Pigs in Heaven

“Maybe they’d rather have peaches,” Alice says.

Sugar laughs. “No, a chicken’s not that smart. Here’s the fire pit where we have the hog fry.”

“You fry hogs?”

“Oh, yeah. Cut him up first. For a special occasion. We had one here for me and Roscoe’s anniversary, I’m sorry you missed that. Quatie organized it, she’s the social director.

We ate up the whole hog. Everybody came, all the kids and the grandkids and the husbands and the cousins. The only ones that didn’t come was the ones that’s dead.” Sugar laughs.

Alice tries to imagine what it would take to get her family collected in one yard. “They come from far away?” she asks.

“I guess the furtherest anybody come was from Tahlequah.

My kids all live right here.” She points through the woods.

“See them trailer houses? That one’s Johnetta’s, that’s Quatie’s, the two boys is on the other side of the road, they moved back in together since they both got divorced.” She pauses and bites her lip. “No, one’s divorced and the other one, his wife died. So they’ve got the kids up there. They’s all right around.”

“Why don’t they move away?”

“Well, because they’d just end up coming back anyway, because this is where the family is. Why move away just to turn around and come back? Too much trouble.”

“I never heard of a family that stuck together that much.”

“Listen, in the old days they didn’t even go across the yard.

They just added onto the house. When you married, the daughter and the husband just built another room onto her folks’ house. Roscoe says the houses just got longer and longer till there wasn’t no place to sweep your dirt out. I think trailer houses was a right good invention.”

Their trail has joined up with an old road, two mud tracks running through deep woods. Every mud puddle is surrounded by a prayer group of small blue butterflies. Alice is fascinated by their twitching wings. She wonders if the butterflies are all related to one another too. “How much of a piece of land have you got here?” she asks Sugar.

“It was Roscoe’s mama’s homestead land, sixty acres.

Every one of them got sixty acres, back in the allotments.

Most of them sold it or give it away or got it stole out from under them some way. I don’t know why she didn’t, probably didn’t get no offers. So we ended up here. When the kids each one got big, we told them to find a place to set a trailer house and go ahead. They have to pay taxes. We don’t. I don’t know why, I guess because it’s homestead land. Oh, look, there’s poke.”

Alice spies the purple-veined shoots clustered in a sunny spot beside the road.

“We’ll have to be sure and pick those on our way back,” Sugar says. “Roscoe told me there was a lot of them here.

He come down here the other day looking for the eggs. We got one hen that’s real bad about stealing the nest.”

“That looks like a tobacco plant growing there,” Alice says, pointing.

“Probably is. You might find marijuana, too.” Sugar giggles.

The forest opens before them onto a grassy park with a long bank sloping down to the creek. Where the water is deep it stands a cool, turquoise blue. A steep limestone cliff pocked with caves rises behind the creek, and above the cliff, a wooded hill. Alice and Sugar stand a long time looking.

“I’ll bet there’s crawdads right in there.” Sugar points to the shallows.

Alice feels herself relax, looking at the water. Bright orange dragonflies zip low and dive and stab their tails at their own reflections, then light in the rushes, transforming all that energy into perfect stillness. The sunlight reflected upward from the water lights the undersides of Sugar’s and Alice’s faces and the broad hickory leaves above them, as if they’re all on a stage. “I can see why you’d call it Heaven,” she says.

“Oh, this isn’t the good one yet. This one they call the mushrat hole. I guess they used to trap a lot of mushrat and mink down here. Heaven’s on down the trail a little bit,” Sugar says, and she strikes out again downstream.

When Alice arrives in Heaven at last, a little breathless, she instantly begins to worry about boys cracking their skulls.

Sugar is right, this blue hole is clearer, much larger and deeper, and the limestone cliff is alive with children leaping like frogs into the water. Sugar stands without a trace of worry on her face, watching small boys, most of whom are presumably her descendants, dive off twenty-and thirty-foot rocks. Some of the kids are barely past toddler age; they have more trouble climbing up the bank than jumping off. Alice is astonished. “Don’t you worry about them?” she asks.