Winter Run

by Robert Ashcom

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

There are certain special—and rare— books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place—rural Virginia of the late 1940s.

Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven.

But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"—as old Professor James puts it—are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more—they love him.

Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity.

Release date: October 14, 2002

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was a dark day. Water glistened black on the sidewalks. The naked branches of the trees lining the street hung overhead like webbed fingers on crooked arms. Another two degrees and it would all be frozen. Everything was close, everything held tight, bare hands clenched in pockets.

There were new buildings and a lot of construction around the hospital. But I couldn’t mistake the smell once I walked through the doors. The color-coded lines on the walls were supposed to guide me to my destination. They didn’t make any sense. Finally a nurse gave up explaining and just took me to the ward.

And there she was. I would hardly have recognized her. The disease had taken her away. Who would have ever thought that so much flesh was necessary to make a face. Hers was gone. Skin stretched taut over the bones that everyone said were the source of her beauty. Bones. People had talked about them. She was unmistakably Scandinavian. In youth her creamy white blond hair had fallen to her shoulders. She wore it that way even after it turned silver. She had been tall, willowy, with slender arms. Arms always waiting for me, reaching out to take me back. But not now. It was too late. This time I was sure. Her rings were gone. They had looked foreign on her long, tapered fingers, anyway.

I watched her. Her cool slate-gray eyes were closed, her breath rising and falling, the kind of breathing you do when you are in pain. Tubes. The whole nine yards.

All my life I called her Gretchen except in loaded moments. Then she became Mother—the Swedish orphan, raised by friends after her parents both died of cancer within a single year. The friends were Cath -olic and strict. Gretchen was expected to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. But she never had. How could one thing be three? Or the other way around? She was defiant. And so for the rest of her life she received the sacrament in her left hand although she was right-handed.

“Hello Mother.” Her body shifted slightly.

Then the idiot question: “How are you?”

“Fine.”

What do you say to the already as-good-as-dead—to one whose rings and bracelets have been removed? I put my hand on her wrist. It was cold and very small.

“I am here. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No thank you.” In clear English.

There followed two days of tension and suspense, arguments with doctors about pain medication, about the chances of her coming back. I knew she wouldn’t, not looking like that. She knew how she looked.

I had to leave for a few days. I told her what I was doing. She came up from wherever it was she was and said, “Before you go, make a list of your choices and put it on the chair. I never approved of them—but put it on the chair.” Then she went away again.

My choices? My choices? What do you mean?

I couldn’t breathe. It was like suffocation from the dust around a grain bag when it is being filled. The dust is like ether and the world spins. And your eyes swim. You raise your head and the far wall of the feed mill looks obscured as if by rain. That was what it was like—sitting on a steel chair in that room, with my choices.

And then the world lit up the way it did once as I was leading a stallion out to his paddock on a spring Sunday morning. It happened just as I opened the gate to let him through. And for a moment everything was revealed to me. Then it was gone.

It happened again there in that hospital room. This time the revelation was a story.

Virginia in the late forties. The end of summer—days echoing with the bobwhite’s call and the incessant cooing of the mourning doves. The honeysuckle had lost its scent, and on the real farms the corn was tasseled and high, about ready to gather. Blackberries were in, though I didn’t have the patience for them. But Gretchen made preserves, so sometimes I had to pick them. They were worse than shelling walnuts. It was the brink of fall. Soon the air would be full of wood smoke, and it would be hunting season.

The farm was huge—almost seven hundred acres. But there were no crops, just pastures mostly gone to broom sage and a couple of garden plots and the little pasture where the milk cow lived by herself except when Bat, the mule, was living at Silver Hill.

There was also the four-acre fenced lot where the hogs were kept. There were huge oaks in the enclosure, and in the fall the hogs could live off the acorns. The rest of the time Matthew fed them the leftovers from the house and commercial feed from the coop. The hog lot was completely surrounded by the broom sage field above the pond. The hog lot was like a fortress in the middle of the field. It had been tightly fenced and refenced over the years. The fence was thick with honeysuckle and multiflora rose. Deep in the middle was a spring coming out from under a rock. The spring flowed its muddy trickle to the fence and then down the hill to the pond, carrying the hog waste. We didn’t know any better in those days. Even in a drought, the place was always muddy. It had become a sinkhole.

Paradise trees and cedars had grown up to the point where you couldn’t see into the place except where the hunt club had put in chicken coop jumps—those paneled A-frames that straddled the wire fence, allowing the huntsmen and horses a safe jump into the hog lot if that’s where the fox and hounds led them. It took a special horse to jump into that place, with the mud and slop. Horses hate hogs. So what usually happened was the riders stood next to the fence, listening as the hounds gave tongue in the frantic way they have when they are close. Add to that the oinking and squealing of the hogs and the horses hating the smell and refusing to stand still, and it was mayhem. But thrilling.

That August, on the first day of foxhunting—called cubbing—the hounds were brought to the farm to hunt. I had a pony and would ride with the hunt later that year, but on this day Matthew and I stood above the lot and watched the whole thing from the burnt-out summerhouse yard. Sure enough the fox had run into the hog lot, with the hounds in hot pursuit. I kept looking up at Matthew saying, “They’ll kill him! They’ll kill him!” Feeling awful for the fox but cheering for the hounds in my mind at the same time.

“Be patient, Charlie,” he said. “Quit your jumping up and down and watch. Be still, Charlie. Be still!”

Around and around the hounds went, now coming to our side, then straight toward the jump on the other side. I was sure the fox would come out and take off in the open. Crescendo after crescendo. The hogs were squealing and running—apparently with the hounds, the whole huge group in pursuit of the fox. It was outrageous and wild, as if something from time beyond memory had been turned loose, broken loose from whatever shackles time could have contrived for it—the sound and the hounds—and our wild imaginations. I could feel the tension in Matthew next to me, too. What was really happening? After twenty minutes of unbearable suspense, the huntsman decided to go in on foot and round up the hounds, and to hell with this mess. So in he went, blowing the horn and hollering for the hounds. The whips stood around the enclosure cracking their whips and hollering, “Get to him!” at the top of their lungs. I wanted to go in, too, but of course Matthew wouldn’t let me. Finally the huntsman emerged, covered from head to foot in mud and hog slop. The hounds were behind him. They were also covered. They were panting and shaking their heads and tails and looking thoroughly satisfied, in contrast to the huntsman who was thoroughly furious and told everyone so, including the Master.

I pulled on Matthew’s arm, “They killed him, didn’t they? They killed that fox in there? Why did the huntsman let them go in there?”

“Charlie, be still,” he said again. “Be still and watch!”

So for twenty minutes we squatted next to the huge poplar and watched. The last hound had come out, covered in mud and glory, the whips hollered, “Pack up!” and the hunt left to find another fox. Still we watched. Then Matthew pointed to a patch of honeysuckle, as a darkening shadow emerged. I held my breath and gripped his sleeve. The fox stopped as he came into the open. Looked around.

He was covered in mud also. He looked like a half-drowned cat. He shook himself, and as his coat dried, he became twice as big. Then he trotted off, his ears pulled back to hear if anything happened behind him.

“Now Charlie, if we wouldn’t of been down wind of him, that fox would of smelled us and never come out until we were gone. Do you see, Charlie? Do you see?” He always questioned me. Did I see?

Yes, I saw. Because the breeze was in our faces, we could have smelled the fox, had we been able, but he couldn’t smell us. Yes, I saw.

I had to get into that place and see how with all that hell going on, with the hounds roaring around, the hogs squealing and running, and mud and slop everywhere, that fox had got out of there in one piece. How? I would find out.

For a moment the reverie ended. Is that what it had been all those years ago—the fox and the mud? Or was it the darkness and mayhem and the sounds … the darkness?

“Charlie, are you listening?” Then his hand was on my shoulder, and he pulled me around so he could look straight at me. “Charlie, quit! I know what you’re thinking. You know that old boar hog is in there and would eat you alive.”

“But—”

“But nothing. No!”

The big brick-and-clapboard house at the top of the hill was 175 years old and home to only Professor James and his wife. They had no children. A middle-aged black couple, Matthew Tanner and Sally, his wife, looked after the Jameses. Matthew milked the cow and took care of the gardens and, increasingly, drove the old professor where he needed to go. Matthew was a hunter and the Jameses loved wild game. In the fall each year Matthew killed a buck, even in the days when they were really scarce. He also killed a tom turkey each spring. Sometimes he was the only one in the community to accomplish this feat, the turkeys were so few and shy. He knew the woods and fields. He fit into the land and its moods and seasons like black hands into the brown cloth work gloves we all wore.

I turned nine that summer and I knew all this about him. Had known it since I was a little boy and held his coat sleeve when things got exciting or I was frightened. It wasn’t thinking that told me. I just knew. We were a pair—the stout black man and the skinny, very blond white kid. Matthew and Sally had no children. Maybe that was it.

Later in the week of the cubbing, I walked up the hill to the big house to find Matthew. As I crossed the front porch I heard the professor talking and chuckling in his wheezy voice. “I know, Matthew. I should never have bought those five old sows from the Gibsons. But Ronnie has been sick and things are hard for them right now. Just try. And maybe that old boar will get them bred. If not, we’ll slaughter the barren ones. Although God knows what we’ll do with the meat. Those old things must be as tough as a rubber tire. You’ll just have to feed them feed from the co-op. We sure don’t have enough leftovers with just you and Sally and Mrs. James and me.” There was a pause. “Oh, and Matthew—don’t let Charlie Lewis near that boar!”

I knocked on the door and pulled it open.

“Ah, and there you are, Charlie,” said the professor. “Did you hear what I said? Do not go near that boar without Matthew. Is that clear? I heard about the hunt you witnessed and your interest in that place.”

“Yes sir,” I said, “but—”

“No damn buts, young man,” he exclaimed. “That animal is dangerous. You mind Matthew or I’m going to talk to your mama and papa.”

He was serious, and as I didn’t want to be kept at home when things were happening on the farm I shut up. It was my way—push them about as far as they would go and sometimes beyond, like the time I took George Maupin’s workhorse, Jim, and rode five miles up the back road bareback to ask George if I could keep the horse for the weekend before they caught me. Shortly after that they had got me the pony.

Two days later, Robert Paine, who was small and skinny and deep, deep black and had done time on the road gang, came to help Matthew move the old sows. As he always did, Robert looked sideways at me when he realized I was along for the ride. But I didn’t pay it any attention and Matthew acted like he didn’t see it. It would be years before the meaning of those looks became clear, before I knew the depth of his enmity, before, on a January night sitting around the fire next to the store at hog-killing time, my Eden would end.

Once the men got the old ’32 Ford stake body running, we drove up the valley road to the Gibson’s and loaded the sows up the pen’s ramp into the truck. They protested mightily, but the men knew hogs and squeezed them into the truck without any trouble.

At the other end, Matthew backed the truck up to the gap in the hog-lot fence with its vine-covered gate barely visible. He lowered the tailgate on the truck, and the sows slid and snuffled their way down to the ground and wandered off into the jungle of vines and stumps and mud.

That evening, we went back to be sure the sows hadn’t gone crazy and jumped the chicken coops. We sat on one of the jumps with our legs hanging inward. The trees in the lot had been thinned a few years back leaving four-foot-high stumps. The stumps had grown up in honeysuckle and blackberries. Each stump had a clump of dirt and grass around its base, like a little island in a sea of thick red mud and greasy puddles of brown water. It looked like a spooky Halloween garden. An evening mist was coming in, but we could see the shapes of the hogs, lying in the mud between the puddles. They looked like the larvae you find under an old board in a barn lot: pale to white and, in the mist, without real shape. Like slugs. You always hear that pigs are intelligent, but it’s hard to believe that anything that mud-caked and smelly could be intelligent. They are, though. And they all have different personalities, and special eyes.

We heard one grunting a ways off and then the huge gray boar came into sight—iron gray, with wiry hair all over his back, swinging his head from side to side as he walked among the prone shapes, occasionally pushing one with his nose, checking to see if she was in heat.

The boar moved steadily in our direction.

“Hey, old hog!” Matthew called. “Are they all right, or are they too old?” Then he turned to me. “Too old, I reckon. But the man wants them bred. So that’s what’s going to happen.”

When Matthew called, the big boar had raised his head. His eyes looked right at us, not like cows and horses, which hardly ever will look you in the face. His eyes were bright. They seemed to have their own light, like the hog had a flashlight in his brain turned on us to see what we were thinking. Does a hog oink only through his nose? That big male rumbled, way down in his chest. He sounded wild. I stared at him, thinking, What would you do if I came in there? I could walk around checking the sows with you. And we could look into every corner of the lot, to see if we could find a snake. And if we did, you would eat it, because Matthew told me a hog would eat a snake, alive—even a copperhead—and it wouldn’t hurt him.

I know what I could do. I could bring the pony and jump the chicken coop and ride around with you. That way I wouldn’t get. . .