Luke 8:26-39
I never read of the Gerasene Demoniac without thinking of Miss Petunia, a sow we once owned. She had the indecency to die one very hot, Oklahoma July day, during my adolescence. She passed away in the sun-baked hoghouse, where she had retired to avoid the relentless sun of that arid summer. The hoghouse had never smelled very good while Miss Petunia lived. But by the time she had been dead for two days. . .well, it is too soon after mealtime to talk about it.
On the fourth evening of her death, it was clear that she would have to be removed, all 400 pounds of her, from the hoghouse. My brother-in-law, who owned the farm where I grew up, usually took care of things like this, but the July heat and the stench being what they were, he felt that God was leading me to be responsible for getting Miss Petunia out of the hoghouse. So, I muffled my face in a dish-towel and crawled up to the hoghouse door and peered in. I could only say, as Mary of Bethany once said, of her brother, Lazarus, "Lord, Lord, Lordy, she hath been dead for four days and she stinketh (John 11.39)." The old sow just laid there like an expired sumo wrestler, reeking and aswarm with maggots. I gagged, removed myself and tried to think: how does one get a four-hundred pound sow out of a hoghouse?
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I needed a miracle. I began praying for her immediate resurrection and ascension. But alas it happened not. So I went and got the tractor and a log chain. I backed the tractor up to the door of the hogshed, that putrid and en-maggoted orifice of hell, and crawled in. I prayed for Jesus to come and rapture me from the corruption. He came not. I prayed to die. I died not. I cursed my foul existence, scraped aside the maggots and wound the log chain first around Miss Petunia's massive 75 pound head. I then entwined it around one of her rotting flanks, just to make sure it didn't come off. I slipped the flattened link of the chain into the hook and crawled back out of the hoghouse. I got upon the tractor, started it and pulled her out of the shed. I drug Miss Petunia out into the middle of our pasture and unhooked the chain.
When I got back to the house, they wouldn't let me in. They burned my clothes. Some suggested that I should be thrown in the fire with my clothes. I washed, I brillo-padded my hands and steel-wooled my flesh. I dipped myself seven times in Abana and Pharpar, clear rivers of Damascus (II Kings 5.12); yet I was unwelcome in the house. Alas, there was nothing more to be done. So, I cried "unclean" and lived among the tombs until gradually, after frost, with the approach of winter, was I welcomed back into society.