Authors: Robert Ashcom
“Reckon we better plan right now for hog killin,’” said Billy Abel, almost in a whisper. “The way things be, who knows, it might not happen this year. Or maybe ever again.”
“Go on with you, Billy! What you mean? Just because Professor gone don’t mean everything going to change,” said Sally’s sister, Jean—because Billy always thought things would work out bad, no matter what.
Then Charlie in his loud voice said, “No need to wait. It’s all changed already!” He was looking around at the kitchen as if this would be the last time he ever saw it, which it was.
Fred Henry spoke up in his talky way, “What’s
wrong, Charlie? Don’t you like living in your new house? I know your mama and daddy glad to be out of the Corn House, what with it so small, and all …” Uncharacteristically, he stopped. Everyone knew how Charlie felt about leaving the Corn House and moving to the big house across the tracks on the other side of the village. You could see it in his eyes when he got off the bus in the village instead of riding on up the hill to the lane at Silver Hill. In spite of knowing the village like the back of his hand, having grown up in it, he would look around like he was lost or in the wrong place. Then he would turn away and trudge up the bank and across the railroad and onto the lower lawn of his new home.
A ways down the hall to the dining room, Robert Paine said to Billy, “It don’t matter whether hog killing goes or not for Charlie. He been baptized in that branch once—and that’s enough for anybody, even Charlie.” He looked up to be sure Charlie had heard. Charlie was used to the tension between them. It had always been there.
But it was true. Charlie had surely been immersed in that branch. It had happened five years ago, when he was nine. Before that, Charlie had just been around. Almost like any other kid. Everyone in the community knew him, because he looked so different. But at that hog killing things changed. And all because the pipes burst at the school one night in the
January cold snap. It took ten days to fix the pipes, and it happened that hog killing went on during that time. So after Gretchen’s fears had been calmed by the professor, Charlie got to go along with Matthew, as he and Robert went around the neighborhood picking up the slaughtered hogs.
Hog killing took place each year just after a hard freeze in January. Billy and Matthew would meet up in the store one morning.
“Reckon it’s time, Matthew?” It was both a question and a statement.
“Reckon so, Billy … Monday?”
Word would go around the neighborhood, and Monday morning it began. Everyone in the area kept hogs. Some had one, some five. They were usually kept in plain board pens down the hill behind each house. They stank and squealed and ate garbage and feed from the co-op. On the appointed day, the men in the family went down to the pen with the .22 and the long, razor-sharp butcher knife.
By the time Matthew and Robert arrived, the hogs were supposed to be dead and bled out. But if there weren’t men in the family or the shooter had missed, Matthew and Robert would help out and get the job done. They would return to the village with five hogs at a time, a truckload, each with an ear notched in a special way so the men could keep track of the owners.
Behind the store, next to the branch, there was a huge metal scalding tub with a fire under it. The hogs
were loaded into it one at a time. Billy Abel, who had blue eyes in his dark face and was a man of many words, wore a ridiculously tall chef’s hat to preside over this ritual. He looked like a cross between a witch and a clown, brandishing his butcher knife as he danced around giving orders with the steam rising all about him from the scalding tub. His first job was to delicately test the water with his index finger while being careful not to slip down the frozen bank into the branch. Standing next to him by the tub would be James Walker, who was six foot five. He held a bucket of cold water from the branch ready to pour a little in each time Billy hollered that the water was getting too damn hot. The water had to be just the right temperature for the hogs to let go of their hair, so that Matthew and Robert and Leonard could shave each one with the razorlike knives after it had been heaved up to the edge of the tub. That done, two other Walker brothers would lift the hog out of the tub and hang him up by the hind legs on the racks set up next to the road. Everyone had to be careful about slipping. The ground was frozen solid, but as the day went on, the surface became slick with blood and thawed ice.
When there were five hogs hung up, Billy would, with another flourish, zip his knife down the belly of each one. As the guts cascaded out, they were caught in large pans to be separated out for sausage and scrapple. They kept most except the lungs—the men called them “lights”—which were slung up into the air by the windpipes and caught on the power lines
running along the road. In that way everyone who drove by could tell how the hog killing was going by the number of lungs hanging from the wires.
To a stranger, it would have looked like something from another world, certainly not like the end of the forties in America what with ten black men talking and laughing as they heaved the huge hog carcasses around in the steamy mist with the lights and wind-pipes hanging overhead on the wires, and Billy doing his dance, with his knife and his chef’s hat, talking his head off, his blue eyes flashing with pleasure.
Charlie loved it, from the first second. He was like a blond ghost dodging in and out, asking questions so fast that not even Billy could keep up with answers. “Why do you scrape that thick, old hair off the hogs, Billy?”
“Well, Charlie, sometimes we cook the pork with the skin on. Wouldn’t do to have that thick, old, bristly hair on our plate, would it?”
On and on during the morning. Until about the fifth hog, hanging on to Matthew’s coat while he was scraping a hog, Charlie said in a dreamy voice, “Matthew, how many years have you been doing this?”
Then just slick as you please, Charlie slipped right down the icy bank into the branch, which was two and a half feet deep.
Robert Paine hollered, “Look out! God damn it! I told you Matthew not to let that little white boy in here.”
Charlie let out a yell as he struck the cold water, slid on the muddy bottom, and for a second disappeared
completely from sight.
There was total confusion. Billy, still the comic demon, leapt up and down, waving his butcher knife and hollering, “Oh my God! Miz Lewis going to kill us! Oh my God! What we going to do, Matthew? That boy going to drown!” while Matthew, as usual, took charge of the situation and put a handy fence board across the branch—which was really just a ditch about four feet wide. But it
was
over two feet deep. By the time Charlie surfaced, the whole crew had gathered around on both sides of the branch.
Charlie could swim. His daddy had taught him in the pond behind Silver Hill when he was seven. But he’d never been in cold water like that. So he let out with another mighty yelp as he reared up from the water covered with mud and ice, then slipped and fell back in again.
Matthew was yelling, “Grab the board, Charlie! Grab the damn board!”
On the second try, Charlie grabbed the board and hung on like death as Matthew clutched at him from one side of the branch and Leonard from the other. The problem was that they each got an arm and pulled. And for a second it looked like all three would end up back in the branch, which would have struck a tremendous blow to everyone’s dignity. There would be laughter in the store for at least the next ten years.
“Let go, Leonard!” Matthew bellowed and heaved at Charlie’s coat sleeve, almost pulling the coat ashore
and leaving the boy behind. But Charlie somehow stayed inside the coat and ended up in Matthew’s arms, already shivering uncontrollably.
As Mr. Dudley opened the back window of the post office to see what the yelling was all about, he saw a cluster of black men peering into the branch next to the scalding tub, as if they had added some new twist to the normal ceremony of hog killing. But it was just Charlie, and since the phrase “just Charlie” was already becoming a staple in the talk of the village, no one was one really surprised when Matthew rushed into the store, nearly carrying Charlie, and set him down on the nail keg next to Aunt Millie Mays’s old rocking chair.
Aunt Millie was a very old black lady with only two bottom teeth, who spent her days in the winter sitting next to the pot belly in the store. For many people, she was a mystery. Some people weren’t even sure who she was or where she had come from. But in winter, she was always there. Watching. Staring at people. Never saying anything. That day she took one look at Charlie and began to cackle in a high, crazy old voice—pointing and gabbling, “You done took a bath now, Charlie Lewis, for sure. That’s just what you need—washing in all that hog blood and mud and water. Now you know what it’s like …” She paused to draw breath, and then began again, with real urgency, “Where you come from, Charlie Lewis? Where? Tell me where?” Rocking and cackling, holding on to her head scarf with one hand and pointing with the other
forefinger, which was almost bent double with arthritis, at Charlie who looked up at her, startled, for a second. Almost afraid.
People didn’t usually pay Aunt Millie any mind. But something in her crazy voice made everyone in the store stop now and stare at Charlie.
He was just a skinny, nine-year-old boy, with his mother’s fair coloring. He was just Charlie, huddled there in his winter coat, having been washed in that branch sure enough, even though by mistake, but soaking wet, nonetheless, and to whom Aunt Millie never spoke another word.
Then the spell was broken and Matthew was cranking the phone and telling the operator he wanted number 32. Gretchen came on the line and Matthew told her what had happened, and she was no doubt out the door before Matthew could hang up. She rolled into the gravel parking lot in a hurry, rushed into the store prepared to be furious—took one look at the bedraggled boy, sat down on the nail keg next to him, and clutched him in her arms, crooning, “Why do you do these things, Charlie? Why?” Always the same words.
Most of us thought she knew the answer, that it lay not very deep within herself but that for some reason she could not bring herself to speak it.
Hog killing went on and two hours later he was back, as he was each year following. Some years Charlie didn’t see much of it because of school. But some years, if there was snow, he would be around for the
whole thing. And every once in a while someone told the story again of Charlie being baptized in the branch and of Aunt Millie’s pointing at him in the store and being so crazy. And everyone would laugh—Charlie, too—except Robert, who only laughed at his own jokes.
On this funeral day in the hall at Silver Hill, Robert laughed. He remembered it as his own story.
But Billy didn’t laugh. He said to no one in particular, “Well, I’m asking around to see who’s got hogs. Seems like not as many hogs around this year as usual …”
Just at that moment Alice Wilson, an old black lady who had been the maid at Silver Hill before Matthew and Sally came and was helping serve, called down the hall, “Charlie Lewis, your mama want you in this parlor right now to make your manners. And she say this instant! So you better come!” Charlie headed for the parlor right then because Alice could actually scare a person, even as gray and dried up as she was.
Alice’s own famous story was about the time a poor old classmate of the professor’s, who had become an alcoholic and ruined his life, kept coming around pan-handling until Alice had had enough. She warned the man that there would be trouble if he came around again. And sure enough, the next time he walked up the brick walk between the boxwoods, she came to the door with the professor’s double-barrel 16-gauge and told him to get out of there, right now. The poor man
then made the mistake of saying something about not having to take that kind of talk from a colored person, at which point she started counting to ten. He suddenly realized then that this old lady was serious and he started to run. But it was too late, because when she got to ten, she let go with one barrel of number 12 bird shot and blew the poor man the rest of the way down the brick walk. The village laughed about it for days. That would teach some old drifter, no matter who he was, to mess with Alice Wilson. There was all sorts of trouble with the law, but the professor took care of it. The story even had a happy ending because the man’s people came and got him, and he went home and never had another drink for the rest of his life, at least so we were told.
But now Alice looked so bent over with age and grief you wouldn’t have thought anything of her, until you looked into her fierce unyielding eyes as she took Charlie’s arm to hurry him up to the parlor, and whispered, “Charlie you be a brave boy now. You hear me? Be brave!” And when he didn’t turn his head, she jerked his arm. “Look at me, Charlie Lewis. Did you hear me?” And this time he did look into her almost black eyes and then down at her hand on his arm. A hand whose veins seemed as big as the bones, and said, “Yes ma’am, I hear.”
Just as they entered the room, a tall white-haired man pushed past them on the way to the dining room.
“Who was that?” whispered Charlie.
“Oh, that’s some big man from Richmond the
professor knowed for years.” And here a small devilish smile came on her face, and she whispered, “Don’t he just look walkingstickyfied? I swear I never did like that man.” She pulled Charlie on into the parlor where Gretchen and Mrs. James were waiting.
Gretchen had made most of the funeral arrangements. There had been no one else, really, so she just stepped in and did it. Now she met Charlie’s gaze coolly. She was standing next to Mrs. James, tall and erect and grim in her black dress, her hair pulled back in a bun at the base of her neck. Her posture said that she would do this bitter thing, no matter what. Charlie, if he had thought about it, would have understood the price she paid for her icy control. There must have been two hundred people in and around the house, all told. As each person came by to pay his or her respects, Gretchen, if she knew the name, would lean down and whisper to Mrs. James who it was. No one knew how much the old lady understood about what was going on around her. Sometimes she would act as if she knew nothing all.