James ate every meal after that on the bottom step. It became a habit, but a hated one. He had never noticed before, but Mother often spoke too softly to be heard from any distance, and Billy and Mark always made their nasty comments under their breath. So they would start laughing, often at James’s expense, and he couldn't defend himself because he didn’t know what they had said. He couldn't even hear Mother saying "Now, be nice to you little brother, boys.”

After a week or two, most of the time, he didn’t even try to listen to the rest of the family’s conversation. But even he was curious that hot July day when the letter arrived about the pigs.

Billy brought the mail in that day from the mailbox at the crossroads a mile away. James had never seen them, of course, but Billy and Mark had told him there were three mailboxes there, one for each of the families that lived on their road. People usually didn’t have mail boxes just outside their homes but instead a whole block would have one at a common place.

Usually the Carters' mail was just bills or thin envelopes carrying curt orders from the Government about how much corn to plant, which fertilizer to use, where to take when it was harvested or another brain washing propaganda of the Government, of that’s what Dad says.

A letter from a relative was a cause to celebrate and Mother always dropped whatever she was doing and sat down to open it with trembling hands, calling out loud at intervals,

“Oh, Aunt Effie’s in the hospital again….”

Or,

“Tsk, Elisabeth’s going to marry that fellow after all…”

James almost felt like he knew his relatives, though they lived hundreds of miles away and he hasn’t even seen them. And, of course, they didn’t even know he existed. The letters Mother wrote back painstakingly, late at night, when she’d saved up enough for a stamp, contained plenty of news of Billy and Mark, but never once Mother mentioned James’s name.

This letter was as thick as some James’s grandmother usually sent, but it bore an official seal, and the return address was embossed on the letter.

Billy held the letter at arm's length, the way James had seen him hold dead baby pigs when they had to be carried out of the barn. Dad looked worried the minute he saw the letter in Billy’s hand. Billy put the letter beside Dad’s silverware. Dad sighed.

"Can't be anything but bad news,” Dad spoke in a low voice.

“No use ruining a good meal. It can wait"

He went back to eating chicken and dumplings. Only after his last belch did he turn the envelope over and run a dirt-rimmed fingernail under the flap, He unfolded the letter and,

“It has come to our attention…” he read aloud. "We understand it” Then he read silently for a while,

calling out at intervals, "Mother, what's 'offal'? and that dictionary? Billy, look up 'reciprocity'. "

Finally, he threw down the whole thick packet and proclaimed. “They're going to make us get rid of our hogs."

“WHAT!?” Billy asked. More serious than Mark, he had talked for as long as anyone could remember about, “When I get my own farm, it's going to be all hogs, I'll make the Government let me do that, somehow…”

Now he looked over Dad's shoulder. "You mean they're just going to make us sell a lot at one time, right? But we can build the herd back up……"

"Nope,” Dad said. "Those people in them fancy new houses won't be able to stand pig smell. So we can't raise hogs no more."

He threw the letter out into the center of the table for all to see.

"What'd they expect, building next to a farm?”

From his seat on the stairs, James had to hold himself back from going to fish the edge of the letter out of the chicken gravy and looking at it himself.

"They can't do that, can they?" he asked.

Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. James felt like a fool for asking as soon as the words were out of his mouth. For once, he was glad of his hiding place. Mother twisted a dishrag in her hand.

"Those hogs are our bread and butter," she said. "With grain prices the way they are...what are we going to live on?”

Dad just looked at her. After a moment, so did Billy and Mark. James didn't know why.