The Piglet in the Melted Tar

The roadworks had stopped for the midday heat, and that is when we got the call. A flagger walking back to his post had heard a sound from the tar pool at the edge of the site, a thin squealing that rose and fell and rose again, weaker each time, and gone to look, expecting a bird.

It was a piglet, no more than a few months old, standing in the middle of a pool of road tar that the sun had melted soft. He had wandered off a smallholding beyond the fence line in the cool of the morning, and crossed the tar when it was still firm enough to lie to him. By noon it was not firm at all. All four of his legs were sunk and stuck fast in the black pool, and the tar had him the way deep mud has a calf, only crueller, because tar does not let go of what it touches. Every time he heaved, the tar stretched, held, and pulled him back, and settled him a little deeper.

He was screaming when we reached him, or trying to. The sound came out thin and hoarse and spent. His pink skin was black to the belly with tar. His eyes were half-closed against the glare off the black surface, and his whole small body trembled in long waves that the tar turned into slow, terrible ripples. He had been fighting it for hours, under a sun that was softening his prison and cooking him at the same time. Between efforts he stood with his head hanging, breathing in quick, shallow pulls, too exhausted even to squeal at our shadows.

You do not pull a living thing out of tar. That was the first rule, and the vet on the phone was plain about it: pulling tears, and force only seats the body deeper. Tar is freed, not fought. So we began by saving him from the sun, because the sun was doing two kinds of harm at once. Two of us rigged a shade tarp on poles over the pool, and the moment the shadow fell across him his trembling changed, easing from panic toward plain exhaustion. My partner laid boards at the pool’s edge so we could work close without stepping in ourselves and becoming part of the problem.

Then we worked the way the vet directed: warm water and plain vegetable oil, poured gently around each leg, a little at a time, to soften and slick the tar where it gripped him. I knelt on the boards and worked with my hands in the warm black mess, easing the tar away from his skin with my fingers, freeing one leg at a time while the others kept him calm and shaded. The tar came off in slow black ribbons. He did not fight us. A piglet with anything left fights everything. He only stood, eyes half-closed, and let strangers’ hands move around his legs, and that stillness frightened me more than the screaming had.

Three legs came free, one by one, each lifted clear and set down on a clean board we slid beneath him. The fourth, a hind leg, would not. The tar had wound around it in a thick cooled rope where the shade had not yet reached, and it held like a knot. The complication was that every small movement of his body, as the freed legs shifted his weight, tightened that last hold, and he began to sink again at the hip, slowly, the black surface closing over the freed side. We stopped freeing and started holding. My partner got both forearms under his chest and took his weight steady, neither lifting nor lowering, while I warmed more water and worked oil into the tar rope with my thumbs, softening it strand by strand, until it loosened all at once and the leg came free with a soft, sucking sound.

We lifted him out whole, then, all four legs clear, and laid him on clean sacking in the shade. He lay completely flat, black and gleaming and trembling, too weak to stand, his breathing slowing by degrees into something that sounded like sleep. At the site office the vet checked him carefully: no broken bones, no tearing of the skin, only tar worked into every fold of him, exhaustion, and the deep weariness of a small body that had fought a pool for hours. They cleaned him the slow way, oil and warm water and patience, a patch at a time, until the pink showed through again. By evening he was standing, stiff and indignant, and eating as if the day had merely made him hungry.

The smallholder who owned him came at dusk, having searched the lanes since noon, and the piglet heard her voice and found the strength to complain loudly at the fence between them. He went home in her arms, clean, oiled, and entirely unrepentant.

We named him Nhua — the Vietnamese word for tar. It seemed honest: the melted tar tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that roadworks site sometimes, when the sun stands high over unfinished roads and the black surfaces shimmer and soften at noon. I think about how a pool of tar can look like solid ground in the morning and become a trap by the time the heat stands over it, and how a small life can walk into it trusting the cool of the day. And someone happened to be walking back to his post at midday. And someone happened to stop at a thin sound most men would have blamed on the heat, and to look, and to call.