Pigs

 The soil in the valley of Blackwood was a rich, greasy slate-grey, heavy with generations of rot and river silt. Nothing grew upon it quite right; the corn rose tall and thick-stalked, but the ears were often blighted with black, weeping smut, and the apples in the neglected orchard behind the main house hung heavy and red as drops of arterial blood, yet tasted of alum and old iron.

At the bottom of the long slope, where the marshy ground began to heave and breathe mosquitoes in the summer heat, stood the pens.

They were built of stout, blackened oak that had drunk thirty years of wet manure and sour slop. The fences were reinforced with rusted corrugated tin and braced with cedar posts that leaned drunkenly into the muck. And there they stayed, shifting like slow-moving hills of coarse bristle and mud: the pigs.

They were not the pink, clean-eared yorkshires of the picture books. These were old-stock razors, crossed with wild boar that had wandered down from the timberline back when the county was still just a rumor of surveyors’ chains. They had shoulders like draft horses, bristled with coarse black hair that stood in frozen ridges along their spine, and tiny, wet eyes that gleamed with the flat, dull malice of river stones. Their snouts were scarred and calloused from rooting through flint and shale, and when they breathed, they sounded like blacksmiths’ bellows pumping through grease.

Arthur Miller watched them from the kitchen window, scraping a thick wedge of salt pork across a piece of rye bread with a bone-handled knife. He was a man who moved with the deliberate economy of a clockwork mechanism that had lost half its teeth; every shift of his shoulder was an effort, every breath a dry hitch in a chest lined with coal dust and forty years of cheap tobacco.

Below the house, down by the troughs, Caleb was working.

Caleb was forty, with the wide, stupid shoulders of a dray animal and ears that sat too flat against a skull the shape of a lard bucket. He didn't talk much—mostly because there was nothing in his head that required words to sort out. He understood the shovel, he understood the bucket, and he understood the rhythm of the iron gate.

A galvanized bucket swung from Caleb’s right hand, clanging rhythmically against his shin with every heavy stride. Inside it was a jumble of gray things—wet wool, a heavy buckle that had caught the gray light of the late afternoon, and something that looked like a length of butcher’s twine, though it was knotted and thick.

Arthur didn't watch the bucket. He watched the pigs.

They knew the sound of Caleb’s boots before he even reached the bottom wire. The low, rumbling drone that lived permanently in the floorboards of the kitchen—a sound like a distant diesel engine idling in a cellar—began to swell. It started as a vibration in the soles of the feet, rattling the loose panes in the pantry window, then rose into a wet, rhythmic grunting that smelled of hot swill and warm tallow.

Hup. Hup. Hup.

The sows pressed against the lower rails, their huge, dug-heavy bellies swinging low in the mire. Their jaws worked constantly, slavering thick ropes of yellowish foam that hung from their tusks and dripped into the froth at their feet. They didn't smell fear; fear was a thin, sour thing that didn't interest them. They smelled protein. They smelled the particular, heavy iron tang that clung to the clothes Arthur kept hanging in the back lean-to.

Caleb reached the gate. He didn't use the latch; he simply dropped the heavy iron chain that held the split-log stile together and kicked the barrier inward with his boot.

The black tide moved.

It was silent for a heartbeat—just the sucking sound of trotters pulling free from the knee-deep muck—and then the noise broke. A high, bubbling shriek from a three-hundred-pound boar that had tried to crowd the gatepost, followed by the wet crunch of bone meeting bone as the others piled over him. They didn't fight out of anger; they fought because the space between them and the bucket was narrower than their bulk allowed.

Caleb tipped the bucket.

The contents didn't hit the trough. They hit the center of the press, where the three largest sows—animals the size of Shetland ponies, their hides scarred white from old tusks—were churning the mud into a froth.

A boot went in first. A heavy, leather-laced work boot with a steel toe that had been ground thin on the quarry stones. Then the gray bundle of wool—a heavy fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to a fellow who called himself Miller, though Arthur knew for a fact he’d never seen a salt sea in his life.

The pigs didn't hesitate. A sow with a torn ear—the one Caleb called Old Peg—lunged forward with a force that sent a spray of black mud six feet into the air. Her snout drove straight into the wool. There was a dull, tearing sound, like a wet sack of flour splitting open on a stone floor, and then the frantic, rhythmic working of forty sets of jaws.

Arthur turned away from the window. He didn't need to see the rest. The bodies were easy to get rid of in the farm; they always had been. His father had known it, and his grandfather before him, back when the valley was thick with hemlock and the law didn't ride this far out unless someone set fire to the courthouse.

The county sheriff was a man named Gantry, and he had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved out of an old turnip left too long in the root cellar—pale, pitted with smallpox scars, and perpetually damp around the nose.

He sat in the Windsor chair by Arthur’s cold stove, his heavy woolen greatcoat still buttoned to the chin despite the stove being dead. The air in the kitchen smelled of lard, wet wool, and the heavy, sour musk that always drifted up from the pig pens when the wind shifted from the north.

"We got an inquiry," Gantry said. He didn't look at Arthur; he looked at the salt cellar on the oilcloth table, turning it between two fingers that were stained yellow with tobacco juice. "Fellow out of Lansing. Name of Henderson. Brother to the one who didn't come back from the timber sale over at the Ridge."

Arthur sat across from him, paring his thumbnail with the bone-handled knife. "Lots of timber sold this season. Men go where the work is."

"This one didn't go to the timber," Gantry said softly. "His horse was found tied to the hitching rail behind the livery in town. Saddle still on it. Money in the bags. Only thing missing was the man himself and about three hundred dollars in gold he’d drawn from the bank to buy a span of mules."

Arthur didn't look up. "Mules are high right now. Man carrying gold through the timberline is asking for a hole in the back. Lots of rough trade between here and the state line."

Gantry finally raised his small, watery eyes. They were the color of ditch water under an overcast sky. "He was seen heading up this road, Arthur. Old man Henderson says his boy told him he was coming to see about some draft stock you had for sale. Said you advertised 'em in the handbill down at the feed store."

"I have stock," Arthur said. "Whether a man buys 'em or not is his business. None of 'em stayed."

"That right?" Gantry leaned forward, the old wool of his coat giving off a sharp, damp odor. "Because I walked down your lane about an hour ago, Arthur. I looked at that pen you got down by the creek. Those hogs of yours... they look like they’ve been eating mighty well lately. Coats are shining like patent leather."

"They get slops from the kitchen. And the butchering scraps from the fall."

"Scraps," Gantry repeated. He reached out and tapped the table with a yellow nail. "Henderson’s boy had a silver signet ring on his left hand. Initials J.H. inside the band. I didn't see no ring in the mud, but I did see old Peg rooting around something that looked suspiciously like a belt buckle with an eagle stamped on the brass."

Arthur stopped paring his nail. The silence in the kitchen grew very heavy, broken only by the ticking of the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel—a clock that hadn't kept the right hour since the winter of the great freeze—and the distant, rhythmic hup-hup of the pigs down in the run, smelling the cool evening air and waiting for their mash.

"You want to walk down there with me, Gantry?" Arthur’s voice was dry as chaff. "You want to climb over that rail and ask Peg for the ring back? She’s about four hundred pound of bone and bad temper. She don't care much for county sheriffs."

Gantry stared at him for a long, hard minute. He knew Arthur. He knew Arthur’s father, who had once spent three days in the town lockup for biting a bailiff’s ear off during a land dispute. These weren't people you argued with using warrants and ink; they were part of the furniture of the valley, rough-hewn and stubborn as the stumps that still choked the lower pastures.

"The marshal from Lansing is coming out tomorrow," Gantry said, standing up and smoothing down his coat with stiff, slow movements. "He’s got different ideas about things. He thinks a man ought to leave a trace behind. A boot-heel, a button, something a dog can tree."

"Tell him to bring his own shovel," Arthur said. "The ground’s hard down by the creek. Takes a pick to break the shale."

The night came down black and thick, the kind of dark that felt like a wet wool blanket thrown over the windows. There were no stars, only the low, greasy glow of the moon behind a skin of gray cloud.

Out in the pens, the noise didn't stop. It changed character after dark. The sharp, demanding squeals of the afternoon died down into a low, rumbling chorus—a steady, wet vibration that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth.

Caleb was out there.

He sat on an overturned lard tub by the corner of the lower pen, his huge, square hands resting on his knees. In his right hand, he held a short-handled mattock, the iron head dark with old grease. He didn't move. He didn't smoke. He just sat and listened to the sound of forty pairs of massive jaws grinding together in the dark.

Inside the house, Arthur sat by the cold stove with a kerosene lamp turned down low, oiling the breech of an old 10-gauge double-barrel shot gun. The metal was pitted and blue-gray, smelling of three-in-one oil and sulfur.

He wasn't thinking about the marshal from Lansing, and he wasn't thinking about the gold in the floorboards under his bed. He was thinking about the sow, Old Peg.

She was nine years old now—older than most hogs ever got in this valley. She had outlived three litters of boars, two different hands who had tried to drive her with a cattle prod, and a winter where the snow had drifted up to the eaves of the kitchen roof. She knew the smell of blood better than any hound the county could buy, and she had teeth that could crush an ox femur like a dry cedar shingle.

A sound came from the lane.

It wasn't the steady clop of a farm horse or the rattle of a spring-wagon. It was the heavy, labored cough of a Model T engine struggling up the grade—the low-gear whine of a transmission that hadn't seen fresh grease since the Coolidge administration.

Arthur didn't get up. He just sat there with the grease rag in his hand, watching the yellow beam of a single headlight sweep across the drawn shades of the front window, painting a long, distorted arc of light across the peeling wallpaper.

The car stopped by the well-sweep.

A door creaked open—the high, thin shriek of dry hinges. Then boots on gravel. Two sets. One heavy and authoritative, the other dragging slightly, like a man with a bad hip or a heavy load.

Arthur heard the front gate latch lift.

Click.

Then the heavy wooden steps of the porch began to groan under a weight that wasn't Caleb’s.

Down by the pens, the noise rose.

It wasn't the rumble now; it was a sudden, electric surge. The deep, wet grunting swelled into a harsh, rattling scream that shook the cedar rails. In the dark, fifty feet of black mud began to heave.

Old Peg had risen from the wallow. She stood six feet from the gate, her massive head lowered until her snout nearly touched the slush. Her small, red-rimmed eyes caught the pale glare of the car’s remaining headlight as it cut a slant down the hill.

She didn't wait for Caleb to open the latch.

With a lunge that threw a tidal wave of gray muck over the lower rail, she hit the corner post. The rotted oak groaned, the rusted wire staples shrieked as they pulled free from the grain, and the entire corner of the pen leaned outward six inches into the dark.

Behind her, the rest of the herd pressed forward—not in panic, but in that slow, dreadful coordination of things that have smelled the killing floor for a hundred generations.

From the porch came the sound of a sharp, metallic click—the safety of a service revolver being thrown off—and then a voice, thin and sharp against the dark:

"Federal marshal! Open up in the name of—"

The rest of it was lost.

It wasn't a gunshot that cut him off. It was the sound of the porch railing giving way under five hundred pounds of wet, lunging weight, followed by the heavy, meaty thud of something large and soft hitting the dirt at the bottom of the steps.

Arthur Miller didn't look toward the door. He picked up the 10-gauge, broke the barrels with a sharp snap that sent the spent hulls flying into the corner, and slid two fresh red paper shells into the chambers.

The house grew very quiet, save for the sound of the engine idling down by the well, its single eye staring blindly into the dark woods across the road.

Outside, down by the marsh, the rhythmic hup-hup started up again—faster now, like a drumbeat in a cellar, steady and heavy and deep enough to rattle the teeth in a man’s skull.

Arthur blew out the lamp.