Pigs in Heaven

“Nobody’s ever got drowned here,” Sugar says. “They do sometimes up in the river, but not here.”

The kids have noticed the two women; they wave their arms in wide arcs, shouting, “Hi, Grandma!” Sugar waves back, not very energetically, Alice thinks, as if it is no big deal to her to be acknowledged publicly by grandsons. Several older children stand knee-deep in water farther down the bank, fishing, and they, too, wave at Sugar. One boy crosses the creek and makes his way toward them carrying a heavy string of fish. He lays the fish on the grass in front of Sugar, just exactly the way Alice’s old cat used to bring birds to lay at her doorstep. Alice can’t get over what she is seeing: adolescent boys being polite. Even more than polite, they are demonstrating love.

Sugar makes over the fish. “Where’d you get all these?

You must have been down here since Friday.”

“No,” he says, embarrassed. He is a stocky, long-haired teenager with broad shoulders and a gold razor blade on a chain hanging on his bare chest.

“What kind of fish are they?” Alice asks.

“The purple ones are perch,” he tells her politely. “These are goggle-eyes. They go under rocks. The ones with the pink fins are chub.” He turns back to Sugar, animated. “We caught a snapping turtle in the mud. Leon poked a stick at it and it bit it and wouldn’t turn loose. We just pulled it right out of the water. Those things are stout.”

“They’ll give you a stout bite, too, if you don’t leave them be.”

“I’ll clean these and bring them up later, Grandma.”

“Okay, Stand. Bring me some watercress, too. I see some growing down there by them red rocks.”

“Okay.” Stand walks away with his catch.

Sugar hobbles over to a pair of decrepit aluminum folding chairs that are leaning against a tree and shakes them open, setting them in the shade. “That Stand likes to get drunk, but he’s a good boy. He loves to hunt. He brings me something every week. ‘Grandma, I brung you this,’ he’ll say. He don’t stay home. Junior is always taking him somewhere and dumping him off and then about three o’clock he’ll go after him, he’ll have something. Squirrel, or anything green, you know.”

“He’s your older son’s boy?”

“No, not exactly, he’s Quatie’s, but she already had six or seven when he was born, so Junior adopted him. You know how people do. Share the kids around.”

Alice doesn’t exactly know, but she can gather.

“I wish he wouldn’t drink, though. I swear he’s the spit image of Roscoe, when I first met him.”

“You must have fell hard for Roscoe,” Alice says. “You wrote me you’d met him at the railroad yard, and then the next thing I know you’d run off and married him.”

“Well, I was mad because you run off and got married first. And anyway I was sick of factory work.”

“I’ll tell you, Foster Greer wasn’t anything to be jealous of. You’ve been a whole lot luckier in love than I ever was.”

The two women sit still, watching slim brown bodies slip through air into water as if they were made for nothing more than this single amphibious act. Sugar sighs.

“He had shoulders just like that. Roscoe did. From carrying the ties.”

“Railroad ties? That’s a job.”

“Mm-hmm. He used to cut ties and posts. Later on when we got married and come on back up here he cut cookstove wood. Just cut it right out of these woods around here. He’d sell it for fifty cents a rick. Now you get twenty-five dollars a rick.”

“Isn’t that something, what we used to pay for things?”

“Oh, Lordy! Remember when we worked in that mattress factory for fifteen cents a day?”

Alice laughs. “That was fun, though. More fun than you’d guess.”

“No, what was fun was when we’d go to beer joints, or sneak in to watch them wrestling matches they organized in the barns.”

“Oh, I liked those!” Alice says. “Those matches they have now on TV are just plain stupid. Like a costume party of grown-up men. I liked those tough-looking boys in the baggy shorts.”

“You had a crush on that one, what was his name?”

“Rough and Tumble Ludwig. I did not.” Both women cover their mouths and laugh.

“You know what I really loved?” Alice asks suddenly.

“When we’d go out to the colored church with that girl Ar-netta from the mattress factory.”