The hog farmer’s younger brother entered into that unfortunate marriage, and he moved away from the ridge below Velvet Knob, and he worked the hoot owl shift in a coal mine that shorted his pay, had him digging in small light, in bad air that made his lungs rattle, in cramped rooms with dirty water everywhere. The younger brother and his wife lived in a Jenny Lind house in the Blue Eagle coal camp with Nathaniel, who was still their little boy.
The hog farmer’s wife is the Jacob’s ladder quilts she gave to them, although the hog farmer tried to stop her, and the cornmeal, the jar of honey, the tub of sauerkraut, and the hams. When his brother’s wife screamed at Nathaniel for tracking in coal dust, threw their plates at the wall and broke them, the hog farmer’s wife is the china set she packed up for them.
We’ll eat on tin, she told the hog farmer.
But I got you those little cups and saucers with pink roses, he said, and she would remember her surprise at the poor-me whimper coming from his mouth. I’ll drink from the dipper, she told the hog farmer, and then she put her mouth on his fingertips. I’ll drink from your hands.
The hog farmer is the ash heap by the garden that Malachi stumbles into on the morning of the first day of school, or maybe Nathaniel pushed him into it, Malachi won’t say. The hog farmer is Malachi’s smudgy face and streaky arms when he’s too busy to fetch water and boil a tub and get out clean clothes for hapless Malachi, Malachi who is all thumbs and two left feet, who is big and strong for his age but ungainly, who dulls knife-blades and breaks shovel handles no matter how many times the hog farmer tries to teach him their proper use.
And who will look after the dirty boy? Where is his wife, who is surely too pregnant to have gone far? What will she give away today? How will she absolve Nathaniel this time? Anger churns in him. She’s at the creek, he guesses. At the creek, cooling her swollen feet, chewing wild ginger, patting a loaf of clay. At the birch, the sassafras, tasting bark, tasting leaves.
The hog farmer’s wife is man-of-the-earth that she discovers when she digs morning glories in the gully, its roots shaped like a person’s leg, the biggest ones that she drags home, must be twenty pounds each, tasting something like a wild potato when she cooks them—but her boys push their plates away, want no part.
She is the song that she likes to sing while she washes clothes, the one about Scotland town, a far country, the man who dresses in a beggar’s rig so he can spy on his untrue love, so he can put his ring in her glass of wine. She is the Kentucky Harmony tunebook, the shape notes she sings at brush meetings.
She is the apple box she sits on in the dooryard after dark, she is three or four stars she sees when the clouds pull apart, the silver light as she sits there listening to her husband’s hound rove and yip, giving song to things distant and unseen.
The hog farmer is the saw briars and blackjacks and scrub pines that spring up faster than he can clear them from the rocky hill field. He is honey in the crock that his wife hides from him, that he sneaks his finger into when he wants to steal a lick. He is the sins he won’t name and likes too much to quit. He is Skull Cracker, Panther’s Breath that burns his throat, makes his eyes drip, sours his stomach.
The hog farmer’s wife is the morning that she spends talking with the Syrian peddler, the afternoon, the whole day. She meets him while she’s digging blue cohosh along the gravel lane, and she sits with him in the shade. She watches him slip off his canvas straps, watches him unpack his box, and then his valise, and then his notions case. He tries to sell her hand-mirrors, cotton checks and ginghams, papers of sewing needles, cards of horn-buttons and lace, wart removers and dandruff cures and hair food. He tells her that he’s carried his box through Cheat country, the spruce woods there, that he’s traveled down the Monongahela River on a skiff. She asks him to tell her more. Sometimes he runs out of English, and then they speak to each other by wriggling their fingers and making shapes with their hands.
She is a few silver coins tied up in a handkerchief that her husband doesn’t know about. The peddler tells her he misses his village on a mountain, the terraces, the young cedars, the goat herds, the Maronite church with its iron steeple. She buys a prayer book and a saint carved from olive wood and painted Jerusalem gold—a holy woman that she can hide in her apron—and then she presses her remaining coins into the peddler’s hands. Another gift. He tells her that even on a still day he hears the wind singing when he stands among the great spruces, hears the branches stirring, and it sounds like the waves of the sea.
The hog farmer tells his wife she can’t keep giving her best to any- one she meets, it’s selfish of her, she’s gone too far this time—but then she reaches for him. He is his wife’s arms when she clutches him, he is the wings of her shoulder blades when she turns from him. Her voice and dreams are the only gold he knows, he is the gold of her, the gold of sundown and Elberta peaches and poplar leaves and moss that grows between roof-shakes, he is gold in her hands. He is motes of hay in barn light, grass-bits caught in a ray, in a spill of gold that spears through the cracked gray boards. He is cedar smell, and the soft bed, and the odor of wood-smoke caught inside his house.
Have a moon, she says, offering him a crescent she’s formed.
Clay on her tongue, on his lips, he is the taste of earth on her hands.