Miss Sarah was real happy about it too. She lay there purring and purring and purring, like her motor was running and wouldn’t stop. And those three kittens with their wet milky noses all buried into her belly, all sucking away to beat mercy.
“Look, Pinky,” I said, lifting her up so she could see Miss Sarah and her litter.
“No matter how many times a barn cat has her kits,” Mama said, “it’s always a wondrous thing to see,”
Chapter
6
June come. I sure was happy as today was the last day of school.
It was hot that afternoon. But I came racing home with my final report card all folded up in my pocket. The weather was dry as dust, and I was glad to be walking across pasture on the soft green meadowland, instead of kicking rocks the long way round which was by the dirt road.
Way off to my right side, a wagon was coming down the long hill, headed for town. I didn’t know the team or the driver. As the wagon moved along the dirt road, it blowed up clouds of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind it. Looked like the wagon was chased by a long dusty-gray snake. The driver had his coat took off, riding in his shirt with his sleeves rolled up. It looked like Isadore Crookshank who sat the seat, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
I watched the wagon until it went out of sight around a roadbend. And soon the snake had gone, too. It was like the wagon hadn’t passed by at all.
From a quarter mile away I could see the corn cratch that Solomon moved with the capstan. And its new boards from one end to the other, like stripes, to fill in what used to be the open space between slats. Closer, I could see Pinky moving about, chasing one of the chickens.
“Pinky,” I yelled. But she was too far away to hear. So I ran again. But not too far, as it sure was a hot day for June.
Now that I was near, I called to Pinky again. This time she heard, and come to meet me. Boy! She was growing. I’d had her just ten weeks and already she was about my size. I lay on my back on the grass so she could come up to me and I could see her face. It always looked to me like she was smiling. In fact, I know she was. Lots of things smile, like a flower to the sun. And one thing sure. I knew that just like I could smile to see Pinky, she sure could smile to see me.
I got up, running toward the house. Pinky followed, but not as fast as when she was tiny. Her weight gain was good, but it slowed her down some. Just as we got to the fence, I saw Mama on the front stoop, waving for me to come up to the house. I’d hoped she hadn’t took notice of me rolling on the meadowgrass in my school clothes.
“Rob,” she said, as I came in the house, “look who’s here.”
There she was, sitting in our good chair, and wearing one of her big dresses with all the colorful flowers on it, and smelling so good with perfume that it almost made me sick. There she was, Aunt Matty.
She lived in town, in Learning. Once a month or so, she’d come to pay call on Mama. She wasn’t my real aunt, like Aunt Carrie. But I guess she was a distant cousin twice moved; which to go along with my reckoning means that she used to live in two other places before she moved to Learning. Anyhow, she wasn’t my real aunt. Just a friend of Mama and Aunt Carrie, so that they got out the good cups to drink tea out of. But I called her Aunt Matty. Or sometimes Auntie Matt. Her real name was Martha Plover.
“Hello, Aunt Matty.”
“Well, look at the size of you. You’re growing like a weed.” Aunt Matty always said that, and yet it always made me feel good.
“Thank you,” I said.
I should have excused myself right then and there, and changed my clothes for chores. But instead I made my big mistake of the day. And it could of been my big mistake of the whole darn summer.
Like a fool, I pulled out my report card.
I showed it to Mama and to Aunt Carrie. They couldn’t read hardly at all, but they knew what an A looked like. I’d got A in geography, spelling, reading, arithmetic, and history. The only other mark I got was a D in English, which I didn’t bother to point out. So when Mama and Aunt Carrie saw all them A’s they said I was a good boy.
The trouble kicked up when I showed my report card to Aunt Matty. She could read. But as it turned out, she couldn’t read the letter A, no matter how many she saw. All she could read was D, where I got a D in English.
“You got Din English!”
The way Aunt Matty took on, it must have been the first D anybody ever got, because it sure gave her the vapors. I thought she was going to die from the shock of it. Like she seen a ghost. There it was. A big black D, as big and black as Miss Malcolm could make it, right there on my old report card. And it was more than poor Aunt Matty could bear. She let out a gasp, and her hand went to her throat like she was spasmed.
“D in English,” she said again, to make sure that there wasn’t a soul who missed it.
Well, I thought to myself, I’ve done it. Brung disgrace on my family’s house. Appeared a D in English was so dark a deed that no one could live it down.
“’Course it’s not the end of the world,” said Aunt Matty. “There is a remedy.”
Remedy! There was a word that struck a fever. Mama had give me a spoonful of remedy for one thing or another almost every winter and spring. It made you go to the backhouse a lot. Morning, noon, and night. Sometimes twice each, and it was no picnic to have your butt burn like Hellfire.
“All he needs,” said Aunt Matty to Mama and Aunt Carrie, “is a tutor.”
At this, I heaved a breath of well being. I sure knew what a “tooter” was. Jacob Henry had one. Its real name was a cornet, and he played it in the school band. But what Jacob called it was his “tooter.” So I was some relieved, now knowing that I weren’t going to get marched to the kitchen, took by the ear, and forced to gag down a tablespoon of remedy. A cornet was bad, the way Jacob played it. But it sure beat a remedy that you had to swallow now and run after.
“Fact is,” said Aunt Matty, “I will tutor him myself.” That was when I busted out laughing fit to kill. Aunt Matty, big and round in her flower dresses and all her beads, was strange to look at as she was. But to see her blowing on a cornet, with her cheeks all puffed out the way Jacob’s got, was too much to stand. A sight like that could lead the high school band in a parade. Auntie Matt and her silver cornet, highstepping down the main street of Learning every Four of July. It was more than ribs could take.
That’s when I should of known better. Seeing me laugh was more than Aunt Matty could bear. Anyone who got a D in English had no right to joy. It was her next words that stopped the laughing for time to come.
“D in English! It’s no laughing matter. Next thing it’ll be an F, for Failure. And you know what that means. Expulsion. He’ll be put back a grade. So there’s no time to lose. I’ll start to tutor him today, and right now. Come, Robert.”
Up jumped Aunt Matty, grabbing me with one of her chubby hands and her big old floppy pocket-book with the other. I could tell she meant business. As she drug me into the parlor, all her bracelets were rattling as if to say so. Well, it was all right with me. If Aunt Matty wanted to play the cornet, I was partial to it.
“Grammar,” she said, pushing me with some force into a hardwood ladderback chair. “That’s where you’re falling down. Before I married your Uncle Hume, I was an English teacher. And that’s where we’re going to start. Living in this house and all its Shaker ways, it’s a wonder you can talk at all. You’d get better than a D in English if you were a fearing Baptist.”
That was it! That there was the time my heart almost stopped. I’d heard about the Baptists from Jacob Henry’s mother. According to her, Baptists were a strange lot. They put you in water to see how holy you were. Then they ducked you under the water three times. Didn’t matter a whit if you could swim or no. If you didn’t come up, you got dead and your mortal soul went to Hell. But if you did come up, it was even worse. You had to be a Baptist.
And here I was, alone with one. Bless the dear old goodness there weren’t a pond in our parlor. It sure
would be a painful caution to have a Baptist the size of Aunt Matty hold you under. Even to think of it made me gasp for breath, and I made a throaty noise.
“You all right?” asked Aunt Matty, digging around inside her big pocketbook. She came up with a tiny whitelace hanky, not much bigger than a stamp.
“Here,” she said, “blow your nose. You can’t learn English with an acting sinus.”
I blew!
“Now then,” said Aunt Matty, as she snatched back her hanky, giving it a sick look, “we’re going to have a little test on grammar. You tell me, Robert, which sentence is correct. Ready?”
“Yes’m.”
“It was I who he called. It was me who he called. It was I whom he called. And, it was me whom he called.”
I just sat there, dumb as a post. I guessed I didn’t have brains enough to dump sand out a boot. If she’d asked me if’n I was Robert Peck, I don’t guess I could of answered a good stout yes or no.
“Well?”
“I don’t know, Auntie Matt. They all sound fair enough to me.”
“Just as I suspected from the first.”
“The first what?”
“It’s just an expression, Rob. But it’s just as I feared. You don’t know grammar, because you don’t know how to diagram.”
“We haven’t had that yet,” I said.
“’Course you haven’t. Trouble with teachers today is, they don’t diagram. All they think of is the Bunny Hug.”
“We haven’t had that either.”
Aunt Matty went fishing into her big pocketbook once again. She pulled out an armload of things that she didn’t want, and finally some paper and pencil.
“So,” she said, writing as fast as she talked, “I am going to write out a sentence, and you can diagram it. Hear?”
“Yes.”
“There now. Jack hit the ball hard with Joe’s yellow bat. Let’s see you diagram that.”
“I can’t, Auntie Matt.”
“I know you can’t. But any schoolboy who gets a D had better learn. First off, what’s the subject?”
“English.”
“What?”
“English is the subject I got a D in.”
Aunt Matty wiped her face with the hanky I blowed my nose into. She gave a big sigh (like Solomon when he’s pulling the plow and comes to the end of a furrow) and I knew that grammar sure was a tribulation.
“Rob,” she said real soft, “I used to teach English, and there was one thing I never did. Know what that was?”
“Played the cornet?”
“Not exactly. I never got angry. A good teacher does not lose her temper, no matter how stupid her pupils are.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because in our school they sure are some dull ones.”
As Aunt Matty fanned herself with the hanky, I wondered what she was thinking about. I was joyful to hear that Aunt Matty didn’t get mad. An angry teacher is bad aplenty, but I didn’t know how good I could fend off an angry Baptist.
Picking up the pencil, Aunt Matty started to draw some lines and circles (and a few other geegaws that I’d never seen before and never seen since) on the sentence about Jack. She put a zig-zag here, and a crazy elbow joint there. There was ovals and squiggles all over the paper. It was the fanciest thing I ever saw. The part about Jack was still in sight, but now it had arms and legs that thrashed out in six directions. It looked to me like a hill of barb-wire. And the worse it got, the prouder Aunt Matty was of it.
“Behold!” she said at last, trying to pry loose the pencil from her own fingers. “That is a diagram!”
I wasn’t about to make sport of it. Aunt Carrie always said that only the foolish defy the Dark Spirits. I didn’t know the truth of it, but years back in the town of Learning, somebody had come across an old woman who was a witch. She’d just look at a barn and it’d burn to cinders. She could dry up a creek with one crack of her knuckles. And sour your cow’s milk before it bubbled in the pail. One look from that old witch, they said, would mildew silage and peel paint. Must have been a Baptist.
“Gee, Aunt Matty,” I said. “I ought to get A in English now for certain.”
“Here,” she said, handing me the paper that she’d sweated over like it was canning. “Take it up to your room and pin it on the wall.”
She pushed the paper to my hand, and I felt the unholy touch of it all the way upstairs and down.
“Did you thank Aunt Matty?” my mama asked me. “Can’t forget manners.”
“Thank you, Aunt Matty. Now I got to do chores. If’n it don’t get done, they’ll be a nevermind of fuss ’tween I and Papa.”
I was careful not to slam the door. Just outside, Pinky was waiting for me, and we raced each other to the barnyard fence. And just as I took leave of the house, I heard all of Aunt Matty’s bracelets go rattling, and I heard mama say:
“How was the first lesson?”
“Next time,” said Aunt Matty, “I’ll teach the Pig.”
Chapter
7
Up on the ridge north from our house, it was open field. You could walk for most of a mile before reaching the woods.
The grass was high now. And seeing as I’d worked all day on the hay wagon with Papa, it sure felt good just to know that evening chores were done, and I could lie on my back in the soft grass and do nothing except wait for evening.
Pinky was with me, and she was lying down too. Even though she hadn’t put in a lick of work all day. But there she was, a mound of white pig in a whole field of purple clover and kickweed. Here and there was a stand of wild paintbrush. Most of it yellow, and some red. It didn’t seem to want to mix with the clover, and it just kept to its own kind.
The whole hillside was purple clover; and in the early sundown, it looked more purple than I’d ever see it. Pinky was rolling in it. Over and back, over and back. I knew it felt good to her, because I was lying in it myself, and the clover felt right and good to me. The clover was getting ripe now, and you could take a big red-purple ball of it in your hand, and pull out the flower shoots. They were good to suck, and tasted just as sweet as the bee honey that was made from them.
Drawing one between my front teeth, I squeezed the sugary nectar into my mouth and spit out the pulp. It sure tasted good. I’d tried to get Pinky to taste some, but I guess that pigs just don’t cotton to clover none.
Just overhead, I could see a hawk drawing a circle in the sky. He was low for a hawk, and he must of just left his nest on the ridge and was making his first circle of evening flight. He went higher, with little moving of his wings. As he passed over us, I could see the red of his tail—like a torch against the softer colors of his underbody.
He went up, up, up. His circles were wider as he drifted south over the open meadowland of our farm. So high that he was only a dark speck with wings. The clouds above him were orange now. Like when Mama poured peach juice on the large curds of white potcheese. At the western-most turn of his circle, I almost lost him in the sundown.
But now he was returning. I wanted him to come back so as I could watch him circle. As the tiny speck of him passed over my head, he stopped. For an instant he didn’t fly at all, and just appeared to be pasted against a cloud, not moving. Then he got bigger, and bigger. I couldn’t see any wings, as he was falling fast as a stone. I sat up in the clover to watch his dive, and for a minute I thought he was coming down for me.
I knew a hawk wouldn’t bother me none, so I sure knew it weren’t me that hawk was hunting. And down he came; down, down, down. Not moving his wings at all, like they was pegged to his sides and he couldn’t brake his fall. He was going to hit the ground for sure, and I jumped on my feet to see it.
Whump! The hawk hit only a few rods from where I was standing in the clover. Just the yonder side of a juniper bush where the clover wasn’t near-by at all, and where it once had been open meadow-land for pasture. He hit something as big as he was, pretty near. And whatever it was, it was thrashing about on the ground. Seeing his talons
were buried in its fur, the hawk was being whipped through that juniper bush for fair. But all he had to do was hang on, and drive his talons into the heart or lungs.
Then I heard the cry. Full of pity it was, and it even made Pinky get to her feet. I’d only heard it once before, a rabbit’s deathcry, and it don’t forget very easy. Like a newborn baby, that’s the sort of noise it is. Maybe even a call for help, for somebody to come and end its hurting. It’s the only cry that a rabbit makes its whole life long, just that one death-cry and it’s all over.
The cottontail rabbit had stopped kicking; and the hawk was resting after the struggle, probably trying to get his breath back. So I didn’t move. Pinky either. We both stood stock still, up to our knees in that clover like we was hitched. That old hawk saw us, you can wager on that. He saw us for certain sure, but it didn’t mean spit to him.
I started to move forward real slow through the stand of clover, toward the hawk. Trying to keep the juniper bush ’tween the two of us, and hoping that big white pig didn’t come crashing along to see what was up. Took about three steps and that was all. Mr. Hawk snapped those big wings out and whipped ’em fast, so off he went. I could tell that rabbit was dead, the way it hung all loose in the talons of that old redtail. The hawk went off and away from us, flying low and close to ground until his speed was such as he could climb. To him that rabbit must of been a burden and a half, but it sure was going to be a hot meal.
The grass whipped on my legs as I ran after him, fast as I could. So I could see where on that ridge his nest was that I knew he’d circle back to. Pinky didn’t want to miss a trick, so she was right at my heels. But I lost sight of the hawk. He just plain melted over a hilltop and out of sight. I sure would of wanted to see his nest. And to see him tear up that fresh rabbit and feed his little ones. I bet soon as he landed at his nest with his kill, all his brood had their beaks open, wanting to get some hunks of warm rabbit down their gullet.
A Day No Pigs Would Die Page 4
