The Long Home

by William Gay

  And down the line. Past sleeping houses behind whose walls sleepers spun dreams he’d never know, let alone share. A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out sign, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.

  Maybe down to Hardin’s, he might think, fingering the scant sheaf of bills, the ball of greasy change. Who knew who’d be there? A blond whore from Memphis watching him from beneath mascaraed lashes. “You wasted in this onehorse town, Daddy,” she’d tell him. “Let me take you away.”

  Rounding a curve on the Mormon Springs road he came upon them framed in his headlights temporary as startled deer, the old man and Winer stepping from the hedgerow of sumac onto the roadbed and turning frozen in momentary hesitation as if undecided whether to flee or wait and take their chances, will he stop or not? A madman coming at them in a two-thousand-pound carton. Motormouth locked the wheels and slid sideways toward them.

  “Lord God,” the old man said. He leapt backward as the car careered past, flailing at it with his stick as if he might head it off like an animal, the stick striking the front fender and rebounding into the night, Oliver scrambled up swearing from out of the sawbriars and gravel, fiercely red and diabolic in the brakelights. The backup lights of the Chrysler came on then and the car fishtailed drunkenly back toward them.

  “He’s seen he missed us,” the old man said. “I reckon he means to try his luck again.”

  “It’s just Motormouth Hodges.”

  “I know who it is,” the old man said irritably. “Why do you think I was scoutin the bushes?”

  Motormouth had rolled down a window and was peering myopically into the night. The Chrysler idled throatily. Past the dark horizon the first stars were out, a pale band of them strung eastward. “Yins want a ride?”

  Oliver was silent a long minute. “Not hardly,” he finally said.

  “What are yins doin out here anyway?”

  “Hunting ginseng,” Winer said.

  “You must have needed some real bad,” Motormouth sniggered. He lit a cigarette, the flaring match giving his face a yellow, wolfish cast. “I never knowed you had to slip up on it in the dark,” he said.

  “We got turned around back on Buttermilk Ridge. Cordwood cutters got the woods so changed it’s easy to get on the wrong road.”

  “I been on that wrong road myself,” Motormouth said. “Get in. I ain’t got all night.”

  “Well, I have,” Oliver said. “And hopefully two or three more. I wouldn’t slide my bony ass across them seatcovers for a hundred dollars with the ink still wet on it.”

  “Get your gimlet ass in here, Winer. I got a thing or three to show ye.”

  “Not tonight, Motormouth. We’ve been out since good light hunting sang. We’re trying to get what we can before frost.”

  “That’s what I’m doin myself. Tryin to get what I can fore frost. Get in and I’ll run ye home anyway. Don’t you think I’d let ye out, or what?”

  Winer grinned. “I’m not even sure we’d get there.” His fingers traced the long scrapes on the Chrysler’s rocker panels, straight furrows like clawmarks as if the car had barely escaped some dread beast. Lines like hesitation marks on the wrists of an aspiring suicide. “Looks like you been cleanin out a ditch-run or two.”

  Motormouth put the car in gear, the pitch of the engine rising. “Well, they never did build roads to suit where I wanted to drive,” he said. “If you old folks don’t want to ride, you can walk then. I got things to do. I’ll see you.” He released the brake, left in the small storm of dust and rocks the wheels flung.

  The old man watched as the taillights winked from sight. “You take a little bitty crazyhouse and put a wheel on each corner and give it a kick down the road and you’d have somethin about like that,” he said.

  Several years back William Tell Oliver had gone out to his hoglot one morning and found a curious phenomenon. He had kept a few sows and a boar then and what he saw so surprised him that he set the bucket of feed he was carrying aside and stood leaning against the fence, ignoring the riotous squealing of the pigs, just staring out at the lot.

  There were two holes there, craters almost, ovals roughly five or six feet in diameter and almost two feet deep. After a time the old man climbed the fence and passed among the milling hogs and inspected the holes closely, expecting who knew what. They were a wonder to him. He squatted in the offal of the lot examining them. The manure and rich black earth mounded their rims and the bottoms were smooth. He peered closely at the bottoms, perhaps looking for the remnants of some motel star, thin, bright layers of celestial slag. Hurled here at random or by discernment.

  There was nothing. Only the dark earth beneath the layered manure and what he took to be spade marks. “Be damned,” he said to himself. With his walking stick to part the thick weeds about the fence he searched for signs. He had no idea what he expected to find. Old bones replevied from the curious graves, new bodies so destined. All he found was the hot ferment of the weeds and a copperhead moving sleek and burnished in search of deeper shade. He let his mind wander. What would there to be steal? He counted the hogs three time and all three times there were all accounted for. “What else in a piglot,” he asked himself, “save pigs and pigshit? A manure thief?” He looked for tiretracks without expecting to find them, for there was no road through the weeds and his mind could conceive no one so desperate for pigshit they must steal it under cover of darkness and cart it away on their backs.

  It was a mystery and he didn’t care for mysteries: an old man who suspected chaos and disorder beyond the curtain of swirling dark, he hungered for order and symmetry in what remained of his life, a balancing of the scales.

  He fed and watered the hogs and returned to the house. When his chores were completed he sat for a time in the shade of a pear tree, his eyes closed, feet up on a Coke crate, listening to the drone of bees glutting themselves on the ripe and windfallen fruit. Before the day was over he had returned to the lot to puzzle anew over the holes. He learned no more than the nothing he already knew.

  In the morning there were three more holes, somewhat shallower but spaced over a wider area, as if someone had been digging for something at random. “Be damned,” he said again. He stared at the harried earth, suspecting perhaps some magnetic anomaly that sucked meteors and asteroids from the dusty band of space he hurtled through. He stared upward, seeking some cosmic mirror whose reflections marvelously cast chaos into order, righted the perverse and disorder, but he peered only into the blue emptiness, past shapeless wisps of clouds that fled westward ahead of the sun. He stood listening to the morning sounds that mocked him with their familiarity. He could hear the crinkling of hot tin, the pop of barn rafters warping in the heat. The furtive scuttling of a lizard. A thin film of perspiration crept across his shoulders, dampening his chambray shirt.

  He counted the pigs again without expecting to find one gone. They were all there and he was halfdisappointed, surprised to find himself willing to sacrifice a pig for an explanation. A pig thief he could have understood, there was reason in it, sense. There was no sense in these holes pitting his hoglot. After a while he got a manure fork and began halfheartedly to shovel the earth back into the holes.

  He took a long nap that afternoon and about dark he made himself a quart jar of coffee and carried it with him down to the barn. He had an old Browning over-and-under and he carried that too. In the hayloft he arranged bales of hay into a comfortable chair and settled himself out of sight to see what transpired.

  For a long time nothing did. Dark deepened and shadows took the world. He sat immersed in the cries of insects, in the timeless tolling of whippoorwills. There was something of eternity in these sounds, at once bitter and reassuring. He’d heard them as a boy, as a young man, they sounded the same then as now. In this curiously altered stillness he felt he might even hear his wife open the kitchen door an
d call his name, his son might be on the spring path following him, a small form forever stalemated by time. He drank from the jar of bitter coffee and wiped his mouth on a sleeve, forced his attention to the barnyard below him. It lay in darkness but after an hour or so the moon cradled up out of the eastern trees and the pale illumination crept across the face of the land, tree and fence and stone imbued with significance like images in a dream.

  The moon was high over the treeline and he judged it ten o’clock or better before he saw anything stir. When the boy came he came up from the branch-run with silent stealth, easing through the border of gum and persimmon, peering all about, cautious as a grazing deer. Apparently satisfied, he came out of the brush and approached the fence, carrying a burlap bag and a shovel whose handle was longer than he was tall. It was the Hodges boy. Why, he ain’t no morn nine or ten year old, he thought. The boy threw the sack over and leaned the shovel against the fence and clambered over. He took up the shovel and immediately fell to work, selecting a fresh corner of the lot to dig in. Just clock in and go to work, the old man thought in puzzlement. The boy dug for some time and then unpocketed a flashlight, knelt on the scattered manure he’d dug from the hole, raking carefully through it with his hands. Kneeling so in the earth he raised his face to the moon clocking on westward and then arose and commenced shoveling again.

  The old man was at a loss. For a moment he thought of Hodges’s grandfather digging for money on the Mormon place, perhaps some genetic quirk had encoded it in the third generation, a trait so degenerated by now that nothing remained save the compulsion to dig at random just on the offchance someone might have buried something worth replevying.

  Oliver rose as stealthily as he could, even so his knees popped and he stood still and silent until he saw the boy hadn’t heard. Then he moved cautiously toward the ladder and climbed down it. When he eased into the moonlit piglot Hodges was still digging. Oliver approached within a foot or so of his back. “Hidy,” he said. The boy dropped the shovel as if electricity had coursed through it and leapt five or six inches into the air. When his feet touched earth they were already pedaling as if he rode an invisible bicycle and he was almost immediately at the fence. Oliver caught him as he was scrambling over the topmost slab and lifted him, kicking and squirming and cursing, and set him back to earth.

  “Let me alone,” the boy was yelling.

  “Whoa, young feller. Hold on a minute here. Noboby aims to hurt you. I just want to know what you’re up to.”

  Hodges was trying to jerk his arm free. “None of your Goddamn business. Now let me alone.”

  “You’re young Hodges, ain’t ye?”

  “What’s it to ye?”

  “Well, they don’t call ye Hodges, do they? What’s ye first name?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Me tell ye my name so’s you could run straight to the law with it.”

  “Hell, son, I don’t need no name. I got you in the flesh, right by the seat of your britches. I’s just askin to be polite.”

  “My name’s Clifford.”

  “All right. That’s some better. And just so you’ll know, I ain’t never been one to run overquick to the law. Now, you reckon if I turn you aloose you can control the impulse to jump that fence?”

  “I ain’t done nothin.”

  “You move right pert for a feller just takin the night air. Ain’t none too qualmy about these copperheads neither.” Oliver released his grip on the boy. “Now, what’s my hoglot got you can’t dig up nowhere else?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Oliver had been wanting to smoke but had been afraid of setting the hay in the barnloft afire. Now he packed the bowl of his pipe and struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit the tobacco. When he spoke his voice was furred by the smoke. “What was you diggin for?”

  “It ain’t none of your business.”

  “Well. I reckon it’s your shovel. But it’s my lot and my hogs been standin around losin sleep and watchin you diggin like a fool. Now, what is it? Do you just like diggin or is there somethin particular about my hoglot that appeals to you?”

  The boy seemed to be considering, there was a shrewdness to his features, a transparent cunning. Oliver watched the play of thought on the small freckled face. Half is better than nothing, the face was thinking. Oliver grinned. The face was already trying to devise a plan for cheating him out of half of whatever it was he didn’t even know about yet.

  “Well. I guess we could split.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  The boy squatted on the earth before him. In the moonlight they were dwarfed by the dark shape of trees above them. A warm wind smelling of summer going overripe came looping up the hollow across them. Faint surcease scented with rich opulence, the ripe pears and musk of honeysuckle. An owl called lonesome from a hollow negated by dark.

  “Well. It’s pigs.”

  “Pigs?” the old man asked in disbelief.

  “Hell, yeah. I’d a thought a man as old as you are would have figured it out hisself by now.”

  “Boy, you’ve lost me. Figured out what?”

  “Diggin up them pigs.”

  Oliver felt like a participant in some surreal conversation in which the answers bore no relation to the questions, lines had been fragmented and shuffled indiscriminately. “They Godamighty. Is that what you been doin out here of a night? And them sacks… ”

  Hodges nodded. “To tote em home in,” he said.

  “Lord God, boy. You don’t dig pigs up out of the ground like taters or somethin.”

  “You want em all for yeself,” the boy said craftily.

  “Whoever told you pigs were dug?”

  “My mama did and I don’t know what cause she’d have to lie.”

  “I see,” Oliver said.

  “I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted em up in the hogpen.”

  “And you not havin a hogpen…”

  He sat in ruminative silence, just smoking his pipe and listening to the crying of the nightbirds, somewhere far and lost and streaking down the night the whistle of a train. “And what’d you figure, just kindly eliminate the sow? Bypass her sort of? Just dig the pigs up ahead of her and sell em?”

  “Yeah. A person’s smartern a hog ain’t he?”

  “We won’t argue about it,” Oliver said. “I suspect folks listening to us might work up evidence for either side.”

  He sat watching the boy. This diminutive hog rustler, self-confessed and unrepentant thief of unborn swine. He with his fallow burlap bags and eye cocked to livestock futures. Oliver saw little that was lovable. He had a moment of clairvoyance, an insight of weary foreknowledge stabbed with regret. He knew that Clifford Hodges would always be slipping in at night and digging up somebody else’s pigs. He would always be playing the longshot or taking a shortcut, figuring the angles in somebody else’s game. And he would never have a game of his own. If he lived until he was grown he would be shot then or shoot someone else in a failed inept holdup. He and a cohort halfmad as they looked aghast at each other across the body of a fallen grocer or gaspump operator. If he won the game he’d be in Brushy Mountain penitentiary, if he lost the graveyard. Oliver felt pity for him, a commiseration for the things that had been and the things that were yet to be. He wished for words to encourage him, but none came. And his own life did not lend itself to examples.

  “Well, what about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “About them pigs. Are we goin to split like we said or are you goin to dig em up after I leave and keep em for yeself?”

  “Boy, they ain’t no pigs there to dig.”

  “You done got em.”

  “Goddamn it. Son, that ain’t where pigs comes from. I done told you that.”

  “So you say.”

  “Well, there’s a considerable body of evidence to back it up.”

  “Then where does the old sow get em?”

  Oliver took deep breath
. “All right,” he said. “They grow here in the sow. Then when they’re big enough, when they’re made, they come out.”

  “Come out,” the boy echoed. He was shaking his had, staring at Oliver in wonderment. “Everbody says you’re crazy and by God you are,” he said. “You’re crazy as hell. I never heard such a crock of bullshit in my life.”

  “Well,” the old man said, “don’t blame me for it. It’s not like I laid it out or anything. It’s always been like that.”

  “I’m goin to tell Mama,” Hodges said. He arose and took up the burlap bag and shovel and hurled them over the fence and clambered after them. “Keep ye damn pigs,” he said. “I don’t mind ye bein greedy but I hate to be took for a fool.”

  Oliver grinned to himself. “You watch for snakes,” he called. After a while he could hear Hodges scurrying down the embankment, a small bright angry thread in the pastoral tapestry of night sounds. He hunkered still in the barnlot awhile listening and then he arose and went on back toward the house.

  6

  The horses had been gone for three weeks before Cecil Blalock even learned where they were. He had covered almost all the county asking and had come to think they must have started back toward west Tennessee, where he had bought them, for everyone in the county knew him and he could not imagine anyone just putting his up Morgans and not telling him. Blalock was the only man in the country who raised Morgans.