The Rock Hole

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  Pepper groaned. “Whew! You’re not very good at this.”

  I offered her the knife but she refused to take it. For the next few minutes I did my best, but it was too much for a ten-year-old.

  “Here, I’ll help you.” Cody finally did the hard part and the bloody job was finished. “You kids stay here and I’ll go get the truck. When I get back we’ll see about loading these guys up. Glad I brought a come-along.” He handed me the carbine. “Now y’all stay put. Keep this, ’cause there may be a coyote or a wolf come by here with the smell of all this blood. Aim careful if they do and make sure of your target. Don’t shoot me by accident.”

  Pepper’s eyes got big, but before she could answer, Cody trotted outside the circle of our lantern. We listened to the night while the sacked piglets grunted quietly to themselves. There is no silence in the river bottoms. Crickets, frogs, night birds, and completely unknown sounds filled the air, sounding even louder once Uncle Cody was gone.

  “You know, we can’t see squat past this lantern light.” I was feeling a little creepy at what might be out there beyond our secure circle of light. “Let’s blow it out so we can see. Wolves could already be eating the sow over there before we even knew it.”

  Pepper snorted. “They’ll most likely try to eat us since we’re pretty much covered in blood.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m here.” I turned off the lantern. The sounds got louder.

  She punched me. “That idea was as good as bringing a big knife to cut Cody’s head off with.”

  “I didn’t do any such of a thing. I was trying to save him.”

  “Well, don’t try to save me. I’d druther have a wolf gnaw my arm off than to have you hit me in the face with a sword.”

  “You’re a girl. You don’t know nothin’ about gnawing and knives and such.”

  “Kiss my ass. I know I ain’t raised no mouse under Cody’s eye.”

  “You couldn’t have done it, because you were running in the other direction when you saw that snake.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “I wasn’t expecting no five-hundred-pound pig neither.”

  “Well, be quiet so the wolves won’t hear.”

  “They can smell, too.”

  “You ain’t helping my nerves any. Let’s just be quiet.”

  I took out my knife and thumped it into the dirt for a while. I quit when I couldn’t see after clouds rolled in and covered the moon. Then it got really dark.

  “What’s that sound?” Pepper asked in a whisper.

  I listened. It sounded like footsteps moving toward us through the grass. I imagined a dozen different things were sneaking up on us: everything from Indians, to bears, to the dog killer.

  Pepper moved closer. I could feel her shaking. “Does that sound like somebody breathing?” she whispered.

  “I think it’s somebody walking.”

  It was then we distinctly heard a soft chuckle.

  Pepper gave a nearly soundless scream. “Light the lantern.”

  “I ain’t got no matches!”

  “Shit. Use the flashlight, fool!”

  I remembered the flashlight, but it was somewhere on the ground nearby. I was feeling through the grass, half expecting my hand to touch something hairy, or that another hand was going to grab mine, when the El Camino’s headlights flickered through the trees.

  Cody drove up and got out quickly. “Hey! Where y’all at?” His voice sounded scared.

  I gave up on the flashlight and stood up. “Right here. We couldn’t see out there with the lantern on.”

  Uncle Cody found us with his light, but the little beam didn’t do much to light up the bottoms. “Good thinking. I got nervous when I didn’t see any light.”

  Pepper jumped up and ran to Cody. “We thought we heard somebody out there.”

  “Well, there ain’t nothing there.”

  “I can’t find my flashlight,” I said.

  He worked his beam on the ground around us. “I don’t see it.”

  “I laid it right there.”

  “You must have left it laying somewhere else.”

  I knew where I’d put the silver metal flashlight. And now it was gone. “I had it when you left.”

  “Well, I don’t want to waste time finding it in the dark.” He didn’t realize how scared we’d been, and neither of us told him. “Y’all come on and let’s histe this sow up in here first.”

  I stared into the darkness. I hadn’t lost my flashlight. It had been took from right beside us.

  Cody drained the beer he’d been holding between his legs and threw the can into the dark. Pepper shined Cody’s extra flashlight on the truck and using the cab as an anchor, he attached a come-along to a wide canvas strap he’d run through both open windows. We unrolled the cable and wrapped it around the sow’s back feet. Cody started cranking at the come-along, gaining a few inches with each pull.

  Cody did most of the work because it was heavy. “Whew. This thing must weigh three hundred and fifty pounds. Here, Pepper, you take a turn.”

  She had to throw her whole body into it and when she gave out, I took over. We finally got the hog into the small bed and pushed her around until there was room for the boar. We helped some, but I think I was more in the way than anything else, because I kept trying to see what was in the darkness around us. The tailgate groaned like it was going to give out before we had him loaded.

  Tired, sweaty, and bloody, we finally finished. Too long for the bed, the hogs lay with their heads hanging off the tailgate. Cody looked at his watch. “Lordy mercy. It’s only eight-thirty. Throw them pigs in on top there and let’s go.”

  The El Camino rested low on her springs, so we drove slowly back to camp. I kept expecting to see somebody with my flashlight caught in the headlights. But the only thing we saw was an armadillo.

  It didn’t take long to skin out of our dirty clothes. We washed up at the little brook down from the spring. It was dark under the trees, but the path was easy to follow. Our hands were hardly dry before Cody was ready to go again. He popped another beer and checked on the piglets. You could see them moving around in the burlap toesacks.

  “You guys will be safe in a pig pen before daylight.”

  We drove to Miss Becky’s house. She was still up and the windows glowed when we pulled up the drive. She heard us and the porch light pushed back the darkness and she peeked through the screen door.

  “Cody? What are y’all doing back here? Is everything all right?” Miss Becky didn’t expect us back and it scared her. She also didn’t like it when kinfolk showed up late at night. It usually meant trouble or a death.

  Pepper and I boiled out of the truck before he had time to answer. “Come take a look at these two hogs we killed. We brought you a mess of pigs, too!”

  Miss Becky hurried off the porch in her nightgown to look into the truckbed. “My lands. Y’all brought home a lot of work.” She immediately took control. She’d been rendering hogs since she was little, on a little scratch farm in Grant. “Here, you kids put two of the shoats in the hog pen and I’ll look at them in the morning. Leave the other’n in the sack. Top, empty the slop bucket in the feed trough while you’re down there. I’m sure she’d weaned them already and they’re probably hungry, poor little things.”

  We took our time at the hog pen, turning two of them out of the sack. They grunted a couple of times and huddled up in one muddy corner for safety while we waited, hearing the adult’s voices in the yard. When we figured she was finished chewing on Uncle Cody about his drinking, we carried the remaining pig back up to the house and put the sack in the truck bed.

  Not looking any worse than when we left, Cody backed the truck up to the smokehouse door, and they attached the chain hoist to the hogs. In no time they hung from the rafters. Miss Becky propped the carcasses open so they’d cool during the night.

  I finally noticed the car was gone. “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “He’s out.” It was Miss Becky’s way of
saying Grandpa was doing law work. “Y’all want to come in and sleep in a good bed tonight?” She knew there was no way we’d stay.

  Cody tilted his hat back. “No, ma’am. The troops and I have a good camp waiting for us down on the creek, but thanks.”

  She gave us kids a looking over and finding little else wrong, sent us inside to wash up again. Cody had on a clean shirt and was waiting behind the wheel while we cut two huge slices of coconut cake and hurried outside.

  “You two eat more than any kids I’ve ever seen.” The porch light went out and we headed out again. “Pepper, why didn’t you bring me a piece?”

  “I did.”

  Sitting between us, she shared her cake with him. I’d never noticed her graceful fingers before, despite the broken and chewed off fingernails. She looked a little different in the dim light of the dashboard. There was something embarrassing about watching her feed Uncle Cody one bite at a time, and I was glad when it was gone.

  He slowed the truck and turned up the gravel drive leading to Uncle Henry’s house on top of the hill overlooking the highway.

  Pepper brushed the last of the crumbs off her lap. “What are we doing here? You got a wart you need taking off?”

  Everyone knew about Uncle Henry’s power of wart removal, but no one could answer for sure how he did it. Some thought he prayed warts away, closing his eyes and rubbing his fingers around and around in a pattern. Others said his body oils made them disappear.

  “Naw.” Cody turned into their steep drive. “We’re dropping the other piglet off with Aunt Mamie.” He stopped at the back porch and turned off the engine. A single bulb lit the yard. Cody lifted the sacked piglet out of the bed and we clumped up the wooden porch steps. Pepper rapped on the screen, and Uncle Henry opened the door.

  He stood nearly six foot seven and was shaped like a pineapple. I saw him mostly in the spring because he had the closest storm cellar to Grandpa’s house. Over the years we made several hurried drives in the middle of the night to his hand-dug cellar, thinking a cyclone was going to blow us away before we got there. There were always a couple of other families with the same idea. We’d stay under the ground until the storm blew over, or the men thought it was safe to go home.

  In her nightgown, tiny Aunt Mamie peeked around her tall husband. She was a little gray-haired woman with a heart as big as Texas. She hugged all three of us while Uncle Henry simply smiled. “My lands, Becky called and said y’all were on the way. What are y’all doing out this time of the night?”

  “We’ve been hunting and thought you could use a pig.” Cody handed Aunt Mamie the sack.

  “Y’all get in this house.”

  Pepper hugged Uncle Henry’s ample belly stretching his undershirt. Pulling at his suspenders and grinning up at him, she suddenly became a little girl again. “You got any new puppies?” she asked.

  Aunt Mamie was always taking care of something. A month earlier a litter of newborn puppies squirmed in a box beside the wood-burning stove in the living room. Their mama had been run over on the highway below the house. Since they were far from being weaned, Aunt Mamie fed them with an eyedropper every few hours, but she said it was no step for a stepper.

  “Naw, hon.” She put the sack with the softly grunting piglet on the plank floor beside the door. “Our new mama-dog hasn’t found any puppies in a while, but looky here.”

  We knelt beside about thirty peeping chicks, tiny yellow balls of fluff in a shallow cardboard box near the stove.

  Cody bent over and hugged Aunt Mamie. “Found some puppies?”

  Aunt Mamie poked him in the side with her elbow and cut her eyes at us as if we had no idea where babies came from.

  Cody laughed and settled down on the worn horsehair sofa. He and Uncle Henry talked farming for a while, and then with a grin Uncle Henry asked how business was across the river. “I might need to get over there and take me a dose of medicine or two.”

  Uncle Henry hadn’t had a drink in his entire life. Aunt Mamie acted like she was mad, but I could tell she was putting us on. She left and returned with a plate full of cookies.

  We didn’t stay long after the plate was empty. It was getting late and we’d already interrupted their nighttime routine. Cody had something on his mind so we hugged some more and promised to come by soon for some mincemeat pie.

  The lights went out before we got to the end of the driveway. Instead of heading toward the bottoms, Cody turned left on the two-land highway and cruised past the store and the gin, still running under the lights. A man in a wagon moved the big vacuum pipe around the surface of the load, sucking the cotton up to begin the separation process. Smoke boiling out of the chimney from the burning cottonseed hulls hung low to the ground.

  I dug the vaporizer out of my jeans and took a puff.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I wondered why Cody decided to take the long way until I saw the lights of the little frame school. There was a dance going on in the wood frame basketball gym, and the grass yard and playground were full of cars and trucks.

  Like every Depression-era gym built by the WPA, wooden bleachers on each side of the basketball court were capped by a stage opposite the entrance. The open doors and windows gaped wide for ventilation. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” filled the air, and we could see people dancing on the maple basketball court.

  Cody’s eyes twinkled in the lights of his dashboard. He shut off the engine. “Let’s have a little fun before we go back to camp. I hear your great-Uncle Cliff up there on stage, and he don’t play very often any more.”

  He got no argument from either of us. A large crowd of men and women milled outside the entrance, talking and laughing. Pepper and I wove past the adults and slipped in through the open doors. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Cody join a group of men beside a truck. The glint of a bottle flickered in the dim light and then someone blocked my view.

  Age made no difference on the dance floor. Kids spent the evening wandering or playing chase through the older folks’ legs. Young couples and singles lined the walls nearest the wooden bleachers watching the dancers.

  Uncle Cliff hunkered over his beat-up guitar on the wooden stage, his legs crossed at the knee. He must have been seventy then, gray-haired and bony, singing softly into a microphone. Lined face hidden by a worn out, shapeless felt hat, he wasn’t there to be seen, but to play music so folks could enjoy themselves.

  Local musicians backed him up with guitars, fiddles and one big standup bass. The songs switched between waltzes, two-steps, and an occasional Western swing when it suited them.

  He slowed down for a bit and got away from dancing songs. When he sang “Old Blue,” a song about a dog and a boy, everyone stopped to listen. One line went, “…old Blue died hard, digging little holes in the front yard.” It made me want to cry, but I held it back. Several women dabbed at their eyes when he got to the part about lowering Blue into the grave with a silver chain, and when the song was over everyone clapped, whistled and whooped like it was the best song in the whole world. Uncle Cliff didn’t say anything at all. He started a fast two-step and the floor once again thickened with dancers.

  Pepper and I stayed together for a while, feeling a little out of place at first. I still didn’t know a lot of the adults there. Of course Pepper knew everyone since she’d lived in Center Springs all her life. We hung around the door, and after a while half a dozen older local boys surrounded her. A couple of them gave me a look, but I held my ground and gave it right back.

  Cale Westlake, the Presbyterian preacher’s boy was one of those. “I didn’t know you were coming by.” He was a head taller than me and two grades ahead.

  “Neither did I,” Pepper laughed. “But I doubt I’d have told you anyway.”

  He took Pepper’s arm and turned his back on me. His lackeys laughed and shouldered me aside.

  She frowned at Cale but she also looked like she wanted to talk to him. I wandered off toward the refreshment table set up underneath the goal farthest fro
m the stage, and one of the ladies dipped me a cup of polly-pop. Limp crepe paper hanging from the goal rustled each time a breeze pushed through the door.

  Uncle Cliff and the band started a Bob Wills tune. I took the strawberry punch and wandered back outside. A group of women giggled and laughed not too far from the door, one or two were sneaking a little dip of sweet Garrett snuff.

  I saw Cody’s hat behind the truck. About twenty men stood around the pickups backed up with the tailgates down. Uncle Cody perched on one, holding court.

  I wiggled through the adults and took up a safe position beside a fender.

  “That old boar had me running across the meadow like my head was on fire and my ass was catching.” The men chuckled.

  “How’d you get up that tree without dropping your rifle?”

  “Damned if I know. All of a sudden I was sitting up there in that tree like a monkey, shooting as fast as I shot at them gooks over in Nam.”

  “He just ran up the side of the tree.” Horrified that words had actually emerged from my mouth, I couldn’t believe it had happened again. My mouth engaged all by itself.

  Everyone turned in my direction and though one or two of them scowled, the rest laughed.

  “Did you see it?” asked T.D. Stacker. He was one of those solid farmers who worked, went to Sunday services, and sometimes snuck a beer when he was with folks who knew when to keep their mouths shut. His boy Butch was in one of my classes, but I hadn’t seen Butch inside.

  “Yessir. I had my hands full of squealin’ piglets, but Cody shinnied up in the tree using nothing but his feet. I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”

  Uncle Cody chuckled. “You won’t ever again, either. The only way to run up a tree is for something to be chasing you.”

  I figured their good humor was all lubrication. T.D. lit a cigarette and looked down at Cody’s cowboy boots dangling above the ground. “I can’t imagine how you did it with those slick soles.”

  “Dug in with my toes.”