A Girl Named Zippy Read Online Free

beat the band. Just as Dave was about to slip a rope around the sow’s neck, she bent over and started running straight for Debbie. I’m talking about a missile-shaped, one thousand pounds of hard meat. With teeth.
    There was a moment of silence while all of us waited for the dreaded convergence of the twain. The pig was running flat-out, dead on. Debbie bent her fat little knees and held out her plank. She never blinked.
    The pig hit her in such a way that Debbie went flying straight up in the air, belly first, truly like a human weather balloon. She hovered for a second, and then came down, completely stiff, still clutching her barn board out in front of her. She landed in the mud with such force that it nearly buried her.
    I have never heard grown men laugh that hard. One by one they dropped to their knees, peeling off their seed caps and wiping their eyes of tears. All the while Debbie lay spread-eagled and stuck like an artifact, yelling, “You goddamned worthless idiots! Get over here and help! And where’d the goddamned pig go?!”
    The sow, completely forgotten, stood placid and perplexed in the middle of the barn lot, next to the old Marathon Jeep the chickens used to roost in. David Lee just walked over and roped her, all the while holding his side and repeating, “Oh, Lord. Whoo. Oh, man. Whooeee.”
     
    WE CARRIED LITTLE SAM in through the mud room, which was the size of most living rooms. It held two deep freezers and four or five saddles on saw horses, fourteen tons of strange farm implements, beautiful leather tack, and mud. On the wall was an old, poster-size photograph of Geronimo.
    We stole a clean towel in the laundry room, and had just laid Sam down on top of the heating grate when Debbie came in out of the kitchen.
    “What do you think you’re doing, bringing that pig into my house?” Her head was cocked to the side, and she had her fists balled up where her hips would have been.
    “We’re gonna save it from the dead baby pig pile, Debbie, and enter it in the Fair Parade, and take it to the farm we buy when we’re older.”
    “That pig better
not
shit on my clean towel, do you hear me, Julie Ann?”
    I looked up at Debbie with my most sincere Have A Heart face, but Julie just kept rubbing the piglet’s side. Finally she said, quietly, “Nowwww, Mom.” Debbie harummphed, and went back to the kitchen.
    Julie and I sat by the pig until late into the night, feeding it water from an eye dropper and keeping it warm. I told Julie many times how impressed I was by her compassion, which was not always in evidence, and how good and right I thought it was to try to save the Poor and Unfortunate Sam.
    “Mmm hmmm,” she said, with just the slightest upturn on the last syllable to let me know she agreed with me.
    Toward morning, exhausted by our lifesaving efforts, we fell into bed. We woke at the same time, and sprang up to check on our little charge. He was just as we had left him, but when Julie pulled back the receiving blanket it became clear, alas, that he was not breathing.
    I sat down hard with disappointment. “Oh, no,” I said, tearfully, rubbing his little pink belly.
    Julie said nothing, just picked him up and headed for the mud room door. I was grabbing my hat in preparation for the funeral when I saw her step outside and sling Sam by the back leg into Biz’s pen.
    I froze, aghast, my hat dangling from my hand.
    “Julie Ann Newman!” I said, nearly whispering with indignation.
    Julie stopped me with her hand on my arm. I have never in my life seen kinder or more sparkly eyes than hers, and every time she gave me the silencing look I realized how much she knew that I would never know. The arc of that piglet through the air into the dog pen contained more comedy than I will ever see again in my life, but my heart still ached. She didn’t laugh, and I didn’t cry.
     
    WHEN IT BECAME completely impossible for me to live without a pet chicken, my dad took me out to Tinker Jones’s,