Outer Dark(56)

Holme rushed to higher ground like one threatened with flood and perched upon a rock there to view the course of things. The hogs were in full stampede. One of the drovers passed curiously erect as though braced with a stick and rotating slowly with his arms outstretched in the manner of a dancing sleeper. Hogs were beginning to wash up on the rock, their hoofs clicking and rasping and with harsh snorts. Holme recoiled to the rock’s crown and watched them. The drover who had spoken him swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight.

Holme blinked and shook his head. The hogs boiled past squealing and plunging and the chalky red smoke of their passage hung over the river and stained the sky with something of sunset. They had begun to veer from the bluff and to swing in a long arc upriver. The drovers all had sought shelter among the trees and Holme could see a pair of them watching the herd pass with looks of indolent speculation, leaning upon their staves and nodding in mute agreement as if there were some old injustice being righted in this spectacle of headlong bedlam.

When the last of the hogs had gone in a rapidly trebling thunder and the ochreous dust had drifted from the torn ground and there was nothing but quaking silence about him Holme climbed gingerly from his rock. Some drovers were coming from the trees and three pink shoats labored up over the rim of the hill with whimpering sounds not unlike kittens and bobbed past and upriver over the gently smoking land like creatures in a dream.

Holme walked slowly up the bluff. The sun was bright and it was a fine spring day. The drovers had begun to assemble and they seemed in no hurry to overtake the hogs. They were handing about plugs and pouches of tobacco with an indifferent conviviality.

That beats everthing I ever seen, one said.

That’s pitiful about your brother.

I don’t know what all I’m goin to tell mamma. Herded off a bluff with a parcel of hogs. I don’t know how I’m goin to tell her that.

You could tell her he was drunk.

Tell her he got shot or somethin.

You wouldn’t need to tell her he went to his reward with a herd of hogs.

He shook his head sorrowfully. Lord I just don’t know, he said. I just wisht I knowed what to tell her.

You won’t see her for a couple of months anyways, Billy. Give ye time to think some about it.

What happent? Holme said.

One of the drovers looked at him. They Lord, he said, where was you at? Did you not see them hogs?

I seen him a-settin on a rock over yander, Billy said. Vernon went right past him and he never reached to help him nor nothin.

The drovers looked at him, a bizarre collection of faces that seemed assembled from scraps and oddments, all hairyfaced and filthy and half toothless and their weathered chops lumpy with tobacco chews. One spat and squinted up at Holme.

That right, stranger? he said.

Holme ignored him. I didn’t see you comin to help, he said.

I wasn’t near him, Billy said. I couldn’t of got to him. You was right there.

I seen him a-settin on that rock.

That’s all right about him settin on some rock, who was it got them hogs started in the first place?

That’s right. How come em to do thataway?

Where was you at, stranger? When them hogs commenced runnin crazy.

I wasn’t nowheres. I was way back yander.

Behind em kindly?

He just watched Vernon go right on out over the bluff and never said diddly shit.

Somethin had to of spooked them hogs thataway.

Well ain’t he just said he come up behind em?

He never raised hand one to save him.

Stranger we don’t take too kind to people runnin off folks’ stock.

We ain’t got a whole lot of use for troublemakers hereabouts.

Vernon never bothered nobody. You can ast anybody.

Shit, Holme said. You sons of bitches are crazy.

Peace be on all you fellers, a voice sang out behind them. Two of the drovers removed their hats. Holme looked around to see what was occurring.

A parson or what looked like one was laboring over the crest of the hill and coming toward them with one hand raised in blessing, greeting, fending flies. He was dressed in a dusty frockcoat and carried a walking stick and he wore a pair of octagonal glasses on the one pane of which the late sun shone while a watery eye peered from the naked wire aperture of the other.

What’s the ruckus here? Hey? He drew up and looked from one to the other among them and looked at the ground as if he had forgotten something, taking a kerchief from his sleeve and snorting into it.