The Hinterlands (30 page)

When we was out there in the open, I tried to judge the time again by the height of the sun. My sense of time had been ruined by all the strain and exertion. My shadow fell a little bit further over Sue, but I couldn't tell how much it had advanced. It could have been one o'clock, or two o'clock, or even three o'clock, for all I knowed. It was much hotter in the open sun. The rock sent up heat like a stove. The puddles felt scalding when I stepped in them. When I glanced back I thought I seen a thunderhead low on the southern horizon.

Suddenly it come to me how hungry I was. I hadn't eat a thing since the grits at dawn and I had been running on an empty stomach for hours. Now what I thought of was gritted bread. You know what gritted bread is, boy? People don't fix it much anymore. But back in the old days in mid- to late summer, that's what you had. When the corn was in its milk you had creamed corn and regular roastnears. But after the corn got too hard and tough to eat off the cob you picked it and grated it. Just a grater made by driving nails through a piece of tin. The kernels was still a little soft, and not hard enough to grind up as meal. They wasn't many mills back then anyway. And even if we had cornmeal it was gone by July and August. Long as the corn was in its milk we had it fresh every day. Ain't nothing better than new taters and beans and fresh corn.

But once you gritted the hardening corn and mixed it with buttermilk and salt, you put the batter in a skillet and baked it over the fireplace like regular bread. When it got all brown on the outside, you had something special.

I looked back over my shoulder at the thundercloud. It was looming higher, even while we was still on the long rock. The thunderhead sparkled on top like a snowy woods where the sun touched it. But underneath, the cloud was sooty and ink black. It was coming up fast. I could feel the change in the air, the closeness. Sweat drops clung to me like little snails.

I tried to brush the sweat out of my eyes with my sleeve. How much sweat could there be in me, for I hadn't had a drink since the coffee at Aunt Willa's? My sleeve was all brown from dried blood. Every time I wiped away the sweat it seemed to start my lip bleeding again. And the sweat stung the wound.

At the far end of the rock they was even more ashes and burned sticks scattered where bonfires had been. As we run the last hundred yards I thought how hard it would be to smooth a road on the wavy surface. The road would have to go around the edges, unless we wanted to spend a year cutting through the uneven dips and rises. Moving rock is the hardest part of road making, even if it's just little loaf-bread size rocks that have to be dug and carried away. But if you have boulders to shove around, it means every kind of shoveling and straining and prying.

But the worst is where you have a dyke of solid rock. Back then we didn't have nothing but black powder for blasting. And most of the time we couldn't afford black powder for road building. But if you did have powder, it took a whole day just to drill a hole for it. Took two men to drill, one hammering and one turning. And they had to keep washing the dust and grit out of the hole. If you had a rock of any size, it could take weeks to bust a way through.

Don't tell me you've heard all this before? It gets on my mind how we used to do things, and I want to tell you. An old man likes to talk. It relieves his mind, especially when he can't get out and work no more. And I'm telling you about the old days so
you will know. Soon they won't be nobody who remembers those times.

They was a trail in the bushes at the north end of the rock leading straight down the slope. It must have been a hunter's trail, or the berry-pickers trail. Sue turned right onto the path and I was relieved not to have to fight through the zone of bushes. The track was well used, and I wondered who would come this far to pick berries. We must be ten miles from anywhere. And then I smelled smoke.

The smell got stronger. It was like we was follering a trail of smoke. It was like the smoke was crawling along the path, or something going ahead was leaving the smoke. And the further we went, the stronger the smell got. They was people at the source of that smoke, for it didn't smell like no leaf fire or grass fire burning on its own.

The first thing I seen ahead was clothes spread on bushes. They was linens and scarves, britches and stockings laid over bushes by the trail. They looked like tents or kites fell in the woods. I hoped it wasn't no more Melungeons, but I couldn't even slow Sue down. Then I seen the washpot over the fire in the clearing. A woman wearing nothing but rags was bent over a tub. Her hair fell in tangles all over her shoulders and face as she scrubbed clothes on a washboard. The woman seen Sue and me coming and stood up by the tub, her hands dripping. Except for the rags hanging around her gaunt frame she was practically naked.

As Sue run by the washpot I seen the children. They emerged from beside bushes and posts and logs like little partridges. None had on a shred of clothes. I guess she was washing whatever clothes they had. They watched me like I was a ghost dropped from thin air. Thunder cracked in the sky. The clearing smelled like smoke and ashes, and the heavy soap the woman was using.

“Howdy,” I hollered, and waved my hand with the hatchet in it.

Then I seen the house at the same time I seen the man. The building was made of poles and was low as a stable. The reason I knowed it was a house was it had a stick and clay chimney at one end. At the other end was a pen of palings, and chickens was pecking in the dirt there. But they was chickens all around the yard and guineas too. The guineas started hollering when they seen me, and it was like ten saws was sawing on nails.

“Howdy,” I said to the man. He was red-headed and terrible fat. He set on a stump in front of the building whittling a stick. His knife stopped in a curl of wood when he seen me and Sue coming around the washpot. I don't know if he hollered to the children, or if the woman did. But all of a sudden those naked little younguns was running along side and around me. They must have been five or six of them, and they run right past me yelling “Soooy, soooy,” and “Get back, get back, old hog.”

I couldn't tell what they was doing at first, and then it come to me the man had told them to catch Sue. He must have thought she was run away and I was trying to catch her. Every time one of the kids got close to Sue and tried to grab her she jerked to the other side and pulled me with her.

“Stand back,” I said. “Just let her go.” But they just ignored me. Maybe they thought if they could catch the hog they could claim her. One of the boys tried to grab Sue's ear, but he fell down. I hoped he didn't get hurt, for they would blame me.

Two of the children got in front and headed Sue off again, this time closer to the shackly cabin. Chickens squawked out of the way and the guineas kept up their pottaracking. I didn't see how I was going to get through with the paling fence on one side and the children crowding on the other.

The dirty little younguns closed in and Sue either had to knock down the fence palings or come to a halt. “Get back, hog, get back, hog!” the children shouted.

“We don't want to stop; we're surveying a road,” I said. But again they didn't seem to hear me. Thunder cracked in the sky behind and above me.

“Stand back,” I said. “We want to go before the storm breaks.” But the kids watched the hog like it was a prize they had chased down in the woods. Sue turned this way and that, looking for an opening. The wind had pulled the smoke around our way and I could smell the ashes and steam off the dirty clothes. I wondered if the family had itch was why they was boiling their clothes. The woman called something but I couldn't tell what it was above the racket. The whole clearing smelled like chickens and rancid fat.

The sow wheeled around to lunge sideways, but the fat redheaded man was blocking her way. He had his knife in one hand and a stick in the other. He moved slow, but his vast bulk shut off our way of escape. He wore a rough kind of overalls and no shirt and seemed almost as naked as the kids. The red hair on his chest looked stiff as wires. None of them seemed like they had left the clearing in a long time or seen anybody.

“We are surveying a road,” I said to the man. But he just watched me without speaking. I wondered if he and all of them might be deaf. I knowed I looked a sight, with my hair and beard flying every which way and blood all over my chin and shirt, and dried on my wrist and sleeve.

“We just want to go on,” I said. “I'm going to build a road through to Douthat's Gap so you all will have a way to market.”

“Don't want no market,” the man said. “We just want this hog that's invaded our yard.”

The man's eyes was green as the slime in a ditch. He didn't smile and he didn't blink when he talked. He reached out to prod Sue with the stick.

I didn't have no proof of who I was or what I was doing. I was
twenty miles from any law or help. And I was tired. If they wanted to take Sue, I reckoned they could. I wasn't going to hit naked children with no hatchet. They pressed around the sow.

“You'll get paid for the right-of-way,” I said. “When the road is built and tolls are charged.”

They was a blast of thunder above all the hollering, and the air was now cool. It was the damp air of a storm. I wanted to get out of the yard before the rain hit.

Sue turned to run through the fat man's legs, but he caught her with his stick. He was quick as a hog hisself, at least with his hands. He pressed closer and reached into his hip pocket for a string. “Tie that hog's legs with this,” he said to the bigger boy. The man was sweating and panting, and his face was the color of pokeberry juice.

It looked like Sue was done for. The woman had come up behind me and closed off any retreat that way. She held her long troubling stick pointed at my back, its end bleached by soap and hot water. They was nothing to do but give in. Them people seemed hungry enough to eat me. I figured I'd be lucky if they let me go and just kept Sue. I could come back with the sheriff some day and charge them, but it wouldn't help me survey the road.

The boy made a loop in the twine and bent over to put it on Sue's front foot.

“You're making a mistake,” I said. But the man looked at me with those green eyes and didn't answer. You could hear a wheeze in his lungs. Thunder broke out again in the air straight above.

As the boy knelt to put the twine on her hoof, Sue seen the opening in the circle and jumped through it. She brushed two of the children aside and shot forward like from a cannon. I jerked after her and felt the children clawing at me. The man whacked
my back with his stick. I felt the end of the woman's troubling stick as she swung at my head but hit my shoulder instead.

Once me and Sue broke out of that circle, we run like the Devil hisself was after us. Lightning lit up the yard, and we leaped across chickens and piles of trash, filth from the kitchen, and guineas screeching like fiends. People like that never have horses or outhouses, and their yards are like sewers. I don't think we touched ground more than twice as we aimed toward the woods.

They was a garden of pole beans at the end of the yard. The sticks was thin and crooked and bent every which way. It looked like a brushpile the vines was crawling over. I don't know how they got in there to pick them. But the biggest poles had vines going all the way to the top, ten or twelve feet high. The patch looked like a hanging jungle. I was glad Sue picked her way around the edge and didn't try tearing through the vines. I don't think we could have got through. Them people would have caught us in that mess and killed us for ruining their garden.

The shareholders I had got had agreed to pay small fees for the right-of-way through cleared property. We was going to try to get free use to open woods. Where possible, we would go around any clearings. But even the small fees couldn't be paid until the road was open and tolls was coming in. I didn't know how we would deal with this family.

Sue surrounded the beanfield and entered the woods just as they was another blast of thunder straight overhead. You would have thought it was a war and shells was bursting. They have the awfullest lightning storms in South Carolina on a hot day. It's like the whole sky turns to fire and explosions. If you reached out a finger lightning would hit it.

If they was a path out of the clearing, we had missed it. You know how the woods will put up a solid front against a clearing,
plugging each chink to claim every inch to reach the light. The undergrowth will fill up the gaps, and they seems no way into the woods. I guess every bush is trying to crowd out the others.

Sue plunged right through the wall of bushes and, though my face got slapped and scratched, it felt good to be in woods again. It was dark, except for lightning flashes. The people was hollering and the guineas screeched behind, but nobody follered into the woods. It was like we had gone from day to night.

Then everything lit up, and the woods was all flickering in shadows, like blue dust had been throwed on the air. Hogs are afraid of thunderstorms, but Sue seemed to ignore the crashes. The next clap echoed off the mountains ahead and behind. They was a roar back there, but I couldn't tell if it was wind or heavy rain. If you stop in woods before a storm, you can hear the rain advancing like an army. But we couldn't stop, and I was out of breath and mostly heard the blood in my ears and my own panting.

In the humid air gnats stuck to my neck and forehead. I tried to rub them away with my wrist. I thought of turning loose of Sue's tail and letting her go on her own as the storm descended. We was so far off the way, it probably didn't make no difference. At least I could sit down and rest and maybe crawl into a laurel thicket out of the storm.

A shadow shot over me and they was a crack in the air like a whip had been popped, and a second later the ground and air shook. The torment of the heat was unleashing its power. I had heard that hogs draw lightning like dogs, because of their hair. Sue trotted straight ahead through the dark woods.