until he’d entered the orchard.
Free Emmy? Mose signed. Get away from here?
I shook my head and signed, He might come back quick. We’d be in big trouble. I glanced where the pig scarer had gone. Follow, I signed.
Mose shook his head and signed, You crazy?
The pig scarer was far enough away that I could whisper. “Where does a man go in the middle of the night, Mose?”
Pee, Mose signed.
“He could pee in the yard. Come on, before it’s too late.” And I took off.
The moon lit the scythed grass between the rows of trees with a silver luminescence. Mose and I kept to the black shadows of the apple trees. The pig scarer’s lamp was easy to follow. He headed west to the end of his orchard. When Mose and I arrived at the last of the trees, we saw him fifty yards out, kneeling beneath a lone oak in a fallow area, bent so far over that his forehead touched the ground. The sound of his deep sobs was enough to make a stone weep. It’s impossible to witness such open grief and not feel pity wrung from your heart. I’d heard little kids at Lincoln School cry all night long, and I’d heard Mose, too, but I couldn’t recall ever hearing a man cry this way. It made me think that no matter how big we grew or how old, there was always a child in us somewhere.
Mose touched my arm and signed, Go now.
I’d seen what I came for, though I still didn’t understand it exactly, and I nodded and we slipped back toward the barn.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE PIG SCARER was in a surprisingly good mood the next morning. I wondered if the tears, like rain, had washed him clean of his misery, at least for a while. Or maybe it was because of the news Albert gave him, that the mash was ready for its first run in the still. Or it could have been something else entirely.
The stack in the woodshed was pitifully low, and Albert told the pig scarer that we would need that and more for both the firing of the still and any cooking that he hoped to do on the stove in the farmhouse. When Emmy had finished gathering eggs from the chicken house, which was one of her daily chores, he put her to work helping Albert get things ready for the first run of the still. He took a two-man saw from where it hung on the barn wall and handed it to Mose, then he pulled down an ax for himself. He pointed toward a wood cart in the corner and said to me, “Bring that, and you and the mute come with me.”
He led the way, carrying his ever-present shotgun, and we walked through the orchard to the edge of the Gilead River. The whole distance the pig scarer merrily whistled “Wabash Cannonball,” as if whatever labor awaited us was something to look forward to. He stopped where a great cottonwood stood, long dead but still upright, its branches dry and brittle, its trunk riddled with holes where squirrels or maybe woodpeckers nested. The tree was only a stone’s throw from the brush on the riverbank in which we’d hidden the canoe, and I caught Mose’s eye, and we exchanged a look of concern.
“There she is, boys. Been meaning to take her down for a while. Looks like today’s the day.”
The morning air was fresh and smelled of blooming wood lily and wild rose and prairie smoke, which had all taken root in the fallow between the orchard and the river. It was going to be a hot day, I could tell, and the idea of spending hours cutting down a tree and splitting it into pieces small enough to feed a stove or a still fire wasn’t particularly enticing. But the beauty of the day itself and the mood of the pig scarer helped. Sweating in Hector Bledsoe’s hayfields wouldn’t have been half the hell it was if the man himself had been anything but a bastard. The pig scarer was downright jovial that day, and it made a difference.
Before he and Mose set to work cutting down the cottonwood, he walked around the base of the trunk, as if taking its measure. On the side that faced the river, he knelt and said, “Son of a gun.” He reached down and pulled something from the ground, then held it out in his hand so that we