being habitually tardy by the end of our first week, Ogee was the one who fired him.

“You are not laid off,” Ogee said. “You are gone.”

Kevin put his hands on his hips, his skin speckled with pig stuff. He shook his head at me in a non-apology.

“Gone,” he said, “sounds good to me.”

But he stayed right where he was for a moment, maybe expecting me to join him,

Kevin left that night for Planada to shore up cattle fences against the arrival of the Four Horsemen. When I sent him a text asking what was wrong he replied, simply, u no.

I did. But as yet, I was not letting myself think about it.

All the animals began their demise in what was called the in-take ramp. This was not a ramp so much as a large concrete area divided by metal fencing into an arrangement of pens. Before the livestock could act upon what they sensed must be an approaching appointment with horror, they were segregated off by the dozen. Pig-men with electrical prods kept the flow moving, as the individual pens decanted from one to another until the animals reached the stunning room.

That was where I worked, along with Kevin, before he got fired. And after him I worked with Stuart, a big guy who was trying to join the Coast Guard but wasn’t intelligent enough, and another man who replaced Stuart and would ultimately replace me, an experienced pig man named Cal, just out from Wisconsin. Cal had two children and a vigorous way of chewing huge wads of gum that made it look like an athletic event, sugarless, Double-bubble, it didn’t matter. He chewed, blew bubbles, stunned pigs.

Before each pig could be sure what was going to happen the animal received a jolt of electricity. This lightning was delivered through a pair of clamps, one on either side of the pig’s head. The jolt took place in a stunning box, a walled in area the size of the average kitchen which held routinely about a dozen animals at a time. I was an apprentice stunner at first, but I got good at it right away.

Twelve pigs were herded into the stunning pen. They urinated and snot flowed from their snouts. When I clamped the fitting over each head almost invariably the animal seemed aware of the change in this immediate future. His eyes closed, and his legs stiffened almost before the shock, as though he sensed what was happening, and wanted to get it over with right now.

When the electricity swept through them they fell to one side kicking, and this kicking made all the other livestock stiffen, startled and shocked beyond even their ordinary sense of alarm, snout to snout and rump to rump. We were supposed to hold the jolt-clamps to each pig for a minimum of seven seconds, but because of the speed required we gave them less than two seconds worth of amps each time.

When three or four animals were stunned, the shacklers fixed chains to their hind legs. The animals were lifted, still kicking and shuddering, by a mechanical conveyor into the concrete room where their throats were cut and the blood from the still beating hearts emptied out. Sometimes it was my turn to use the cutting knife, and I was good at that, too.

The hot tank awaited after the knife, a reservoir rich with blood where the creatures, sometimes still writhing, were elevated around the corner and let fall.

None of this bothered me at the time, and I kept it like that. I had an apartment off Foothill Boulevard, a studio with security bars on the window, and I was able to afford a Samsung flat screen TV, Bose headphones, and I ate Chicago-style pizza every night. I slept well, too exhausted to dream.

But nothing lasts.

One day the inspector for Cal OSHA and the woman from the Department of Agriculture arrived both at the same time, and despite what you hear, sometimes these inspections are a surprise.

“Slow down, Hugh,” Ogee said, so close to me our hard hats clicked together.

“Slow it is,“ I said, knowing how Ogee liked to be heard and understood.

But inwardly I was thinking that I did not know how to do all this anything but rapidly.

We slowed down, however, applying the legal seven seconds of current for each pig, but we were not used to this measured pace, and the pigs that day seemed to sense our awkwardness, milling and shrieking more than usual.

At first my calamity was routine--ragged, off-pace, but normal enough. I confronted a pig who went sideways on me, and I had to follow him around in a circle, matador fashion, bending over to fit the clamps over my adversary’s head.

The two inspectors were already freckled with pig, not blood so much as everything else, and they wore white coats as if to make the swine-soil look all the more shocking, and you could see at a glance that they did not like what they were seeing, a pig fighting back and me not knowing what to do.

I got scared.

For the first time since maybe the initial five minutes many weeks before the place had an emotional impact on me. This was my fourth month on the job. I had gotten two pay-raises and I was in my own mind a veteran, having sent thousands of animals into the hot water that finished-off even the most stubbornly alive.

But I hesitated. I did not know what to do, and the pigs chose that moment to raise a din that sounded like tires shrieking, wheels skidding, nothing in that place untouched by panic.

You cannot see the tusks on these livestock, but they have them, little nascent stubs that reside back in their jaws, remnants of what they used to tear around with when they were free in whatever wild forest bred them. This pig--my pig, I want to call him--attacked me like a beast trained for the part. He lunged at me, instantly and painlessly, leaving a puncture hole in my plastic apron, cutting me to the bone and opening me from knee to hip like the pages of a book.

I fell down, slipping on my own scarlet flow, and then, and only right then was I no longer afraid.

I was stunned. Stunned, and on my way to bleeding to death. But I knew at that instant how the almond tree feels growing right out of the stock of the mother peach, how it feels to be a tree and to be growing up into the sunlight..

And I did not wonder at this. I knew as surely as I breathed that in some way, in some common sense, openhearted way, not only do people and animals have souls, but trees and for all I knew electricity and concrete, too.

I can’t hold the vision in my mind anymore, the way I did then, but I was not afraid to bleed out right there on the slaughterhouse floor, Cal yelling, Ogee pulling the clamps out of my hands, naturally endowed endorphins flooding my body, preparing me for a blissful end..

I spent a week in Highland Hospital, with a room that overlooked Interstate 580, getting injections of Cipro and liberal shots of morphine. Ogee came to visit, and Kevin drove out to tell me about his born-again girlfriend. He wore a T-shirt that read Romans 16:16. My dad was already too sick to come to Oakland.

When I left the hospital, I went home to the orchards.

The first machine used in the harvesting process is the shaker.

This contraption drives right up to the stump of the tree, and it vibrates the tree. The shaking goes on as the nuts come flying off the branches, and patter on the ground.

A shaker can shake trees so hard that windows far off rattle, and you think to yourself how violent it all is. And I mean all of it: harvest, departure, and the eventual return, winter on its way.

After the almonds are all shaken hard to the ground they sit for about two or three days to dry, taking in the sunlight.

I like to go out then, like my dad did when he was alive, and kick my way though the downfall, enjoying the sight of all that plenty. Because it is less than a week before a windrower, a machine that rakes the harvest, sets it all in long columns so the crop can be gathered.

With people, the gathering takes time, cancer, illness, deep-core weariness. Often the human body heals, but sometimes there is an end to it all, and other times there remains a permanent hitch in the stride.

With trees, however, it all must be a joy. Crows show off, calling to each other, and human beings come and go.

Danielle moved north to Medford, Oregon, to work for Harry & David, the fruit company. The new buyer for the local packing house is a pretty, dark-eyed young woman named Amati, with an MA from UC Davis and no use for western-style hats or growers who wear them. At least not yet.

I ask her if trees have feelings and she answers, with a half-shrug, “I doubt it.”

“But maybe, right?” I suggest.

She humors me. She shrugs again, and smiles, a silent, Maybe.

And maybe not

I know what she means. Maybe they have feelings but don’t know it. Maybe the whole thing--acreage, animals, all of it--is a big living being that doesn’t know what’s coming, but begins to guess.