Free Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks Page B

would consider it a treat.
    Eagerly, he dragged the heavy tub across the back yard to the end of the barn where the pigpen was located, swung back the gate, and slid the tub inside. Closing the gate, he climbed up on the fence and watched Tricksie and Anne hungrily shove their snouts into the mushy substance.
    After a few moments, the animals’ rapid eating began to slow, and Ham, bored, left them alone and returned to thehouse. He wondered if, after such a huge afternoon meal, they’d be hungry again in the morning, and he decided yes, because, after all, they were pigs, weren’t they?
    The next morning, as he always did, Ham got up, dressed, came downstairs, and while his mother made breakfast, he went out to feed and water the hens, his father’s fighting cocks, and the pigs. These were his daily chores. It was a sparkling clear morning, cloudless and dry, with a light frost that silvered the grass and made it crackle under his feet as he walked. He went to the henhouse first, completed his tasks there, and went on to the pigpen, lugging the bucket of watery grain mash he had made up in the barn.
    As he rounded the corner of the barn and neared the pen, he started to call, “Soo-ee! Soo-ee! Here, pig-pig-pig!” Then he saw them. Tricksie, the larger of the two, was lying on her side near the fence, facing away from it. Anne was also lying down, a few feet beyond Tricksie. Ham thought they were sleeping, so he called again, expecting them to scramble awkwardly to their feet and rush to the trough. When they failed to respond to his second call, he thought, They must be full from yesterday’s extra meal.
    But then, coming closer to the fence, he realized that both pigs, though still the same size in relation to each other, in fact had nearly doubled in size. They both seemed as large and as round as hills, and as inert.
    He put the bucket on the ground, reached around for a stick, and after a few seconds found the long, pointed maple branch he sometimes used to prod the pigs away from the trough while he filled it. Reaching through the slats of the fence with the stick, he poked Tricksie on the back, but got no result. She lay there as if she were a huge pile of sand.
    Again he poked her. Nothing.
    He then saw a purple trickle, like a string, from the pig’sfig-shaped anus, and he knew that she was dead. He looked over at Anne and saw the same purple string dribbling down the inside of one of her hams, and he knew that both pigs were dead.
    Grabbing the stick firmly, he started whacking it against Tricksie’s hindquarters, her back, her swollen belly, swinging the stick in as long an arc as he could, whacking the pig’s body all the way up to the head, which he couldn’t quite reach, so he pitched the stick into the pen, climbed over the fence and jumped down into the muck, where he picked up the stick and resumed beating the carcass, swinging the stick from over his head, bringing it down hard against the pig’s ears, eyes, and snout.
    He moved to the other pig and began to thrash its belly and head, too, again and again, when at last the stick broke off in his hand. He threw the piece of wood away and stood there in the deep, dark mud, weeping, and through his clenched teeth brokenly cursing his mother, calling her stupid, stupid, stupid.
    THE EROTIC MOUSE
    The winter that Ham’s sister Jody was born, his mother asked him from then on when he was playing in the house to please play in the front room. He was nine that year, and because he liked building things, he took up a lot of room when he was playing and usually left a great clutter behind him. This was why his mother, still tired from having the baby and too busy with feeding and caring for her to cope with Ham’s expansive play and the resulting mess, had insisted. “You never pick up after yourself, so from now on all your puzzles and model planes,
all
of it, gets done in the front room!”
    The front room was an unfinished first-floor room to theright