A Yoke Built for Two | A Dead Hog, a Shovel, and a Fifteen-Year-Old - I Believe | Lyssna här

May in Missouri. Warm, not hot like it will be in July. Humidity in the air, mist at the bottom of the hill hiding the green grass.

Bright white gravel under tires. He opens the passenger door. He is fifteen. His grandma drove him.

The Oldsmobile idles behind him until the screen door opens and a man comes out. Then she pulls away.

The man is the rancher’s son. Sixty years old, maybe more. His truck is running in the yard.

“You eat breakfast?” he says. Then, “Dad’s in the hospital. Nursing home after that, probably. He won’t be coming back to this.”

The house first. Old, white, small, on top of the hill. A garden plot on the side, a shotgun sitting by the door nearest the garden. Dogwoods and oaks, leaves out full now. One level. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room. Clean. The beds made tight with homemade quilts. Glass jugs on the floor by the kitchen door. “Dad’s corn whiskey,” the son says. The boy can eat lunch in here if he wants. Running water. The well is outside.

A newspaper picture in a frame on the side table. Five generations. A new baby, and a great-great-grandmother still alive to hold him.

“That’s my mom,” the son says. “Holding the baby. That picture is ten years old now.”

Then the work. Build a cattle corral and an alley good enough to back a trailer in and load. Stay out of the old smokehouse. It’ll fall down any day now. One of those sheds needs knocked down before it falls down, you can use the tractor to help. The chicken coop needs cleaned out. Probably hasn’t been since Mom passed. Most of the perimeter fence needs checked. Water tanks sorted.

The truck is still running.

The son looks at his watch. Plenty to do.

“But there’s a job that needs done before all that.”

He points down past the pens, to a hog lot at the bottom of the slope. There’s a dead hog in it.

“Drag it down the hill and bury it,” he says. “Shovels are in the shed. Twenty years ago I’d have dug it myself.”

He shakes the boy’s hand. The truck backs around and goes down the drive and the sound of it fades and then it’s gone.

Quiet after that. Wind in the oaks. A rooster somewhere below.

Act I. The Hog Lot

He doesn’t start with the hog. He walks the place first, down the hill and through all of it, to get eyes on everything.

The corral isn’t started. The materials are already there, stacked and waiting. Old railroad ties. Cattle panels. Each tie has a mark on it, showing how deep to set it.

The smokehouse is tall and narrow. He’s never seen one before. A fire pit dug in the dirt floor with a simple metal ring, chains hanging overhead. He doesn’t go in.

The chicken coop is full of old bedding, gray with dust. Hornets have built above the door. He’ll have to take care of that.

One of the water tanks is dry. Wolf spiders in the bottom, big ones. He throws a rock in and they scatter, but they can’t jump out of the tank.

An old blue Ford tractor sits by the shed. Small. It doesn’t have a bucket to dig, and even if it did, he doesn’t know how to use it. He’ll have to learn. Shovels inside, and a manual post hole digger leaned in the corner.

The pigs and chickens are closest to the house. Cattle beyond. The fields run out to meet wooded hills. Forty acres. A big pond on the far end you can barely see from the house, a smaller one tucked in by the woods. The cattle are moving through the field toward water, and he watches them go.

He’s put it off as long as he could and another hour longer. He walks to the hog lot. A short metal hog house, small doors on each end.

The hog is dead in the far corner. Big. On its side. The flies rise off it when he comes near and settle again. No mark on it that he can see. No telling what killed it.

The son didn’t say how it died. He said drag it down the hill and bury it.

He takes hold of a hind leg above the hoof and pulls. It moves about a foot across the metal grate floor, the hide loose over the bone in his grip. He lets go and stands there. The air in the hog house is close now. He takes hold again.

It’s downhill. That’s the one thing going for him. He pulls and rests and pulls. The hog gathers grass and dirt ahead of itself. The flies come along. When he stops he can hear them. When he pulls he only hears his breath.

He drags the hog under the wire fence. At the bottom of the hill he picks a spot away from the ponds, where the ground looks soft.

Nobody said where. Nobody said how deep.

The first foot is topsoil and goes easy. Then the shovel rings. Rock. He works around it, pries it, lifts it out. There’s another one under it.

The afternoon goes like that. Ring, pry, lift. His hands blister. He walks up to the well, finds some gloves, has a drink and comes back down.

He stands in the hole and thinks about how deep is deep enough. Shallow, and something digs it up. Coyotes, or dogs from the next place over. Then it’s all to do again, and worse. He keeps digging.

The light goes long across the field. Whippoorwills call from the trees.

Gravel at the top of the drive. Headlights swing across the field and stop. The Oldsmobile sits up by the house, lights on, pointed down the hill at him.

She doesn’t honk. She waits.

He drags the hog to the edge and tips it in. It lands heavy. Filling the hole goes faster than digging it. He mounds the dirt over and stands there a minute in what’s left of the light.

Then he carries the shovel up the hill toward the headlights.

That night there’s supper, and dishes, and then she asks. What were you doing out there tonight? He tells her.

“Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off of it?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

They never talked about it again.

Act II. Corral and Alley

The next morning he starts on the corral.

The railroad ties outweigh him. He can’t carry one, so he tips them end over end to where they need to go.

The ground is the same ground he dug the grave in. Ring, pry, lift. Each tie has its mark. He digs until he thinks it’s deep enough, then tips each tie into the hole, lifts it out again, and digs some more until the mark disappears. He tamps the dirt back in layers, and pulls on the tie with his whole weight. It doesn’t move. He does the next one.

Whoever marked the ties isn’t there to ask.

His hands ache and cramp for ten days until they get used to the work.

He learns the tractor in the yard. The throttle is steady, and his foot coming off the clutch is not. It lurches and rocks and then it doesn’t.

He cleans the old bedding out of the chicken coop, swinging the spring door open and shut, and a hornet stings him in the ear. He buys hornet spray, empties it into the nest, knocks it off the coop with a fence post, and only gets stung the once. He cleans the coop down to the boards.

The shed comes down easy. The tractor pushes and the frame lets go at once. He drags the boards clear and stacks what’s worth keeping. It’s good work and it goes fast. The son comes out one day and asks what happened.

It was the wrong shed.

He spends weeks walking the perimeter fence and fixes what needs fixed. At noon he takes his boots off and eats in the kitchen, standing up. The house stays clean.

In late June he turns sixteen. He passes the test in town, and after that he drives himself out in the mornings. There’s a last morning she drives him. Neither of them marks it.

After that the mornings are his. He drives the Oldsmobile out himself, plays Metallica too loud the whole way. His grandma hates Metallica. Some evenings he drives to the next town to see a girl he met.

Alone, afternoons drift. He is sixteen. He daydreams. Some days he gets less done than he should, and nobody says anything about that either.

The cattle get checked every day. By the end of July the corral stands, ties to the mark, panels hung, an alley wide enough to back a trailer in. He would be home for football camp in August.

In the fall they sold the animals. The cattle went up the alley the boy built, into a trailer, and down the drive. They leased the ground to a neighbor. The boy went home, back to school.

The old man never came home.

Act III. Jennies

Two summers later.

Jerry and the boy ride in Jerry’s F-250 to the local college. Jerry is a rancher who needed another ranch hand.

Jerry is more than a rancher. He teaches economics at the college full time, with summers mostly off, and he lays carpet and linoleum in his spare time. He hates the flooring work. He does it if the money’s good, or if he likes you.

This job is at the college, and the money’s good. Industrial carpet in a dorm. Take out the old carpet, scrape and clean the floors, put in the new.

They set up in the gym. Huge rolls of new carpet, and the boy carries them by himself. The boy brings in the radio.

The college cheerleaders come in for practice. The Jennies. Three of them watch him carry a roll all the way across the gym. Then Garth Brooks comes on the radio, “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” and they start dancing, and they sing along.

He’s seventeen.

The old carpet comes out first. The boy cuts it loose and rolls it and carries the rolls out. Jerry tells him how the floors go: sweep, then sweep a second time. Every time you sweep again, you find something you missed.

The boy sweeps a room and calls it clean. Jerry sweeps it behind him and holds out his hand. Two staples and a chip of tile. He doesn’t say anything.

The boy sweeps the next one twice.

The boy is fast and thorough, but Jerry works most jobs with him the first time he does one. After a few rooms they have a system. Jerry measures the cleaned rooms and marks the new carpet. The boy cuts on the marks, carries the carpet down the hall, and lays it out nearly finished. Jerry follows behind and makes the last cuts, and that room is done.

The last cut at every doorway is Jerry’s. He kneels at the metal strip, sets the knife, and makes one pass. The edge lies flat. The boy watches how he holds it, where his weight is, what his off hand does. Jerry goes the speed he goes, whether the boy is watching or not.

The rooms go by. Measure, mark, cut, carry, lay, finish. Music from the gym comes down the hall all afternoon.

At the end of the day Jerry walks every finished room. He toes a seam. He presses a corner with his boot. He stands in each doorway, looking at the floor.

“Good,” he says.

They load the truck in the dark.

Jerry put him on for as much as he could work. Summer and winter both.

Tomorrow the work is hay and fences.

Postscript

Thank you for spending this time with me today.

The entire story you just heard is true, as close as memory gets. The ranch is real. Forty acres in Missouri. The mist, the shotgun by the garden door, the corn whiskey by the kitchen door. The hog and shovel are real. The railroad ties really came with a mark showing how deep. The wrong shed really came down. The Oldsmobile is real. The dancing Jennies are real, and so is “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Jerry is real. His name is really Jerry. Sweep, then sweep a second time. That’s what he did, job after job.

The five-generations picture is real too. I never knew who the baby was.

I did omit a key detail. I was the boy. Fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. The old man in the hospital was my great-grandfather. He lived to be near ninety-five. The man with the running truck was his son, my great-uncle. My grandpa had passed, so my great-uncle paid my wages to my grandma. And the woman in the Oldsmobile, who waited with her lights on while I finished in the dark, was my grandma. I lived with her that summer and took care of the ranch until the family could figure out what to do with it.

What they figured out was to sell the animals. The cattle left through the corral I built. Years later, when my great-grandfather died, the family offered to sell me the land. I was a young man. I didn’t have the money. It sold to someone else and isn’t in the family anymore.

One more thing for the ledger. The whole truth. The same summer I buried that hog, I left the ranch for two weeks. For some reason I still don’t know, the state sent me for proctored IQ and ACT tests and called me gifted, and there was a program for kids like that at the University of Missouri, where I’d go to college a few years later. Make a note of that, not because it’s important for me, but because we’ll need it in a minute for the philosophy.

Now the question.

A political philosopher named Michael Walzer wrote a famous book about justice, and in it he took a hard look at the work nobody wants. Dirty work. Degrading. And he made a claim: When people gain the power to refuse that kind of work, that’s a sign a society is succeeding. Somebody complains the welfare state made people unwilling to take certain jobs? Walzer says good. That was the point.

Let’s hear that again. His premise, regarding work, is: The power to refuse degrading work is the measure of success.

I’ll be fair to him first. Some people might refuse the work because they believe a yoke must be difficult. But mostly they refuse because it’s hard and it pays badly and nobody thanks them. That’s not weakness. It’s just the math.

And I’ll be fair to the economists too. They’ll tell you that early hard work doesn’t make the man. The kid who works young and rises was usually the kid who already had advantages, and the work gets the credit. Believe them. You just heard about my two weeks at the university. I was that kid. If this story claimed the shovel made me, it would be a lie.

So what’s true?

Nobody told me how deep to bury the hog. Nobody checked. I worked on the ranch the rest of the summer and never checked. I didn’t want to know. My grandma asked the only question anyone ever asked about it. Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off? I said I don’t know.

Thirty-some years on, I still don’t.

The railroad ties came with a mark. Some man who wasn’t there set that standard, and it held long after he couldn’t come check it. But here’s what I learned about marks. A mark can tell you how deep. It can’t show you how. Alone, a boy guesses. Sometimes he guesses right and nobody ever knows. Sometimes he knocks down the wrong shed.

Jerry showed me how. Jerry worked the first day of every new job beside me. Jerry marked, and I cut on his marks, and he made the last cut at every doorway, and at the end of the day he walked every room. And I think about who Jerry was. An economics professor with a ranch of his own. The man with the most choices in the county spent his summer days on his knees in a dorm hallway. He had every power Walzer measures. Every power to refuse. He did the work if the money was good. Or if he liked you.

There’s another philosopher, John Rawls, and he asked a different question than Walzer did. Walzer looked at the hard work and asked who should have to do it, and what we owe the ones who do. Rawls said decide the rules before you know, because time and chance happen to us all. Decide the rules before you know whether you’re born the professor’s kid or the kid whose family is selling the ranch. Then tell me what’s fair.

Rawls asked the better question. Because you don’t know. You don’t know if you’re the boy with the marks or the boy without them. And nobody can honestly answer “nobody should have to dig.” The hog doesn’t care about our philosophy. The hog is dead and somebody has to bury it and the tractor doesn’t have a bucket. Somebody has to dig. When we gain the power to refuse the work, the work doesn’t disappear. It moves to whoever can’t refuse it, and we agree not to look.

So here’s my answer, and I don’t agree with Walzer. The measure of a society isn’t how many of us escape the work. It’s who climbs down into it on purpose, and who they bring with them.

Scripture says, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Something to note about that verse. The Greek word translated easy does not mean effortless. It carries the sense of something kind, good, or useful. Early Christians described Christ’s yoke as one that does not bruise the neck of the person carrying it. The burden is still a burden. But the yoke is easy, and the burden is good.

And a key point: a yoke is built for two. For Christians, that might mean the Almighty is on one side of the yoke.

In old agriculture, you pair a green animal with a seasoned one. The seasoned one carries the weight and sets the pace, and the young one learns the pull without being crushed by it. The burden never gets lighter. It gets shared.

I stood in my first yoke alone for a summer. It worked out for me. You now know some of the reasons why, and they don’t have much to do with the shovel. For most kids standing alone, the numbers say it doesn’t work out.

So here’s the ask. Be the one who chooses the work. The dirty job, the hard job, the one you’ve earned the right to refuse. Choose it in front of your kids, and teach them to choose it too. Not because suffering is holy. Because it’s work that needs done, and doing it next to someone is how people get made. Somewhere near you is a green kid. Don’t wait for a program to save them. A program can’t hold the other end of a yoke. Mark the cut. Stay in the room.

My great-grandfather’s ranch is still out there, but it’s not in the family anymore. The corral too, as far as I know.

And the grave? I never went back to look. It never stank. I never saw a coyote.

But they mostly move at night.

Sources

Philosophy

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983, Chapter 6, “Hard Work.” My copy from Apple Books.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press, 1971; rev. ed. 1999.

Scripture and Language

“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28–30, King James Version.

Lincoln H. Blumell, “Is Jesus’s Yoke ‘Easy’? Reconsidering the Translation of Chrēstos in Matthew 11:30.” BYU Studies 65, no. 1 (2026): 6–36.

Labor Economics and Mobility

Christopher J. Ruhm, “Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment?” Journal of Labor Economics 15, no. 4 (1997): 735–776.

V. Joseph Hotz, Lixin Xu, Marta Tienda, and Avner Ahituv, “Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?” Review of Economics and Statistics 84, no. 2 (2002): 221–236.

Charles L. Baum and Christopher J. Ruhm, “The Changing Benefits of Early Work Experience.” Southern Economic Journal 83, no. 2 (2016): 343–363. An earlier version appeared as NBER Working Paper No. 20413, 2014.

Jared Ashworth, V. Joseph Hotz, Arnaud Maurel, and Tyler Ransom, “Changes across Cohorts in Wage Returns to Schooling and Early Work Experiences.” Journal of Labor Economics 39, no. 4 (2021): 931–964.

Thomas Le Barbanchon, Diego Ubfal, and Federico Araya, “The Effects of Working While in School: Evidence from Employment Lotteries.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15, no. 1 (2023): 383–410.

Raj Chetty et al., “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility.” Nature 608 (2022): 108–121.

Work and Identity

Blake E. Ashforth and Glen E. Kreiner, “‘How Can You Do It?’: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity.” Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 413–434.

Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Youth Labor Law and Agricultural Safety

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Hazardous Occupations Orders, 29 C.F.R. Part 570.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #40: Overview of Youth Employment (Child Labor) Provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act for Agricultural Occupations.” Revised December 2016.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Child Labor Regulations, Orders and Statements of Interpretation; Child Labor Violations—Civil Money Penalties.” Federal Register 77, no. 103 (May 29, 2012): 31549–31551. Withdrawal of the proposed 2011 revisions to federal youth agricultural labor regulations.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “Childhood Agricultural Injury Prevention.”

National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, Cultivate Safety.

Music

Dennis Linde, “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Recorded by Garth Brooks on In Pieces. Liberty Records, 1993. Referenced by title; no lyrics reproduced.