Miss Petunia was a sow we once owned. One very hot July, during my Oklahoma adolescence, our old sow died in the hoghouse. The hoghouse had never smelled very good when Miss Petunia Was alive, and by the time she had been dead for two days -- well, you really don't want to know about it.

On the fourth evening of her death, it was clear that she would have to be removed, all four hundred 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. 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, reeking and swarming with maggots, just laid there like an expired sumo wrestler. I gagged, removed myself and tried to think how does one get a four hundred pound sow out of a hoghouse.

I needed a miracle. I laid my hands on the TV during a Robert's telecast but nothing happened! I began praying for her immediate resurrection and ascension. My prayer life during those years was not all that effective. 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 seventy-five 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 dragged Miss Petunia 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 (2 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. Only gradually, after frost, with the approach of winter, was I welcomed back into society.

The event has marked my life. I rarely eat pork. I don't even eat bacon-burgers. I fully understand the Levitical taboos against swine. I only eat things that divideth not the hoof and they must chew the cud a little (Lev. 11:3). When Antiochus profaned the Great Temple of Israel, he did it by offering a pig in sacrifice on the temple altar. Judas Maccabeus had apparently also once had to get a dead sow out of the hoghouse for it is still called the Abomination of Desolation (Dan. 11:31). The Levites knew that nothing smelling as bad as Miss Petunia smelled can ever bless the life. Only those can freely taste a pig who have never confronted a dead one in a hot July hoghouse.