it wouldn’t take any time at all to put together. While they worked, I made the mash for the corn liquor. The pig scarer stood by, shotgun in hand, watching with silent interest.
After a while, I ventured, “That’s a cider press in the corner.”
He looked at the machinery broken into pieces against the back wall. “Was,” he said with a note of regret.
“Looks like a tornado hit it. What happened?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I play the odds. Every once in a while, I get an answer.”
I thought he almost smiled. Instead he said, “Old and just fell apart.”
Like hell. Somebody had taken a sledgehammer to that press, or my name wasn’t Odie O’Banion. Revenuers did that sometimes. But maybe sometimes men who went crazy with rage did, too.
By evening, the little still was completed and the mash was fermenting. Though it would take several days before we would be ready to do the first run, the pig scarer seemed pleased. That night when he unlocked the tack room door, Emmy brought us a good meal of baked chicken and roasted carrots. After we ate, the pig scarer sat on the hay bale outside the tack room, with Emmy at his side, and said, “Can you play ‘Goodbye Old Paint’ on that mouth organ of yours?”
“ ‘Leaving Cheyenne,’ you mean? Sure.”
I pulled out my harmonica, but before I put it to my mouth, the pig scarer surprised me. He lifted a fiddle from behind the hay bale and settled it beneath his chin.
“Go on,” he said.
So I launched into that old cowboy tune, and the pig scarer began to bow that fiddle along with me. He was pretty good, and we sounded not half bad together. The whole time I was aware of the fact that both his hands were occupied with the instrument and not his shotgun. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d positioned the hay bale far enough out that even Mose, who was the fastest of us all, probably couldn’t have reached him before the shotgun was in his hands. Still, it gave me hope.
“You play a good fiddle,” I said.
“Haven’t had occasion for a while.” He cradled the instrument gently in his hands and for a moment seemed somewhere else. “Sophie used to beg me to play at night when I put her to bed.” Saying that name woke him from whatever reverie he’d been in, and he set the fiddle down.
The song had put me in mind of horses, so I asked, “What happened to the nags who used to wear these harnesses?”
“Sold ’em,” he said. “Year ago. Was going to modernize, buy myself a tractor.”
“Never did?”
“You see one around here anywhere, boy?”
“Nope. And I don’t see any animals either, except those chickens in that coop.”
“Used to have some goats,” the pig scarer said. “Mostly pets for Sophie.”
There was that name again, stumbling accidentally from his lips. As soon as it was out, it seemed to turn like a boomerang and hit his heart. He sat up straight, snatched the hooch bottle from his back pocket, and took a long pull.
“What happened to the goats?” I asked.
“Ate ’em,” he said.
“You ate your daughter’s pets? That doesn’t seem right.”
“How old are you, boy?”
“Thirteen.” Which wasn’t true, strictly speaking. I still had a couple of months to go, but it sounded better. Older, wiser. Tougher.
“When you got a couple more decades behind you,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “then you can talk to me about what’s right.” He stood up directly, grabbed his shotgun and fiddle, and said to Emmy, “Collect those chicken bones and them dishes. Night’s over.”
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Albert said.
“Think I give a good goddamn about what that boy means or don’t mean, Norman? Come on, girl.” He hustled Emmy out and bolted the tack room door.
I lay in the dark thinking about the bitterness inside the pig scarer and the sadness that was there, too, and I figured they were probably twins joined at the hip. I thought maybe it wasn’t love that consumed him but a terrible sense of loss, which was something all of us who’d taken to the Gilead knew about. I’d considered loss only from my own perspective and Albert’s and Mose’s and Emmy’s, because our parents had been taken from us. But it worked the other way, too. Losing a child, that had to be akin to losing a good part of your heart.
Slowly, the pig scarer was becoming like Faria when I’d first met