The Boar
Joe R. Lansdale
Contents
Preface
Part One
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
Part Two
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
About the Author
Preface
I’ve always liked coming of age stories, and have written several. Some of them were for adults, a few, like this one, were designed, at least on the surface, to be for younger readers. But the theme is the same, and the way I write is the same, so I like to think this novel is for anyone willing to read it, adult, or young adult.
I became passionate about young adult fiction in the eighties, and because of that, I wrote this. For a while it was called Get Back, Satan, Satan being the wild boar in the novel, but that title didn’t stick, and the publisher who planned to publish it under that title didn’t publish it at all. That’s a long story and this isn’t the place for it.
I turned around several years later, intending to revise the novel, reread it, and found I liked it as it was. It was published under the current title, and published again some years later by another publisher, and like most of my work, published overseas. There is currently interest in it for a film and I co-wrote the screenplay.
I think of it as a novel of the thirties more than I think of it as a Young Adult novel. Frankly, all those categories just make me tired. A book is a book is a book. It either works for you or it doesn’t.
I didn’t grow up in the Great Depression, but my father and mother did, being somewhat older than most parents when I was born. They told me about the Great Depression, as did my grandmother on my mother’s side, my uncles, and people that my parents knew from that time. My brother, who is almost seventeen years older than me, was born during that era.
Due to my parent’s experiences we saved string, rubber bands, were fanatic about not wasting food, clothing, or anything, for that matter. This was all a holdover from the Great Depression, and from my view, good common sense.
Anyway, I knew about this era almost as if I had been there. I did do some research, but so little was necessary. The Great Depression was in my DNA. I had always wanted to write about it, and this was my first crack at it. Later I wrote The Bottoms, Sunset and Sawdust, and All the Earth Thrown to the Sky, another novel marketed as Young Adult, and I am currently working on another title that takes place during this era, The Edge of Dark Water.
All that matter is this: is it a good book.
I think it is. I’m prejudiced about that, I’m sure. But it seems to be a book that continues to garner positive attention from readers, year after year.
So, what I offer you is that book. The decision as to its worth is yours.
As a side note, I should mention that some of the characters in this novel appear briefly in my better-known novel, The Bottoms. I liked them and couldn’t let them go, so they have a brief moment on stage in that novel.
Happy reading.
Part One
One
This happened in the summer of 1933 in the Sabine River Bottoms of East Texas. Those that still remember call it the year of The Devil Boar.
It was also the year that Richard Harold Dale became a man at the not-so-ripe-age of fifteen.
I know, because I probably recall that year and The Devil Boar better than anyone else. I should. I’m Richard Harold Dale, and I still bear the scars.
Times were hard then. Real hard. The Depression was going on, and there just wasn’t much of a way to make a living.
I suppose, in many respects, us country- and river-bottom folk had it better than the city slickers. We’d always been poor, so when times got bad we didn’t notice quite as much as those who’d had steady jobs and lost them. Our family pretty well lived off the land, and always had, raising all we ate and selling the extra.
The extra was our main problem in the thirties. You couldn’t get much for it. People just didn’t have the money anymore.
Course, ‘33 wasn’t all that good a year for our crops either. What the heat didn’t kill, the insects ate. It was like all kinds of bugs from everywhere in the world had been passed the word that there was a free lunch being served in our fields and they ought to come on down, bring a friend and sit a spell, take in as much as they could eat.
And they did. They ate and ate and ate.
What was left was just enough to get by on, and if it was too tough for the heat to kill, and too untasty for the bugs to eat, you can bet we weren’t all that thrilled with it either. But it beat an empty belly.
For our meat supply we depended on hunting and fishing. The woods brought us squirrels, coons, rabbits, and possums. The Sabine supplied us with perch, bass, catfish, crawfish, and an occasional turtle. In other words if it could be eaten, we ate it.
In the past we’d raised a hog or two, but not that year. There just wasn’t enough extra to go around for feeding a pig. Stuff we might have thrown out for it to eat the year before we were eating and had pretty well convinced ourselves it was mighty good.
Just putting food on the table from meal to meal kept the entire family—which was Mama, and she was pregnant, Papa, Ike, my little brother, and me—hopping like toad frogs. It was that way for near everybody. In fact there was an old joke that went something like this: Fellow looks out the window and says, “Ma, times must be getting better.” And the lady asks, “Oh, why’s that, Pa?” And the fellow says back, “There ain’t but one man out there chasing a rabbit this morning.”
To tell the truth, I don’t remember those days as bad times. Busy maybe, but not bad. I was young and had the entire river bottoms of East Texas at my fingertips. I didn’t just read about adventures like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had, I lived them. Our house isn’t there anymore, but in those days it was deep in the woods at the end of a narrow, rutted, clay road about half a mile from a shallow spot in the river. If anyone came down that road, they were either coming to see us, or they were going to stop at our place to ask permission to leave their car or wagon and do some fishing. Papa always told them they could. And as he used to say, “The river ain’t ours to give permission about. The water you put a claim on today will have gone on down to Louisiana tomorrow.”
Since anyone coming down that road was going to have to stop and see us, we always got excited when we heard a car or wagon coming. Living where we did, we didn’t always make it to town regularly, and since we didn’t own a radio then, anyone that might be bearing gossip and news was always welcome.
In fact, thinking back on that year of 1933, the first thing I really remember about it was Doc Travis and his noisy Model B Ford.
Something he brought me that day, and the news he told us, changed my life forever.
Two
Papa, Ike, and me were outside, chopping wood. Papa was cutting some of the bigger logs into lengths, and I was using a hatchet to cut some of the smaller stuff into kindling. Ike was gathering up what we cut and stacking it in separate piles.
Ike was ten years going on thirty. Most of the time he seemed near grown. He was spunky as the dickens and as determined as a billy goat. Some of the logs Papa split were near big as Ike, even with them halved, but Ike would wrestle them into place like they were enemies that had to be whipped, or he’d die trying.
Mama used to say Ike was born to consider, and I reckon he was. He seldom said anythin
g unless he had something to say.
Me, I’d blabber all day long about next to nothing. Every now and then when I got going, Papa would look over at me and say, “Take a break, boy.”
That would shut me up for a while, but pretty soon I’d be at it again, popping my lips together faster than a hummingbird could beat its wings. I loved talking better than anything, except reading. We didn’t own many books. The Bible, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and a book of his short stories, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Kipling, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and my all time favorite, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. (It used to drive me wild that someone would give their son the middle name Rice. I wondered if he had brothers and sisters with the middle names Oats, Wheat, Corn, and Barley.) There was also a book on flower gardening.
I had read each of those books—including the one on flower gardening—at least half a dozen times. And that was another reason I liked seeing Doc Travis. He often brought me a magazine or two. Usually The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s, but whatever it was, by the time I got through reading and rereading it, the pages had been turned so often they were as soft as tissue paper. Guess that was the reason they usually ended up in the outhouse.
Even then, well-read and near-memorized, I hated to see them go. But we just didn’t have room in our little shack for me to turn into a magazine collector.
There I go again, chattering on like a squirrel in mating season. To get back to this time I’m telling you about, we were out at the woodpile working when all of a sudden the hounds started barking and we hear Doc Travis’s car coughing up the road.
We knew it was him right off. His Ford had a sound that didn’t remind you of any other. It seemed to me like it was going to blow up at any minute and toss parts all over East Texas and Northwestern Louisiana.
By the time Papa and I had laid our tools down and Ike had manhandled the last log into place, around the curve came Doc Travis, the Ford popping and sputtering.
He parked in the yard and got out, the hounds hopping around him like fleas trying to find a place to latch on. He was wearing his usual dust-filmed black hat and suit and his white shirt which was no longer a true white. It had been sweated in, dusted over, and washed with strong lye soap so often it had taken on a color somewhere between dirty-slush snow and spoiled-egg yolk yellow.
Papa slapped his hands clean on his overalls and walked over to meet him. Papa and Doc Travis shook hands for a long time.
“How’ya been, Leonard?” Doc Travis asked Papa.
“Can’t complain, not even a little bit,” Papa said.
“Good, real good.” Doc Travis turned to Ike and me. “You boys are looking fit enough. Growing like a couple of pigs.”
Mama came to the open door and called out to Doc Travis, “Well, if it ain’t that old freeloader come to visit.” She smiled and Doc Travis smiled back.
Mama was certainly something to smile about. Even four months pregnant with a fine sheen of sweat glistening on her face and a strand of strawberry-colored hair falling down on her forehead, she somehow managed to look fresh, clean, and happy.
“Good morning, Beth,” Doc Travis said. “Glad to see you can still spot a man that’s come for breakfast.”
Mama took off her old, gray apron, brushed the strand of hair off her forehead, and said, “Get in this house and eat something, you ole sawbones, or I’m going to sic the dogs on you, and you know what killers they are.”
Two of the dogs had already gone back under the house, and the other, a pup named Roger, was licking Doc Travis’s shoes cleaner than a shoe-shine boy could have done with a brush and a rag.
“Well,” Doc Travis said, “now that you got me scared, I don’t rightly think I can do much else other than that.”
Mama smiled wider. “All of you, get on in here.”
And the lot of us trooped into the house.
Three
After Doc Travis had eaten, Mama offered all of us coffee. Doc Travis turned to Mama after sipping from his cup and said, “How’s the little mother?”
Mama patted her slightly round stomach and smiled. “Fine,” she said.
The baby was actually the reason Doc Travis came by so often. The year before she had lost one, and now that she was pregnant again, he came by to check on how she was feeling. So far she’d been doing real well, but Doc Travis had warned us to try and keep her away from stress and overwork, as she now had a natural leaning toward easy miscarriage.
But even before the baby, Doc Travis was a regular visitor. I don’t think there was any question that he enjoyed our company. Mama told me once that she sort of felt that we, along with maybe a dozen other families, were the kin folks he didn’t have.
Doc Travis emptied his cup, then, suddenly, he snapped his fingers. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Richard and Ike, out there in the car I got something for you two, and, Richard, there are a couple magazines you can have.”
Ike and I nearly knocked each other down getting out the door. The gift for both of us was a bag of peppermint candy. We got candy so seldom, we always managed to make it last by allowing ourselves only one piece a day to suck on. That bag of peppermints would last us a long time.
The magazines were really special this time. They weren’t the sort he usually brought me—The Saturday Evening Post, Sunday school magazines—they were thick things printed on cheap paper with shiny covers. I’d seen their kind before, and their bright artwork had always drawn me to the newsstands for a looksee. But I’d never asked Papa to buy me one. I knew it would break his heart not to be able to afford it.
I gave Ike the bag of candy to carry, and I held one of the magazines in either hand and looked at them. The left hand magazine read Dime Detective and it had a picture of a man wearing a brown suit and hat and holding a gun. The other was called Black Mask, and it was also a detective magazine. The cover was pretty much like the Dime Detective, a man with a gun.
When I brought them into the house, Mama looked at them and made a face. “You sure those things are healthy for a boy to read?” she asked Doc Travis.
“Best thing in the world for a boy to read,” he said.
Ike and I thanked Doc Travis, and Mama put the candy on the shelf and told us we could have a piece later on. I sat down by the window and put the magazines in my lap. I was just about to open one when Doc Travis said something that caught everyone’s attention.
“Leonard, I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, because if you get hurt I’m going to blame myself, but there’s one of them fairs supposed to be in Tyler this weekend. I’ve got to go over that way and see my aunt. If you’ve got a mind to ride over, you’re welcome to come along.”
Mama went slightly pale.
Papa nodded. “Thanks, Doc, I’d be obliged.”
I glanced at Ike. If he was thinking anything it didn’t show. That kid could have played poker with the devil and bluffed him out of his tail, hooves, and horns.
The concern with the fair was simple. Papa wrestled at them. Did it for money. He wasn’t big, but he was stout, broad-shouldered, and wiry. Over the years he’d gained quite a local reputation.
Prize money from those matches was usually pretty good. Anywhere from fifty to two hundred dollars. That meant if you won, one night of wrestling could maybe earn you more than a season of farming.
It was rough and tumble business, however, and that’s why Mama was frightened. You never knew if Papa might come home with a broken rib, a leg disconnected, or worse.
And folks calling what Papa did wrestling, was misleading. It was more like brawling.
The rules, to say the least, were flexible. Wasn’t unusual for a match to contain a goodly amount of slugging, headbutting, and kicking. About the only thing that was off limits was eye-gouging and hitting below the belt, but I heard tell a right smart amount of that slipped in from time to time.
I think Papa was proud of the f
act that he was good at it, but I think he was also a little ashamed. Once I heard him tell Mama that he sometimes felt like those Roman gladiators who fought each other so the crowd could enjoy seeing blood.
So I reckon he had mixed feelings. One thing for sure, he never let any of us go and see him wrestle. And I won’t lie about it none, I sure wish I had. I bet he was something to see.
Way it worked was the fair would usually have its own man. A well-fed, experienced toughie who took on all comers. This way the fair could draw a crowd at a nickel a head, and charge a quarter entry fee for the wrestlers. A local fellow didn’t usually stand a chance against the fair’s wrestler, and when the fair moved on a few days later, it was usually a bunch of nickels and a handful of quarters richer.
Papa, however, caused many a fair to move on shy its prize money and with a bad attitude toward its prize wrestler.
In favor of Mama, the subject was quickly dropped. Doc said, “You hear about Herman Hall’s prize hound?”
“Red?” Papa asked. Half the hounds in East Texas were named Red, but Herman Hall’s Red was special. It was generally agreed that he was probably the best coon dog in two counties.
“Dog got himself killed,” Doc Travis continued. “Was running a coon and cut a wild boar’s trail. I’m not talking about no Piney Woods Rooter either. I mean a big hog like from the old days.”
“Figured there were still some around,” Papa said, “but I haven’t heard tell of one in five or six years.”
“Red cut this boar’s trail the other night and started after it. Herman said he and his boys never saw the hog—not really. But they saw Red fly up in the moonlight, tossed over six feet. Then they saw a huge shape crash off through the bushes. It was so big Herman figured it was a young black bear, but when he went to check on Red, the dog was gutted, tore up like wet newspaper. They held their lanterns down to the ground and looked at the tracks. Big as a man’s hand, Herman said. And deep. Herman said from the looks of those tracks, and considering poor old Red’s wounds, that boar must have weighed over four hundred pounds and had tusks as big and sharp as daggers.”