Fruits of Silence

By Jimmie vonTungeln

©2006

             The boy leaned forward on the wagon seat and shrugged. He twisted his face the way young boys do, not so much for the sake of doing anything but more to relieve the monotony of childhood. The rubber wheels rolled with a smooth hum in tune with the crunch of the horse’s shoes striking gravel. The boy nodded with the pattern. “What’s an Arkansas, Daddy?

            When they were in town selling the pig, one of the ladies said that 1948 had been a hard year for Arkansas and maybe that was why there wasn’t much pork. It was a conversation the boy didn’t understand.

            “Ain’t no thing, just where we live, that’s all,” the man said.

            “Why we live at Arkansas, Daddy?”

            “We just do, now hush talkin’ or I ain’t bringing you with me again, you understand?”

            “Yessir,” he said, and shrugged again.

            They contrasted, the man was thick and dark—the darkness made more so by a white stubble of whiskers—and the boy was lighter brown and dusty. He was quick in movement.  The man was slow and deliberate.

            The wagon was also a contrast, a piece of the recent past of wood and horse grafted onto automobile tires. It was as if the new was stealing in upon the old and whatever gods ruled the backwoods could not hold back the future. Man and machine moved together, sliding slowly into the land of dark woods and scattered homes like a stream flowing into the lowlands.

            “Why did we sell the pig, Daddy?”

            “We need the money, son, I told you once.”

            “We got money now?”

            “Hush boy.” He saw the trap opening and slammed it shut.

            With the slamming he returned to thinking about the day and the day was like something coiled around his neck, threatening to strangle him.

            He made himself focus and then he could see the thing from beginning to end. He remembered the killing and the sticking. He saw the smoke-like steam in the late autumn air, first from the blood then, later, from the innards that spilled out as he started the butchering.

            Lost in himself, he was trying to calculate—trying in spite of the hugeness of such a task. There had been but one hog this year. The rest of the hogs had burrowed into the shack where he kept the arsenic and, in their search for food, spilled the arsenic and licked it in their greed.

            “What are we going to do?” his wife had asked.

            “I don’t know,” he said and he despised himself for not knowing.

            They might have thought it was salt, he supposed, though it had been for the killing of boll weevils and not for hogs. So they had been punished, punished like you might punish a child with one reprimanding stroke, but dreadfully punished and punished in a final way.

            He felt weak and played out when he found them, curled like fallen leaves, cold dead, and—worst of all—unfit. That was the terrifying part: both his winter’s wages and his winter food unfit, except for the one he had butchered at the beginning of the week. He had divided it and kept half and had ridden to town with the boy and had sold the other half.

            “Not a lot to choose from this year,” one of his regular customers said. He said it as much in accusation as in observation. His face narrowed as he waited for an answer.

            “Nawsuh, jes one hog this year, das all. Be mo fo sure next year.”

            “Well I hope so,” and then, in front of the boy, “You better git your mind on your business out there.”

            “Yassuh,” he said as he and the boy rode away.

            Maybe there was some luck, he was thinking. The hog that had been spared was spared because he was the biggest one and couldn’t follow the others through the rooted-out hole and into the shed and onto the poison.

            So he had butchered the hog. His older boys helped him, the four of them straining to hoist the dead beast into a barrel of water half buried in a slant in the ground and fired to bring the water to a boil. Then they scraped the hide and then wrestled the thing onto a board nailed at the corner of the shed, hanging it by a stick sharpened at both ends and thrust through the tendons of the legs.

            While the carcass hanged there, twisting slowly, almost delicately, like a bottle tied in a tree, they finished the butchering while the youngest boy, the one with him now, watched in fascination. He asked no questions but watched quietly as if he were witnessing a sacrifice and, not understanding the purpose, was forming his own.

            Ya’ll put up our half and we’ll peddle the other half in Armistead,” he told his wife and sons.

            “How much you reckon it will bring?” she asked and he knew the unasked question—the one he had even asked himself: how long will our half last?

            “Church, Daddy!” the boy yelled suddenly, pointing across the other’s chest. “There’s the church.”

“That’s right,” the man said. Then he looked over his shoulder toward town as if he left something there, something that he needed back.

            “Why ain’t nobody there?” the boy asked, pointing toward the lopsided white building positioned between the road and a dark forest beyond.

            “It ain’t Sunday. No reason to be there.”

            “Can’t you go ‘cept Sunday?”

            “Won’t do no good. Ain’t nobody there,” then turning to the boy, “If you don’t hush, I’m going to take a trace belt off and wear you out.”

            The boy turned to look at the church as they rode by. The building looked small and harmless with no wagons pulled around it, no children bouncing in front, and no families proceeding in a slow march to the entrance. He tried to imagine it filled with the saints and bulging with the sound of singing. He tried hard for a moment and then shrugged. He moved his legs toward the front and looked ahead.

            The man settled on his seat, hunched with his thoughts curled before him like a dog at slumber, bringing him neither rest nor peace.

            He was thinking that white people seemed to know when you were up against it and he knew that he had come out short in the trading. Most years, he rode home with the tight role of bills resting in pile of loose change with it all bulging so he could feel it through the worn money purse he carried in his pocket. This time he felt nothing and it was exactly that nothing, that non-feeling where there should have been something that brought the fear.

            Then he was thinking about the cold months ahead and how the faces of his family would look when the hunger really set in, not at first when they would simply do without for that was easy and they were used to it. Later, when the hunger was hurting and wouldn’t go away, they would ration the flour and the meal and they would forget how it felt to be full. Then they would look at him and accuse with their eyes and not speak, particularly the youngest for he had not been through it before.

            He thought about the church then and about a Sunday the preacher told about the life of Job.

            “The land is like that,” he told his wife after the service. Then he had thought about it some more. “No, not like that at all. It don’t do it like a test. No bet. No joke. It does it all the time, like it was trying to keep you off balance and unsteady so you can’t ever see quite straight and like you ain’t never going to draw a breath that ain’t been bought and paid for with your life’s blood.

            “It’s the Lord’s will,” his wife had said.

            The road stretched on along lengthening shadows. A half-mile or so before they reached the white settlement, just before they crossed Bayou Dupree, they met Happy Bill. The boy saw him first as Bill emerged from hiding at the far end of the bridge, as if he had been waiting for them. The boy sat straight in his seat.

            “Happy Bill Daddy, there’s Happy Bill,” he said.

            The man stopped the wagon to allow the figure to cross the bridge. As the stranger approached the wagon, the man nodded. “Brother Bill,” he said in greeting.

            “God bless you gentlemen,” the figure studied the man’s face briefly and, bowing low, added: “Dead pigs, dead pigs. Everybody knows, too bad, too bad.” He rose to his full height. “And how are we by fine Christian brothers. He smiled and the smile revealed a mouth alternating with strong white teeth and black gaps where teeth had once been.

            “We’re fine,” answered the man as he began to calculate in his head how much this would cost, what the least amount that it could cost without loss of face. Happy Bill could not be ignored. He was a fixture on this rural, southern landscape who commanded much respect in an ancient tribal sense flowing back to those dark ceremonies that first held young boys in check and later opened the door of manhood to them. He knew his power, understood it, and seldom misused it.

            He was crazy, no doubt, but it was widely held that when the seizure hit, he spoke the truth. Doubters said it wasn’t the truth, just what happened to be in his head at the moment. Some said he could see the future and some said he could make things happen. The whites tormented him so he avoided them when possible. They knew they could induce the seizure with a poke to his ribs. So they did it when a crowd was present to witness the torment. His own people honored him, never taking chances in this harsh land.

            “Came from Canaan’s Land today my brothers where I journeyed to sup in the presence of mine enemies. I am sanctified and holy. How about you? Are you ready, quite ready, to pass to glory today good friends?” And then, quickly, as if all in one motion, came the twitch and the bowing. “Did you see Sis Ella’s bloomers in church last Sunday. Fell, yes fell she did. Right between the sister-holders. White they were, I promise you, white as the heart of a lily, praise god almighty.”

            The boy nearly laughed, but the man looked hard at him and then addressed the other.

            “Evening Brother Bill. Can we help you today?”

            “Would be nice for me and good for your soul. Yes, would be nice,” he said. “Maybe just a nickel so old Bill could say to Jesus, “I have met a man of faith.” He consulted the sky. Then he looked into the man. “Just a nickel please.”

            “Most assuredly,” the man said. “Most assuredly,” and he reached for the money purse. Producing a coin for the other man, he handed it from the wagon. “Will you pray for me brother?"

            “You be blessed,” said the other. He jerked and the jerk bent him over. “That boy, he’s the one, he must bring the wrath down for sure. He the devil Christ, he is.”

            He stepped away from the wagon, his arms swooping like the boy had seen hawks do on a cold day. Still spinning and swooping in a fluid, mocking motion, he moved behind the wagon.

            “Git hoss,” said the man and he snapped the reins hard upon the horse’s back.