Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

McKinley built it himself, doing all the rough heavy work, with one professional carpenter to mark off the planks for him to saw, with the seething old man ambushed in the wheel chair behind the window without even the hog any more to vent his rage on. Obviously, as well as from habit, Meadowfill would have to keep the loaded rifle at hand. He could have no way whatever of knowing the hog would not come back; and now the town began to speculate on just how long it would be, how much he would be able to stand, before he fired the rifle at one of them—McKinley or the carpenter. Presently it would have to be the carpenter unless Meadowfill took to jack-lighting, because one day (it was spring now) McKinley had a mule too and the town learned that he had rented a small piece of land two miles from town and was making a cotton crop on it. The house was about finished now, down to the millwork and trim which only the expert carpenter could do, so McKinley would depart on the mule each morning at sunrise, to be gone until nightfall. Which was when old Meadowfill probably touched the absolute of rage and impotence: McKinley might yet have been harried or frightened into selling his unfinished house and lot at any moment, possibly even for a profit. But no man in his senses would buy a cotton crop that hadn’t even sprouted yet. Nothing could help him now but death—his own or McKinley ‘s.

Then the hog came back. It simply reappeared; probably one morning Meadowfill wheeled himself from the breakfast table to the window, expecting to face nothing save one more day of static outrage, when there was the hog again, rooting for the ghosts of last year’s peaches as though it had never been away. In fact, maybe that’s what Meadowfill wanted to believe at that moment: that the hog had never been away at all and so all that had happened since to outrage him had been only a dream, and even the dream to be exorcised away by the next shot he would deliver. Which was immediately; evidently he had kept the loaded rifle at his hand all the time; some of the neighbors said they heard the vicious juvenile spat while they were still in bed.

The sound of it had spread over the rest of town by noon, though Charles’s Uncle Gavin was one of the few who actually felt the repercussion. He was just leaving the office to go home to dinner when he heard the feet on the stairs. Then Res Snopes entered, the five-dollar bill already in his hand. He laid it on the desk and said, “Good morning, Lawyer. I wont keep you long. I jest want a little advice—about five dollars’ worth.” Stevens didn’t touch the bill yet: just looking from it to its owner who had never been known to pay five dollars for anything he didn’t already know he could sell for at least twenty-five cents profit: “It’s that hawg of mine that old gentleman—Mister Meadowfill—likes to shoot with them little bird shot.”

“I heard about it,” his uncle said. “Just what do you want for your five dollars?” Charles’s uncle told it: Snopes standing beyond the desk, not secret: just polite and inscrutable. “For telling you what you already know? that once you sue him for injuring your hog, he will invoke the law against livestock running loose inside the city limits? For telling you what you alreay knew over a year ago when he fired the first shot at it? Either fix the fence or get rid of the hog.”

“It costs a right smart to feed a hawg,” Snopes said. “As for getting rid of it, that old gentleman has done shot it so much now, I doubt wouldn’t nobody buy it.”

“Then eat it,” Stevens said.

“A whole hawg, for jest one man? Let alone with going on two years of bird shot in it?”

“Then give it away,” Stevens said, and tried to stop himself but it was too late.

“That’s your legal lawyer’s advice then,” Snopes said. “Give the hawg away. Much obliged,” he said, already turning.

“Here,” Stevens said, “wait;” holding out the bill.