Free Moo by Jane Smiley Page A

good, but this party had gone well, all the way through the frozen raspberry mousse and chocolate-dipped orange wafers she was now clearing from the table. Dr. Bo had been discoursing about hogs, which allowed the other guests to ruminate peacefully and think their own thoughts, when Margaret broke in suddenly and exclaimed, “You know, this reminds me of something I hadn’t thought of in years. Before I ever went to school, we used to go to my great-grandparents’ place in the country, and it seems like everybody there lived in terror of the hogs. I remember there was a mule and also a horse, and if we rode them into the woods, we had to be careful to never fall off, because then the hogs would get us. It seems to me that we were told they would eat us. Are hogs carnivorous?”
    Dr. Bo pressed himself back in his chair until it creaked, and said, “Hungry hog’ll eat almost anything. Used to be common practice to let ’em forage in the woods, and the veneer of civilization lies very lightly on the hog, very lightly indeed. You say to that hog, ‘Adapt,’ and that hog will adapt, whether to a life of ease or a life of brutish warfare. All over the world, hog and human take each other’s measure. It is a delicate alliance, as your folks would have attested.”
    Swept up in her newly discovered train of memory, Margaret said, “And back home, we never had pork. My father couldn’t stand pork!”
    “Where are you from?” said Joy.
    “I grew up in Kansas City, but all of my father’s family lived in Arkansas. That’s where those hogs were. I think I was only five the last time we visited there.”
    Dean said, “I’m surprised you remember it. My family moved when I was five, and I can go right to the house we lived in before and not recall a thing.”
    Dr. Bo, not to be turned from his favorite subject, said, “That hog, that southern hog, would have been lean and very fast. Rich in the hams, dark in the shoulder.”
    Margaret said, “My grandmother did bring the ham to the table as if—you know, she always said, ‘Jesus himself ate ham at the LastSupper,’ and my uncle always said, ‘Jews don’t eat ham, Mama,’ and then my grandmother would look at him and say, ‘Well, how do you think they knew he was a Christian and not a Jew, then?’ ”
    Everybody laughed.
    Dr. Bo tried for one last fact. “Spanish brought the hog, set ’em free all over the Caribbean so they could come back the next year to a ready food supply. Ecological disaster, of course.” Helen set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he drank deeply of it.
    There was a long pause in the conversation, not unusual when Dr. Bo was a member of the party. Helen knew that most of the guests were trying to develop some interest in, and feeling for, the information they had just been given about hogs. She said, “Shall we take our coffee into the living room?” Twenty minutes left, a half an hour at the most, even though it was only ten-thirty. This group was predominately youthful, and that meant sobriety. She looked across at Ivar. In her first year at the university, they had met at a party given by a couple in the psychology department where the whiskey drinking, as at all parties then, started at six, dinner was brought to the table toward ten, and heads were sometimes laid upon the table between courses. The last drop of brandy was licked from the rim of the last bottle long after midnight. At that particular party, in fact, the hostess’s elderly mother, bourbon in hand, was discovered, along about nine, to have passed away in her chair. She was left to herself, just her legs covered with an afghan and the drink removed from her grasp, until the roast beef and coffee could sober everyone up. Helen had been impressed by the aplomb with which the hostess had gazed down at her mother, thoughtfully sipped her own drink, then returned to the kitchen and taken the rolls from the oven.
    Timothy Monahan accepted brandy, turned the glass in