Hardcastle (2 page)

He could tell them how hard it had been to find any sort of work at all, even for a day or a few hours. It would be a difficult thing for them to understand since on their ragtag mountain farm there was never a shortage of work to be done. He would tell them how he had knocked about here and there. How at last he’d heard they were trying to hire linemen out in Salt Lake City, Utah, and were offering a good wage but weren’t having much luck finding trained men; how he’d ridden the rails all the way out there only to learn it was nothing more than a rumor. And he could tell them that’s when he’d decided to come on back home.

He didn’t know what he’d tell them, but no such things as those. If he told them any of that, he’d be telling them how he’d been beaten, turned tail, and run.

His hunger was gnawing at him, and he was thinking he ought to stretch out and try to get some sleep when some stiff in a car up the line shouted, “Sooey, pig! Soooeeey!” The voice, made faint by the noise and speed of the train, seemed to hang beside the track like a signpost before it was snatched behind. Music saw a swale sheltering a house, barn, and a few trees, and then a field of corn stubble before he glimpsed the sow and the litter of piglets. “Hot damn!” he said, and on a sudden impulse snatched up his paper parcel and leaned out of the boxcar, holding on until it should rock again toward the cornfield. “Whoa!” the big man said behind him, roused at last. “Catch yourself, fool!” But he had already leapt into a violent rush of air, and in the next second, into a helter-skelter and even more violent conflict with the earth. He rolled and bounced and kicked up the dirt beside the railroad bed, it seemed to him, for hundreds of yards. He was surprised more than scared. The dizzy contortions of body and limb registered, oddly, without pain, and after a while it seemed to him that he had been able to withdraw somehow toward the center of himself, where he was relatively inviolate and bemused, like the stationary dead center of a rolling wheel. He was even able to hear hooting and jeering from the boes on the freight.

Later, after the train had blown past and gone and he had picked himself up, he discovered that his tin cooking pot was bent nearly flat, that he had lost a shoe, that the side of his face was skinned a little, and his right forearm and left hip were skinned a lot. He limped a little way down the track looking for his shoe before he felt suddenly so dizzy and weak he had to sit down on a tie. Although the freight was out of sight, he could still feel the diminishing vibrations of it, still hear its almost inaudible song along the rails. He blinked and rubbed grit from his eyes and spat it from his mouth. “Didn’t kill me,” he said, as though offering a final argument to a side of himself that took a strange, grim pleasure in pointing out his stupidity. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, collecting grit, and spat a viscous string of dirt and blood. Slowly his strength seemed to return, and he got up and limped down the railroad track, his shoeless foot feeling vulnerable, almost somehow amputated. When he saw the shoe, it was forty feet out in the cornfield, pointing away from him as though striking out on its own. He climbed down the short embankment, crossed the fence, and took it up. It was scuffed, but less than the one that had stayed on his foot, less than the rest of him. He sat down and put it on and felt whole again. He could not afford to let himself consider exactly where he was or how far he might have to walk before he could catch another freight.

The sow and the litter of pigs were a hundred and fifty yards away. Nearly a half mile beyond them, the roofs of the house and barn rose just above the swale—the owners of the pigs no doubt lived there—but there was no one in sight. He got up again and started out, but after he had closed considerable ground, the sow took note of him and began to lead her piglets away; and he had to trot, and then run, to get any closer. His side hurt but there was no help for it. The piglets began to squeal as he gained on them, and the sow, realizing at last that her litter could not keep up with her, stopped abruptly and turned to face him. Her flat nose handled the air, speculating on his motives as her piglets overtook her and swarmed behind her flanks. He came on, and as if with sudden insight, she seemed to start, as though she would turn and bolt away, but she did not. Some of her litter held their ground in the shadow of her protection as he bore down on them; others broke and ran. For a second time she started—a sudden spasm that seemed to force a grunt out of her and lift her off the ground in its violent agitation—and more of her litter deserted her. A great staple in her nose he hadn’t seen before, pig eyes bleared with what seemed an ancient hatred, a funny downward bow in her neck which kept her snout high, at last she charged, two confused piglets charging with her.

“Hot damn!” Music shouted, his voice rising so far above its usual register it cracked and broke; and just as he and the sow were about to collide, he jumped her. He overtook and scooped up a piglet, and his ribs pained him sharply, but there was no time to rest for he heard her already behind him, clattering through the corn stubble. He made for the fence with the piglet screaming and squealing under his arm, and the sow, he could tell, closing on him. He slowed a little, glanced over his shoulder, and chose exactly the right moment to jump up and to the side; and for a second time, she rushed almost directly beneath him. He could feel the terrific weight and momentum of her in the near miss. She slewed halfway around before she hit the four strands of barbwire and had a violent, momentary fit, extricating herself. It was nearly time enough. He had angled a little to one side but never ceased to run for the fence. He had his right hand on the fence post, his left leg over the top, and his right foot on the second strand when her snout slammed into the shank of his right leg with almost, but not quite, enough force to topple him back into the cornfield. But he fell the other way. Still, somehow she caught the cuff of his trousers and shook it with twice the strength of a dog before she lost her grip and left him lying on his shoulders on the other side, the piglet still clamped under his arm and one foot cocked up over the top strand, where his pants cuff was hooked on a barb.

She seemed to stand back a moment to grunt and think, which allowed him to get one leg under him and the other loose from the top strand before she tried to get at him through the fence. He kicked at her face. “Shitass! Git away!” he shouted and scrambled up the slight embankment to the railroad bed. “Jesus,” he said and tried to catch his breath. Sweat rolled down his ribs, and his legs shook. He gave a quick look toward the house and barn in the swale. No one was in sight.

The sow grunted to her litter, but the scattered piglets were hesitant, nervous. Still she grunted to them, and skittish as they were, they gathered. She dropped her snout close to the ground and seemed to be counting them out of the top of her head as they straggled in. She knew, Music thought, that her tally would be one short—the one kicking and squealing under his arm—but she had to confirm it. When she had, she kept pace with him inside the fence while he limped back down the line to collect his paper parcel. He crossed the tracks and went down the far embankment to walk out of sight of the sow and to keep from being quite so visible from the farm. The piglet he clutched ceased its squealing and struggling only long enough to baste his side with a string of wet, clinging turds.

Half a mile down the track, with apologies, he took out his pocketknife and cut the piglet’s throat. Three miles after that he came to a trestle over a creek, and under the trestle he dressed out his supper, washed his shirt, and sponged off his pants, finding one moist, soft pig turd in his pocket and another pressed between the waistband of his trousers and his side.

He built a fire and cooked the carcass whole. The flesh, where it wasn’t charred, was white as milk and sweet, and although he wished for pepper, and most of all for salt, the piglet was delicious. He ate his fill, then wrapped the rest in newspaper and tucked it away inside the paper sack. He spread his shirt to dry by the fire, put his suit coat on over his undershirt, and permitted himself the luxury of rolling a cigarette from the small store of tobacco he had left. Lying back with his arms behind his head, he watched sparks from his fire rise up toward the trestle and wink out. “Fool, yourself,” he said.

The next day, twenty miles or so down the track, sore in every muscle, he came to a town and caught himself a milk-run freight going east.

2

EVENING, SWITCH COUNTY
KENTUCKY

A DAY OF pork and two days of nothing, and William Music was hungry again. He held on to the side of the coal car with his right hand, to the paper sack with his left, and leaned out over the railroad bed. The train was not going fast, but there was no good place to jump. The edge of the railroad bed gave way to a rocky bank down to a river. He looked up the line, searching for a wider spot, and saw an ellipse of gravel and cinders perhaps a dozen feet across with a stand of poplar and water maple guarding the abrupt slope to the river. He tossed the paper sack away first, so that he would be committed to follow it, and jumped. He thought he was going to be able to keep his feet, but he couldn’t even though the train was going no more than ten or twelve miles an hour. The fall hurt his ribs again, and he collected some cinders in the heel of his hand. Slowly, as though he were an old man rising after a nap, he propped himself up into a sitting position; and while the train clicked and clattered on past, he picked cinders from his palm. It was a shallow, bright pain that caused his mouth to water.

When he had cleaned some of the grit from the hot abrasion, he groaned, rose, picked up his sack, and started back down the line toward the little mining community the train had just come through. It hadn’t looked like much the first time, but as he approached, it looked far worse. The coal tipple looming beside the tracks seemed empty, derelict, as though no coal had rattled through it in a long time. There was no smoke coming from the power plant, and the corrugated sheet iron of its roof and sides seemed to house yet another volume of deep and long-undisturbed quiet. At last he saw the padlock on the powerhouse door and blew a snort of disgusted laughter through his nose. He had a knack, he decided, for jumping off trains into places that weren’t quite places at all, but a kind of no-man’s-land between places. He leaned back and looked at the wooden sign high up on the tipple. It was scummed over with coal dust and bled through with rust from the bolts that held it. In bold letters it said:
BEAR PAW COAL
. He wondered how long it had been out of business, cursed himself under his breath, and went on. He crossed the railroad track and a tilted wooden bridge over the river, making for the road he had been glimpsing for an hour or so, winding along the western side of the valley. Just across the bridge there was a long, low building on his side of the road, and on the far side, a row of shacks strung out to the south with smoke rising from two or three of the chimneys. “Ain’t a ghost town anyhow,” he told himself, but he wasn’t much encouraged. It looked like a place where an empty belly would be hard to fill.

He decided he would turn north on the road, since if Shulls Mills didn’t lie directly east, it didn’t lie south; that would be Tennessee; southeast would likely be North Carolina.

He calculated he had close to an hour and a half to find something to eat before dark. He’d seen a fair number of homesteads scattered along the valley, and now and again a coal camp too, though probably, he thought, no better off than the Bear Paw; still there had to be some sort of food around. Chicken, he decided, was what he wanted. That’s what he’d keep an eye out for. If he couldn’t find a chicken, then surely, he thought, he’d come across a garden with maybe some turnips or carrots still in the ground, or maybe a potato mound covered over for the winter, or cabbages, say; but he wanted a chicken, a hen with eggs in her.

Just as he came abreast of a large, ramshackle building on his left, a man leaning against its gallery, whom he had not seen, straightened and stepped toward him. “Evenin,” the man said.

He was slight, with a frayed work shirt buttoned primly around his neck, looking, like the rest of his clothes, as though it had belonged to a larger man. One empty sleeve of his jumper was pinned to his shoulder. “Evenin,” Music said.

Underneath the broad-brimmed felt hat, which sat absolutely level on the man’s head and which Music would have taken for black but for a lighter band of grey where the hatband was missing, the face studied him so calmly that there was something just short of insolence in it. The man’s face, grey with stubble and streaked with snuff or tobacco at the corners of his mouth, was impassive; his eyes, speckled and hard as pebbles at the bottom of a stream, did not leave Music’s. Some slight movement behind the man caught Music’s attention, and he saw another man and a half-grown boy sitting on the gallery of the building, their backs propped against the wall. “Got some white here that’ll keep the cold out if ye’ve a mind,” the man said, his face expressionless, his lips scarcely moving.

For a moment Music did not understand. It was as though he’d thought the one-armed man, planted so woodenly before him, had had another purpose altogether in stopping him, as though he’d somehow read the larceny in his heart and was going to tell Music what happened to chicken thieves in that part of Kentucky. Corn liquor, the man was offering him. Moonshine. And in the light of that, the man’s gnawed, impassive face seemed almost benign. “I’ve had no corn liquor in a long time,” Music said, his tension leaving him so suddenly he gave a little bark of laughter.

“Twon’t find better in Switch County,” the one-armed man said. “Hit’s doubled and twisted.” The man cleared his throat and spat. “If ye’ve a mind,” he said, “hit’s twenty cent a pint. Twenty-five if ye aim to trade with clacker.”

“There’s not but eleven cents in my pocket, mister,” Music said, “and I guess I’ve got no clacker, for I don’t know what it is.”

The man nodded almost imperceptibly. His eyes the nondescript color of pebbles never left Music’s face. “Yes,” he said, “I taken ye fer a stranger.”