Winter Run Page 2

  Looking back, it is no wonder they were all so angry with me and frightened. It was as if I somehow wanted to run back up the pipe of evolution and burst through at the other end into a meadow where nature and its creatures and I were the same thing.

  “Matthew,” I asked, “is that hog tame or wild? I mean, he stands there looking at us and doesn’t run away, so he’s not like a deer or a fox. What would he do if I went in there with him? Would he be like a cow and maybe stand still or maybe walk away—”

  “Charlie!” he interrupted. “Now you listen to me. I told you before about hogs.”

  “Oh, I know. You mean about maybe eating you if you fell into a little pen with them. But that boar is in the open—it would be like—”

  “No, it wouldn’t be like anything you ever seen! That boar (he called it a “bo”) is dangerous. You’ll end up just like Billy Gibbons over to Smith’s. They have a big pen, too. But that didn’t keep them hogs from near eating him that morning he come in drunk and slipped and fell into the pen when he was calling them. Hadn’t of been for the horse trainer come to check a sick yearling, and hearing all the commotion from the hog pen, Billy would of been dead! You know they had him down in the slop and had tore his clothes off, and you could see blood all over his chest where they started to eat him. They had a time getting him out of there. What with those hogs not wanting to let go of that boy and Jimmy running around yelling for help and that old woman, Mrs. Greeves, standing there laughing and saying how that would teach him to come in drunk, before she knowed how bad it was. Hadn’t of been for the horse trainer, that boy would sure Lord have been dead.

  “Now Charlie, I know you. And if I see you coming near this hog lot without me, I’m going to call your mama and get her to keep you home. And you know she will if I tell her. Are you listening, Charlie?”

  Gretchen? She was always there in the background, looking at me. At the time I understood she was afraid, but I never knew of what.

  That evening she was in her garden. She was kneeling on a feed sack with a narrow trowel in her gloved right hand transplanting tulip bulbs that Mrs. James had given her. Her thick hair was pulled back with a rubber band, and there was a thin line of perspiration on her upper lip. She looked up and smiled. Her gray eyes were cool and appraising, thinking, What have you done today, Charlie? What new, crazy thing have you gotten into today? Not out loud, but I knew what she was thinking. Out loud she said, “Did you and Matthew and Robert get the pigs moved?” She called them pigs. She was a city girl.

  “Yes, and we saw the boar hog. He’s huge, Gretchen. Huge! And he rumbles down in his chest when he moves around. He looks like a wild animal—”

  Her eyes tensed. “You know you’re not to go there alone. Professor James spoke to me about it. And I will speak to your father about it this weekend. You must not go near that pig lot without Matthew. Do you hear me, Charlie?”

  The pony was tough. The day I got her she kicked me in the right knee as I was walking into her stall to feed her. Her name was Tricksey, which I hated. To me she was just the pony. Her coat was gray, but depending on how wet the red clay of our fields was, she was pink or reddish brown. When I went to catch her in the big open broom sage pasture, she blended with the land so I could hardly see her. Sometimes I absolutely couldn’t see her. She was a part of the countryside. She fit in.

  She was hard to catch. Like the other things about the land and the animals I couldn’t understand, I didn’t understand her. But she would come to a handful of grain if I stroked my palm and wiggled the grain around in my hand.

  That afternoon she was harder than usual to find. She seemed to blend into the ground even more. Maybe it was a sign. The plan was the same as the daydream: The pony and I would jump over one of the chicken coops into the hog lot. Then I would find the boar and just hang around with him.

  Gretchen had gone to town, and Matthew was nowhere to be seen. We trotted down the dirt lane to the hog lot. The weather was threatening, ominous to the west over the mountains. We had passed the hog lot many times, so I was sure the pony was completely used to the smell. At the first chicken coop jump, I stopped her and looked over into the pen. No hogs in sight.

  She refused twice. By the third time, I was really furious and beat her hard behind the saddle with the crop. She landed in a mud puddle and stopped dead still. And I almost fell over her head. But there I was—in the pen. From the inside, it was like a trap, with the paradise trees growing everywhere and the mud. Even the honeysuckle looked stronger. I had landed twenty feet from the rock with the little spring flowing out from under it. It bubbled up clear but quickly muddied as it started its journey to the outside world. Swamp lilies grew around the rock. It was a little garden in the sea of mud. We moved in deep enough that I couldn’t see the fence behind me—or in front. It was like being out of sight of land in a boat. I had never felt the pony so alive and aware. She walked stiff-legged, with her neck rigid and her nostrils flared, looking. I loved it.

  We found the sows in a group, lying on their sides in the mud with their heads up, looking startled at us with those flashlight eyes. When she saw them, the pony slammed on the brakes, again, and whirled around, right out from under me, leaving me sitting in the mud. And then she was gone, galloping back toward the chicken coop jump, whinnying in a panic. She had never been in with hogs before, not right in the pen with them. Neither, of course, had I. I got up. I looked at the sows. Not one moved. Well, I thought hopefully, wishing it to be so, this will probably be fine. The sows aren’t upset.

  I was standing in six inches of mud. I looked around. Through the vines, I could just see the chicken coop jump on the other side of the pen. It felt like I was way down inside something. The cloudy sky was far above. The air was close—August close.

  He came from behind me. I heard the sound but didn’t immediately put it together with the boar. When he rumbled in his chest, I turned around. So there I was. It was as if I had known somehow that I would be in there on the ground with that six-hundred-pound hog, figuring out what to do next. The big old sows were sprawled out in the mud in front of me with their heads still up like fat women on a beach watching as the shark’s fin bears down on the swimmer.

  I went for the nearest stump—which meant sloshing across five feet of mud and water. I grabbed the four-foot-high stump and frantically started to climb it. I was very frightened but also very excited. I wasn’t going to let that boar get me!

  The stump was rotten; it broke off at the base as soon as I started to climb. I fell to the opposite side of its base from the hog. I got up and reached for the next one. It held and I pulled myself up using the honeysuckle vines. I must have looked like a fence lizard peering over the top of a half-round post. I figured I was about in the middle of the enclosure. The sows were still mildly interested. The boar was more interested, very interested. But all was not lost. I could see the opening of the far chicken coop through the vines, about fifty feet away. In a way it was comical. The damn thing was just a big, bristly, gray pig, looking up at me with flopped over ears, snuffling loudly through his nose. Just a pig.

  But he had those flashlight eyes, and I knew the story about Billy Gibbons at the Greeveses was true. When after ten minutes the boar was still looking at me, I began to worry. Clinging to the stump was getting old. It was a sure thing I was not going to be able to wander around the hog lot checking the sows with him. There were a number of possibilities in the long run, none of them attractive. At some point someone would see the pony around the barnyard with the stirrups and reins flapping. No matter who saw the pony first, word would get to Matthew, and he would put it together and come after me and no doubt would have to shoot the hog to get me out of there—with results nearly as awful as being eaten by him. There would be no talk at the store in the evenings about how Charlie Lewis had escaped the huge-ass gray boar that had him up a stump or about how Charlie walked home, muddy but safe, to catch the pony and put her away and walk to the house to take hi
s licks.

  So I had to figure something out. The solution was not immediately apparent until the boar stopped looking at me, turned his head to eye the sows, and oinked his way over to them; then the situation started to look a little brighter. The chicken coop jump was there, a faint glimmer, a window, a way out, with about fifty feet of mud and water and roots to trip me up. Then I heard our car horn. Not just a toot. Steady. Gretchen had found the pony and was on the way up to the big house, looking for Matthew. If I was going to do it, I’d better do it quick …

  When I finally let go of the honeysuckle to slide down the stump, the boar turned his head and forgot the sows. The the sows saw me, too, and oinked onto their feet and came with the boar, the whole damn pack of them. We were off through the mud and goo and water. I grabbed a branch and began to pole vault myself toward the chicken coop jump. The boar rumbled along behind me. He was excited. The pitch of the rumbling went up—the predator in a sight chase with his prey. I was still very frightened, but I would beat them!

  It was dark in that hog lot. The paradise trees were low down with their smell like lead, and the oaks made a high canopy. The hog stink was deep in my nose. All around were the stumps sticking up above the mud and water on their mounds of dirt, like islands. But they were not for me.

  I heard Matthew’s truck, so she must have found him pretty quickly. They were coming for me and I didn’t want to be found. I wanted to be like the fox, deep in the enclosure, fooling everyone. I could wait for Gretchen and Matthew to leave and then escape on my own. I didn’t want them to be waiting for me. I wanted to do it alone.

  But the boar and the sows were too close. And there was the chicken coop beckoning. I could see the daylight shining through the opening and then the truck stopping. By this time I had started yelling at myself to hurry up, because here they came! The boar was snuffling at my legs. Matthew was waving his arms. Gretchen was screaming. And then I grabbed the top board of the chicken coop and pulled myself over while the boar slammed into the wooden jump with the sows right behind him.

  I landed in her arms and lay still. She wiped the mud and water from my face, smoothed back my hair, which was the same color and texture as hers, whispering, “Charlie, why do you do these things? Why don’t you let the world alone?”

  I knew what she meant, but she was talking about her world, not mine. She hovered over my life like a gentle bird with huge wings to clutch me to her. She held me with her strength, saying in her soul, Come back. Let it alone. Be safe. But I wasn’t little, and I wasn’t coming—not in the way she meant. Even then, and never again.

  I looked up into Matthew’s eyes, with their bloodshot whites and deep brown pupils. He was angry because he was afraid. But I had needed to know. I said to him, “You see! It was just like with the hounds and that fox. Those hogs couldn’t catch me. I made it through. I knew I could.”

  I hadn’t known. But even at nine, I had had to go in there, into that dark, forbidden place.

  Then in his soft voice, Matthew said, “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go home.” He picked me up with his huge hands as if I weighed nothing and set me firmly on my feet. “Let’s go home.”

  Sight

  By the age of eight, Charlie was crazy about horses. Maybe it was even earlier, but during that summer it came to a crisis, as things often did with Charlie and his enthusiasms. The problem began with Bat, the old one-eyed mule who was owned by Leonard Waits but seemed to spend most of her time at Silver Hill. Bat and Charlie were close, if such a thing could be said about a pale blond boy and a brown mare mule. But the fact was that they spent a lot of time with each other. The mule often jumped out of whatever pasture she happened to be in to end up where Charlie was. She even met the school bus—or at least she was usually there when the bus arrived. Many folks refused to accept the idea that a twenty-five-year-old mule would actually wait at the bus stop for a seven-year-old boy, and the fact that it often happened was written off as coincidence. Charlie talked to her just the way he would a human, and while he was on his own two feet she did almost anything he wanted. Most of the time she even followed him around loose, without a lead line, more or less like a dog.

  But the relationship did not extend to riding.

  The first problem was that she had a high, straight backbone that was so uncomfortable that even with a pillow Charlie could hardly bear to sit on her. The next problem was that when he was on her back, he had virtually no control over her. The way the friendship seemed to work was that when Charlie was on the ground and she could see him out of her one eye, their special relationship held. But when he was on her back and she couldn’t see him—because of the blinkers on the old work bridle—he became just another human being. Most of the time she wouldn’t even move. Mule nature took over. This theory was offered up by Jimmy Price who was considered an expert on horses because he had a mare named Princess who would lie down and roll over on command. Lacking any better authority, his theory was accepted. And so Bat fell from grace as transportation and, more important, as the embodiment of the romance of riding.

  The summer Charlie was to turn eight, the woods on the far side of the farm next to the railroad were to be logged. No one was sure why. Professor James surely didn’t need the money. There had to be something, some reason, but nobody knew what it was, not even Matthew.

  A white man named George Maupin, who lived ten miles west at the foot of Burdens Mountain, had the contract in the beginning. George was only five foot six, but he was absolutely square and the physical power implied in his shape was true. He always wore a businessman’s hat, summer and winter. He had sweated right through it for so many years that the band was two shades darker than the rest of the hat. George was an old-fashioned logger. That meant that he had two strong workhorses, a beat-up six-ton truck with a log rack, a huge two-man chain saw with a four-foot cutting bar, his own strength, and the need for one other strong man.

  Before the war came, George had been doing fine. Landowners hired him to go into old woods, take out the biggest trees for saw logs, leave the rest, and not make a mess. In those days George had four horses and could move really large logs. It was a time before we got used to the woods being torn up by skidders and bulldozers.

  George’s branch of the Maupin family was native to the area around the village. There were three brothers, but the home farm next to the village was not big enough for one family, let alone three, so George, just before the war, had bought a little place in Burdens Hollow at the foot of the mountain. It was not really a farm, just a rocky fifteen-acre pasture with a log house and barn, with the beginning of Burdens River running through the pasture. It was a mountain farm—there were black snails in the stream, the kind found only in mountain creeks and rivers.

  When George got home from the war, he wanted to pick up where he’d left off. But now there was competition from the machines. And time was becoming money. Even so, there were still some people like the professor who cared about the woods—not many, but enough to keep George busy, at least for a while.

  Because Silver Hill was so far from George’s home, his two workhorses would be fed ear corn in the barn at the Corn House, where Charlie and his parents lived, and turned out in the broom sage field behind it at night. Charlie was intensely interested, as he was with anything new. Other than his unsatisfactory experience with Bat, he knew next to nothing about riding beyond the fact that you pulled on a single rein to turn left or right, both reins to stop, and kicked with your heels to go. Leonard Waits, who owned two big workhorse mares in addition to Bat, had let Charlie sit up on one of the mares a few times. Charlie had also watched Leonard put on the stiff, old work bridles with their twisted wire bits and blinkers. So he knew how to do that much. There were no saddles at the farm; the professor had long ago given up riding. Anyway, the time of horses was ending.

  But not for Charlie.

  • • •

  Monday of the first week in June, the horses had arrived in George’s neighbor’s
cattle truck. Their heads hung so far out over the side of the truck you would have thought they would either fall out or jump out at the first intersection. But they were quiet creatures and it took a lot to surprise or scare them. The neighbor backed the truck up to a bank and off they came. To Charlie’s delight.

  “What’s his name, Mr. Maupin? He sure is big. How old is he?” Charlie began his usual flood of questions. George Maupin knew who Charlie was, as everyone did, but he had never been around him to any extent and was surprised and amused at the rush of questions.

  “His name’s Jim, Charlie. I reckon he’s about ten. I got him when he was a colt. Give a hundred dollars for him. I knowed the mare he come from and she was a big, strong, gentle mare. I never did hear who his daddy was. Anyway, he growed up to be a good one. Strong like his mama. And you can drop the lines on him in the woods and he won’t move a step till you come back.

  “Can I ride him, Mr. Maupin?”

  “Well, Charlie, I don’t know about that. Maybe …” His voice drifted off. He was a man who seldom spoke without cause, and he was a little bit amazed by Charlie. George wasn’t used to little kids who talked a mile a minute in grown-up language, so he inadvertently opened the door to what was to become another one of Charlie’s passions, because “maybe” always sounded like “yes” to Charlie.

  Jim, who stood at least three feet taller than Charlie at the shoulder, was totally gentle. That first evening he munched his ears of corn and then stood quietly while Charlie figured out how to get the bridle on him. This problem was solved by leading the huge horse up to a fifty-five-gallon drum, after putting a hay bale next to it. Charlie then crawled up the bale onto the barrel and finally got on a level with Jim’s head. Once the bridle was on, he coaxed him forward so he could leap to his back, clutching the little pillow he used for a saddle. That first evening when Matthew saw Charlie emerge from the barn, ducking his head down by the horse’s withers so he wouldn’t get knocked off by the overhead and clutching his pillow, he burst out laughing. Once in the barnyard Charlie put the pillow behind himself and hopped backward onto it. So there he was: the nearly eight-year-old boy, smiling in his blond way, proud that he had managed to get himself tacked up and mounted even if his charger was a gaunt and tired workhorse.