The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (22 page)

When Theron’s mother and Daddy came down to the field that night, there was Piggy, standing up straighter than he ever had in his fat life, and Theron, looking tall and proud, was sitting on his back. He stayed up until he was sure they’d had a good look at Piggy and then he slid down and said, “See, Daddy? He’s broke. He carried me just fine.”

Mr. Pinckney was just about to open his mouth and say, “If he’s so well broke in, let’s see him walk,” but Mrs. Pinckney was grabbing him by the elbow and dragging him away, saying, “That’s wonderful, Theron,” with every step she took. When they got out of earshot she told Mr. Pinckney it didn’t really matter if Theron had propped Piggy up on a rock. If he cared that much about Piggy let him keep him, and if she saw the dog warden even drive past in his pickup truck she was going to forget the marriage vows and fill Mr. Pinckney full of shot.

Theron came back from the field so late that his parents were already in bed. His mother had left a plate of hoppin’ john on the table, but he was too stirred up to eat. He went to bed instead, murmuring verses over and over to himself, so he’d be able to remember them the next day.

Everybody thought Theron was in school the next morning, like he ought to be, but when Luvver and Fester started playing hide-and-seek, and Luvver left Fester hiding his eyes on the tree counting to a million and two, he took off for the back field to find Theron sitting on Piggy in the middle of the field, waving his arms for all he was worth. Luvver said why wasn’t he in school, but Theron just said something he couldn’t understand and gave him such a ferocious look that he turned and ran for home. He didn’t even tell Fester about it when Fester finally found him hiding under the marble-topped pier table, where Theron’s Daddy kept his boots.

Long and fine-ringing words were swimming in Theron’s head when he came up for dinner that night. He came late, about six, and everybody but his mother was sitting out on the front porch. Theron slid around to the kitchen and pulled up at the table while she had her back to him, working at the stove.

“Mama,” he said, and she jumped because she hadn’t heard him come in at all. “Mama, don’t you think this is beautiful?” and then he said a long, musical piece that ended:

Footprints in the time of sands …

Hugging his skinny shoulders, trying to hold the words within himself because they warmed his insides.

His mother touched his head affectionately. “You better eat your grits.”

His father wouldn’t even listen.

Theron cornered Luvver outside the cold-house after school the next day, and said poetry at him and
said
poetry at him. Luvver was quiet enough, and Theron’s heart lightened, until he saw that Luvver was quiet mostly because he was picking his nose.

He kept pretty much to himself after that, going down to the field as soon as he got home from school. He was quiet and edgy most of the time, thinking about the poetry that would come to him as soon as he got on Piggy’s back. Piggy still hated standing up, but he seemed to know how much pleasure it gave Theron, because he stood patiently as long as Theron wanted him to.

Once Theron came home from school to find his mother on her knees beside Piggy, running her fingers over his balding neck. She looked up at him and said, “Is there something special about Piggy, son?”

He said, “I tried to tell you, Mama. He makes poetry come.”

“These things I hear you say in your sleep?”

“I guess so, Mama.” He wished she would let him go. He wanted to get on Piggy’s back again.

“It was real strange,” she said thoughtfully. “He almost tried to get up a while ago. He kept poking me with his nose like there was something he wanted me to do.”

Not long after that Theron built a lean-to down by the field and moved Piggy out of his stall on the porch for good. He snuck out of the house with a Queen Anne chair and a pile of quilts and a Holland vase to make the place look pretty, and he fixed up the shack. When fall came, he used a lever to roll the big rock in the door of the shack, so that they could sit there most of the day, Theron mouthing poetry and Piggy drowsing a little, one hip dropped, listening to Theron’s voice. His Daddy was off with the shrimp fleet, looking for better waters, and there was nobody to bother Theron about how much time he spent down at the field.

Daytimes Piggy would let Theron ride him, and some new lines would come to him as he sat, and evenings he would talk to Piggy, reciting as many lines as he could remember, and Piggy would lie on his side with fat flanks heaving. He’d put his muzzle in Theron’s lap and look up at him with yellow eyes. One of the twins would come down with a little pail of supper and Theron
wouldn’t have to go back to the house until late at night. Sometimes his mother would stop him in the halls and look him in the eyes and try to talk to him, but he’d say, “Night, Mama,” and go to his room. In bed, he would cross his feet and look at the ceiling, calling the lines as they came to him. Soon there were so many crowding in his mind that he was afraid he’d forget some, and he took to writing them down. He moved into the shack that October, and he and Piggy lived quietly in the haze of autumn, with words flying around their heads like dandelion puffs in the sun.

It was too beautiful not to share. Theron went up to his Daddy’s rolltop desk one day and got a magazine and copied the address down, because he thought other people ought to be able to see Piggy’s poetry too. He got three cents from his mother, who loved Theron enough to let him go his own way, and he got out one of his favorite poems and mailed it to the
Breeders’ Gazette
. He went down to the mailbox every day for a couple of weeks, looking for a letter, and then he forgot about it.

In November Theron’s Daddy came home. He dropped his canvas bag and his yachting cap on the floor in the front hall and peeled off the twins, who were climbing up his trousers, and asked Mrs. Pinckney where Theron was.

She chased the twins into the kitchen and said, “Dow’t the field.”

Theron’s Daddy gave her a close look. “He been any help to you since I left?”

“Course he has,” she said, edging in front of the dining room door so he wouldn’t see the harness Theron was supposed to repair, still waiting on the dining room table.

“He’s wasting his time with that—
horse.”
Mr. Pinckney pushed his sleeves up above his elbows and looked around for something to threaten Theron with.

“Eldred Pinckney, you lay one hand on that boy …” Mrs. Pinckney stood toe to toe with him.

He backed down a little. “It’s not Theron, it’s
Piggy
I’m after,” he growled. “Should’ve let the dog warden take him right off. I’ll drive him down to Beaufort tonight and see what I can get for him …” Theron’s Daddy was so mad he’d forgotten Piggy wouldn’t walk. He grabbed a cane from the elephant-foot umbrella stand and barged for the front door. The screen swung open and banged him in the face and he reared back to see a little man in a sack suit still reeling from his battle with the door.

“It’s wonderful.
Wonderful
,” he said, sweeping past Theron’s Daddy and taking Mrs. Pinckney by both hands. “Where is he?” He readjusted a folder of papers under his arm and started sniffing around the house.

“What’s wonderful,” Mr. Pinckney said, standing smack in the doorway so the little man couldn’t see into Theron’s room.

“Why,
this
,” the man in the sack suit said. He closed his eyes as if he were in church and started reciting:

Sky of Sky! With clouds all brindle

With the birds that dart between them

And thy sun which doth enkindle

Nightingales before we’ve seen them

In our nooks …

Then his voice trailed off as he saw that Theron’s parents didn’t think it was wonderful at all, they were just staring, and he said, “Oh, you didn’t know about it,” his voice getting fainter and fainter, “ … perhaps-I’d-better-explain …”

A little later, while Mr. Pinckney was sulking on the widow’s walk, Mrs. Pinckney took the man in the sack suit down to Theron’s field. Theron was just taking Piggy into the shed.

“Theron, honey, this is Mister Brooks. He runs a poetry magazine …”

Mr. Brooks flushed to his round collar and said, “That’s just in my spare time, I’m afraid. Actually I work for the
Breeders’ Gazette
. I was down this way doing a story on hogs …”

“You got my poem?” Theron said and pulled him inside.

He sat Mr. Brooks down on a marble-topped commode, far enough away from Piggy so that Mr. Brooks wouldn’t be frightened of him, and they talked for a long time. Mr. Brooks told Theron the
Breeders’ Gazette
didn’t exactly take to his kind of poetry, in fact it didn’t take to poetry at all, but he happened to be working there (“just to support my poetry magazine”) and he saw it and he wanted Theron to know he thought it was great. Then Mr. Brooks gave him a copy of
Fragile
, which was
his
magazine, and then he gave Theron five dollars, which was because his poem was in it. He got down off the commode and came over and took Theron’s hand.

“If you could come back to Louaville with me, I bet I could get you a scholarship somewhere. You could write poetry for the reviews, you know, the
Prairie Schooner
, you could win the Bollingen prize …” Mr. Brooks’s eyes were hazed over with longing. “We’d both be
famous
, son. With your talent …”

“———,” Theron said through his fingers, blushing red.

“What did you say?”

“It wasn’t me, it was Piggy.” He said it over and over, but Mr. Brooks didn’t want to understand. Theron did get it across to him that he couldn’t go to Louaville ever and thank you very much. Then he looked down at the five
dollars and he promised to send Mr. Brooks all his poems because Mr. Brooks seemed to feel so bad.

He patted Piggy on the nose and walked Mr. Brooks to the edge of the field. “I couldn’t leave Piggy, see,” he said, and then he handed Mr. Brooks a big sheaf of poems because he looked like he was about to cry.

On his way back to the house Mr. Brooks must have said something to Theron’s Daddy, because he came down to the shack and took Theron’s five dollars. After that he never said anything more about getting rid of Piggy, and he stopped talking about sending Theron back to school.

There were little bits of money after that—Theron’s Daddy took the checks to keep up the house—and copies of magazines,
Challenge
and
Output
at first, mimeographed just like
Fragile
, and then austere-looking reviews that bored Theron and Piggy because there were no pictures in, and in a few years there were copies of
The Atlantic
and
The Saturday Review
. One year Piggy was a Yale Younger Poet. Sometimes people came down to see Theron, all bright-eyed and loaded down with their own poetry but Theron’s Daddy sent them away. Every once in a while Mr. Brooks would send Theron a clipping about a speech he’d given on poetry—Theron’s poetry, because Mr. Brooks had appointed himself Theron’s literary Goddaddy and his agent (that was the way he explained it to Theron) and he was very famous now. He’d even quit the
Breeders’ Gazette.

In a few years the twins got married and moved away, and there began to be scruffy patches on Piggy’s shoulders, and transparent hairs in his mane. Theron only sat on his back two hours a day now, and the words that came to him were all detached and sharp and pure, wheeling like gulls over the river.

His mother brought his food down to him every evening and took the poems to mail to Mr. Brooks. Piggy’s longest poem paid for the funeral when Theron’s Daddy died. After he was buried and put away, Theron’s mother began hanging around the shack door of an evening, too lonely to go back to the big old house. At first Theron was impatient with her for being there, because the words were singing in his brain and he wanted to be alone with them, but one night when she touched his hand as she gave him the bucket, he looked down to see soft, trembly lines around her mouth, and he was so sorry about that and the way her hand shook that he opened the door and sat her down in the Queen Anne chair. Piggy rocked a little until he was lying alongside her, and put his head in her lap. They both sat quiet as marsh-rabbits and listened to Theron make the words ripple in the air.

Theron threw back his head in the glow of the lamp, thinking he’d be perfectly
happy if he could die right then. As his mother got up to go something glittered on her cheek, and Theron saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“Son, that was beautiful.” She ducked her head and slipped out the door before Theron could say anything to her. Piggy nickered and looked almost as if he’d like to follow her up to the big house and put his head in her lap again. When she came the next night Theron opened the door and motioned toward the Queen Anne chair without a word. After that his mother spent all the long evenings with him and Piggy, listening to Theron in the closeness of the lowceilinged shack.

One night after she’d left, Piggy nudged Theron, who watched amazed as Piggy struggled to his feet without urging and edged his hind quarters around so that his belly was resting on the rock. He took Theron’s sleeve gently in his teeth, tossing his head until Theron climbed up, slowly because Piggy tired easily these days. Then he gave Theron his most beautiful piece of poetry. When he got it in the mail Mr. Brooks was to say that it was the culmination—the pearl—of Theron’s late period: