The Piglet on the Raft

The flood took the village the way floodwater always takes a place, quietly and from underneath, until the lanes were channels and the houses stood in brown water up to their windowsills. We were working the village in the boat by mid-morning, lifting people and dogs and what could be carried, when the farmer waved us down from his rooftop and pointed out across the water with a hand that shook. Something of his was out there, he said. Something small, and still alive, the last he had seen of it.

It was his piglet, a few months old, and the flood had given him the strangest of boats. A wide wooden plank, torn from some fence or shutter, had come to rest under him as the water rose, and now it drifted and turned slowly in the current in the middle of the flooded lane, caught in an eddy that kept it circling the same drowned garden. He lay flat on the plank with his legs splayed, his small pink body soaked and dark with floodwater, his whole frame trembling in long waves that never stopped. He did not squeal when our boat came into view. His eyes were half-closed. He had screamed his voice away sometime in the night, and now he only rode his plank and shook, too frightened and too spent to swim for a shore that was not there. Every slow turn of the plank carried him past walls and rooftops an impossible distance from anything dry.

You do not rush a thing like that. A boat’s wash can swamp a plank, and panic can tip it, so we cut the engine early and came the last stretch on poles and paddles, keeping our water flat and our voices lower than the rain. I stood in the bow with the loop pole ready and a crate lined with sacking at my feet, and we eased in alongside his slow circle, matching it, the way you walk beside a frightened animal rather than toward it.

The water in the lanes was full of what the flood had collected: branches, buckets, a chair turning slowly, fence posts standing out of the brown surface like the tops of drowned gates. Twice we had to stop and push debris clear of the bow, and twice I looked back at the plank and made myself take the time anyway, because a plank that has held a life all night does not care about our hurry, and the eddy that kept him circling would keep him a while longer if we let it. The rain had thinned to a grey drizzle, and the whole village seemed to be watching from its rooftops in silence.

The complication came when we were nearly alongside. The plank, drifting on its lazy circle, caught on a submerged fence beneath the surface and tipped sharply, all at once, and the piglet slid across the wet wood to its very edge and hung there half off, squealing at last in a thin, hoarse burst, scrabbling at nothing. I got the loop pole out and caught him as he went, the padded loop settling under his chest, and I held him there against the plank’s edge, half in the water and half out of it, taking his small frantic weight on the pole while the boat closed the last of the distance. My partner leaned out and got both hands under him, and we brought him over the side together, plank, piglet and all nearly, and set him shaking in the crate where he lay down at once and did not try to rise.

At the relief point on the high ground the vet checked him over: no injuries, only cold through to the bone, filthy floodwater in his ears, and exhaustion of the kind that flattens a small body completely. She dried him, warmed him with towels and a heat lamp, and gave him warm fluids a little at a time, and slowly the great trembling eased into shivering, and the shivering into sleep. He slept the whole afternoon in the crate, and when he woke he ate as if eating were a job he had been kept from, and complained loudly between mouthfuls, which the vet said was the best sound a piglet makes.

We carried him up the slope to where the farmer’s family was camped on the high ground, in a hall above the waterline with half the village. The farmer took him out of the crate with both hands as if he weighed nothing and everything, and the children wrapped him in a dry shirt, and he lay in the middle of their blankets that night, dry for the first time in two days, while the water stood in the lanes below and the plank, wherever it had drifted, carried nothing more.

We named him Phao — the Vietnamese word for float. It seemed honest: the flood tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that flooded village sometimes, when the rains come heavy and the rivers rise toward their banks. I think about a plank of wood, torn loose and useless, becoming the whole world to a small animal, and about how long a night on turning water must be when you are a few months old and your voice gives out before your strength does. And someone happened to be standing on his rooftop at the right hour, scanning water he had already searched. And someone happened to refuse, one more time, to look away from a small flat shape turning slowly in a drowned garden.