“It costs a right smart to feed a hawg,” Snopes said. “As for getting rid of it, that old gentleman has done shot it so much now, I doubt wouldn’t nobody buy it.”
“Then eat it,” Stevens said.
“A whole hawg, for jest one man? Let alone with going on two years of bird shot in it?”
“Then give it away,” Stevens said, and tried to stop himself but it was too late.
“That’s your legal lawyer’s advice then,” Snopes said. “Give the hawg away. Much obliged,” he said, already turning.
“Here,” Stevens said, “wait;” holding out the bill.
“I come to you for legal lawyer’s advice,” Snopes said. “You give it to me: give the hawg away. I owe the fee for it. If five dollars ain’t enough, say so.” Then he was gone. Stevens was thinking fast now, not Why did he choose me? because that was obvious: he had drawn Essie Meadowfill’s deed to the property under dispute; he was the only person in Jefferson outside Meadowfill’s family with whom old Meadowfill had had anything resembling human contact in almost twenty years.
Nor even Why did Snopes need to notify any outsider, lawyer or not, that he intended to give that hog away? Nor even Why did he lead me into saying the actual words first myself, technically constituting them paid-for legal advice? Instead, what Stevens thought was How, by giving that hog away, is he going to compel old Meadowfill to sell that lot?
His Uncle Gavin always said he was not really interested in truth nor even justice: that all he wanted was just to know, to find out, whether the answer was any of his business or not; and that all means to that end were valid, provided he left neither hostile witnesses nor incriminating evidence. Charles didn’t believe him; some of his methods were not only too hard, they took too long; and there are some things you simply do not do even to find out. But his uncle said that Charles was wrong: that curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
The trouble in this case was, his uncle didn’t know what he was looking for. He had two methods — inquiry and observation — and three leads — Snopes, the hog and Meadowfill — to discover what he might not recognise in time even when he found it. He couldn’t use inquiry, because the only one who might know the answer — Snopes — had already told all he intended for anyone to know. And he couldn’t use observation on the hog because, like Snopes, it could move too.
Which left only the one immobile: old Meadowfill. So he picked Charles up the next morning and at daylight they were ambushed also in his uncle’s parked car where they could see the Meadowfill house and orchard and the lane leading to Snopes’s house and, as the other point of the triangle, the little new house which McKinley Smith had almost finished. They sat there for two hours. They watched McKinley depart on his mule for his cotton patch. Then Snopes himself came out of his yard into the lane and went on toward town, the Square. Presently it was time for even Essie Meadowfill to go to work. Then there remained only old Meadowfill ambushed behind his window. Only the hog was missing.
“If that’s what we’re waiting for,” Charles said.
“I agree,” his uncle said.
“I mean, to distract the eyes that have probably been watching us for the last two hours long enough for us to get away.”
“I didn’t want to come either,” his uncle said. “But I had to or give that five dollars back.”
And the next morning was the same. By then it was too late to quit; they both had too much invested now, not even counting Snopes’s five dollars: two days of getting up before dawn, to sit for two hours in the parked car without even a cup of coffee, waiting for what they were not even sure they would recognise when they saw it.
It was the third morning; McKinley and his mule had departed on schedule: so regular and normal that he and his uncle didn’t even realise they has not seen Snopes yet until Essie Meadowfill herself came out of the house on her way to work. To Charles it was like one of those shocks, starts such as when you find yourself waking up without knowing until then you were asleep; his uncle was already getting out of the car to begin to run when they saw the hog.
That is, it was the hog and it was doing exactly what they expected it to do: moving toward Meadowfill’s orchard at that twinkling purposeful porcine trot. Only it was not where it should have been when it first became visible.
It was going where they expected it to be going, but it was not coming from where it should have been coming from. It was coming not from the direction of Snopes’s house but from that of McKinley Smith’s. His uncle was already running, possibly from what Ratliff called his uncle’s simple instinct or affinity for being where something was going to happen, even if he wasn’t always quite on time, hurrying — Charles too of course — across the street and the little yard and into the house before old Meadowfill would see the hog through the window and make the shot.
His uncle didn’t knock; they entered running, his uncle choosing by simple orientation the door beyond which old Meadowfill would have to be to use that particular window, and he was there, leaning forward in the wheel chair at the window, the glass sash of which was already raised though the screen was still down, the little rifle already half raised in one hand, the other hand grasping the handle to the screen to jerk it up. But he — Meadowfill — was just sitting there yet, looking at the hog. The town had got used to seeing meanness and vindictiveness and rage in his face; they were normal. But this time there was nothing in his face but gloating. He didn’t even turn his head when Charles and his uncle entered: he just said, “Come right in; you got a grandstand seat.” Now they could hear him cursing: not hard honest outdoors swearing but the quiet murmuring indoors obscenity which, Charles thought, if he ever had used it, his grey hairs should have forgot it now.
Then he began to stand up from the wheel chair and then Charles saw it too — a smallish lump a little longer than a brick, wrapped in a piece of gunny sack, bound in a crotch of the nearest peach tree about twenty feet from the house so that it pointed at the window, his uncle saying, “Stop! Stop! Don’t raise it!” and even reaching for the screen, but too late; old Meadowfill, standing now, leaned the rifle beside the window and put both hands on the handle and jerked the screen up.
Then the light sharp vicious spat of the ·22 cartridge from the peach tree; his uncle said he was actually looking at the rising screen when the wire frayed and vanished before the miniature blast; Charles himself seemed actually to hear the tiny pellets hiss across old Meadowfill’s belly and chest as the old man half-leaped half-fell backward into the chair which rushed from under him, leaving him asprawl on the floor, where he lay for a moment with on his face an expression of incredulous outrage: not pain, not anguish, fright: just outrage, already reaching for the rifle as he sat up.
“Somebody shot me!” he said.
“Certainly,” his uncle said, taking the rifle away from him. “That hog did. Can you blame it? Just lie still now until we can see.”
“Hog, hell,” old Meadowfill said. “It was that blank blank blank McKinley Smith!”
He wasn’t hurt: just burned, blistered, the tiny shot which had had to penetrate not only his pants and shirt but his winter underwear too, barely under his skin. But mad as a hornet, raging, bellowing and cursing and still trying to take the rifle away from Charles’s uncle (Mrs Meadowfill was in the room now, the shawl already clutched about her head as if some fatalistic hopeless telepathy communicated to her the instant the hog crossed their unfenced boundary, like the electric eye that opens doors) until at last he exhausted himself into what would pass with him for rationality. Then he told it: how Snopes had told Essie two days ago that he had given the hog to McKinley as a housewarming present or maybe even — Snopes hoped — a wedding gift some day soon, with Charles’s uncle saying, “Hold on a minute. Did Essie say Mr Snopes gave the hog to McKinley, or did she say Mr Snopes told her he had?”
“What?” Meadowfill said. “What?” Then he just began to curse again.
“Lie still,” Charles’s uncle said. “You’ve been shooting that hog for over a year now without hurting it so I reckon you can stand one shot yourself. But we’ll have a doctor on your wife’s account.”
His uncle had the gun too: a very neat home-made booby trap: a cheap single-shot ·22 also, sawed-off barrel and stock and fastened to a board, the whole thing wrapped in the piece of feed sack and bound in the crotch of the tree, a black strong small-gauge length of reel-backing running from the trigger through a series of screw eyes to the sash of the window screen, the muzzle
