Tales of Uncle Ernest – (Continued)

Section 3, “The Pig” – Chapter 4

When Uncle Ernest traipsed across the lawn to the house to freshen his drink, I swung there, gently, in that whitewashed, wood-slatted swing, under the spell of his tale. Suddenly, I was scolded by our blue jay, which was flitting back and forth on the rim of our water barrel at the corner of the house. And, from an underbrush somewhere on the farm, when I least expected it, I would hear the sharp, clear “bob-white” call of a quail. Then his mate would answer a “bob-bob-white” from some point, either nearer or farther away on the farm.

As Uncle Ernest lumbered toward the swing, the whippoorwills in the deep woods started their love songs; “Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will” echoed their cries, as they echo still in my mind—as if I were sitting there still in that swing as a boy at dusk, under our ancient maple.

“After we settled in,” Uncle Ernest continued. “Ricco took us on a tour of the facility. I mean to tell you, Moose, there were pigs everywhere. We saw piglets with their mothers, shoats scampering around, barrows and gilts at the feeders, and large, lazy sows and boars lounging in the sun and wallowing in the mud puddles.”

“When we entered the farrowing house, an enormous building with two hundred stalls where sows had their litters, we saw a strange sight. Shoveling hog manure from one of the stalls was an odd looking man. He had a full, black beard and large, bushy eyebrows— so much facial hair that it seemed as if he was trying to hide his face, but his head was as bald as an ostrich egg. He was a small man and wore filthy coveralls, and when he saw Ricco he shoved his arm forward and shouted to us, ‘Ock toong, snell, snell!’

“ ‘Shut up, Dolph, and keep shoveling!’ Ricco told him in broken English.”

“Why was Ricco so mean to him?” I asked Uncle Ernest.

“You’ll find out in a few minutes,” Uncle Ernest answered, rising to return to the house once more.

“Great,” I said, leaping off the swing to the grass. While Uncle Ernest was gone I felt pretty good, so I did a few cartwheels, tried a full flip and landed on my back in the grass. Sitting there in pain, I looked up to see a crow rowing effortlessly across the yard. He navigated through the branches nicely, swooped under the clothesline, and, with wings spread and landing gear outstretched, alighted with a sort of upward and backward lurch on the grape arbor post. Settling his feathers with a haughty shuffle, he tilted his head from side to side, pecked at the post a couple of times and, crouching for the spring, flew off towards the stable with a shrill “Caw, caw, caw.” I looked over at the swing and saw Uncle Ernest grinning at me, so I hopped back on and waited for him to continue.

 “You know, Moose, Ricco told me that he had no respect at all for that bald-headed Dolph. Ricco said that he was a nasty weasel, and told me everything he knew about him: one evening, about two years before we arrived, a tug boat captain saw a rubber dingy with three people aboard making its way towards the shore. They were coming from the open sea, but the captain didn’t see a vessel of any kind on the horizon. When he looked more closely, however, he saw an object sticking out of the water about 200 feet off shore. Then it hit him: it was a periscope; they came out of a submarine. Later that day, Ricco told us, the three of them came to his hog farm looking for employment.

“Since he needed help at the time, he hired Dolph and his girlfriend, Eve. He told the other man that he could probably get a job at a beef farm five miles down the road. His name was Fox, and Ricco found out later from Eve that he had been some kind of desert fighter in Northern Africa.

“Laughing and slapping his thigh, Ricco told me, in that weird, Portuguese accent: ‘That gal must have thought I was a real country boob to believe that kind of nonsense.’ This is how Ricco explained to us what happened:  ‘I gave Dolph and Eve a place to stay and explained their duties, but I guess Eve couldn’t stand that goofy Dolph, because a week later she left him and went to live with Fox on the other farm. When I found out what a total jerk Dolph was, I tripled his work load so he now has to shovel hog manure about sixteen hours a day. The guy acts as if he has something to hide, as if he's a mass murderer or something.’

“ ‘He is,’ Ricco said, ‘without a doubt, the most undesirable human being I’ve ever met.’ When Ricco finished his description, Rocco and I said that Dolph must be deranged, and that we’d be sure to keep an eye on him. Yeah, Moose, the guy was bad news; wait till you hear what he did to me.”   [To be continued Friday, 2/17/2012]