Free Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks

rooster and scared the hens so bad they probably won’t lay till spring.”
    Ham said that he was sorry. He said it several times because it felt strange to him when he said it, almost as if he didn’t mean it, as if somehow he were glad that Henry was dead and the hens wouldn’t lay.
    His father told him that being sorry never changed anything in this world. Never. “So the first thing you’re going to do is buy a new rooster for those hens. If we’re lucky we’ll get them laying again. It’ll probably help if we put the fighting cocks out in the barn right away, so this afternoon I’ll build a couple of coops for them out there. Up to now I kept them in here because it was easier for you to feed them all at once. Now it’ll be harder for you,” he said grimly.
    “How much will a new rooster cost?” Ham asked, knowing the answer even before he heard it.
    “Two or three dollars,” his father said, flicking his cigarette butt into the snowbank and heading for the house.
    Ham stood there alone for a few seconds and then started running to catch up to his father, who had almost reached the house.
    THE DRUNKEN PIGS
    In certain years the family raised a pig. Always Poland China pigs. But there was a period of about five years when they were raising two pigs, every spring butchering the older of the two and replacing it immediately with a young one. In two years that pig would weigh one hundred and fifty pounds or more, and its turn, as the older of the pair, would have arrived.
    By that time Ham, whose responsibility it was to feed them, would’ve grown attached to the bristly, pinkish white beast, so he was grateful that every time his father and Archie Carr, the butcher, packed one of the pigs into the back of Archie’s truck and drove off with it, they left behind a football-shaped and -sized piglet, so small it had to be fenced separately for a while to protect it from the clumsy, thrashing bulk of the remaining adult pig.
    “Pigs don’t get along until they’re about the same size,” Ham’s father had explained. “Like people.” Then he had laughed down lightly at his son, and touching the boy’s coal black hair with his enormous fingertips he said, “Naw, not like people.”
    Ham knew that they raised the pigs to kill and eat and that it saved them a lot of money. It was wartime, and even though his father worked hard every day as a plumber, Ham knew that they were poor, so he tried to think about the pigs the way he thought about the vegetable garden.
    It wasn’t easy. The pigs themselves made it difficult for him. They had too much character for it. Certainly they rooted like potatoes in the dark ground of the pigpen, but sometimes Ham would stand on the rough board fencing of the pen and watch them snuffle through the dirt, and when the pigs realized that he was there, they’d stare up at him and wrinkle the loamy surface of the dirt with their buried noses,as if signaling to him. Besides, the pigs
ate
potatoes—or at least they ate the peelings, whole buckets of them, left over from Ham’s mother’s cooking at the end of each week.
    And yes, it was true that the pigs were in fact shaped more like a summer squash than anything else—they surely weren’t shaped like animals, or people. Rounded at the ends, long and smooth-sided, so fat their tiny legs in soft ground were almost invisible, with a tendril-like tail at one end and leafy ears at the other, it should have been easy to think of them as nothing more than gigantic pinkish summer squashes. Except of course that they ate squashes, ate greedily the seedy cores that Ham’s mother scraped away when she was canning for the winter.
    Another thing that made it hard for Ham to think of the pigs in the same way he thought of the vegetables from the garden was that the pigs made noises, grunts and loud, high squeals, which Ham thought he understood. One time the pigs broke loose from the pen and were very hard to find and catch because, once