Mending the Centaur

Royse awoke before dawn and stole over the creaking floor into the kitchen. He looked towards the door at the back of the house where his son, James, lay curled in a pocket of warmth beneath a frayed quilt. He didn’t want to wake him since there wasn’t much in the cupboards. It was better to sleep than to wake up early and be hungry. Royse warmed himself with a cup of coffee, but the weakness of it reminded him of the way things had come unhinged. Once he finished the coffee he filled a tin bucket with hot water and headed out to feed the pigs. It steamed and sloshed against the soft curve of the lip while he moved down the path. Aside from a wind that scratched through the barren treetops, the hollow was quiet. Royse hadn’t smiled in a long time; it had been four years since he’d placed his Julee in the ground. Since then the surrounding hills had begun to seem unfamiliar and James’s voice came to him distant and faint. In that interval Royse’s face had grown around its deepening lines and creases like a maple tangled in barbwire.

The hogpen clung to the side of the mountain above the icy creek. Royse’s tin-roofed house stood fifty yards above, screened by a stand of scraggly, leafless trees. A lingering scent akin to curdled buttermilk wafted in the air as he neared the primitive structure and opened the wooden bin containing a dusty sack of feed. Royse stood for a moment trying to shake his weariness and listened to the rippling of the creek overlaid with the snorts and grunts of awakening pigs. After a moment, he went about the task pouring the warm water into the trough and mixing the feed. He entered the shelter just as the lumbering black sow sank her head into the steaming mixture. Pausing to let his eyes adjust to the dark, Royse applied a swath of iodine tincture to the dried and shriveled remnants of each pig’s umbilical cord. He then shook out the burlap sacks and spread them back over the floor and returned the distraught pigs to their bedding. The coming of morning light revealed by degrees the pallid woods, which seemed to have deepened beyond the distance of sight by the time he emerged back into the cold, crisp air.

With a stroke of good fortune I just might be able to get the Centaur running again, Royse thought, making his way back up the path. He knew what he needed to do and could see a way to make it happen. Nearing the house, he passed the machine which stood sharp and angular like some barricade of war poised against a frenzied charge of muddy soldiers, his thoughts settling on the loamy scent of newly plowed furrows and the rough texture of dried seeds loose in his calloused hands.

More than a week had passed since the obstinate sow had farrowed a litter of eleven glistening pigs. They writhed like larvae exposed beneath an upturned log. One was born dead. The stars formed a million points of radiance that spilled out through the night onto the serrated horizon, giving form to the mountains’ silhouette.

Royse set a pair aside to raise as his own, leaving the other eight to sell. They should make him enough to get the Centaur mended and running. He expected to clear near about ninety dollars by his figuring.

Royse took the birth of the pigs as a sign that his luck was turning. His designs were finally starting to take shape and before long the Centaur would be gouging at the earth. If he could seed a couple acres of corn, beans, tomatoes and cabbage before the end of April, he could still raise a respectable crop. It was a late start and he had to put his fate in the weather, but nothing else could be done.

February fell away into March and Royse was able to sleep...