The Boar Read online

  When Jesse reached the river, Uncle Pharaoh barked out for him to whoa, and he did. Without a word from Uncle Pharaoh, I reckon Jesse would have jumped in the Sabine and tried to swim that cart over to the other side.

  Jesse dipped his head and took a drink of the river, then slowly and carefully, he dropped down to lay still on the wet bank. Though I wasn’t close enough to hear for sure, I’d have bet a nickel—if I’d had one—that Jesse hadn’t even rattled his harness when he laid down.

  Uncle Pharaoh put his leaf aside, reached his pole out of the slot, and holding his arm wide to avoid the flannel top, popped it. And out flew the weighted and baited line. It passed low and close over Jesse’s head and plunked in the water just shy of an old rotted tree stump—a good place for a channel cat to be laid up in cool, wet shadow. The cork bobbed and big ripples fanned wide on either side of the line.

  For a moment I just stood there watching Uncle Pharaoh and Jesse, and thinking that they were some sight even for the Sabine River Bottoms, which was full of pretty strange sights. I figured it wasn’t everyday anywhere that you got to see a hundred and fifty year old man fishing for catfish from a half-lying-down position in a hog-drawn cart.

  After a few more minutes of taking that sight in, I turned back to the trail and followed it around to where Uncle Pharaoh was parked. When I was pretty close on them, I said, “Howdy, Uncle Pharaoh.”

  He cocked his head in my direction. “Howdy yourself, little white boy.” He smiled at me. There wasn't a tooth in his head, just withered gums that reminded me of dogchewed leather. “How is you?”

  “Fine. How you been, Uncle Pharaoh?”

  “Talk some quieter, little white boy. You frighten the fish. There’s an ole cat under that log I been trying to catch now for a year, but he’s too smart for me. Now, how has I been? Well, I’m a hundred and fifty years old, so you can figure that for yourself.”

  If Uncle Pharaoh wasn’t that old, he had to be awful dadburned close. I’d never seen anyone that looked as old as he did. Even some pictures of dried up dead folks I’d seen, mummies, they were called, didn’t look as old as Uncle Pharaoh. He was shiny bald, toothless, and his eyes were an odd gray color, like maybe they’d been poked with pins to let the brown run out. His skin was more wrinkled than a raisin and it looked tough enough to have come off an old mule collar. His arms were knotty looking and his wrecked legs looked as twisted as bois d’ark limbs.

  “You that little white boy that’s Abraham’s friend?”

  “Yes sir, Uncle Pharaoh.” Uncle Pharaoh was like that. He didn’t see so good anymore and his mind had a habit of sort of wandering in and out on certain matters. Just about every time I came to visit, I had to reintroduce myself.

  “That your hound?” he asked, because Roger had finally decided to join me. He came out of the woods panting, wet from having been in the river and his hair was full of cockleburs.

  “Yes sir.”

  Uncle Pharaoh nodded. “He won’t bother Pig Jesse none, will he?”

  “No sir, he’s just a big ole pup. He ain’t real good at bothering squirrels yet.”

  “He bother Pig Jesse, and Jesse tear his ears off. Part that worries me, is they get in a fight, Pig Jesse drag my butt all over creation in this here cart. You don’t let that happen, little white boy.”

  “No sir, I won’t. Is Abraham up at the house?”

  “Reckon he is. He’s drawing water.”

  “Nice seeing you, Uncle Pharaoh.”

  “Nice to see you, little white boy. Even if you is a bit muddy through these eyes.”

  I went up the path, calling Roger after me. Just as Uncle Pharaoh had said, he was at the well, cranking up water and pouring it into a dishpan. He’d probably made quite a few trips because he was sweated up good.

  “How’re you?” I called.

  Abraham looked up from his work and grinned. “Well if it ain’t Ricky done come to help me haul water.”

  “Where we hauling to?”

  “The stove. Mama’s canning some beans.”

  I unloaded my .22 and leaned it against the well, and took one end of the big dishpan while Abraham took the other. Roger bounded along between our legs until I thought I was going to fall down. I finally had to yell him out from under us.

  We carried the pan into the smell of boiling beans and the lingering tang of hot-peppered cornbread, maybe a day or two old.

  Mama Wilson was at the stove. She was wearing an old, faded blue dress made out of burlap sacks and she had a thick, white rag tied around her head. It was hot as the dickens in there on account of the cookstove, and Mama Wilson had a sheen of sweat on her black face that made the flesh look like rich cane syrup popping to a boil.

  When she looked around and saw me a smile jumped on her face. “Little Ricky, how is you, and your folks?”

  “We’re fine,” I said.

  “Good. You boys pour that water in the cook pot there, then get me one more and you can go about your rat killing.”

  We hefted the water up to the pot on the stove and poured it in. Mama Wilson opened the fire door and stoked up the flames with a long piece of pitch pine, then stuck a big hunk of split oak in there. Abraham and me made one more trip to the well, poured the water in the pot, then went out in the yard to cool off. We didn’t hang around long though. If you did, jobs that needed doing had a way of coming up.

  I told Abraham about the magazines I had in my shirt, and after I got my .22 and hollered at Roger for chasing a chicken, we left out of there, the big pup sulking behind us.

  We were on our way to the tree house.

  Ten

  That tree house was a corker. A year or so later, when I saw my first Tarzan movie, Tarzan and His Mate, I compared his tree house to ours, and I tell you, the Ape Man didn’t have a thing on us.

  It was about a mile from Abraham’s place, built up in a nest of oak limbs that stuck out over the river in a spot that was as good a swimming hole as you could imagine. Plenty of cool, clear water about ten to fifteen feet deep. You could dive right off the edge of the tree house into it, and there was a rope you could climb up on when you were ready to make another jump.

  The house had been built by Abraham’s papa and oldest brother—who was grown now and gone off somewhere—and they had built it to stay. It was big enough for a grown man to stand up in, to live in for that matter. It had a porch all the way around, doors on either side, and a trapdoor at the bottom.

  We had all kinds of stuff in there. An old deck of cards so gummy from us handling them that you had to shake your fingers to make a card come loose when you wanted to lay it down. Couple cards with naked ladies on them. A half fruit jar of soured black berry wine that was too nasty for us to drink, but we kept it around on account of it made us feel more grown up. A bow and arrows that Abraham had made, each arrow topped with a real Indian arrowhead his middle brother had brought him back from Arkansas. And there was the spear.

  The spear was Abraham’s pride and joy. He had learned from his great-grandfather, old Uncle Pharaoh, that he and his family were the kin of a great tribe of colored folks who’d once lived in Africa. Uncle Pharaoh didn’t recall what they were called anymore, but he said they was as tough as Comanche Indians. They killed big lions with nothing but a shield and a spear, and not from distance. They went right up to the lion, sassed him, and killed him face to face.

  Uncle Pharaoh, who could still speak some of the African language when his mind was obliged to recall it, said they killed the lions by covering themselves with these long shields and taunting the critter until it jumped. When it was in the air, the hunter dropped to one knee, poked the spear around the edge of the shield, and let the lion come down on it.

  Course even with that spear in it, Uncle Pharaoh said things could get mighty sticky after that. If the lion didn’t die right off, best bet was to lie on your back with the shield pulled down over you and hold tight. If any part of the hunter got out from beneath the shield, there was a goo
d chance he’d go home without it, because a lion didn’t die easy. If the fellow was lucky, he’d be known from then on out as Gimp, Scar, or Lefty. If he wasn’t so lucky, then they’d be holding services of a sort for him that afternoon. Least that’s how Uncle Pharaoh told it, and I’ve no reason to doubt him.

  Uncle Pharaoh was the one who taught Abraham how to make his spear. It was about eight feet long, made of hickory wood with the center wrapped in cured hog hide and the point was made out of two feet of filed-down cane knife. It was strong, yet it was flexible. I guess if a lion had been loose in our neck of the woods it would have been just the thing to have along. But since there wasn’t much call for it, it had a place of honor on the tree house wall. To go with it, Abraham was making a shield of willow limbs and bowed oak slats covered in hog hide. When it was finished it would hang behind the spear.

  But this day I’m telling you about, Roger goes off in the woods to do dog stuff, and Abraham and I climbed up into the tree house. I put my .22 in the corner and we stripped off and went for a swim, diving off the porch and climbing up the rope time and again. If we’d had much more fun than we were having, I reckon they’d have needed to have us arrested.

  After we’d gotten worn out, we climbed up into the tree house and put our clothes on. I got the magazines and handed them to Abraham for a look. He couldn’t read a lick, but those covers told a million stories alone. I figured it was the first time he’d seen magazines like that. He and his family didn’t go into town that often. The town had a way of pointing out that they were different, least in the eyes of the townsfolk. And people who’d speak to them in the bottoms expected them to step off the sidewalk in town.

  “Where’d you get these?” Abraham asked.

  “Papa,” and I told him about the wrestling match Papa had won. I told it so good you’d have thought I’d been there.

  “These don’t look like them others,” Abraham said.

  “I’ve read some of the stories,” I said, “and they ain’t like the others.”

  “You going to read some or what?”

  “I’ll read,” I said, and I was more than willing. Reading aloud was something I really enjoyed, even if I had to skip a word I didn’t know sometimes.

  And Abraham enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed reading.

  “What’s the name of these?” Abraham asked.

  I held them up, one at a time, running my finger under the titles. Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze was the one that grabbed his fancy, and it was my favorite cover too. It had this big, gold-looking fellow with funny eyes and a lot of muscles wearing a shirt so torn up it wasn’t worth patching or making rag cloth and ought to been thrown away. He had this little black doll in his hand, and there were three guys wearing funny getups looking out at him from behind this post. They sure didn’t look happy about much.

  “Read a story about the glowing fellow,” Abraham said.

  “All right, but it’s a long one and I don’t reckon to finish it today.”

  “We’ll do it like that other story that time, in parts. I liked wondering what was going to happen next.”

  That had been a fun way of doing it. I’d gotten three issues of this Sunday school magazine with a story in it about four boys hunting for lost treasure in a cave. I read a piece each time Abraham and I could get together, and I never did tell him there was supposed to have been another issue that finished up the story. Instead, I just made up an ending. Reckon the fellow who wrote the story couldn’t have done any better than I did. I know Abraham sure liked it. He said he thought the last part was the best, especially the stuff about the pirates and the cavalry and all.

  By the end of the day, I’d nearly read a third of the Doc Savage story, and it was a doozy. The place I found to stop was where this fellow was about to cut a silken cord Doc was hanging onto, dropping him eighty stories to the pavement. I figured when I got home I’d have to take a peek, just to make sure Doc made it.

  We talked over the story for a while and tried to figure out how Doc was going to get out of his mess, and by the time we’d gotten some ideas and decided hands down that Doc was our hero, it was near dark.

  I put the magazines inside my shirt, and when I was buttoning up, Abraham said, “You gonna come back pretty quick and finish reading it?”

  “Soon as I can. If it hangs around the house too long, it’ll end up in the outhouse.”

  “Outhouse?”

  “We ain’t got no room for a magazine collection,” I said.

  Abraham pursed his lips. “That ain’t no good place for stories to end up. We ain’t never had no magazines like these.”

  I had to nod to that.

  “I got an idea, Ricky. Leave them here. Yeah, that’s it. Bring them here and we’ll start our own one of them things where they keep books.”

  “Library?”

  “Yeah, one of them.”

  “Good,” I said. “Real good.”

  “We can start right now, and later on I’ll build us some shelves along the walls and we can put everything we get worth keeping up there. And it’ll keep you from going home today and reading the story, cause oncet you get it read I don’t know when you’ll come back.”

  Abraham had a point there. When I got home and started finding out what happened to Doc, chance was I’d read the whole thing. Kind of a halfway idea I had anyway.

  “Well, all right. I reckon they’re in as good a place here as anywhere. It’s drier than our house.”

  “There you go.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt, and with only a tiny bit of reluctance about not finding out what happened to Doc tonight, I handed the magazines over to Abraham who promptly put them in a stack in the corner.

  “I got to run along home now,” I said. “There’s a few chores I got to do yet, and I told Mama I’d be home by now.”

  “I got things to do too,” Abraham said. “Feed the hogs and Jesse.”

  “Ain’t Jesse a hog?” I asked.

  “Just in the way he looks,” Abraham said.

  We closed up the shutters on the windows, I got my .22, and we went down. Roger wasn’t anywhere in sight, and calls and whistles didn’t bring him out.

  “Darn his hide,” I said.

  “What was he supposed to do?” Abraham said. “Lay here under this tree all day waiting on us? He didn’t even have nothing to read, nor nobody to read to him.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said.

  “That mutt done gone home, Ricky, and there ain’t no cause to fret about it. You come to our place and get some pitch for torches. It’s darn near dead solid dark. You get along home and that old pup is going to be there waiting for you. Mark my words.”

  “So’s Mama,” I said, “and probably with a switch. I think I’d better just run on from here.”

  “You’re going to get a whipping anyway, so you might as well get some pitch pine. You’ll go halfway to our house on your way back anyway. Few minutes ain’t going to make no difference.”

  “Reckon you’re right,” I said.

  I tried to call up that fool dog again, but no luck. “All right, let’s head on out,” I said.

  We started for Abraham’s house at a trot. When we got there he got me some matches and some sticks of pitch pine, and I headed out for home fast as my feet would travel and the dark would let me.

  Eleven

  The trail was nothing new. I’d traveled it by day and by night, with and without torches. But there was no denying I was glad for having let Abraham talk me into going by his place for the pitch sticks. It was a partial moon night, and the woods were so thick not much light was squeezing in. It was, as Papa says, as dark as a banker’s heart.

  Pitch pine has a lot of sap in it. A stick will flicker and blaze and put off enough smoke to choke a good-sized horse, but it’s a slow burner, and it doesn’t throw out a lot of light. It sort of kicks it out in sputtering starts, and those flare-ups make all kinds of shadows.

  I guess on account of that Doc Savage story I
was jumpy. Those shadows looked like all manner of things to me, even though I knew better. So when the sound came my nerves were already set off just right and I nearly jumped three feet high. Something was crashing through the brush, and behind it came a bark. It was Roger, I’d recognize his voice anywhere. But the type of bark I didn’t know. Whatever it was he was chasing was new to him. And from the sound of that brush crashing down, big.

  The crashing and barking came closer and closer. It was going to break the trail any minute. Shoving the blazing pitch stick into the center of the trail, I found me a sweetgum on the other side and got behind it. If Roger had him an eating animal, I was going to drop it for the stewpot. Mama might even be in a better mood if I brought home some meat.

  The crashing sound was still coming, and getting louder, but Roger had quit barking. I got down on one knee behind the gum and put my .22 around the edge of it and got it steady, ready to shoot. There was enough light there in the trail, that when the critter broke cover I’d be able to get a good look at it, decide what it was, and then, if need be, get off a shot. Provided, of course, Roger wasn’t right on its tail.

  Closer it came, the more certain I was that it had to be a big old coon, in spite of the fact I hadn’t recognized Roger’s coon bark.

  When I was sure it was about ready to break trail, I cocked back the hammer on the .22, and suddenly, the brush burst open.

  And there, for a brief moment in the flickering pitch light, was Roger! He seemed to explode out of the brush, tongue lagging from his mouth like a wet sock, eyes wild, running so hard his front and back legs were nearly knocking together.

  Roger hadn’t been chasing anything. It was chasing him.

  As he disappeared into the shadows and brush on my side of the trail, the thing that was chasing him came into view, and even before I could see it, I could smell it. It was an odor like three weeks of spoiled laundry, dead animals and angry skunks. A wall of stink so strong and thick you could darn near drive a nail in it.

  Then it broke trail. I got only a glimpse before its chest hit the pitch pine and sent it spinning and smoldering into the dirt, but I knew what that huge, dark, red-eyed shape had been.