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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Wednesday,
July 19, 1922,
concluded
The moon was on the wane, just a sliver in the eastern sky this early in the night, but it was enough for Red to find his way. The lake to his left showed as a dark border of cypress and bush along the bank a quarter mile away. Fisher Creek was a line of river brush ahead, to the east, over where the sickle of moon showed him the way.
He crossed the bridge over Fisher, struggled through Padgett’s Branch again, then nearly dropped the shotgun as he fought his way back across Mudfish Slough.
Cursing under his breath, he licked his finger and tested the wind. It was out of the southwest, but after sunset the wind could get tetchy, and if it got behind him there’d be no pork for dinner. Hogs could smell as good as any hound dog.
He swung to the north to avoid crossing the wind, nearly to the lake shore, then east and south again. He sought out the same fallen tree they’d shot from before, laid the bag of vittles from Ma Middleton carefully behind it so as not to clank any of the tins together, and crawled up right to the log.
When he peeked over it, he saw he had almost left it too late; the last of the herd of wild pigs was just coming from the palmettos, with the rest strung out ahead of them almost to the Slough. Their soft squeals and grunts barely reached him on the night breeze, but the last of the sun’s pink glow to the west gave him enough light to outline the hogs as they made their way to the water, like a line of cows to the barn. Crickets chattered from the bush around him, and something rustled in the grass to his left. Probably a ’possum he’d startled from her hole.
Red held the shotgun back |
He waited for a grunt from the pigs, and pulled it back to full cock, the sear making a click the boy thought must be heard all the way back to Middleton’s Fish Camp.
The herd didn’t hesitate, and in one swift motion Red raised the Parker and fired. His intended target, an animal of about a hundred pounds, was knocked, squealing, right off its feet.
Red waited as the other pigs screeched, wailed, and ran every which way, then ran off back towards the palmetto head. He snatched the bag of goods, ran to the pig and drew his Buck knife. He expertly cut the still-thrashing animal’s throat, then gutted the carcass quickly, and not nearly as cleanly as Guy could have done.
He thought of the old Scottish word his mother’s father had used, gralloch. That meant butchering on the fly, like cattle rustlers and sheep thieves did, and like them he wasted no time. The lower legs gave him little trouble with the Buck, but the neck bones were just too thick, the tendons too tough. He had to get the head off to lower the weight, or he wouldn’t be able to drag the rest of the carcass back to camp. He left the right back hoof on.
Red knew it wouldn’t be long before the other pigs came back. They would see the dead one as nothing more than food, and if he was still there, they would consider him food too. No number of guns could save one man from a herd of wild hogs that had had a taste of meat, and he shivered in the heat, just for a second. Farmers never fed their pigs meat scraps until just before killin’ time, to fatten them up, and once you did you never went in the pen with them. If they got you down you would be pig shit the next day. He’d seen it once, where they’d eaten an unwary young man, and all that was left was a couple of his teeth, sticking out of a pile of pig manure. And those were domestic pigs.
He cocked the left-hand barrel of the Parker |
“God damn it!” he yelled, jumped back in disgust, and fell backward over a palmetto root. He dropped the shotgun and landed hard, on his ass. He reached to his right, feeling for the gun, and instead grasped a prickly pear cactus, hidden in the tall grass. He screeched as the two-inch thorns sank into his palm, and cursed fit to catch the grass on fire. He cursed again, one word for each of the main spines as he dragged their ragged shafts and barbed points out through his stretching, protesting flesh, and the blood flowed from every deep prick.
“God! Damn! It! To! Hell!” He nearly ran out of cuss words before he’d plucked the dozen or more tough, needle-like thorns that made up the majority of the armor this truly prickly plant presented to the hard, hot, vicious world of the Florida savannahs. He would simply have to suffer its second line of defense, the evil little inner thorns, shorter, as thin as a hair yet somehow still able to stab into, and break off in, the toughest flesh, even the calloused hand of a farmer. Getting them out required light, and tools finer than a shotgun or a Buck knife, which-all would have to wait until morning.
Meantime his light was going, and he heard a deep, rumbling hog grunt from the palmetto hammock. He scrabbled in the tall grass, trying to avoid another run-in with the cactus, finally found the shotgun. It was too dark to see whether the extra shells he fumbled from his pants pocket were buckshot or slugs; he just wanted something loaded in case they came after him.
Red took off his belt and slid the tongue through the buckle until it made a loop, slipped it over the pig’s remaining back hoof and tightened it. He figured, minus the head and guts, the animal now weighed between fifty and sixty pounds.
He stood and peered ahead into the gathering gloom |
It wasn’t twenty minutes until Red could see the fire at the cutting site. He figured Guy and Jenny had built up the fire to light his way home, and he was right. When he pulled the hog into the clearing, they were waiting for him, both smiling and flushed with firelight, rum and, Red had little doubt, no short measure of sex.
Guy was already struggling to his feet (foot, Red thought, in a dark little place in his mind, his foot), and came to help him with the carcass.
“We heer’d y’ shootin’ an’ built up th’ fire, did it really take you two shots…holy shit brother, what happened?”
Red had forgotten his face and chest were smeared with stinking pig blood and matter, quickly turning black in the heat. He gingerly slid the shotgun out from between his belly and his braces, the finer prickly pear thorns in his right palm burning against the stock, leaned it on the shack and went to retrieve his belt. “Hell no it didn’t take no two shots, you know damn well better than ’at.”
Guy did know. Guy was a good shot, and rarely missed his first try with a slug. To his personal knowledge, Red Dedge had never missed his first shot.
Red was now stripping down to his birthday suit; the blood had soaked right through his outer clothes and into his union suit.
“I had t’ blow the head off with the buckshot an’ got God damn pig brains all over me. Don’t nuthin’ stink worse than pig brains.”
It was true |
Stark naked, not caring that Jenny was frankly looking at his body, Red headed back through the brush to the little creek that fed water along the west side of the cutting, and for the second time that night, washed a mess from his body and his clothes.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
ReplyDeleteRoger, many lines of this novel are poetic, this installment’s opening a nice example, “The moon was on the wane, just a sliver in the eastern sky this early in the night, but it was enough for Red….” But I’m unconvinced that Red himself appreciates the scene. I suspect it’s only the omniscient narrator’s view.