Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  She turned, surveying the thick-trunked trees all around us, including at least three black walnuts easily identified by their tough, rivuleted bark. Past the trees, the views off the mountain to the east toward Dacus were breathtaking.

  “This was no accident. He lied.” Her voice was a broken whisper. “Why?”

  “Lionel Shoal?”

  “The brains behind Golden Cove.” She spit the words out. She really would feel better if she let herself cuss.

  “This section has the richest variety of plant life and animal habitat on the property. He promised Dot it would be set aside as a preserve. That was the only reason she agreed to sell.” She sighed. “Dot’s getting to the age where it isn’t smart to live off up here by herself. She figured this deal would make provision for herself and protect the land at the same time.”

  She gestured around her, impotent, frustration choking off her words.

  Maggy turned away from the two dozers. In cutting the jagged, muddy swath through the undergrowth, they had shredded several giant laurels. She took a few slow steps and stopped. At her feet lay a large dog-wood, the bark scraped off one side exposing splintered white wood. Without a word, she turned and purposefully started back down the ravine.

  I struggled after her on the lumpy hillside, concerned she was overexerting herself. She certainly kept in good shape, but she wasn’t a young woman. Even so, she was whipping the daylights out of me.

  When we got to the top of the rise on the other side, I was out-huffing her. Her ire must have given her an extra push.

  “I’m going to find Dot. And that Lisa Livson with her sales brochures. I intend to find out what’s going on here.”

  She started to march off, then hesitated. “Would you stay and keep a watch over Jesse?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She headed down the almost-reclaimed logging road, one probably left over from the turn of the last century, the last time progress had skinned these hills bare.

  Back at our digging spot, I found Noah’s and Jesse’s collecting had taken them several paces apart. The small mound of uprooted plants, carefully wrapped and stacked on their sides, had grown. The hillside where we’d been working was now dotted with little holes and disturbed mulch. It smelled wet and earthy and primitive.

  I didn’t like the holes. The plants belonged where they’d grown, not wrapped in space-agey cloth waiting to be carted off to some less hospitable and certainly less serene environment.

  We had no choice, though. We had to move them or wait for them to be plowed under.

  “Oh, decided to get back to work, I see.” Noah called over to me. He didn’t really expect a reply.

  I’d forgotten to ask Maggy about the extra gloves. I picked up my trowel and moved closer to Jesse. She gave me a shy sheepdog glance and a faint smile before she bent again to her careful digging.

  I couldn’t think of a good conversational gambit. What do you talk about with an uncomfortable fifteen-year-old? How ‘bout them Tigers? Read any good books lately? That dad of yours sounds like a real sumbitch, bet you’re glad he’s gone? I chose something safe.

  “You go to Dacus High School?”

  Her head jerked up. “Mm-hmm.” She nodded.

  “What grade are you in?”

  ‘Tenth.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s your favorite subject?” Arrgh. I was asking the same lame questions I hated to be asked when I was her age.

  She shrugged. “I dunno. English, I guess.”

  Five words strung together there. Okay. “Is Miz Patterson still teaching English?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “I had her in tenth grade. She could make even the good stuff boring. ‘Bout made me swear off poetry.”

  That didn’t even get a shrug or a dunno. Best let it rest. Bound in our own thoughts, our digging moved us farther apart.

  After a long while, Noah stood and stretched. “Thought I might get some lunch,” he said. “You guys want something?”

  I pulled back my sleeve to check my watch. “Gosh, I didn’t realize how late it was.” Or how hungry I was. I dusted off my knees and shook the kinks out. Jesse stood, too, and carried more wrapped plants over to add to our collection.

  The three of us wandered down the logging track to where most of the cars were parked. Other diggers were also drifting back down the road from other sites, as if some primitive, unheard dinner bell had summoned the workers in from the field.

  Someone—probably directed by the well-organized Maggy Avinger—had set up a makeshift serving table on collapsible sawhorses, with sandwich fixings, fruit, Oreos, chips, trail mix, an industrial-size water can, and a stack of paper cups and plates. A black plastic garbage bag hung from a stob on a nearby tree trunk. All the comforts of home. Except a potty. I’d head for home before I needed to take to the woods—too chilly out here for that and too many people milling about.

  I settled down with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, a handful of nuts, and three Oreos. Some sweet ice tea would’ve topped it off, but the fresh air made up for that one lack. I munched and enjoyed the woods, blocking out the voices of the others gathering around the midday repast.

  After my morning hike with Maggy, I saw our reason for being here in a different light. It had started as a little gardening project, a small do-good for the environment, akin to recycling newspapers and drink cans. Now, after the mud-red dozer tracks, the broken dog-wood, the frustrated tears in Maggy’s eyes, and the little holes in the rich black topsoil, it was more urgent. And more futile. This was too beautiful, too quiet and rich and older than we could imagine. Soon it would be gone.

  The Cherokee who’d roamed these hills knew the truth. None of us can own it. It’s not ours. Why didn’t we all go home, with our chattery voices and paper plates, and leave it to the jays and salamanders and hawks and deer? Just being here messed it up. Trying to enjoy it, make some part of it ours, we ruined it.

  I didn’t want to dig any more disturbing little holes. I wanted to get in my car and—Bud. Damn.

  I scrambled up, filled my paper cup and two more with water, and carried them back to the car, trying to hurry without sloshing out all the water.

  Bud filled the entire backseat, lying on his back with his feet in the air, sleeping the sleep of the satisfied. I called softly through the crack in the window, not wanting to startle him. He blinked, yawned, and struggled to right himself.

  He daintily lapped the water from two of the cups and most of the third before he looked up at me, satisfied. I clipped a leash on his collar and he lumbered out, arched forward, then stretched each of his hind legs.

  A one-hundred-forty-pound bear of a dog, Bud appreciates his own majesty and demands the appreciation of others. When no one joined us to admire him, he did his business, sniffed the air, took a ho-hum look around at the woods, and sauntered back to the car.

  Bud didn’t look pleased when the car door closed with me on the wrong side of it. But better him inside, his yawn seemed to say, even if I refused to make a sensible choice.

  I didn’t see Mom’s minivan. The logging road cut an eroded and healing swath for a winding distance into the forest, so she could have parked farther down toward the main road or farther up, past where we’d eaten lunch. Maybe she had been distracted with some other project and hadn’t come at all. No telling.

  When I returned to our assigned hillside, Noah had Jesse talking up a storm. Sometimes eight or ten words to a sentence. He kept firing questions, about music and bands and movies and stuff I’d never heard about. She smiled and even laughed soft bird twitters. At least she wasn’t ducking her head and shrugging.

  They left me to dig in peace. I tried not to look around at the woods, at the big picture, just focus on each plant as I came to it.

  We worked only an hour more before rain came un-expectedly. March clouds had rolled in, and I heard gentle rustlings in the branches before I felt the drops hitting my bare head.

  In silent
agreement, we walked back to the staging area, hunkered into our jackets. No point in hurrying. The branches overhead shielded us from the light rain, but we were going to get wet, no matter what we did. I didn’t see Maggy or Dot Downing or the sales lady or anybody else in charge. Maybe they were down at the sales office having a powwow. As mad as Maggy had been, I felt a flash of sympathy for Lisa Livson.

  Two men were gathering tarpaulins laden with plant bundles and gently laying them in a truck bed. A sign on the truck read DOMESTICATED GODDESS NATIVE PLANTS, with an address in Cashiers, North Carolina.

  An uncharitable thought crossed my mind as I blinked a raindrop off my eyelashes: Was I slave labor for the Domesticated Goddess’s profit center? Mom would say my cynicism canceled out any martyr points I’d earned by good works. I’d see how cynical I felt tomorrow, according to how sore and angry my muscles were after digging all morning.

  “Avery!” Noah jogged over to join me. “Your gloves. Thanks. I know it’s short notice, but would you like to grab an early dinner?”

  “Uh, sure. I guess so.”

  He grinned and looked relieved. “Figured you’d know the best places, being a hometown girl. I haven’t found a good pizza yet.”

  “There isn’t one, unless you rate grocery store frozen pizza as good.”

  Judging from his clipped city accent, I could’ve predicted the sad shake of his head, but he’d picked the right Dacus local for his restaurant dining guide since I never cook. I eat out whenever I can’t find a free meal with my family.

  “Your choices are simple,” I said. “Barbecue. Fried chicken. Hamburgers. No vegetables until Sunday dinner tomorrow.”

  “Barbecue sounds good. Five o’clock too early?”

  Not too early in a former cotton textile mill town like Dacus. And never too early for me. I eat anywhere, anytime. I gave him directions to Runion’s, and he strode off down the road, which was quickly becoming slippery with rain-slick red clay. I figured he, like the rest of the volunteers driving low-slung cars, hadn’t wanted to risk his car’s suspension or oil pan driving far on the abandoned logging road. My Mustang, on the other hand, could climb trees. I should have offered him a ride. Always too late with the polite gestures.

  When I pulled past him a few minutes later, he was climbing into some tiny beat-up foreign box. With a canoe strapped to the top. What had I gotten myself into?

  5

  Saturday Evening

  I dropped Bud off at Aunt Letha’s house, assuring her that he’d behaved himself and that he’d provided admirable personal security for me and everyone on the mountain. Bud hassled and grinned in his sappy Rottweiler way, dropped to the floor with a thump beside Aunt Letha’s armchair, and closed his eyes.

  Rather than drive the distance to my grandfather’s old lake cabin, I decided to shower and dress at my parents’ house before dinner at Runion’s. That would give me some extra time to make a couple of detours.

  I’d left a big law firm in Columbia and had been back home in Dacus since November. Except for the few February weeks I’d spent in Charleston helping plaintiffs’ attorney Jake Baker try a sad case, I’d called my grandfather’s lake cabin home. Theoretically, I’d been staying there to fix it up. That’s what I told everyone. In reality, as much as I love my parents, I didn’t figure any of us wanted this chick back in the nest. My living arrangements and cabin fixer-upper jobs provided family peace, a face-saving explanation, and property value enhancement all around.

  Luna Lake was isolated and the cabin rustic, with only a rudimentary kitchen and wall pegs instead of closets. Most of my business suits hung in the closet in my old bedroom at my parents’ and, even though racing my grandfather’s vintage Mustang up and down the mountain made the commute fun, it still took twenty minutes each way—if I didn’t get stuck behind a poky tourist or in front of a sheriff’s deputy testing out his new radar unit.

  In November, shortly after we met, Melvin Bertram had started talking about refurbishing his old family home place—the grand Victorian that had served for a time as the Baldwin & Bates Funeral Home—and turning it into offices. He suggested that would be a good place for me to open an office, well before I’d seriously thought about moving back to Dacus. He had also graciously—and persistently—offered to let me live in the other half of the upstairs. Melvin knew how hard it was to find rental property in Dacus. Beyond that, I don’t think he wanted to be alone in feeling the uncertainty of a return to Dacus.

  Making two offices out of the downstairs parlors and dining room had been easy. However, I wasn’t sure we’d have enough privacy, splitting the upstairs into separate living quarters. More important, though, did I really want only a few steps between my office and my bedroom? Particularly since some of my clients could copy my number from a scribble on the holding cell wall. Not people I wanted visiting me at home.

  In the last few weeks, I’d traded anxiety over my job limbo for housing limbo. Opening a single practice in Dacus might not be the best career move, but this living quarters thing was another whole fret.

  The Dacus real estate offerings were haphazard, everything from million-dollar lake homes to double-wide trailers, with the occasional badly located brick ranch or badly built subdivision trilevel thrown in. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and mentally trying on houses and locations tired me. Still, a FOR SALE sign could make me cut a sharp right or left, just to see what was available.

  In the extra few minutes I had before meeting Noah, I drove by a white clapboard house completely over-grown by kudzu, then a sad 1970s-vintage Colonial sitting on a weed-choked pond with a sign in front advertising it as “waterfront property.” When I finally got home, I took a few minutes to catch Mom and Dad up on Golden Cove, Maggy Avinger, and Dot Downing. Thanks to my detours, I arrived at Runion’s fifteen minutes late.

  Noah’s dented, canoe-laden car sat near the entrance. Only an early arrival could capture such a prime spot at Runion’s on a Saturday night.

  He stood to wave me over and pulled the rickety ladder-back chair out for me, which made this feel more like a date than I was ready for.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “No problem. Can I get you a beer?”

  The waitress walked up, ready to take our orders. Runion’s isn’t a dine-at-your-leisure place, especially on weekends. Before long, they’d have a line waiting for seats. To allow us a little extra time to order, she got my ice tea while I explained to Noah the merits of chopped versus sliced barbecue.

  “What kind of meat is it?”

  Poor boy. “Pork. Nothing but pork barbecue around here.”

  “No beef brisket?”

  “Nope. No mustard-based sauce; that’s Columbia and Charleston. Or vinegar-based sauce; that’s Low Country and eastern North Carolina. Tomato-based red sauce, slightly sweet, not as smoky as Texas. Cooked into the meat, not poured on afterward.”

  The waitress slid my drink in front of me on the red-checkered plastic tablecloth and wrote down our orders, not wasting a motion.

  “Hushpuppies or loaf bread?”

  Noah glanced at me, confused.

  “Hushpuppies,” I said, and she sailed off, her jeans tight on her well-padded hips, her movements quick.

  I was really too tired to play cultural attaché tonight, but he asked, so I explained. “Hushpuppies are deep-fried balls or squirts of corn bread. Some are oniony. These are sweet and really crusty. The honey butter there is to dip them in, but even I think that’s a bit too much.”

  “And loaf bread?”

  Gee whiz, kid. “From a loaf of bread? The square white stuff?”

  He’d obviously never eaten Carolina barbecue or sat down to supper with a working family who didn’t have time to make up corn pone or biscuits or money to waste buying brown-and-serve rolls.

  “I gotta ask, Noah. Where’re you from?” It hadn’t taken long back in Dacus to slide into old habits. Here it seemed more important to get background on any-body who’d found his way to Dacus—no
t into Dacus, just to it—than it had been in Columbia or Charleston. Getting into Dacus could take at least a generation.

  He took a swallow from his beer bottle. “Everybody always asks that.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. People just tend to know one another and they know when someone’s new.”

  “Colorado. What’s that tell you?”

  “What part?”

  “Vail. Actually, a little town near there.”

  “Mm-hmm.” That might explain a bit of the California quality he had about him. “What brings you here?”

  “A job.” His voice carried a mild challenge.

  “You strike me as bright, capable. You’re inquisitive, not afraid to work, if today is any indication. Pardon me, but there are better jobs than the Dacus Clarion for guys with those credentials.”

  “That’s your dad’s paper you’re talking about.” More challenge.

  “Don’t let the title ‘publisher’ fool you. My dad’s a recovering engineer. But that’s another story. So you left Vail and came here.”

  “Not directly. Stops in graduate school, the University of Washington, San Francisco. Bouncing around.”

  Granted, I didn’t know him well, but he didn’t strike me as a drifter. True, he had a scruffy quality, his hair too long, his jeans a bit raggedy. But that could be attributed to his age—early thirties, I’d say—and his maleness.

  I have a working hypothesis: Most people don’t move idly about. If someone leaves home voluntarily, it’s to follow a job or a girlfriend or boyfriend or to try something new in school. A few bounce around looking for something they’re unlikely to find with a change of scenery, but most—not all, but most—settle near people they know or places that look like home. I personally prefer my time-worn, blue-tinged Blue Ridge Mountains.