Outer Dark (15 page)

That’s right, the woman said. The squire threw her a sharp look.

I don’t know, John said. Ain’t this a favor?

No.

No. It’s just what’s fair.

Don’t make no difference about fair or not fair, it’s against the law. You ain’t authorized to work no prisoners.

I ort to of just shot him and let it go.

No, you done right bringin him in like ye done. But you cain’t ast me to break the law and turn him back over to ye. Can ye now?

Shit. Scuse me mam.

I wouldn’t ast you to break the law. Would I now. John?

John had risen from the chair. He didn’t look back. He went out through the house with the shotgun hanging in one hand and his boots exploding over the bare boards through the rooms and they could hear the doorlatch and then the loud and final closing of the door and silence again for a moment and then a riotous squabble of chickens and then nothing.

Set down, the squire said. What are you doin with your boots off of such a cold mornin?

Holme took the chair the other man had vacated and sat and pulled on the boots laboriously. He stamped his numb feet on the floor but he could feel nothing. He looked up.

He told me to just tote em. I reckon he figured a feller barefoot be less likely to cut and run.

The squire shook his head sadly. I believe he’s slipped a cog somewheres, he said.

I never bothered nothin in his old house, Holme said.

Don’t make no difference, the squire said. You done been sentenced. I give ye pretty light for a stranger anyways.

Holme nodded.

We’ll get you started here directly you get your breakfast.

Thank ye, Holme said.

Don’t thank me. I’m just a public servant.

Yessir, he said. Grease was frying violently in a skillet behind him and the woman was putting biscuits to warm in the oven. His stomach felt like it was chewing.

The old lady’ll fix ye a bed here in the kitchen. You ain’t no desperate outlaw are ye? Ain’t murdered nobody?

No sir. I don’t reckon.

Don’t reckon eh? The squire smiled.

Holme wasn’t smiling. He was looking at the floor.

Get ye fattened up a little here on the old woman’s cookin you’ll be all right, the squire said. Might get some work out of ye then. You reckon?

Yessir. I ain’t scared to work.

The squire had tilted back in his chair, regarding him. I don’t believe you’re no bad feller Holme, he said. I don’t believe you’re no lucky feller neither. My daddy always claimed a man made his own luck. But that’s disputable, I reckon.

I believe my daddy would of disputed it. He always claimed he was the unluckiest man he knowed of.

That right? Where’s he at now? Home I reckon, where you …

He’s dead.

The squire had propped one foot on the chair before him and was rubbing his paunch abstractedly, watching nothing. His hand stopped and he looked at Holme and looked away again. Well, he said. I guess that’s about as unlucky as a feller would be likely to get.

Yessir.

You got ary family a-tall?

I ain’t got sign one of kin on this earth, Holme said.

Here, the woman said.

Holme looked vacantly at the steaming plate of eggs before him.

Holler when you get done eatin, the squire said, rising. I’ll be out in the back.

All right, Holme said. How long can I stay?

The squire stopped at the door. What? he said.

I said how long can I stay.

The squire shrugged his coat over his shoulders. It’s ten days at fifty cents a day. That’s all.

What about after that?

What about it.

I mean can I stay on longer?

What for?

Well, just to stay. To work.

At fifty cents a day?

I don’t care.

Don’t care?

I’ll stay on just for board if you can use me.

It was very quiet in the kitchen. The squire was standing with one hand on the door. The woman had stopped her puttering with dishes and pots. They were watching him.

I don’t believe I can use ye, Holme, the squire said. Holler when ye get done.

SHE CAME
from the house onto the porch and stood there taking the soft evening air and smelling the rich ground beyond the road where he followed the mule down the creek and back and down again through a deepening haze, he and the mule alike beset by plovers who pass and wheel and repass and at length give up the long blue dusk to bats. The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.

She sat quietly in the rocker. It was full dark when he came up from the bottoms, stooped under the small japanese plow, the mule coming behind him in the gloom and the two passing like shades but for the paced hollow clop of the mule’s shoeless feet in the road and then the softer sound in the wet grass and the slight chink of harness until they went beyond hearing into the barnlot. She was not even rocking. After a while she heard him in the house and he lit a lamp and came to the porch door and called her. She rose and went in, past him wordlessly and her slippers like mice along the dark hallway until he caught up behind her and lit her way into the kitchen where she began to fix his supper.

He sat at the table watching her, his hands cupped uselessly in his lap and his face red in the lamplight. Watching her move from the stove to the safe and back, mute, shuffling, wooden. When she set the greens and cold pork and milk before him he looked at them dumbly for a long time before he took up his fork and he ate listlessly like a man in sorrow.

She started past him toward the door and he took her by the elbow. Hold up a minute, he said.

She stopped and came about slowly, doll-like, one arm poised. She was not looking at him.

Look here at me. Rinthy.

She swung her eyes vaguely toward him.

You ain’t even civil, he said. It ain’t civil to come and go thataway and not say nothin never.

I ain’t got nothin to say.

Well damn it you could say somethin. Hello or goodbye or kiss my ass. Somethin. Couldn’t ye?

I’ve not took up cussin yet, she said.

Just hello or goodbye then. Couldn’t ye?

I reckon.

Well?

Goodnight, she said.

He watched her go, his jaw let down to speak again but not speaking, watched her fade from the reach of the powdery lamplight and heard her steps soft on the moaning stairboards and the wooden clap of the door closing. Goodnight, he said. He drank the last of the milk from the glass and wiped his mouth on his shoulder in a curious birdlike gesture. He’d see all night again tonight the mule’s hasped hoofs wristing up before him and the cool earth passing and passing, canting dark and moldy with humus across the coulter with that dull and watery sound interspersed with the click of bedded creekstones.

A moth had got in and floundered at the lamp chimney with great eyed wings, lay prostrate and quivering on the greasy oilcloth tablecover. He crushed it with his fist and flicked it from sight and sat before the empty plate drumming his fingers in the mothshaped swatch of glinting dust it left.

   She did not know that she was leaving. She woke in the night and rose half tranced from the bed and began to dress, all in darkness and with gravity. Perhaps some dream had moved her so. She took her few things from the chifforobe and bundled them and went to the landing beyond her door. She listened for his breathing in the room opposite but she could hear nothing. She crouched in the dark long and long for fear he was awake and when she did descend the stairs in her bare feet she paused again at the bottom in the dead black foyer and listened up the stairwell. And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. It was damp and cool and she could hear roosters beginning. She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent.

She went west on the road while the sky grew pale and the waking world of shapes accrued about her. Hurrying along with the sunrise at her back she had the look of some deranged refugee from its occurrence. Before she had gone far she heard a horse on the road behind her and she fled into the wood with her heart at her throat. It came out of the sun at a slow canter, in a silhouette agonized to shapelessness. She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.

ON A GOOD
spring day he paused to rest at the side of the road. He had been walking for a long time and he had been hearing them for a long time before he knew what the sound was, a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies. He rose and went on until he reached the gap in the ridge and before long he could see the first of them coming along the road below him and then suddenly the entire valley was filled with hogs, a weltering sea of them that came smoking over the dusty plain and flowed undiminished into the narrows of the cut, fanning on the slopes in ragged shoals like the harried outer guard of schooled fish and here and there upright and cursing among them and laboring with poles the drovers, gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair.

Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.

Howdy neighbor, called out the drover. Sweet day, ain’t she?

It is, he said. Whereabouts are ye headed with them hogs if you don’t care for me astin?

Crost the mountain to Charlestown.

Holme shook his head reverently. That there is the damndest sight of hogs ever I seen, he said. How many ye got?

The drover had come about the base of the rock and was now standing looking down with Holme at the passing hogs. God hisself don’t know, he said solemnly.

Well it’s a bunch.

They Lord, said the drover, they just now commencin to come in sight. He passed his stave from the crook of one arm to the other and cocked one foot on the ledge of rock, his sparse whiskers fluttering in the mountain wind, leaning forward and watching the howling polychrome tide of hogs that glutted the valley from wall to wall as might any chance traveler a thing of interest.

They’s more than one mulefoot in that lot, he said.

What?

Mulefoot. I calculate they’s several hunnerd head of them alone and they ain’t no common hog to come upon.

What’s a mulefoot? Holme said.

The drover squinted professionally. Mountain hog from north of here. You ain’t never seen one?

No.

Got a foot like a mule.

You mean they ain’t got a split hoof?

Nary split to it.

I ain’t never seen no such hog as that, Holme said.

I ain’t surprised, the drover said. But ye can see one here if you’ve a mind to.

I’d admire to, Holme said.

The drover shifted his stave again. Seems like that don’t agree with the bible, what would you say?

About what?

About them hogs. Bein unclean on account of they got a split foot.

I ain’t never heard that, Holme said.

I heard it preached in a sermon one time. Feller knowed right smart about the subject. Said the devil had a foot like a hog’s. He laid claim it was in the bible so I reckon it’s so.

I reckon.

He said a jew wouldn’t eat hogmeat on account of it.

What’s a jew?

That’s one of them old-timey people from in the bible. But that still don’t say nothin about a mulefoot hog does it? What about him?

I don’t know, Holme said. What about him?

Well is he a hog or ain’t he? Accordin to the bible.

I’d say a hog was a hog if he didn’t have nary feet a-tall.

I might do it myself, the drover said, because if he was to have feet you’d look for em to be hog’s feet. Like if ye had a hog didn’t have no head you’d know it for a hog anyways. But if ye seen one walkin around with a mule’s head on him ye might be puzzled.

That’s true, Holme allowed.

Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don’t it?

Yes, Holme said.

I’ve studied it a good deal and I cain’t come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.

No.

The drover stroked his whiskers and nodded his head. Hogs is a mystery by theyselves, he said. What can a feller know about one? Not a whole lot. I’ve run with hogs since I was just a shirttail and I ain’t never come to no real understandin of em. And I don’t doubt but what other folks has had the same experience. A hog is a hog. Pure and simple. And that’s about all ye can say about him. And smart, don’t think they ain’t. Smart as the devil. And don’t be fooled by one that ain’t got nary clove foot cause he’s devilish too.

I guess hogs is hogs, Holme said.

The drover spat and nodded. That’s what I’ve always maintained, he said.

Holme was watching the activity below them.

That’s my little brother Billy yander, the drover said, pointing with one tatterclad arm. This is his first time along. I thought mamma was goin to bawl sure enough when we lit out and him with us. Says he goin to get him some poontang when we get sold but I told him he’d be long done partialed to shehogs. The drover turned and bared his orangecolored teeth at Holme in a grimace of lecherous idiocy. Holme turned and watched the hogs. The drovers stood among them like crossers in a ford, emerging periodically out of the shifting pall of red dust and then blotted away again. They seemed together with the hogs to be in flight from some act of God, fire or flood, schisms in the earth’s crust.

I better get on and give them fellers a hand, the drover said.

Luck to ye, Holme said.

We’ll be stopped up on the river somewheres come dark. If ye chance by that way just stop and take supper with us.

Thank ye, said Holme. I’d be proud to.

The drover waved his staff and scrabbled away over the rocks like a thin gnome. Holme sat for a while and then rose and followed along the ridge toward the gap where the hogs were crossing.

The gap was narrow and when he got to it he could see the hogs welled up in a clamorous and screeching flume that fanned again on the far side in a high meadow skirting the bluff of the river. They were wheeling faster and wider out along the sheer rim of the bluff in an arc of dusty uproar and he could hear the drovers below him calling and he could see the dead gray serpentine of the river below that. Hogs were pouring through the gap and building against the ones in the meadow until these began to buckle at the edges. Holme saw two of them pitch screaming in stifflegged pirouettes a hundred feet into the river. He moved down the slope toward the bluff and the road that went along it. Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs with staves aloft, stumbling and falling among them, making for the outer perimeter to head them from the cliff. This swept a new wave of panic among the hogs like wind through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now up-reared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom.

Holme rushed to higher ground like one threatened with flood and perched upon a rock there to view the course of things. The hogs were in full stampede. One of the drovers passed curiously erect as though braced with a stick and rotating slowly with his arms outstretched in the manner of a dancing sleeper. Hogs were beginning to wash up on the rock, their hoofs clicking and rasping and with harsh snorts. Holme recoiled to the rock’s crown and watched them. The drover who had spoken him swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight.

Holme blinked and shook his head. The hogs boiled past squealing and plunging and the chalky red smoke of their passage hung over the river and stained the sky with something of sunset. They had begun to veer from the bluff and to swing in a long arc upriver. The drovers all had sought shelter among the trees and Holme could see a pair of them watching the herd pass with looks of indolent speculation, leaning upon their staves and nodding in mute agreement as if there were some old injustice being righted in this spectacle of headlong bedlam.

When the last of the hogs had gone in a rapidly trebling thunder and the ochreous dust had drifted from the torn ground and there was nothing but quaking silence about him Holme climbed gingerly from his rock. Some drovers were coming from the trees and three pink shoats labored up over the rim of the hill with whimpering sounds not unlike kittens and bobbed past and upriver over the gently smoking land like creatures in a dream.

Holme walked slowly up the bluff. The sun was bright and it was a fine spring day. The drovers had begun to assemble and they seemed in no hurry to overtake the hogs. They were handing about plugs and pouches of tobacco with an indifferent conviviality.

That beats everthing I ever seen, one said.

That’s pitiful about your brother.

I don’t know what all I’m goin to tell mamma. Herded off a bluff with a parcel of hogs. I don’t know how I’m goin to tell her that.

You could tell her he was drunk.

Tell her he got shot or somethin.

You wouldn’t need to tell her he went to his reward with a herd of hogs.

He shook his head sorrowfully. Lord I just don’t know, he said. I just wisht I knowed what to tell her.

You won’t see her for a couple of months anyways, Billy. Give ye time to think some about it.

What happent? Holme said.

One of the drovers looked at him. They Lord, he said, where was you at? Did you not see them hogs?

I seen him a-settin on a rock over yander, Billy said. Vernon went right past him and he never reached to help him nor nothin.

The drovers looked at him, a bizarre collection of faces that seemed assembled from scraps and oddments, all hairyfaced and filthy and half toothless and their weathered chops lumpy with tobacco chews. One spat and squinted up at Holme.

That right, stranger? he said.

Holme ignored him. I didn’t see you comin to help, he said.

I wasn’t near him, Billy said. I couldn’t of got to him. You was right there.

I seen him a-settin on that rock.

That’s all right about him settin on some rock, who was it got them hogs started in the first place?

That’s right. How come em to do thataway?

Where was you at, stranger? When them hogs commenced runnin crazy.

I wasn’t nowheres. I was way back yander.

Behind em kindly?

He just watched Vernon go right on out over the bluff and never said diddly shit.

Somethin had to of spooked them hogs thataway.

Well ain’t he just said he come up behind em?

He never raised hand one to save him.

Stranger we don’t take too kind to people runnin off folks’ stock.

We ain’t got a whole lot of use for troublemakers hereabouts.

Vernon never bothered nobody. You can ast anybody.

Shit, Holme said. You sons of bitches are crazy.

Peace be on all you fellers, a voice sang out behind them. Two of the drovers removed their hats. Holme looked around to see what was occurring.

A parson or what looked like one was laboring over the crest of the hill and coming toward them with one hand raised in blessing, greeting, fending flies. He was dressed in a dusty frockcoat and carried a walking stick and he wore a pair of octagonal glasses on the one pane of which the late sun shone while a watery eye peered from the naked wire aperture of the other.

What’s the ruckus here? Hey? He drew up and looked from one to the other among them and looked at the ground as if he had forgotten something, taking a kerchief from his sleeve and snorting into it.

Howdy Reverend, said Billy.

Howdy. Bless all of ye’ns. They Lord what’s been thew here?

Hogs, said one of the drovers. Damndest mess of hogs you ever seen, excuse me.

Hard words don’t bother me no more than does hard ways, said the reverend. That’s what all I’m here for. What’s he done? You ain’t fixin to hang him are ye? Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. Don’t hold with hangin a-tall lessen it’s legal. What possessed them hogs anyways?

This here feller run em off, Billy said.

I never done it, Holme said.

The hell you never.

Here now, somebody’s lyin. You, young feller, look me in the eye and tell me you never run them hogs off.

I never run em off, Holme said.

The drovers pressed about to watch.

The preacher looked at the ground again, stuffing the kerchief back up his sleeve.

Well, Reverend?

I believe he run em off.

I told ye, Billy said.

Goddamn it, Holme said, I wasn’t nowheres …

Watch that talk in front of the preacher, boy, one of the drovers said.

But don’t hang him boys, the reverend said. Don’t do it. We’ll take him in to justice. Render unto Caesar what all’s hisn.

He shoved brother Billy’s brother Vernon off the bluff with the hogs.

Just a goddamn minute, Holme said.

There he goes again with that mouth.

Don’t hang him, boys, the preacher cried out. No good’ll ever come of it.

Everbody seen what he done, Billy said. You all seen it.

The preacher looked like a charred bird. He was peering at the ground and pounding his cane there. Ah don’t hang him, he said. Oh Lord don’t hang him. Shaking his head and muttering these things loudly over and over.

I wisht you’d hush about some hangin, Holme said.