The Barn

The boom came.

It came out of the sky a second after the voice, the last great round boom of the last rocket, and it rolled over the grass and the grandstand and the thousand people on their feet, and under it, through it, as if the boom had let it loose, something came through the crowd from behind.

He did not see it at first. He felt it. He felt the crowd move, behind him, the way the café had stopped talking on Sunday, in a wave, from the far side to the near; except that this was not stopping, it was parting, people stepping back, and stepping aside, and somebody shrieking, and somebody laughing, and a child shouting a pig, a pig, Mama, a PIG; and he turned round on the grass in the dark under the last white flower of the fireworks falling, and it came past him.

It came past him a yard away, at the height of his knee, at a speed he would not have believed a thing that size could go: black, enormous, with a white band round its middle as if it had been dipped halfway into paint, going through the crowd on the grass like a boat through water, low and fast and certain, with its ears flapping and its trotters drumming on the dry ground; and its eyes, as it went past him, small and bright in the last of the light, met his, for one instant, and were perfectly calm.

Mabel, he thought.

And after it, ten yards behind, through the gap it had made in the crowd before the crowd closed again, a girl. Small, with two red plaits flying, in a green shirt, with a stick in one hand and a square board in the other, running flat out, with her face set like a fist.

“MABEL,” shouted Rae-Ann Coker, going past. “Mabel, you stop right now.”

Mabel did not stop.

---

He ran.

He did not decide to. He did not think about it. He did not think about the feed-store bag folded in four on the kitchen table, or rule one, or rule two, or the carousel, or the side by the generator where the light was. He thought about a pig going towards the big doors at the end of the hog barn and the creek beyond them, and a girl who had been raising her since February, and he ran.

He ran after Rae-Ann Coker through the crowd, which was moving now, everybody, a thousand people getting up off the grass at once at the end of the fireworks and folding their chairs and picking up their children and their blankets and turning, all of them, in the dark, towards the gate and the car park, so that he was running against them, through them, past shoulders and folding chairs and a man with a child asleep on his chest; and the crowd closed behind him like water, and he did not look back.

Somebody was running behind him. He could hear it. Feet on the dry grass, and breath, and something sloshing.

“Freddie,” said Theo, behind him, panting. “Freddie. Rule one.”

“I know.”

“We’re supposed to stay together.”

“We are together,” said Frederick, and ran.

---

The hog barn was dark at the far end, beyond the lights, and the big doors were open.

He came round the end of the row of barns with the noise of the crowd behind him going away and the dark in front of him coming up, and the hog barn was there, long and low, with its tin roof grey against the stars and its fans still going inside it, and its big doors at the end standing open on the yard behind; and the pen at the end of the aisle by the doors, the pen with the gate, was empty, with its gate hanging open on one hook, and a length of orange baler twine on the shavings in front of it, chewed through, in two pieces.

Rae-Ann was in the doorway. She had stopped there, at the edge of the dark, and was standing with the board in one hand and the stick in the other and her chest going, looking out across the yard.

“She’s gone to the creek,” said Rae-Ann. She did not turn round. She did not ask who they were. “I told Mr Baggett. I told him the gate. Thursday.” She looked at the dark. “She chewed the twine. She waited till everybody was looking at the fireworks and then she chewed the twine.”

“How do you know she’s gone to the creek?”

Rae-Ann looked round at him, then, over her shoulder, at him and at Theo behind him with a goldfish in a bag held against his chest, and her face, in the light from the barn, did not do any of the things faces did. It was too busy.

“Because it’s ninety-five degrees,” said Rae-Ann, “and she’s a pig.” She turned back to the dark. “Come on, then. If you’re coming.”

---

There was a gap in the fence at the back of the yard, where a post had gone and the wire hung down, and Mabel had gone through it; you could see where, because the grass on the other side was flattened in a track, and the track went down a bank into trees.

Rae-Ann went through the gap. Frederick went after her. Theo went after him, and caught the goldfish’s bag on the wire, and unhooked it, and said a word in Wisconsindeutsch that Frederick had never heard him say at the Hartigans’ table.

It was very dark under the trees.

The lights of the fair were behind them, up the bank, beyond the fence, a glow in the sky, and the noise of the crowd leaving, and the generators, and somebody’s car horn; and down here there was none of it. There was the dark, and the trees, black, close, and the smell of mud and water and leaves and the smoke of the fireworks, which had drifted down off the field and lay in the creek bottom in a pale haze at the height of his head, so that the few stars he could see through the branches were blurred; and the insects, all round, in the trees, breathing, louder than the crowd had ever been.

Theo took out his telephone and turned on the torch on it, and the light jumped out across the dark ahead of them, white, and showed them the bank going down, and roots, and the trunks of trees, and at the bottom of the bank, ten yards down, the creek.

It was not much of a creek. There had been no rain for a month. It was a channel of grey mud between two banks, with a thin brown thread of water down the middle of it, very slow, and pools here and there, flat and black in the torchlight.

In the biggest pool, in the middle of the channel, there was a pig.

She was lying in it. On her side. All the way down, in the black water and the mud, with only her head and her shoulder and the curve of her side out of it, black, with the white band gone grey with mud; and as the torchlight found her, she lifted her head, slowly, and looked at it, and at them on the bank above her, and let out a long, deep, contented breath, through her nose, that blew two small holes in the surface of the pool, and lowered her head again into the mud.

They stood on the bank and looked at her.

“She’s happy,” said Theo, astonished.

“Of course she’s happy,” said Rae-Ann. “She’s cool.” She put the board down against a tree and wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “Pigs can’t sweat. Not properly. They haven’t got the glands. That’s why they lie in mud, to cool off, because they can’t do it any other way.” She looked at Mabel, in the pool, and something happened to her fist of a face, very slightly. “She’s been in that barn a week. With the fans. In a hundred and three. And I hose her down four times a day and it’s not enough, it’s never enough, she just stands there and pants.” She looked at the pool. “She’s not running away. She’s just hot.”

Frederick looked at the pig in the pool.

He thought about the farmhouse, with no air conditioning, and the two box fans, and the hot rooms under the tin roof where nobody could sleep, and the trailer by the barn with the blind down and its own air conditioning, humming, all night, for the detail. He thought about lying on the porch boards at midnight because they were cooler than the bed.

“I know how she feels,” he said.

Rae-Ann looked at him.

“I bet you do,” she said, without any expression at all, and picked up the board.

---

“You don’t chase a pig,” said Rae-Ann.

She was going down the bank, sideways, carefully, with the board held in front of her in both hands, a square of white plastic with a handle cut in the top; and she was talking without turning round, low, steady, the way she talked to the pig, so that Frederick understood after a moment that she was talking to both of them at once.

“You never chase a pig. If you chase a pig, it runs, and a pig can run faster than you, and turn quicker than you, and it’ll go through a fence you can’t go through, and then you’ve lost it. You don’t grab a pig, either. You can’t hold a pig. A pig’s all muscle and there’s nothing to hold on to and it’ll knock you flat.” She reached the bottom of the bank and stopped, at the edge of the mud. “You walk a pig. You get behind it, and to the side, where it can see you, and you make yourself big, and you walk, slow, and it walks away from you, the way you want it to go. And the board’s so it can’t see past you. A pig goes where it can see. If it can’t see a way, it doesn’t go that way.” She looked back up the bank, at him, in the torchlight. “You. Get down here.”

He went down.

The mud took his trainers at once, both of them, to the ankle, with a sound like a kiss, and he nearly fell, and did not.

“Get round the other side of her,” said Rae-Ann. “Slow. Not close. Go along the bank and come down past her and stand in the creek on the far side. Where she can see you.” She looked at him. “And put your arms out.”

“My arms?”

“Out. Like this.” She held her arms out from her sides, with the board in one hand and the stick in the other, so that she was twice as wide as she was. “Make yourself big. You’re the fence. You’re the side of the race. If you’re big she won’t come past you. If you’re small she’ll go straight through you like you’re not there.” She looked at him. “Can you be big?”

He thought about it. He thought about the steps of the cathedral, with a hundred thousand people in front of him, and the balcony, and the Blue Drawing Room, and the whole of his life, which had been spent being made big, by other people, for other people to look at.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never tried it on purpose.”

“Well, try,” said Rae-Ann. “And you.” She looked up the bank at Theo. “Hold that light on her. Steady. Not in her eyes. On her back. And don’t drop the fish.”

---

He went round.

He went along the bank in the dark, slowly, holding on to roots, and down the far side, past the pool, through mud to his shins, so that each step was a pulling, and a sucking sound, and a step; and he came out into the thin brown thread of the creek on the far side of the pool from Rae-Ann, and stood in it, in water to his ankles that was warm as a bath, warmer than the pool at Cove Point, with the mud soft under it, and the smoke of the fireworks lying over him in the dark, and the insects all round.

He put his arms out.

He felt ridiculous. He stood in a creek in the dark in Craig County at half past ten on a Saturday night in August with mud to his shins and his arms out from his sides like a scarecrow, facing a pig; and the pig lifted her head out of the pool and looked at him, in Theo’s torchlight, with her small bright calm eyes.

He looked back at her.

He thought: I am the fence.

He did not know how you made yourself big. He thought about it, standing there. He thought it was probably not about the arms. He thought it was probably about deciding that you were there, and were going to stay there, and that the pig could see you, and that you did not mind. He stood in the creek and decided that, as hard as he could.

Mabel looked at him for a long time.

Then she got up.

She got up out of the pool all at once, the way she had come through the crowd, in a great heave of black and grey mud and water, and stood in the creek, streaming; and she looked at Frederick, on one side, big, with his arms out; and at Rae-Ann, on the other, big, with the board; and at the bank behind her, where Theo was, with the light; and at the creek going away into the dark in front of her, where nobody was.

She went that way.

“No,” said Rae-Ann, “no, no, not that way, you…”

---

It took them forty minutes.

It was forty minutes by his watch, when he looked at it at the end. While it was happening it was no time at all, and it was the whole of his life. It was the dark, and the mud, and the warm water, and the smoke lying in the creek bottom, and the torch on Theo’s telephone jumping and swinging along the banks, and the insects, and Rae-Ann’s voice, low and steady and furious, giving orders, left, go left, no, YOUR left, get in front of her, slow, slow, arms out, BIG, and the pig, always ahead, always a little ahead, trotting along the creek bed through the shallow water in the dark with a sort of placid, rolling, unhurried determination, stopping at every pool to lie down in it, and getting up again just as they came close.

He fell over twice. The first time in the creek, full length, on his front, in the warm water and the mud, and came up spitting, and Theo on the bank above made a sound and turned it into a cough and nearly dropped the goldfish. The second time on the bank, on a root, on his back, and lay there for a moment looking up through the branches at the blurred stars and the smoke, and heard, a long way off, behind him, up the bank, beyond the trees, from the direction of the fair, a voice calling something that might have been his name, or might not, and was too far away to tell.

He got up.

“Are you hurt?” said Rae-Ann, from the dark, without stopping.

“No.”

“Then get round her.”

He got round her.

They got round her in the end, at a bend in the creek where the bank came down low on one side and there was a wide flat pool on the other, and the pig had stopped in it and lain down again, contentedly, for the fourth time; and Rae-Ann came along the creek behind her, slowly, with the board held out, and Frederick came down the bank in front of her, slowly, with his arms out, big, as big as he could be; and Theo came along the top of the bank with the torch held steady on the pig’s back, not in her eyes, and the goldfish in its bag in his other hand; and the pig in the pool looked at the three of them, one after another, in the light, closing in, slowly, from three sides, and at the low bank on the fourth side, going up, away from the creek, towards the fence and the glow of the fair.

She got up. She looked at Frederick, standing in front of her in the creek with his arms out and the mud to his knees and his face streaked with it.

He did not move. He stood there. He was the fence.

Mabel turned, and went up the bank.

---

They walked her back.

It was the strangest thing he had ever done, stranger than the slate, or the queue, or the clock, or the moth, and he did it with his whole attention, the way he read an Act. Rae-Ann behind the pig with the board, and the stick, touching her very lightly now and then on the flank, on, Mabel, on; and Frederick on her left side, two yards off, walking, with his arms out, big; and Theo on her right, with the torch, and his arm out too, the one with the goldfish in it, so that the goldfish in its bag of water was held out at arm’s length in the dark beside a pig, being big. Up the bank. Through the trees. Through the gap in the fence where the wire hung down, which Mabel looked at, and considered, and went through, and the three of them went through after her. Across the dark yard behind the barn, slowly, all four of them, in a sort of procession, at the pace of a pig, with the noise of the last of the crowd leaving the car park beyond the barns, car doors and engines and a child crying because it was tired; and the big doors of the hog barn standing open in front of them, with the light inside, and the fans going round.

Mabel went in through the big doors.

She went down the aisle between the pens, past the other hogs, asleep, flat on their sides in the shavings with their legs out like furniture, and the children asleep on buckets beside some of them; and stopped at her own pen at the end, with its gate hanging open on one hook; and looked at it; and walked into it, as if she had been meaning to all along, and lay down in the shavings, on her side, black and grey and streaming mud, and let out a long deep breath through her nose.

Rae-Ann swung the gate shut behind her.

She slid the bolt across. It went into its keeper.

She took her hand away.

The bolt slid back out of the keeper, by itself, with a small iron click, and the gate swung open an inch.

Rae-Ann looked at it. She looked at it for a long time, in the light of the barn, with her red plaits hanging down her back caked with mud and her green 4-H shirt soaked through and the board in her hand; and Frederick watched her face, which had been a fist for forty minutes, and saw it begin, very slowly, to come undone.

“I told him,” said Rae-Ann, in a different voice, a fourteen-year-old’s voice, high and shaking. “I told him Thursday. And it’s still…” She stopped. “It’s still bent.”

---

He looked at the gate.

It was a metal hurdle, hung on two hooks, with a sliding bolt at the free end that went into a keeper on the post: a small iron loop, welded on, that the bolt slid through. And the keeper was bent. He could see it, now, close to, in the light. Somebody, at some time, years ago, had hit it with something, a barrow or a hog or a boot, and pushed it a quarter of an inch out of true, so that it pointed very slightly downwards, and the bolt, sliding into it, sat at an angle, and slid out again.

He thought about the nails in the back of the birdhouse. Nails through side should be pulled, not flattened.

He thought about it for a moment longer. Then he put both his hands round the keeper, the small iron loop on the post, muddy, and set his feet in the shavings, and pulled. Not hard. Steadily. Upwards. With his legs, the way Felix’s father did removals on Saturdays.

It moved.

It moved a little. He felt it go, the iron, a fraction, under his hands. He let go and looked. It was nearly straight. He took hold of it again and pulled once more, upwards, steadily, and felt it go a little further, and let go.

“Try it,” he said.

Rae-Ann looked at him. Then she slid the bolt across.

It went into the keeper. Straight. All the way.

She took her hand away.

It stayed.

They stood and looked at it, the three of them, in the light of the hog barn, at the end of the aisle, with the fans going round over their heads and Mabel in the shavings behind the gate with her eyes closed: a bolt in a keeper on a gate, staying where it had been put.

Rae-Ann put her hand on it, flat, on the cold iron of the bolt, and left it there.

“Mr Baggett said he’d send somebody,” she said, at last.

“He did,” said Theo, behind them.

---

He heard the footsteps then.

He had not heard anything for forty minutes but the pig and the insects and Rae-Ann. He heard them now, behind him, coming fast, from the big doors at the end of the barn: heavy, and quick, and uneven, a man running who did not run, ever, who took stairs one at a time and was always at the top first; and they stopped.

He turned round.

Castellanos was standing in the doorway.

He was standing in the big doorway of the hog barn with the dark yard behind him and the light from the barn on him, in the blue T-shirt with the sailing boat and the leaping fish and COVE POINT RESORT - GRAND LAKE across it in an arc like a rainbow, and it was untucked, all down one side, and torn at the shoulder, and soaked; and he was muddy to the knees, both legs, the dark trousers with the creases black to the knee with creek mud and his black shoes gone; and his chest was going up and down, and his hands were open at his sides, and his face.

Frederick looked at his face.

He had never seen it before. He had known Castellanos’s face for four years. He had seen it in every weather. He had seen it at the top of the stairs, and in the mirror of the car, and in the yard looking at the trailer, and at the bottom of the porch steps looking at the T-shirt, daring them; and on the steps of the cathedral with a hundred thousand people in front of them; and he had never seen this. It was not anger. He did not know what it was. It was the face of a man who has been looking for something for forty minutes in the dark, in a crowd of a thousand people, and then in a creek bottom, in the mud, with a torch, calling, and has not found it, and has been thinking, for forty minutes, every second of them, about what it would mean not to find it; and who has, now, in a doorway, found it, standing in a pig barn at the end of an aisle with mud to the knees and a fourteen-year-old girl and a goldfish, perfectly all right.

Castellanos did not say anything.

He stood in the doorway and looked at Frederick, and Frederick looked at him, and neither of them said anything at all, for a long time, while the fans went round over the aisle and the hogs slept and Mabel, behind the gate that held, let out a long contented breath through her nose.

Behind Castellanos, in the dark of the yard, a light came across the grass, bobbing, and stopped, and went out; and Kimura came into the doorway beside him, small, quiet, with a torch in her hand and mud to her knees as well, and looked at Frederick, and then up at Castellanos’s face, and then, very quickly, away from it.

“Sir,” said Kimura, into her radio, very low. “Found. Hog barn. All three.” A pause. “All well.”

Castellanos still did not say anything.

He looked at Frederick for one moment longer. Then he looked down at his own shoes, which were not there, at the black mud where his shoes had been; and he breathed out, once, a long breath, all the way out, the way Dame Margaret had on the telephone, at her desk, with her folder closed.

“Car, sir,” said Castellanos.