When a raggedy man comes to the door selling apple trees, the hog farmer’s wife gives him dinner the hog farmer hasn’t eaten yet. When she sees his trembling hands, the shiver of his goose-pimpled arms, she gives him the hog farmer’s shirt, his hat, a pair of his shoes. A tramp, the hog farmer will call him. She is give until it’s foolish, give until it hurts.
She is the peace she speaks to the hog farmer when he simmers, when he boils over, when he scolds her for her reckless charity, when he balls up his hand to strike a foolish son.
She is the Bible stories she reads to discipline her sons when they disobey, or fight, or tell lies. She is her promise that she’ll never whip again, never soap a mouth again. She is the words that hush her boys, scare them, awe them, turn them around. She is parable and proverb, she is dust of the ground and the small still voice, she is frogs and gnats and river of blood.
The hog farmer is the forked peach stick or the wire bent into the letter y that he holds with both hands when he dowses for more water, for a new well to dig, when he walks his fields, criss-crossing wagon paths and hog paths with his arms stretched out. He is the twitching of the stick or the wire when he passes over a vein of water, the twitching that spreads to his arms and the thrum that pulses through his body.
He is the creases of his farm, the limestone cliff his boys slide down, the boulders with tatters of lichen, the sinkhole that he shovels dirt into and cannot fill, the blackberry thicket, the holler where the Moccasin Rangers bound his uncle to a hemlock tree and shot him to death. His uncle was named Malachi, and the hog farmer’s daguerreotype of him shows a man with fierce eyes, a jutting nose, a proud chin. He is remembered as industrious and god-fearing, a chair maker, a toy carver. So far, the hog farmer’s son Malachi is lazy, clumsy with knives, not much like his namesake uncle.
The hog farmer is the ledge over the pool in the creek where Nathaniel and Malachi and Spencer laze around when the sun is fierce and bright, he is the glittering pool of minnows his boys splash in. It was his wife who told the boys about the pool when they said it was too hot to work, who put ideas in their heads, got them thinking about its cool waters. His boys who steal his tobacco and papers, who forsake their chores if he doesn’t watch them and drive them hard, his boys who shriek like blue jays and strip off their clothes and paint yellow stripes on their faces and chests.
The hog farmer’s wife is the ragweed that she chews and smears on Nathaniel’s bee stings, the puffy welts on his face and neck. She is the cool yellow clay she applies to Nathaniel after that, greedy Nathaniel who throws rocks to bring down bees’ nests because he loves their honey. Nathaniel who has a crow’s eye for whatever’s flashy or sparkling, and a mosquito’s whine when he doesn’t get what he wants, and a bear’s taste for things sickly sweet. Nathaniel who is their nephew, who has lived with them at her invitation since his parents’ marriage fell apart, whom she loves as surely as she loves her own sons. Even when Nathaniel slips off to the Hartland coal camp and takes part in the muzzle-loader contests and drinks corn liquor there, competing with miners and wild boys, when nobody knows where he is or even if he will come home, she claims him completely, prays that angels gather around him, that nothing scorches him, that nothing swallows him, and she names him our son, our son.
When her hands are calloused, briar-pricked, work-sore, she is the clay she presses her palms in, then her fingers, the backs of her hands.
When his wife feels faint, has pains, when she feels the baby fluttering like a bird, when she stays near their low wooden house, the hog farmer is sumac berries and pigweed, shepherd’s purse and sow thistle that he pulls up for her and sets aside from the garden, from the acres he’s trying to clear. He is purslane leaves that she crunches with her strong teeth.
He burns the broom sedge field, he ashes the garden, he tries to weed the rocky hill field and pry up every last rock, he tries to tear out sumac brush and rambler rose with a briar hook. He thinks his working of the land might show that he loves it; he worries her eating of the land might show that she wants to become it.