“Good-looking hog you traded to Pa, Craig. What do you call those spotty ones?”
“He’s a Poland China,” he said in his tongue-twisted way. “They’re bred for lard. Not what you call a bacon pig.”
She laid aside her seed harvest and came to sit on the porch steps with him. Anton walked out. “Hey, Hedrick.”
His presence eased the younger man. “Bought me a manure spreader, Mester Gaddy. You own one? Chops straw and dung up and sifts it like my old lady straining wheat flour on her bread board.”
“Hum.”
There was a long pause. All three watched the progress of a flicker hammering up one side of the hackberry trunk. Craig was lifting his arms slowly as though he held a gun. He sighted the woodpecker on the red band across the back of its head. “Pow.”
Anton grunted, appreciative. He lit his pipe with a match he struck on his overall pants, drew the smoke into his lungs and exhaled. “There. I allow you got that high-hole.”
Craig was adjusting his position on the step, uncomfortable. “Well.”
Anton asked, “Heard the comical one about the hen that laid the oversized egg?”
“How’s it go?”
“It wasn’t comical to the hen.”
The young people were still, uncommunicative. “Come on, see my Ford, Ellen.” Craig was going in his springy stride to the black two-passenger automobile. He held his gait down to match Ellen’s. She was conscious of the smell of the man, could scarce speak for her contempt. Yet there were the pleading eyes and the wounded way of a beast about him. “You know where I live, Ellen? Just a piece from Tomkin’s Ditch.” He fought with his flaw of speech. There was a rich section, he was confiding, adjoining his, that he hoped to buy and add to his own. He had many plans.
Ellen knew it was because of the way he looked upon her that he was pushing out his chest and leaning awkward against his polished automobile. He was tall in his shining shoes and Sunday wear. Her dress was torn. All the while though, she felt he was the pitiful one. She stood apart from her own body and watched this Ellen Gaddy, her forbearance, her dignity. She was gentle. “I got chores to do now.”
“Well then.” He started the motor, drove hastily off.
In days to follow Craig would stop to talk with her. Ellen, aloof, would listen as he rambled. Her mind would stray on whether Pa would remember to get the sorghum syrup or whether Sam had mended the split butter paddle as he promised.
The fields were being prepared for winter wheat, the horses and plow working over the land. The disking and harrowing were now in progress and the blended figures of man and team moved over the horizon to disappear and return again. Ellen could see them from the potato patch. She was digging in the rows with a fork, and she stuffed the tubers into towsacks. The dust rose; her nostrils were clogged with it. A bluebird, lingering before it flew south, was beading its sad autumn cry, “Far-away, far-away!”
It was then that the days of a summer came upon her and she thought of the man on whom she had laid a curse. She wondered if she could remember his looks and ways, if meeting him she would know him. It’s past and done. He can’t ever hurt me more. Down the row slowly she worked. It’s past. She was testing it. But then it was as if Christian Ay emerged from the shadows and stood by her in the row. She ceased digging, there in the ragged dress, her hair bound by a bit of twine, her feet dirty, black outlining the toenails. The north wind of late October was blowing and the shadow fell across her. It seemed he was broad and strong, he laughed greatly and she loved him in a way that her being ached. She was trembling, water flowing down her face. She stood a while in her surprise, frightened by the issuance from what she had thought a safe memory. Its pain stirred her.
In that night the wind was changing. She heard it, felt its veering. And the whippoorwills came up, calling in the cool caves of morning.
* * * * *
The next day Craig hunted until he found her in the orchard where her goats were grazing on crisp fallen leaves. She was leaning against an apple tree, listless. “Hey, Ellen. Hit’s Indian summer.”
She made no reply. He stood restive before her. A yellow insect hovered whining about his tight-curled hair. “There’s a news-bee, Ellen.” He reached out to catch it and it flew off. “Wonder what it came to tell, Ellen?” The fragrance of the girl’s blown hair as she leaned on the armor of the old tree, brought him yet again to speech, his face on fire. “I’d get two-three nanny goats if you’d a mind for them. You could have honeybees too, and by the doorside I’d set out petunia flowers.”
She turned to him, absent, her face wan, her gray eyes sorrowful. “Think I’d have a poor rake such as you?” After a time she looked up from where she bent her head to see he still was standing there. He wore a bruised look and his underlip sucked in. “I ne’er meant to say that. It’s because I’ve no notion for marrying, Craig. It’s nothing against you.”
“E’er seen my farm, Ellen? Out by Tomkin’s Ditch? You’d only to see hit to change your mind. I was fixing to paint the house, too.”
His dreams left her unmoved. She was watching two winging birds come to settle in a tree. “There’s a pair of doves.”
“I might even build on a porch and put up screening.”
“If one dies, it’s mate’ll mourn till it dies too. E’er find a dove lying dead, no mark on it?”
“I’d set out young shade trees, Ellen, to put a chair under.”
“I came on a dove in the path one time. It ne’er had a sign nor wound on its body and was still warm.”
They returned to the house. Anton was under the hackberry, pulling on his pipe. “Set to dinner along with us, Hedrick.” He was poking the young man with his elbow. “Ellie made a wild-plum pie this morning. She’s one for kitchen chores.”
After their first hunger was spent, Anton was talkative. “A sight of my corn ruined in that summer storm. Might have to buy a load come spring. You lose any crops?”
“I reckon I’ll make out. I’ve got a herd of steers. I’m going to take them to the auctions in Louisville.”
“You fattening steers? Well.” Anton pushed his food with a knife onto the fork he held in his left hand. “I call to mind my sir gave me two matched bull calves when I was a youngen. I set store by them, made them a little yoke and learned them to drag a stone-boat and mind hawp and gee. My sir waited till they were two-year-olds to cut their balls. That was to allow them to get a good crest.”
“What did you name them, Pa?” asked Frankie.
“I mind the off one was Brown. I disremember the near one’s name. I was proud of them for a shirt-tail brat.”
“What happened, Pa?”
“My ma sold them under me. She needed cash for my brother Marc, who was getting his learning. I hunted the barns and meadows, came in squalling someone stole them. What do you mean, your ox-team, Ma says, cash is cash.” Anton pursed his thick lips. “Now, they were so slick you could hunt for a loose hair. I used to file the horns and grease them.”
“Your maw give you a cut on what they sold for, Mester Gaddy?”
“I ne’er seen hit.” He asked Craig, “Have you worked oxen?”
“You couldn’t law them on me. I’m one for mules. Steady, and easy keepers. But to tell you true what I mostly hanker for is a tractor. I aim to get one some day.”
“And where’ll your manure come from then?” Anton gloated.
They were pushing back their chairs. The two men went out on the steps while the women cleared. Frankie was drying plates and laying them upside down, ready for the evening meal. Ellen took the butter and milk jars out to the dry well near the porch. “Go to mass in my auto tomorrow, Ellen?” Craig asked when she passed on the step.
Anton answered, “She’ll go. Be pleasured to.”
Ellen would give them no glance though Craig murmured, “Ellen?” as she was going by up the stairs and into the kitchen. She heard them. “I aim to take a drive later, Mester Gaddy, if it makes no nevermind to you. Ellen’s not seen my farm and my maw’d be proud to meet her.”
“That suits.”
“How’s that seed-boar I traded you?”
“He’s a crapping mean sonofabitch, Hedrick. Set on rutting up his fence all the time.”
“I noticed he liked to do that. Always breaking through. But I wouldn’t say he was mean. That’s hog nature.”
“Maybe so. I call him Luther.”
“That’s a foreign name. Spot would fit him more.”
“After Martin Luther. A crapping bastard Dutchman Brinker worships. Heathen.”
“Say. Bet that’s the first hog e’er to go by that name in this county.”
* * * * *
“Ellie, how come Craig’s pa got killed?” Frankie was asking as they lay in their beds in the muddled dark of their room.
“Oh, it was in hay time. Craig and him were working with a watch-eye hand. Craig and that man were in the loft stacking hay back. His pa was down on the wagon. Well, that watch-eye man was fixing to jump down and pitched his fork ahead of him. It stabbed Moses Hedrick in the back between his shoulders. There he was, holding to the hay frame and the handle sticking out of his back. They said the prongs came out in front. Said he died standing there before he fell down.”