The old man was at a loss. For a moment he thought of Hodges’s grandfather digging for money on the Mormon place, perhaps some genetic quirk had encoded it in the third generation, a trait so degenerated by now that nothing remained save the compulsion to dig at random just on the offchance someone might have buried something worth replevying.
Oliver rose as stealthily as he could, even so his knees popped and he stood still and silent until he saw the boy hadn’t heard. Then he moved cautiously toward the ladder and climbed down it. When he eased into the moonlit piglot Hodges was still digging. Oliver approached within a foot or so of his back. “Hidy,” he said. The boy dropped the shovel as if electricity had coursed through it and leapt five or six inches into the air. When his feet touched earth they were already pedaling as if he rode an invisible bicycle and he was almost immediately at the fence. Oliver caught him as he was scrambling over the topmost slab and lifted him, kicking and squirming and cursing, and set him back to earth.
“Let me alone,” the boy was yelling.
“Whoa, young feller. Hold on a minute here. Noboby aims to hurt you. I just want to know what you’re up to.”
Hodges was trying to jerk his arm free. “None of your Goddamn business. Now let me alone.”
“You’re young Hodges, ain’t ye?”
“What’s it to ye?”
“Well, they don’t call ye Hodges, do they? What’s ye first name?”
“Yeah, I guess you’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Me tell ye my name so’s you could run straight to the law with it.”
“Hell, son, I don’t need no name. I got you in the flesh, right by the seat of your britches. I’s just askin to be polite.”
“My name’s Clifford.”
“All right. That’s some better. And just so you’ll know, I ain’t never been one to run overquick to the law. Now, you reckon if I turn you aloose you can control the impulse to jump that fence?”
“I ain’t done nothin.”
“You move right pert for a feller just takin the night air. Ain’t none too qualmy about these copperheads neither.” Oliver released his grip on the boy. “Now, what’s my hoglot got you can’t dig up nowhere else?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Oliver had been wanting to smoke but had been afraid of setting the hay in the barnloft afire. Now he packed the bowl of his pipe and struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit the tobacco. When he spoke his voice was furred by the smoke. “What was you diggin for?”
“It ain’t none of your business.”
“Well. I reckon it’s your shovel. But it’s my lot and my hogs been standin around losin sleep and watchin you diggin like a fool. Now, what is it? Do you just like diggin or is there somethin particular about my hoglot that appeals to you?”
The boy seemed to be considering, there was a shrewdness to his features, a transparent cunning. Oliver watched the play of thought on the small freckled face. Half is better than nothing, the face was thinking. Oliver grinned. The face was already trying to devise a plan for cheating him out of half of whatever it was he didn’t even know about yet.
“Well. I guess we could split.”
“I don’t see why not.”
The boy squatted on the earth before him. In the moonlight they were dwarfed by the dark shape of trees above them. A warm wind smelling of summer going overripe came looping up the hollow across them. Faint surcease scented with rich opulence, the ripe pears and musk of honeysuckle. An owl called lonesome from a hollow negated by dark.
“Well. It’s pigs.”
“Pigs?” the old man asked in disbelief.
“Hell, yeah. I’d a thought a man as old as you are would have figured it out hisself by now.”
“Boy, you’ve lost me. Figured out what?”
“Diggin up them pigs.”
Oliver felt like a participant in some surreal conversation in which the answers bore no relation to the questions, lines had been fragmented and shuffled indiscriminately. “They Godamighty. Is that what you been doin out here of a night? And them sacks… ”
Hodges nodded. “To tote em home in,” he said.
“Lord God, boy. You don’t dig pigs up out of the ground like taters or somethin.”
“You want em all for yeself,” the boy said craftily.
“Whoever told you pigs were dug?”
“My mama did and I don’t know what cause she’d have to lie.”
“I see,” Oliver said.
“I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted em up in the hogpen.”
“And you not havin a hogpen…”
He sat in ruminative silence, just smoking his pipe and listening to the crying of the nightbirds, somewhere far and lost and streaking down the night the whistle of a train. “And what’d you figure, just kindly eliminate the sow? Bypass her sort of? Just dig the pigs up ahead of her and sell em?”
“Yeah. A person’s smartern a hog ain’t he?”
“We won’t argue about it,” Oliver said. “I suspect folks listening to us might work up evidence for either side.”
He sat watching the boy. This diminutive hog rustler, self-confessed and unrepentant thief of unborn swine. He with his fallow burlap bags and eye cocked to livestock futures. Oliver saw little that was lovable. He had a moment of clairvoyance, an insight of weary foreknowledge stabbed with regret. He knew that Clifford Hodges would always be slipping in at night and digging up somebody else’s pigs. He would always be playing the longshot or taking a shortcut, figuring the angles in somebody else’s game. And he would never have a game of his own. If he lived until he was grown he would be shot then or shoot someone else in a failed inept holdup. He and a cohort halfmad as they looked aghast at each other across the body of a fallen grocer or gaspump operator. If he won the game he’d be in Brushy Mountain penitentiary, if he lost the graveyard. Oliver felt pity for him, a commiseration for the things that had been and the things that were yet to be. He wished for words to encourage him, but none came. And his own life did not lend itself to examples.
“Well, what about it?”
“What about what?”
“About them pigs. Are we goin to split like we said or are you goin to dig em up after I leave and keep em for yeself?”
“Boy, they ain’t no pigs there to dig.”
“You done got em.”
“Goddamn it. Son, that ain’t where pigs comes from. I done told you that.”
“So you say.”
“Well, there’s a considerable body of evidence to back it up.”
“Then where does the old sow get em?”
Oliver took deep breath. “All right,” he said. “They grow here in the sow. Then when they’re big enough, when they’re made, they come out.”
“Come out,” the boy echoed. He was shaking his had, staring at Oliver in wonderment. “Everbody says you’re crazy and by God you are,” he said. “You’re crazy as hell. I never heard such a crock of bullshit in my life.”
“Well,” the old man said, “don’t blame me for it. It’s not like I laid it out or anything. It’s always been like that.”