The Complete Uncle Silas Stories by H.E. Bates Page B

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, Mary Ann?’
    And one year, as we sat there eating in the summer half-darkness, the room rich with the smell of ham and beer and the wine my Uncle Silas had spilled wherever he went, and all of us except my grandmother laughing over Silas unwrapping his gall-stone and laying it tenderly in its calico again, my grandfather for some reason got up and went out, and in less than five minutes was back again, with a scared look on his face.
    â€˜Silas,’ he said. ‘Summat’s happened. The pig’s out.’
    â€˜Not the sow, George? The sow ain’t out?’
    â€˜Busted the door down. How the ‘Anover——’
    â€˜Let me git up. God A’mighty, let me git up.’
    Somehow my Uncle Silas staggered to his feet.
    My grandfather and he were men of utterly opposite character, my grandfather as mild as a heifer, Silas as wild as a young colt, but where pigs were concerned they were equal men. Pigs brought out in them the same tender qualities; they gazed in mutual meditation over sty-rails, they suffered from the same outrage and melancholy when their litters failed or their sows were sick. A sow was sacred to them; litters were lovelier than babies.
    And my Uncle Silas staggered up as though he were choking.
    â€˜My God, let me git out. Let me git out.’
    He pushed back his chair, lurched against the table, made an immense effort to right himself, somehow managed to stagger to the door, and then bawled:
    â€˜George, boy, she ain’t in pig?’
    â€˜Yis!’ We heard the faint voice far across the farmyard in answer.
    â€˜My God!’
    The next moment we heard my Uncle Silas slither down all the five stone steps of the back door, blaspheming at every step and blaspheming even more as he sat on his backside in the hen-mucked yard outside. In another moment we heard him blaspheming again as he got to his feet, and still again when he found he could not keep them. By that time all the men in the room were standing up and half the women saying, ‘Sit down, man, do. All this fuss about a pig!’ and some of us were already making for the door.
    When I arrived on the threshold, Silas was still sitting in the yard. He seemed to be trying to straighten his legs. He kept taking hold first of one leg, then another. One minute they were crossed and he was trying to uncross them. A minute later they were uncrossed and he seemed to be trying to cross them again.
    He saw me coming down the steps.
    â€˜Git me up!’ he bawled. ‘God A’mighty, me legs are tangled like a lot o’ wool. Git me up!’
    I got hold of him by the shoulders and was getting him to his feet, he staggering and slithering like a man on skates and swearing wildly all the time, when suddenly there was a bawl of alarm from across the yard and I saw the sow come round the straw-stack.
    â€˜Silas, stop her, stop her!’ my grandfather shouted. ‘Head her off, Silas!’
    â€˜Git me up, boy, git me up!’
    Somehow I managed to get my Uncle Silas to his feet as the sow came blundering across the yard. There was something pathetic about her. She was like a creature in anguish. She wassnorting and grunting and slobbering with distress and as my Uncle Silas advanced to meet her he spread out his arms, as though in tender readiness to embrace her.
    â€˜Goo’ gal, goo’ gal,’ he kept saying. ‘Come on now, tig, tig. Goo’ gal. Whoa now!’
    Suddenly she saw him. But it was as though she had not seen him. She simply lifted her head and kept straight on. My Uncle Silas too kept straight on, muttering all the time in his thick tender voice: ‘Goo’ gal, come on now, tig, tig, goo’ gal. Tig!’ and she snorting and slobbering in the gentle anguish of alarm at her predicament.
    All at once my Uncle Silas stopped. He held up his arms and began to leap about with a sort of lugubrious excitement, like a man trying to hold up a train.