“He’s seen he missed us,” the old man said. “I reckon he means to try his luck again.”
“It’s just Motormouth Hodges.”
“I know who it is,” the old man said irritably. “Why do you think I was scoutin the bushes?”
Motormouth had rolled down a window and was peering myopically into the night. The Chrysler idled throatily. Past the dark horizon the first stars were out, a pale band of them strung eastward. “Yins want a ride?”
Oliver was silent a long minute. “Not hardly,” he finally said.
“What are yins doin out here anyway?”
“Hunting ginseng,” Winer said.
“You must have needed some real bad,” Motormouth sniggered. He lit a cigarette, the flaring match giving his face a yellow, wolfish cast. “I never knowed you had to slip up on it in the dark,” he said.
“We got turned around back on Buttermilk Ridge. Cordwood cutters got the woods so changed it’s easy to get on the wrong road.”
“I been on that wrong road myself,” Motormouth said. “Get in. I ain’t got all night.”
“Well, I have,” Oliver said. “And hopefully two or three more. I wouldn’t slide my bony ass across them seatcovers for a hundred dollars with the ink still wet on it.”
“Get your gimlet ass in here, Winer. I got a thing or three to show ye.”
“Not tonight, Motormouth. We’ve been out since good light hunting sang. We’re trying to get what we can before frost.”
“That’s what I’m doin myself. Tryin to get what I can fore frost. Get in and I’ll run ye home anyway. Don’t you think I’d let ye out, or what?”
Winer grinned. “I’m not even sure we’d get there.” His fingers traced the long scrapes on the Chrysler’s rocker panels, straight furrows like clawmarks as if the car had barely escaped some dread beast. Lines like hesitation marks on the wrists of an aspiring suicide. “Looks like you been cleanin out a ditch-run or two.”
Motormouth put the car in gear, the pitch of the engine rising. “Well, they never did build roads to suit where I wanted to drive,” he said. “If you old folks don’t want to ride, you can walk then. I got things to do. I’ll see you.” He released the brake, left in the small storm of dust and rocks the wheels flung.
The old man watched as the taillights winked from sight. “You take a little bitty crazyhouse and put a wheel on each corner and give it a kick down the road and you’d have somethin about like that,” he said.
Several years back William Tell Oliver had gone out to his hoglot one morning and found a curious phenomenon. He had kept a few sows and a boar then and what he saw so surprised him that he set the bucket of feed he was carrying aside and stood leaning against the fence, ignoring the riotous squealing of the pigs, just staring out at the lot.
There were two holes there, craters almost, ovals roughly five or six feet in diameter and almost two feet deep. After a time the old man climbed the fence and passed among the milling hogs and inspected the holes closely, expecting who knew what. They were a wonder to him. He squatted in the offal of the lot examining them. The manure and rich black earth mounded their rims and the bottoms were smooth. He peered closely at the bottoms, perhaps looking for the remnants of some motel star, thin, bright layers of celestial slag. Hurled here at random or by discernment.
There was nothing. Only the dark earth beneath the layered manure and what he took to be spade marks. “Be damned,” he said to himself. With his walking stick to part the thick weeds about the fence he searched for signs. He had no idea what he expected to find. Old bones replevied from the curious graves, new bodies so destined. All he found was the hot ferment of the weeds and a copperhead moving sleek and burnished in search of deeper shade. He let his mind wander. What would there to be steal? He counted the hogs three time and all three times there were all accounted for. “What else in a piglot,” he asked himself, “save pigs and pigshit? A manure thief?” He looked for tiretracks without expecting to find them, for there was no road through the weeds and his mind could conceive no one so desperate for pigshit they must steal it under cover of darkness and cart it away on their backs.
It was a mystery and he didn’t care for mysteries: an old man who suspected chaos and disorder beyond the curtain of swirling dark, he hungered for order and symmetry in what remained of his life, a balancing of the scales.
He fed and watered the hogs and returned to the house. When his chores were completed he sat for a time in the shade of a pear tree, his eyes closed, feet up on a Coke crate, listening to the drone of bees glutting themselves on the ripe and windfallen fruit. Before the day was over he had returned to the lot to puzzle anew over the holes. He learned no more than the nothing he already knew.
In the morning there were three more holes, somewhat shallower but spaced over a wider area, as if someone had been digging for something at random. “Be damned,” he said again. He stared at the harried earth, suspecting perhaps some magnetic anomaly that sucked meteors and asteroids from the dusty band of space he hurtled through. He stared upward, seeking some cosmic mirror whose reflections marvelously cast chaos into order, righted the perverse and disorder, but he peered only into the blue emptiness, past shapeless wisps of clouds that fled westward ahead of the sun. He stood listening to the morning sounds that mocked him with their familiarity. He could hear the crinkling of hot tin, the pop of barn rafters warping in the heat. The furtive scuttling of a lizard. A thin film of perspiration crept across his shoulders, dampening his chambray shirt.
He counted the pigs again without expecting to find one gone. They were all there and he was halfdisappointed, surprised to find himself willing to sacrifice a pig for an explanation. A pig thief he could have understood, there was reason in it, sense. There was no sense in these holes pitting his hoglot. After a while he got a manure fork and began halfheartedly to shovel the earth back into the holes.
He took a long nap that afternoon and about dark he made himself a quart jar of coffee and carried it with him down to the barn. He had an old Browning over-and-under and he carried that too. In the hayloft he arranged bales of hay into a comfortable chair and settled himself out of sight to see what transpired.
For a long time nothing did. Dark deepened and shadows took the world. He sat immersed in the cries of insects, in the timeless tolling of whippoorwills. There was something of eternity in these sounds, at once bitter and reassuring. He’d heard them as a boy, as a young man, they sounded the same then as now. In this curiously altered stillness he felt he might even hear his wife open the kitchen door and call his name, his son might be on the spring path following him, a small form forever stalemated by time. He drank from the jar of bitter coffee and wiped his mouth on a sleeve, forced his attention to the barnyard below him. It lay in darkness but after an hour or so the moon cradled up out of the eastern trees and the pale illumination crept across the face of the land, tree and fence and stone imbued with significance like images in a dream.
The moon was high over the treeline and he judged it ten o’clock or better before he saw anything stir. When the boy came he came up from the branch-run with silent stealth, easing through the border of gum and persimmon, peering all about, cautious as a grazing deer. Apparently satisfied, he came out of the brush and approached the fence, carrying a burlap bag and a shovel whose handle was longer than he was tall. It was the Hodges boy. Why, he ain’t no morn nine or ten year old, he thought. The boy threw the sack over and leaned the shovel against the fence and clambered over. He took up the shovel and immediately fell to work, selecting a fresh corner of the lot to dig in. Just clock in and go to work, the old man thought in puzzlement. The boy dug for some time and then unpocketed a flashlight, knelt on the scattered manure he’d dug from the hole, raking carefully through it with his hands. Kneeling so in the earth he raised his face to the moon clocking on westward and then arose and commenced shoveling again.