If that would of done it here back in August I'd of hired him to tote everthing I got outside, the squire said.
It had a old dead cat layin in it, Holme said.
All right, hush now, the squire said. Holme. That's it ain't it?
Yessir.
Where do you come from Holme?
I come from down in Johnson County.
What did they run you off for down thataway.
They never run me off.
Well what are you doin up here?
I was huntin work.
In John's daddy's old house?
No sir. I just wanted to lay over there.
Did you have a sign out up there for hirin hands John?
John smiled cynically, the gun cradled in the crook of his arm. Not to my recollection, he said.
No, the squire said. He leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers four times on the table edge and looked up at Holme.
Well Holme, how do you plead?
Plead?
Guilty or not guilty?
I ain't guilty.
You wasn't in John's daddy's old house?
I was in there but I never broke in.
Well. Maybe we can make it just trespass then.
Holme looked at the man and the man looked back at him. The squire was tapping his fork idly against the edge of the empty plate and sucking his teeth.
I don't figure I done nothin wrong, Holme said.
Well if you want to plead not guilty I'll have to take you over to Harmsworth and bind ye over in custody until court day.
When is that?
The squire looked up at him. About three weeks, he said. If they don't postpone ye. If you get postponed it'll be another six weeks after that. And if you get ...
I'll take the guilty, Holme said.
The squire leaned forward and pushed away the plate. Right, he said. Guilty. He took up a piece of cornbread from a bowl of it in the center of the table and fell to buttering it. Ethel, he said. Hey, woman.
She came in with a small oak box and set it on the table.
Guilty of trespass, the squire said.
She was fumbling among keys that hung to her by a string. When she got the box open she took out some forms and a quill and inkstand. What's his name? she said.
Give her your name, the squire said.
Culla Holme.
What?
Culla Holme.
How do you spell it? She was sitting at the end of the table with the quill poised above a document.
I don't know, he said.
He don't know how to spell it, she said.
The squire looked at her and then he looked at Holme. His mouth was full of cornbread. Put somethin down, he said. You can guess at it, cain't ye?
No sir. I ain't never ...
Not you.
Yessir.
Say it once more slow, she said.
He said it.
She wrote something. What was it now, she said, turning to the squire.
You got his name?
Yes. What was it now?
Housebreak ... No. What was it? Trespass? Trespass. He kicked a chair. Here John, set down. You makin the place look untidy.
John sat. There was no sound in the room save the scratch of the pen. Holme stood before them shifting from one foot to the other.
All right, she said.
You ain't forgot the date have ye? Like you done on some of them last'ns.
No, she said.
All right.
She turned the paper around and made a little X at the bottom and held the quill toward Holme. He took it and bent above the paper and made an X beside the X and handed back the quill. She signed it and wafted it in the air for a moment and handed it to the squire. He waved it away with a languorous hand and looked at Holme.
I fine ye five dollars, he said.
I ain't got no five dollars.
The squire blew his nose into a stained rag and put the rag back in his hip pocket. Ten days then, he said. You can work it out.
All right.
Set down. He turned to the woman. Put that up now and get him some breakfast. You had breakfast? No. Get him some breakfast. Cain't work prisoners on a empty stomach. All right John, was that all it was you wanted?
John was sitting forward in his chair waving one hand about. Just a danged minute, he said.
What is it?
Well dang it, how many of them ten days does he work on my place?
The squire had paused with his hand outstretched, scratching at something in his armpit. Your place? he said.
My place.
Why would he be comin down to work on your place?
Well dang it I brought him in. He was breakin in my daddy's house ...
I cain't be comin down to your place with him ever day just because he happened to pick your daddy's old house to break into.
Well if I hadn't of arrested him he'd not be here a-tall ...
I appreciate you bringin him in and all, John, but they ain't no reward out for him nor nothin. Is they now? I don't make the law, I just carry it out.
Well I don't see why you ort to benefit from what I done. Or from what he ain't able to pay. I guess you goin to pay back the county his wages, or fine, or whatever ...
The squire had stopped scratching. Well now John, he said, you know my books is open to anybody. Ain't that right, woman.
That's right, the woman said. Holme was watching her. She wasn't listening to any of it.
It wouldn't hurt you none to let me have him a few days out of them ten.
The squire shook his head wearily. John, he said, you and me has always been good neighbors. Ain't we.
I reckon, John said.
Have I ever turned ye down for a favor?
I ain't never ast ye none.
Well you always knowed all you had to do was ast. Ain't that right?
That's right, the woman said. The squire threw her a sharp look.
I don't know, John said. Ain't this a favor?
No.
No. It's just what's fair.
Don't make no difference about fair or not fair, it's against the law. You ain't authorized to work no prisoners.
I ort to of just shot him and let it go.
No, you done right bringin him in like ye done. But you cain't ast me to break the law and turn him back over to ye. Can ye now?
Shit. Scuse me mam.
I wouldn't ast you to break the law. Would I now. John?
John had risen from the chair. He didn't look back. He went out through the house with the shotgun hanging in one hand and his boots exploding over the bare boards through the rooms and they could hear the doorlatch and then the loud and final closing of the door and silence again for a moment and then a riotous squabble of chickens and then nothing.
Set down, the squire said. What are you doin with your boots off of such a cold mornin?
Holme took the chair the other man had vacated and sat and pulled on the boots laboriously. He stamped his numb feet on the floor but he could feel nothing. He looked up.
He told me to just tote em. I reckon he figured a feller barefoot be less likely to cut and run.
The squire shook his head sadly. I believe he's slipped a cog somewheres, he said.
I never bothered nothin in his old house, Holme said.
Don't make no difference, the squire said. You done been sentenced. I give ye pretty light for a stranger anyways.
Holme nodded.
We'll get you started here directly you get your breakfast.
Thank ye, Holme said.
Don't thank me. I'm just a public servant.
Yessir, he said. Grease was frying violently in a skillet behind him and the woman was putting biscuits to warm in the oven. His stomach felt like it was chewing.
The old lady'll fix ye a bed here in the kitchen. You ain't no desperate outlaw are ye? Ain't murdered nobody?
No sir. I don't reckon.
Don't reckon eh? The
squire smiled.
Holme wasn't smiling. He was looking at the floor.
Get ye fattened up a little here on the old woman's cookin you'll be all right, the squire said. Might get some work out of ye then. You reckon?
Yessir. I ain't scared to work.
The squire had tilted back in his chair, regarding him. I don't believe you're no bad feller Holme, he said. I don't believe you're no lucky feller neither. My daddy always claimed a man made his own luck. But that's disputable, I reckon.
I believe my daddy would of disputed it. He always claimed he was the unluckiest man he knowed of.
That right? Where's he at now? Home I reckon, where you ...
He's dead.
The squire had propped one foot on the chair before him and was rubbing his paunch abstractedly, watching nothing. His hand stopped and he looked at Holme and looked away again. Well, he said. I guess that's about as unlucky as a feller would be likely to get.
Yessir.
You got ary family a-tall?
I ain't got sign one of kin on this earth, Holme said.
Here, the woman said.
Holme looked vacantly at the steaming plate of eggs before him.
Holler when you get done eatin, the squire said, rising. I'll be out in the back.
All right, Holme said. How long can I stay?
The squire stopped at the door. What? he said.
I said how long can I stay.
The squire shrugged his coat over his shoulders. It's ten days at fifty cents a day. That's all.
What about after that?
What about it.
I mean can I stay on longer?
What for?
Well, just to stay. To work.
At fifty cents a day?
I don't care.
Don't care?
I'll stay on just for board if you can use me.
It was very quiet in the kitchen. The squire was standing with one hand on the door. The woman had stopped her puttering with dishes and pots. They were watching him.
I don't believe I can use ye, Holme, the squire said. Holler when ye get done.
SHE CAME from the house onto the porch and stood there taking the soft evening air and smelling the rich ground beyond the road where he followed the mule down the creek and back and down again through a deepening haze, he and the mule alike beset by plovers who pass and wheel and repass and at length give up the long blue dusk to bats. The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.
She sat quietly in the rocker. It was full dark when he came up from the bottoms, stooped under the small japanese plow, the mule coming behind him in the gloom and the two passing like shades but for the paced hollow clop of the mule's shoeless feet in the road and then the softer sound in the wet grass and the slight chink of harness until they went beyond hearing into the barnlot. She was not even rocking. After a while she heard him in the house and he lit a lamp and came to the porch door and called her. She rose and went in, past him wordlessly and her slippers like mice along the dark hallway until he caught up behind her and lit her way into the kitchen where she began to fix his supper.
He sat at the table watching her, his hands cupped uselessly in his lap and his face red in the lamplight. Watching her move from the stove to the safe and back, mute, shuffling, wooden. When she set the greens and cold pork and milk before him he looked at them dumbly for a long time before he took up his fork and he ate listlessly like a man in sorrow.
She started past him toward the door and he took her by the elbow. Hold up a minute, he said.
She stopped and came about slowly, doll-like, one arm poised. She was not looking at him.
Look here at me. Rinthy.
She swung her eyes vaguely toward him.
You ain't even civil, he said. It ain't civil to come and go thataway and not say nothin never.
I ain't got nothin to say.
Well damn it you could say somethin. Hello or goodbye or kiss my ass. Somethin. Couldn't ye?
I've not took up cussin yet, she said.
Just hello or goodbye then. Couldn't ye?
I reckon.
Well?
Goodnight, she said.
He watched her go, his jaw let down to speak again but not speaking, watched her fade from the reach of the powdery lamplight and heard her steps soft on the moaning stairboards and the wooden clap of the door closing. Goodnight, he said. He drank the last of the milk from the glass and wiped his mouth on his shoulder in a curious birdlike gesture. He'd see all night again tonight the mule's hasped hoofs wristing up before him and the cool earth passing and passing, canting dark and moldy with humus across the coulter with that dull and watery sound interspersed with the click of bedded creekstones.
A moth had got in and floundered at the lamp chimney with great eyed wings, lay prostrate and quivering on the greasy oilcloth tablecover. He crushed it with his fist and flicked it from sight and sat before the empty plate drumming his fingers in the mothshaped swatch of glinting dust it left.
She did not know that she was leaving. She woke in the night and rose half tranced from the bed and began to dress, all in darkness and with gravity. Perhaps some dream had moved her so. She took her few things from the chifforobe and bundled them and went to the landing beyond her door. She listened for his breathing in the room opposite but she could hear nothing. She crouched in the dark long and long for fear he was awake and when she did descend the stairs in her bare feet she paused again at the bottom in the dead black foyer and listened up the stairwell. And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief. It was damp and cool and she could hear roosters beginning. She closed the door and went down the path to the gate and into the road, shivering in the cold starlight, under vega and the waterserpent.
She went west on the road while the sky grew pale and the waking world of shapes accrued about her. Hurrying along with the sunrise at her back she had the look of some deranged refugee from its occurrence. Before she had gone far she heard a horse on the road behind her and she fled into the wood with her heart at her throat. It came out of the sun at a slow canter, in a silhouette agonized to shapelessness. She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun's eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.
ON A GOOD spring day he paused to rest at the side of the road. He had been walking for a long time and he had been hearing them for a long time before he knew what the sound was, a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies. He rose and went on until he reached the gap in the ridge and before long he could see the first of them coming along the road below him and then suddenly the entire valley was filled with hogs, a weltering sea of them that came smoking over the dusty plain and flowed undiminished into the narrows of the cut, fanning on the slopes in ragged shoals like the harried outer guard of schooled fish and here and there upright and cursing among them and laboring with poles the drovers, gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair.
Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.
Howdy neighbor, called out the drover. Sweet day, ain't she?
It is, he said. Whereabouts are ye headed with them hogs if you don't care for me astin?
Crost the mountain to Charlestown.
 
; Holme shook his head reverently. That there is the damndest sight of hogs ever I seen, he said. How many ye got?
The drover had come about the base of the rock and was now standing looking down with Holme at the passing hogs. God hisself don't know, he said solemnly.
Well it's a bunch.
They Lord, said the drover, they just now commencin to come in sight. He passed his stave from the crook of one arm to the other and cocked one foot on the ledge of rock, his sparse whiskers fluttering in the mountain wind, leaning forward and watching the howling polychrome tide of hogs that glutted the valley from wall to wall as might any chance traveler a thing of interest.
They's more than one mulefoot in that lot, he said.
What?
Mulefoot. I calculate they's several hunnerd head of them alone and they ain't no common hog to come upon.
What's a mulefoot? Holme said.
The drover squinted professionally. Mountain hog from north of here. You ain't never seen one?
No.
Got a foot like a mule.
You mean they ain't got a split hoof?
Nary split to it.
I ain't never seen no such hog as that, Holme said.
I ain't surprised, the drover said. But ye can see one here if you've a mind to.
I'd admire to, Holme said.
The drover shifted his stave again. Seems like that don't agree with the bible, what would you say?
About what?
About them hogs. Bein unclean on account of they got a split foot.
I ain't never heard that, Holme said.
I heard it preached in a sermon one time. Feller knowed right smart about the subject. Said the devil had a foot like a hog's. He laid claim it was in the bible so I reckon it's so.
I reckon.
He said a jew wouldn't eat hogmeat on account of it.
What's a jew?
That's one of them old-timey people from in the bible. But that still don't say nothin about a mulefoot hog does it? What about him?
I don't know, Holme said. What about him?
Well is he a hog or ain't he? Accordin to the bible.
I'd say a hog was a hog if he didn't have nary feet a-tall.
I might do it myself, the drover said, because if he was to have feet you'd look for em to be hog's feet. Like if ye had a hog didn't have no head you'd know it for a hog anyways. But if ye seen one walkin around with a mule's head on him ye might be puzzled.
That's true, Holme allowed.
Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don't it?
Yes, Holme said.
I've studied it a good deal and I cain't come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.