Winter Run (2 page)

I turned nine that summer and I knew all this about him. Had known it since I was a little boy and held his coat sleeve when things got exciting or I was frightened. It wasn’t thinking that told me. I just knew. We were a pair—the stout black man and the skinny, very blond white kid. Matthew and Sally had no children. Maybe that was it.

Later in the week of the cubbing, I walked up the hill to the big house to find Matthew. As I crossed the front porch I heard the professor talking and chuckling in his wheezy voice. “I know, Matthew. I should never have bought those five old sows from the
Gibsons. But Ronnie has been sick and things are hard for them right now. Just try. And maybe that old boar will get them bred. If not, we’ll slaughter the barren ones. Although God knows what we’ll do with the meat. Those old things must be as tough as a rubber tire. You’ll just have to feed them feed from the co-op. We sure don’t have enough leftovers with just you and Sally and Mrs. James and me.” There was a pause. “Oh, and Matthew—don’t let Charlie Lewis near that boar!”

I knocked on the door and pulled it open.

“Ah, and there you are, Charlie,” said the professor. “Did you hear what I said? Do not go near that boar without Matthew. Is that clear? I heard about the hunt you witnessed and your interest in that place.”

“Yes sir,” I said, “but—”

“No damn buts, young man,” he exclaimed. “That animal is dangerous. You mind Matthew or I’m going to talk to your mama and papa.”

He was serious, and as I didn’t want to be kept at home when things were happening on the farm I shut up. It was my way—push them about as far as they would go and sometimes beyond, like the time I took George Maupin’s workhorse, Jim, and rode five miles up the back road bareback to ask George if I could keep the horse for the weekend before they caught me. Shortly after that they had got me the pony.

Two days later, Robert Paine, who was small and skinny and deep, deep black and had done time on the road gang, came to help Matthew move the old sows.
As he always did, Robert looked sideways at me when he realized I was along for the ride. But I didn’t pay it any attention and Matthew acted like he didn’t see it. It would be years before the meaning of those looks became clear, before I knew the depth of his enmity, before, on a January night sitting around the fire next to the store at hog-killing time, my Eden would end.

Once the men got the old ’32 Ford stake body running, we drove up the valley road to the Gibson’s and loaded the sows up the pen’s ramp into the truck. They protested mightily, but the men knew hogs and squeezed them into the truck without any trouble.

At the other end, Matthew backed the truck up to the gap in the hog-lot fence with its vine-covered gate barely visible. He lowered the tailgate on the truck, and the sows slid and snuffled their way down to the ground and wandered off into the jungle of vines and stumps and mud.

That evening, we went back to be sure the sows hadn’t gone crazy and jumped the chicken coops. We sat on one of the jumps with our legs hanging inward. The trees in the lot had been thinned a few years back leaving four-foot-high stumps. The stumps had grown up in honeysuckle and blackberries. Each stump had a clump of dirt and grass around its base, like a little island in a sea of thick red mud and greasy puddles of brown water. It looked like a spooky Halloween garden. An evening mist was coming in, but we could see the shapes of the hogs, lying in the mud between the puddles. They looked like the larvae you find under an
old board in a barn lot: pale to white and, in the mist, without real shape. Like slugs. You always hear that pigs are intelligent, but it’s hard to believe that anything that mud-caked and smelly could be intelligent. They are, though. And they all have different personalities, and special eyes.

We heard one grunting a ways off and then the huge gray boar came into sight—iron gray, with wiry hair all over his back, swinging his head from side to side as he walked among the prone shapes, occasionally pushing one with his nose, checking to see if she was in heat.

The boar moved steadily in our direction.

“Hey, old hog!” Matthew called. “Are they all right, or are they too old?” Then he turned to me. “Too old, I reckon. But the man wants them bred. So that’s what’s going to happen.”

When Matthew called, the big boar had raised his head. His eyes looked right at us, not like cows and horses, which hardly ever will look you in the face. His eyes were bright. They seemed to have their own light, like the hog had a flashlight in his brain turned on us to see what we were thinking. Does a hog oink only through his nose? That big male rumbled, way down in his chest. He sounded wild. I stared at him, thinking,
What would you do if I came in there? I could walk around checking the sows with you. And we could look into every corner of the lot, to see if we could find a snake. And if we did, you would eat it, because Matthew told me a hog would eat a snake, alive
—
even a copperhead—and it wouldn’t hurt him.

I know what I could do. I could bring the pony and jump the chicken coop and ride around with you. That way I wouldn’t get all muddy and make Gretchen angry. And if you really didn’t like me in there, I could turn the pony around and race to the fence and jump the jump. And no harm done. And I would find out. Find out how the fox was able to run in there and come out alive. And maybe see another fox hunting for mice …

Looking back, it is no wonder they were all so angry with me and frightened. It was as if I somehow wanted to run back up the pipe of evolution and burst through at the other end into a meadow where nature and its creatures and I were the same thing.

“Matthew,” I asked, “is that hog tame or wild? I mean, he stands there looking at us and doesn’t run away, so he’s not like a deer or a fox. What would he do if I went in there with him? Would he be like a cow and maybe stand still or maybe walk away—”

“Charlie!” he interrupted. “Now you listen to me. I told you before about hogs.”

“Oh, I know. You mean about maybe eating you if you fell into a little pen with them. But that boar is in the open—it would be like—”

“No, it wouldn’t be like anything you ever seen! That boar (he called it a “bo”) is dangerous. You’ll end up just like Billy Gibbons over to Smith’s. They have a big pen, too. But that didn’t keep them hogs from near eating him that morning he come in drunk and
slipped and fell into the pen when he was calling them. Hadn’t of been for the horse trainer come to check a sick yearling, and hearing all the commotion from the hog pen, Billy would of been dead! You know they had him down in the slop and had tore his clothes off, and you could see blood all over his chest where they started to eat him. They had a time getting him out of there. What with those hogs not wanting to let go of that boy and Jimmy running around yelling for help and that old woman, Mrs. Greeves, standing there laughing and saying how that would teach him to come in drunk, before she knowed how bad it was. Hadn’t of been for the horse trainer, that boy would sure Lord have been dead.

“Now Charlie, I know you. And if I see you coming near this hog lot without me, I’m going to call your mama and get her to keep you home. And you know she will if I tell her. Are you listening, Charlie?”

Gretchen? She was always there in the background, looking at me. At the time I understood she was afraid, but I never knew of what.

That evening she was in her garden. She was kneeling on a feed sack with a narrow trowel in her gloved right hand transplanting tulip bulbs that Mrs. James had given her. Her thick hair was pulled back with a rubber band, and there was a thin line of perspiration on her upper lip. She looked up and smiled. Her gray eyes were cool and appraising, thinking,
What have you done today, Charlie? What new, crazy thing have
you gotten into today?
Not out loud, but I knew what she was thinking. Out loud she said, “Did you and Matthew and Robert get the pigs moved?” She called them pigs. She was a city girl.

“Yes, and we saw the boar hog. He’s huge, Gretchen. Huge! And he rumbles down in his chest when he moves around. He looks like a wild animal—”

Her eyes tensed. “You know you’re not to go there alone. Professor James spoke to me about it. And I will speak to your father about it this weekend. You must not go near that pig lot without Matthew. Do you hear me, Charlie?”

The pony was tough. The day I got her she kicked me in the right knee as I was walking into her stall to feed her. Her name was Tricksey, which I hated. To me she was just the pony. Her coat was gray, but depending on how wet the red clay of our fields was, she was pink or reddish brown. When I went to catch her in the big open broom sage pasture, she blended with the land so I could hardly see her. Sometimes I absolutely couldn’t see her. She was a part of the countryside. She fit in.

She was hard to catch. Like the other things about the land and the animals I couldn’t understand, I didn’t understand her. But she would come to a handful of grain if I stroked my palm and wiggled the grain around in my hand.

That afternoon she was harder than usual to find. She seemed to blend into the ground even more.
Maybe it was a sign. The plan was the same as the daydream: The pony and I would jump over one of the chicken coops into the hog lot. Then I would find the boar and just hang around with him.

Gretchen had gone to town, and Matthew was nowhere to be seen. We trotted down the dirt lane to the hog lot. The weather was threatening, ominous to the west over the mountains. We had passed the hog lot many times, so I was sure the pony was completely used to the smell. At the first chicken coop jump, I stopped her and looked over into the pen. No hogs in sight.

She refused twice. By the third time, I was really furious and beat her hard behind the saddle with the crop. She landed in a mud puddle and stopped dead still. And I almost fell over her head. But there I was—in the pen. From the inside, it was like a trap, with the paradise trees growing everywhere and the mud. Even the honeysuckle looked stronger. I had landed twenty feet from the rock with the little spring flowing out from under it. It bubbled up clear but quickly muddied as it started its journey to the outside world. Swamp lilies grew around the rock. It was a little garden in the sea of mud. We moved in deep enough that I couldn’t see the fence behind me—or in front. It was like being out of sight of land in a boat. I had never felt the pony so alive and aware. She walked stiff-legged, with her neck rigid and her nostrils flared, looking. I loved it.

We found the sows in a group, lying on their sides
in the mud with their heads up, looking startled at us with those flashlight eyes. When she saw them, the pony slammed on the brakes, again, and whirled around, right out from under me, leaving me sitting in the mud. And then she was gone, galloping back toward the chicken coop jump, whinnying in a panic. She had never been in with hogs before, not right in the pen with them. Neither, of course, had I. I got up. I looked at the sows. Not one moved.
Well
, I thought hopefully, wishing it to be so,
this will probably be fine. The sows aren’t upset.

I was standing in six inches of mud. I looked around. Through the vines, I could just see the chicken coop jump on the other side of the pen. It felt like I was way down inside something. The cloudy sky was far above. The air was close—August close.

He came from behind me. I heard the sound but didn’t immediately put it together with the boar. When he rumbled in his chest, I turned around. So there I was. It was as if I had known somehow that I would be in there on the ground with that six-hundred-pound hog, figuring out what to do next. The big old sows were sprawled out in the mud in front of me with their heads still up like fat women on a beach watching as the shark’s fin bears down on the swimmer.

I went for the nearest stump—which meant sloshing across five feet of mud and water. I grabbed the four-foot-high stump and frantically started to climb it. I was very frightened but also very excited. I wasn’t
going to let that boar get me!

The stump was rotten; it broke off at the base as soon as I started to climb. I fell to the opposite side of its base from the hog. I got up and reached for the next one. It held and I pulled myself up using the honeysuckle vines. I must have looked like a fence lizard peering over the top of a half-round post. I figured I was about in the middle of the enclosure. The sows were still mildly interested. The boar was more interested, very interested. But all was not lost. I could see the opening of the far chicken coop through the vines, about fifty feet away. In a way it was comical. The damn thing was just a big, bristly, gray pig, looking up at me with flopped over ears, snuffling loudly through his nose. Just a pig.

But he had those flashlight eyes, and I knew the story about Billy Gibbons at the Greeveses was true. When after ten minutes the boar was still looking at me, I began to worry. Clinging to the stump was getting old. It was a sure thing I was not going to be able to wander around the hog lot checking the sows with him. There were a number of possibilities in the long run, none of them attractive. At some point someone would see the pony around the barnyard with the stirrups and reins flapping. No matter who saw the pony first, word would get to Matthew, and he would put it together and come after me and no doubt would have to shoot the hog to get me out of there—with results nearly as awful as being eaten by him. There would be
no talk at the store in the evenings about how Charlie Lewis had escaped the huge-ass gray boar that had him up a stump or about how Charlie walked home, muddy but safe, to catch the pony and put her away and walk to the house to take his licks.

So I had to figure something out. The solution was not immediately apparent until the boar stopped looking at me, turned his head to eye the sows, and oinked his way over to them; then the situation started to look a little brighter. The chicken coop jump was there, a faint glimmer, a window, a way out, with about fifty feet of mud and water and roots to trip me up. Then I heard our car horn. Not just a toot. Steady. Gretchen had found the pony and was on the way up to the big house, looking for Matthew. If I was going to do it, I’d better do it quick …