Free Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks Page A

loose, they remained silent and out of sight. But when Ham’s mother discovered one of them rummaging noiselessly through her geranium bed over on the shady side of the house, the pig had started squealing loudly and had headed straight for the pigpen. The other pig, the older one, had wandered out behind the barn and had fallen through the wooden platform that covered an old unused well back there. Twelve foot down, standing in a foot of water in total darkness, the pig remained silent until Ham and his father, seeing that the cover had been broken, walked over to the well and peered down, and only then did the pig begin to squeal for help.
    Also, the pigs liked Ham. Or at least it seemed to him that they did. They let him scratch their dry, scaly backs and smooth foreheads and often came to the fence when they sawhim there. In calm silence the beasts would poke their snouts between the slats, and he would scratch them. One pig would even let Ham place two fingertips of one hand a short ways into its nostrils, dime-sized openings, as long as with his other hand the boy kept scratching the bony ridge of the snout.
    They tried not to name the pigs. His father had pointed out that if they didn’t give them names, it would help Ham avoid becoming too fond of them. “They’re not pets. Remember that. No more reason to name a pig you’re going to eat in a year or two than name a damn apple tree,” he had explained.
    Ham’s mother had agreed, but later, when Ham accidentally revealed to her that on his own he had secretly continued naming the pigs year after year, she had merely smiled. Because he had referred to only one of the pigs by name, Anne, she asked him the name of the other.
    “Tricksie. I named her that because she looks like the one we had two years ago, and her name was Tricksie too,” he told her, pointing out the pig’s unusually long snout and small ears.
    “Tricksie and Anne. Why Anne?”
    “I don’t know. It just seemed to fit her,” he said. Then he asked her not to tell his father that he had named the pigs, and she assured him that she wouldn’t.
    The September that Tricksie began her final season as a pig and Anne was more than half-grown, Ham and his mother harvested an unusually large crop of grapes. They were Concord grapes, large and purple and darkly sweet, that grew from several clusters of vines in front of the garden and along the south-facing side of the road.
    For a week, every afternoon when school was out Ham would step down from the school bus and walk to thegrapevines and work alongside his mother until suppertime. These were warm, pleasant afternoons for him, picking the dusky grapes in the golden September sunlight, talking quietly with his mother as they worked, chatting of school, his friends, his new teacher. He also liked asking her about what he was like when he was a baby, and she apparently enjoyed telling him. He asked her why she didn’t have another baby, and she said, “Maybe I will,” in such a way that he figured it was a decision. And that turned out to be the year before his sister Jody was born.
    When he and his mother had finally picked all the grapes, having stored them each night in close-woven baskets in the cellar, his mother started making jelly with them. She’d never made grape jelly before, had never gathered a large enough crop, and she was excited at the prospect. She washed the grapes, and squashed them, and separated the skins and seeds from the pulp, the pulp from the juice. She saved the juice in Mason jars and used the cleaned pulp for the jelly. The skins and seeds, sloshing thickly in a five-gallon tub like a purple stew, she decided to feed to the pigs.
    That afternoon when Ham got home from school, she asked him to carry the tub out to the pigpen and leave it for them. He dipped his fingers into the gooey mass and tasted it: sweet, and a little bit sour at the edges. But he was sure that the pigs, after a daily diet of grain mash and water,