“Pig?”
“Dog, actually. You’re down on the farm now, son.”
This was a relatively small operation, Vance said—seventy sows, producing just under fifteen hundred pigs for market annually. He had a degree in animal husbandry from Virginia Tech and sold his product at market over in Smithfield, home of the famed Smithfield hams.
He liked pigs, he told Fogarty.
“They’re smaller than cattle, so you can move them around easier. Chickens are a lot messier, turkeys are stupid, and sheep…you ever know any sheep?”
Fogarty shook his head.
“Sheep are snotty,” Vance said.
Most of the popular notions about pigs were false, he continued as they walked through the afternoon heat and ripening smells, Fogarty with his eyes now downcast.
“These animals are fed with corn and grain, not garbage. You feed a pig garbage; you’ll wind up with a pig that tastes like garbage. Pigs aren’t dirty by nature, and the only reason they roll in the mud is because they want to stay cool.”
“How does one get to be Pig Farmer of the Year?” Fogarty asked, expecting a long litany of accomplishments for Vance’s Pig n’ a Poke Farm.
“It was my turn,” the farmer said simply.
He led Fogarty through the four stages of pig development—birthing, growing, developing and finishing. Each was taking place in a different metal-sided building.
Fogarty was having problems with his sinuses, and for once he was grateful. Still, a pungent reek penetrated at times, a mixture of stale corn, hay, boar urine, and feces.
“These are the boars,” Vance said at one stop, pointing to a row of separate stalls. “A few of them, you don’t want to get in there with. Rambo, the third one from the end, would rather put his tusks into you than eat. A boar won’t bite you like a dog—he likes to rake his tusks over you, so there’s a lot more damage.”
“I don’t know what Rambo is always so cranky about, though. Basically, his job is to eat, sleep and screw. I wouldn’t mind coming back as a boar, would you?”
His visitor smiled uncertainly.
“The problem with piglets,” Vance explained, as they entered another building, “is that they like to chew off each other’s tails. I think it’s just because they like the taste of blood.”
“That’s why I use the bowling balls.”
Fogarty, who had been pondering the sogginess under his armpits—I’m sweating like a pig, he thought—snapped back to attention.
“Bowling balls?”
“Yeah. I put five or six of them in their pen. They like to push them around with their noses, and it distracts them.”
Walter Vance’s special pride was the birthing area.
“I’d like you to put these on,” he told Fogarty, handing him what looked like a surgical gown, a scrub hat and cloth “footies” to cover his shoes.
“You’re kidding,” Fogarty said.
He wasn’t. Feeling ridiculous, Fogarty followed Vance over to where an enormous sow was lying on her side, heaving huge sow breaths as a half-dozen wet, newborn piglets tumbled over each other to claim one of the prominent nipples that lined her belly like gun emplacements on a battleship.
“Pretty, ain’t she?” Vance said. “Well, actually, she’s got a face only a piglet could love, but her babies always grow pretty well.”
Cody Meacham, one of Vance’s three full-time hands, was presiding over the blessed event, talking softly to the recumbent sow. Then he took a plastic case from the carpenter’s apron around his waist and pulled out a syringe.
“It’s show time,” Vance said, smiling expectantly.
Stepping into the hay-strewn stall and bending over, Meacham jabbed the needle into the hindquarters of the sow—whose name was Madonna—and injected a substance designed to induce contractions. There was no immediate reaction from Madonna, but within a few minutes she began breathing more heavily. Vance hunkered down next to her.
“Sometimes they slide out,” he said, “and sometimes they just sort of torpedo out.”
This one slid, to Fogarty’s relief, and Vance snatched it up off the birthing floor, grabbed a paper towel from a nearby roll and wiped it clean. Then he shook the piglet to clear its lungs, inducing a high-pitched squeal. He and Meacham grinned.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Vance told Fogarty.
Had the interview ended there, Fogarty might have taken away a semi-pleasant memory. But before he left, Vance pointed far down another red-clay road to the most distant—and largest—building.
“I want to show you what we do to keep the waste moving,” he said. “Let’s take your car. It’s a little ways down there.”
Fogarty watched in horror as Vance heaved his blood and mud and pig feces—spattered body into the passenger seat. As soon as the car doors were shut, the aroma rising from Walter Vance became almost overpowering, blasting through the blockage in Fogarty’s sinuses. Fogarty was glad when the bumpy five-minute drive to the poop-chute was over, but only for a moment.
The floor beneath the pigs in this building was actually a grate. When the pigs answered the call of nature, the pig waste oozed through the holes in the grate to a concrete floor beneath. Two large troughs ran along one side of the room, fed by water from a large waste storage lagoon outside.
“Once the water gets to a certain level,” Vance said, “the troughs automatically tip over and send water underneath the grate, washing everything to the outside pools. Then the water from the outside pools is piped back into the troughs. It’s sort of like a perpetual motion machine, as long as the pumps keep working. Come on over here.”
As if in a trance, Fogarty followed the pig man over to the troughs.
“See, this one’s about to tip over,” Vance said.
Holding his breath, Fogarty leaned over. Just then, the long metal cylinder flopped forward and sent a cascade of Hershey-colored water onto the floor. At least half of it, it seemed to Fogarty, splashed up on his face, shirt and pants.
“Oops,” Vance said. “I forgot to tell you not to stand too close.”
As they rode back to the farmhouse, Vance suggested that Fogarty might consider throwing those clothes away.
“That smell, once you get it on you, never quite comes off,” he said cheerfully.
There were even pale brown splotches on the pages of Fogarty’s notebook.
“Can I offer you a sandwich or something?” Vance asked as Fogarty dropped him off.
“Uh, no,” Fogarty said. In fact, he thought, he was probably never going to eat sausage, ham or pork chops for the rest of his life.
On his way back to Jefferson Springs, Fogarty planned the rest of his day. He would return to Daniel’s house, take off his clothes, and destroy them somehow. Then he would take a shower for as long as the hot water tank held out. After that, he would find a car wash.
But the temperature had reached the high eighties, and Fogarty first needed a soda. Or maybe a beer.
He wiped the more obvious brown stains from his shirt just before slipping into the Speedy Mart on Main, hoping he wasn’t really as odoriferous as he felt.
The beer cooler drew him immediately, but he resisted the impulse. He was still trying to impress Tucker Daniel—and while the publisher was obviously no teetotaler, Sarah might look askance at him walking through their front door with a six-pack. So if he bought beer, where would he drink it? In his stinking car?
He heard a voice behind him.
“Well, you must be our new editor,” the voice said. “Welcome to Jefferson Springs, Southside Virginia’s Garden of Eden.”
He turned to see a slender woman wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and sweatpants, her fine blonde hair escaping in several places from a couple of inadequate hairpins. Fogarty was taken aback.
“How do you know who I am?” he asked, sounding mildly annoyed.
“Just a guess,” the woman said. “There’s a car outside with New Jersey plates, and we don’t get a lot of tourists through h
ere.”
“Busted,” Fogarty said. “I’d shake hands with you, but I’ve just been to a pig farm.”
She smiled.
“That would explain the condition of your shirt. I heard Whitt and Regina laughing about that story, and how there was no way in hell they were going out there. So, was it as bad as it sounded?”
“Probably worse,” Fogarty said. “Excuse me, but who are you?”
“Zoe Vaden,” the woman said as she pulled a six-pack of Budweiser from the cooler and walked toward the checkout counter. “I write poetry for the paper sometimes.”
Halfway to the counter, she stopped and turned around.
“No offense,” she said, “but I’d change those clothes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
ZOE
The car accident mangled not only sheet metal and flesh but Zoe Vaden’s life; two cars, three dead. Echo photographer Claude Kizer had arrived on the scene for his front-page art long before Sheriff W. W. Inge’s three stubby typing fingers had finished with the press release. Nearly every automobile accident is somebody’s fault. This, however, seemed to be a case where both drivers were obeying the rules of the road.
It was a Sunday morning, and Billy Havens was running late for a fishing appointment with three of his friends down on the Kerr Reservoir. His green Chevrolet pickup was old and rattling and firing on only five of its six cylinders, so Billy wasn’t speeding. Or not much.
Moreover, a dotted line had been laid down in front of him on Route 631 as he swung out to pass a creeping elderly woman in a Pontiac on her way to church. Ricky Van Shelton was singing about redemption on Billy’s tape deck.
Two hundred yards down the road, Glen Leggett—headed for a different church, his wife Martha beside him—glanced to his left. There was nothing coming, so he eased his beige Ford Escort onto the highway. Billy Havens arrived at precisely the same moment, in the same lane.
“It sounded like a bomb going off,” said Evelyn Suttle, who lived across the road.
Certainly, it was a bomb going off in Zoe Vaden’s life. She had escaped Jefferson Springs a dozen years earlier—escaped it for good, she thought—and now she was being yanked back as if by gravity.
Glen and Marsha Leggett owned nearly ninety acres in the northern part of the county, along with the two-story, four-bedroom white farmhouse where Zoe and her brother, Andy, had been raised. Both Leggett kids graduated from Randolph County High School, where Andy was popular and Zoe was miserable. There had been some talk of Andy playing college football, but no one proved interested in a five-nine, one hundred eighty pound kid who was too small to be a Division I linebacker and too slow for running back. So Andy enlisted into the Army.
Andy’s Army career had flourished, and he was now stationed in Germany with his German wife and three German-American children. His job was pleasant and predictable, the pay was good, and the beer was excellent. He had risen to the rank of master sergeant and had no desire to leave this new life and return to the unrelenting tedium of Jefferson Springs.
Nor did Zoe have any desire to revisit her high school nightmares. She had always been attractive and bright, but the popular boys back at Randolph County High School had quickly grown wary of her. Unlike the more pliable cheerleader types, she demanded respect, and that was something most high school boys in the mid-’70s were unable or unwilling to offer.
Andy, a year older, was a jock—football, basketball, and track—had a starring role in the senior play—Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird—and had been elected junior class president. He mixed easily, like a spoonful of creamer in a hot cup of coffee. Zoe curdled.
“What’s the deal with your sister, Andy?” his football teammates would ask. “She’s such a bitch.”
Adding quickly, since Andy Leggett was one of the strongest and fiercest players on the team, “No offense.”
Zoe never really dated in high school and turned down four potential dates to the Junior/Senior Prom. “If I can’t wear jeans,” she told a worried Marsha, “I’m not going.” She became the subject of whispered rumors among the other Randolph girls.
Once, from the other side of a locker after gym glass, she heard Kelli Hodge ask Jessica Booker, “Do you think Zoe Leggett is a lesbian?”
“Well, she wouldn’t go out with Travis Joyner. So…yeah, probably.”
Zoe walked out from behind the lockers, looked Kelli and Jessica squarely in their heavily made-up eyes, and said “Fuck both of you. Rot in hell.”
That didn’t do much for her social life, either.
Instead, she had spent her time listening to music and writing pages and pages of poetry, notebook after notebook of journal entries. The only boy she spent much time with was Adam Webster, and that was largely because he had become her primary pot connection. Adam had moved to Randolph County from the Chicago suburbs, and most of his conversations with Zoe revolved around how much they hated the place.
Besides Adam and a bookish childhood friend named Katie Plummer, there was nothing else for Zoe in high school. Even though she was a junior when her senior brother achieved the heights of gridiron success for the Randolph County Wildcats, she never saw him play. Her grades were better than adequate, largely because of her parents’ badgering and a natural ability to confuse teachers with her writing, but she joined no clubs and no cliques.
It was with a sense of profound relief, then, that after graduation she had fled to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond ready to embrace the debauched and irresponsible aspects of college life with her skinny arms wide open. In Jefferson Springs, every small indiscretion on her part—and there were more than a few—had been quickly relayed to her parents. In Richmond, cast adrift in what seemed to her to be a vibrant and pulsating city, she could do as she pleased. And did, until she flunked out in her second semester.
Glen and Marsha were appalled— but not entirely surprised—that their daughter had jettisoned higher education. They browbeat the chastened Zoe until she finally enrolled in a community college, infused new life into her grade point average, and was re-accepted at VCU.
By then, she had an apartment in the Fan District, a full-time waitressing job, and a fixation with the Grateful Dead. At least five times a year, she would join one of her roommates and several other Deadheads and follow the band to some two-day celebration of excess. She smoked pot every day—sometimes the good stuff, more often the sharp, biting homemade substitute—and often went to class stoned, easing back in her chair and listening to the old walls seem to groan and breathe as dazzling motes of light zoomed through the old high windows. A bumper sticker on her car, an aging white Volvo, read: “Who Are the Grateful Dead, and Why Are They Following Me?”
If anyone asked Zoe about her career plans in those warm, half-remembered days, she would say, “I’m going to be a writer.”
That’s what she told her parents, also, when she decided to drop out of school after her sophomore year.
“I’m sick of sitting in a classroom,” she said to Marsha at the conclusion of an unpleasant scene in the family kitchen. “There’s life going on out there, and I’m missing it.”
“How can you be sick of class?” her father butted in. “Judging from your grades, you never go.”
Glen Leggett ran the First Southside Bank in Jefferson Springs and was well off by Randolph County standards. His father had been a bright leaf tobacco farmer, and that’s how Glen started out. For the first sixteen years of Zoe’s life, spring meant sinking tobacco seeds into the Leggett dirt on dank, chilly mornings and summer meant spraying for suckers and pulling the bottom-most yellow leaves as cascades of sweat rolled down from her pulled-back hair. There was no choice—it was just assumed that she and Andy would help out.
The difference between Glen and his father, however, was that Glen had a degree in business from Lynchburg College. That helped him look beyond the ancient rhythms and rituals of the tobacco season to the wider world, where tobacco was becoming an obscenity to many.
He had a bad feeling about it, even as the federal government kept Virginia’s tobacco farmers safe.
This anxiety didn’t reflect a concern for those whose deaths may have been hastened by the fruit of his fields. Glen was a pragmatist whose mantra was: “Nobody’s making them smoke, right? Only an idiot wouldn’t see that warning label.”
Rather, his fear was that the waves of opposition to tobacco that were beating against its Southern citadel would one day wash away the price stabilization program and leave him and his family with nothing but unpaid-for equipment. He worried about this so much that he made the decision in Zoe’s sophomore year in high school to go to work for the Southside Bank and rent his precious Tobacco Stabilization Board allotment, all fifty acres of it, to Sam Bishop.
For years afterward, whenever Glen looked out his expansive kitchen window and watched Sam’s hired hands and Mexican farm workers toiling in the brutal Southside sun, he always said a silent prayer of thanks for his Lynchburg College degree. College and God, joined, perhaps, by the Stabilization Board, were the pillars holding up his philosophical mansion. He had been keenly disappointed when Andy opted for the military, and Zoe’s exodus from VCU left him devoid of degreed children. Even worse, he suspected that his daughter had become, if not satanic, at least an atheist.
“The Grateful Dead?” he once challenged Zoe upon seeing her bumper sticker. “Don’t they play that heavy metal, all those songs about suicide and the Devil?”
“Actually, no,” Zoe said calmly. “They sound like a bluegrass band. And they mostly sing about drugs.”
In the end, of course, there was nothing her parents could do. Zoe returned to Richmond and moved through a succession of jobs—clerk in a record store, ad salesperson for a free paper distributed around the VCU area, radio DJ, bartender. She had a circle of friends who were tuned to the same frequency, and together they enveloped themselves in a mellow fog, the most important issues in their lives being whose dog had to go to the vet, who was hosting the next party, and whose car might make it to the next Dead show.
The Kudzu Kid Page 6