Free The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair by Percival Everett Page B

doin’?”
    “Just fine.”
    He started to pull himself from his rocker. “Let me get you a chair.”
    “Stay there,” I said. “I’ll just sit right here.” I sat on the porch with my feet riding down the steps. “Your corn is looking real good.”
    “Yeah, but it got cockaburrs in it. Been out there most of the day. On my knees.”
    “Is that your soybeans back that way?”
    “No, that’s Theodore Cheesboro’s.”
    “I didn’t think your property went that far.”
    “Well, that ain’t his property neither,” he laughed. “I don’t know whose it is. Probably belong to some white fella in Rock Hill. But it ain’t Theodore’s.”
    I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and shook one high. I pulled it out with my mouth, tilted the pack toward Bubba.
    He shook his head.
    “Smart,” I said. I struck a match on the cinderblock step and lit up. “I read where they closed one of the mills. The one where you work?”
    “‘Fraid so.” He was momentarily silent. “I might go work at Industrial. I been there already for a physical.” He looked out over the corn. “They closed her up, all right.”
    “You like turtle?” I asked.
    “Turtle meat?”
    “I killed one last week. Cut him up and froze him. I was thinking I’d fry some up tonight.”
    “I love turtle.”
    “Come on over.”
    “I will.”
    He wiped perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. “It’s a hot one, ain’t it?”
    “Sure is,” I said, “but it seems to be cooling off a bit.”
    “Yeah, it’s gonna rain. We need it, too.”
    I tossed my half-smoked cigarette out into the yard.
    “Wanna see some babies?” he asked.
    I looked at him.
    “Pigs. Wanna see some baby pigs?”
    “Sure.”
    Bubba was shoeless. He started down the steps past me.
    “You want your boots?” I asked.
    “Don’t need’ em.”
    We walked around the house. We passed his tractor parked out back.
    “I hear you got yourself a tractor?’ he said.
    “Yep. It’s a ‘49. Needs some work.”
    “A Ford?”
    “Right.”
    “I believe I know the model. Good machine if you get her running.”
    The pigs began to squeal loudly.
    “I wonder what all that’s about,” he said and we walked faster down the hill toward the pens.
    Closer, I could see the little pigs bunching up against their outstretched mother and just outside the pen a lone little pig trying to get back in.
    “So, that’s what the commotion is,” Bubba said. “Why don’t you grab him, Dan, and stick him back in there. I’m barefoot.”
    I walked around the pen and chased the little guy until I cornered him against the side of the feed shed. I grabbed him by his back legs and tossed him over the wire.
    “There you go,” said Bubba.
    “How many you got?” I slapped my hands clean on my jeans.
    “Ten. You think you might wanna try some pigs?”
    “Raising ’em?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ll try anything. Maybe.”
    He laughed.
    He turned and headed back to the house. I followed. We walked past a large uprooted tree. I stopped to look.
    “Storm did that,” he said.
    “Damn. When was that?”
    “That big one, about a month or so ago.”
    “Hunh.”
    “Well, that tree didn’t have real deep roots, no way. See.” He pointed.
    “Still, it’s a big tree. Must have been some wind. You’re lucky it fell that way.”
    “You heard the story about the slave woman and the bad storm?”
    “No.”
    “They say there was this slave woman who was real scared of thunder and lightning and every time a storm would brew up she’d run up to the white people’s house. Well, this real bad storm come up and she went running up there. She had to stay in the kitchen and back then, you know, the kitchen was sometimes sorta off the house, just sorta attached. Well, this big wind come up and picked up the kitchen and carried it down the road and the slave woman got kilt.”
    “Some wind,” I said.
    “Yeah. If she had stayed home and not gone runnin’ to them white