Pig in the Orchard

We used to play "Pig in the Orchard" among the fruit trees of Thompson's Grove, a shady stretch mostly of apple trees with some pear and cherry along the far edge and in one corner. The grove was a couple of acres long, maybe an acre wide, and so there was plenty of territory for our athletic feats of sprinting, dodging, tussling, and...

Sorry, I can't help laughing, but, yes. Spear-chucking.

"Pig in the Orchard" was a brutal, fierce, merciless game. It was absolutely guaranteed to leave you scratched and bruised and probably bleeding, and just to make it even more dangerous and prone to catastrophe we played it on moonless nights, shrieking and hollering as we careened among the trees, flashing between the trunks and underneath the branches like a herd of banshees.

One boy would be the Pig, a distinction marked out with a kerchief tied around his neck. He'd have half a minute to scuttle off and conceal himself at the near end of the orchard. His goal was to elude, misdirect, and, if need be, run like Hell with the rest of the boys in hot pursuit. If he made it to the other side of the orchard, he would have to swap his kerchief with a second one tied to a tree branch. Then he would have the honor of tying the second kerchief around the neck of the newly dubbed "Pig," which he would select.

But if he didn't make it, the Pig would be the sacrifice: That meant that each boy would take a turn delivering a hard punch to his arm or leg or shoulder. Then he'd have to be Pig all over again.

It wasn't enough to catch the Pig. If you tackled him, he could wriggle free and take off again. Three boys had to hold and punch his arms and legs to make the Pig's capture and sacrifice official. A wounded Pig could be very dangerous, of course -- if punched once or twice, he was allowed to "tusk" his pursuers, which meant he was free to punch back. That gave the pig incentive to keep fighting, and made the game all the more hysterically fun.

But our hunting wasn't all a matter of punches. You could also kill a Pig with a solid shot from a spear -- which is to say, a broom or shovel handle. (Just the handle, mind you.) Punches targeted limbs only, but the spear could hit any mark on the Pig, and that, too, made the game hilarious fun, especially the times the spear would wallop someone in the nut-sack. Jeremy Danvers got hit so hard once that he couldn't stand up for ten minutes.

Our mothers hated it when we'd go out playing "Pig in the Orchard," because we'd come home with split lips, black eyes, and cracked ribs. Once or twice I forgot to change out of my school clothes before I went out roughhousing and I just about got a thrashing for ruining my good trousers and shirt. But it was my younger brother who was the worst offender: He'd play the hardest, and he'd almost never change into his worn out clothes. He would also take a special joy in tracking mud into our mother's freshly washed kitchen. She'd be hurt and angry but she never punished him for it. Her guilt was as deep as his rage.

1906

He was only three when she left for the sanatorium in Arizona, and I was three years older. I somehow understood that she wasn't leaving us because she wanted to; I somehow grasped that this was a necessity, and though I had no real inkling just where Arizona was, it was clearly a long, long way from our home in Sedna, a tiny town forty miles to the north of Syracuse.

Our father, a lawyer by trade, had no idea what to do with two young sons, so he solved the problem by putting me in charge of my brother. Whatever precociousness allowed me to grasp the situation also made me receptive to the task of keeping him safe. Washed, fed, dressed -- he wasn't a motherless urchin. I was his caretaker, and he became my entire world.

What was hard during the two years she was away wasn't the responsibility. In those days, children often had responsibilities that no little kid today would ever be given, and they discharged them pretty well. No, what was hard was his fury and his grief. He spent his days sullen and mischievous, on top of being as naturally curious and rambunctious as any boy; I had to watch him every moment lest he get up to some outrageous trick. Come night, and time for bed, his sullenness would transform into an eruption of screaming and tears. I'd hold him and whisper soothing words as he struggled and then sobbed himself to sleep. Exhausted, I'd lay there wrapped around him protectively, the air in the room hot and damp with his outrage. I'd feel his heart racing, feel anger and grief because I shared them. I wondered if our dreams would mesh: I often suffered nightmares of black wings and desolate landscapes, visions of abandonment and danger, and I'd wake up moments before he would startle and scream. Then I would soothe him back to sleep all over again.

Out father had nothing to say about his outbursts. Our father hardly said anything. He'd leave in the morning as I was getting my brother his breakfast; he'd come back at night after I had gotten my brother his supper; the only time I saw our father in proper daylight was Sundays, when he'd stand in his room... his room, absent of our mother... with the morning sun pouring in bright across the wide-planked wooden floor, a river of light that found a channel into the main room through the half-open door. He'd stand there winding his tie around his neck, his white shirt starched and impervious, and I would stand in the main room fussing over my brother with his sullen frown, hair slicked down, eyes dark and accusing. More than once I saw in each of them an echo of the other. I was caught in the middle and knew I needed to keep calm and stay watchful. It was up to me to be sure the wheels didn't fall off the cart we called our family.

1915

My brother's dark, angry look remained constant as he grew from a child into a young man. Mother returned, but somehow he didn't reclaim what he'd lost when she had left; he kept acting like he expected her to transform, somehow, to be younger, or more energetic, to speak a foreign language, or have something to show other than her lack of illness for her two years away. What he had lost, of course, was something from himself, but this never seemed to occur to him. He never found that lost piece because he was too busy looking in the wrong direction.

"Pig in the Orchard" was his favorite game; he played it with me and the other boys, until my friends and I grew out of it. Then he played it with a cohort of friends his own age. But he had pursuits of his own as well: He climbed trees and built tidy little houses high in their boughs. And he found innumerable ways to punish and persecute our mother. His conduct was no better when it came to other girls.

But he loved out mother, too, with a ferocious and even gallant protectiveness. Once, when our father came home drunk and glowering and she crossed him, it was my brother who was suddenly standing between them, eyes shooting black sparks of warning. He was not a large boy, but he was scrappy and fearless --�and our father was essentially a coward. He backed down, and backed away, never again to raise his voice (or a hand) to our mother.

And when Tommy Thorn mockingly called our mother a "lunger" once, a few years after her return, my brother rewarded him with a left cross that laid him out and left his nose forever crooked. He was upbraided and punished for this, but to my brother's mind he was protecting our mother from an attack. He never wavered or apologized. He was a furious young man, but that fury was matched by strength, and whenever our mother needed anything -- wood chopped, a heavy iron stove shifted -- he saw to it himself.

1918

He was sixteen when something terrible happened between him and Lotte Henry, a blonde girl who lived three streets over. Our parents assumed it was something sexual, and maybe it was, but there was more to it... there was something between them that transcended flesh and its animal desires.

The thing of it was, she hurt him right back. Their war went on in some subterranean fashion that no one else quite understood. You knew it was going on, but not the details; it was like a rumble under the earth. Maybe an earthquake, maybe blasting at the mine, maybe the stirrings of Hell itself before Judgment Day. Our father took him aside for a man-to-man talk. Our mother didn't try to talk to him at all. When her gaze fell upon him, it was ever sadder.

I didn't see all of this drama. In the fall of 1918, having turned 19 years old the spring before, I departed for Chicago, where I attended college. Our father wanted me to be a lawyer. I had no interest at all in the law. I wanted to be a writer: A novelist, a war correspondent, a poet, anything that would keep a pen in my hand. Our feud over this burned hot and cold, but never as hot nor as cold as the unending war between my brother and our mother.

1921

As I entered my senior year in college, my brother arrived as a freshman. I went out of my way to school him in what he would need to know: To apply himself to his studies, to avoid the dissolute crowd, to refrain from imbibing drink and smoke. He laughed, and then, somehow, he corrupted me.

I say that as though I don't know how he accomplished it, but actually I do know: He used my need to protect him to his advantage. Because he was not going to stop his wild ways, and I found it impossible to abandon him to his abandon, I accompanied him on his jaunts and excesses.

I did manage to finish my degree, but my standing slipped and my graduation was not cum laude, as all my professors had expected. Their disappointed gazes on the day of our commencement reminded me of how our mother would look at my brother -- not blaming, but depthless in regret and a sense of betrayal.

1923

It ended for me on a cot in a makeshift ward. Chicago was full of the dazed and the dying. Or maybe it was just the corridor I lay in... The fever burned inside me but it felt external, and familiar... My mind flashed back to those nights I would hold my brother, a tangle and ember, in my protection. I was hot with his fury, my heart galloped with his terror and his pique.

Then breath and heartbeat stopped and threads of darkness and light twisted and twined around me, through me... As I glimpsed, or heard, or fell into, moments of the living world: My brother's marriage, rocky from the start, even violent when he would drink and beat her. She left him. She divorced him. He would have wept but instead he drank even more. He died at age 42: Sad, angry, physically and emotionally worn out, his spirit more ashes than light, his clothes as ragged as though Jeremy and Richard and Matthew and Jeff and Simon had all thrashed him in one last killing game under the fruitful canopy of Thompson's trees.

2002

I stopped in my tracks the moment I saw him. He was doing something to his bicycle. I thought he might be about my height, and skinny, with dark hair. I thought he might be in his early thirties, or maybe just a little older -- mid-thirties, like me, but he could have been younger. He could have been a teenager, for all I could tell. I couldn't be sure of anything: The light that seethed in the air around him was too bright, and his image wavered and flickered as though he were a mirage. I blinked, but the light persisted. My heart quivered, and then soared, and I grew lightheaded.

My husband yanked brusquely on my arm to hurry me along. He got jealous if I looked at other men, but there was nothing sexual about this moment of... of recognition...

"Come on," my husband said, pulling at me, and I stumbled forward, confounded.

"I know him," I tried to say, but my husband was steering me onto the patio of the beer garden. He gave me a shove to propel me toward a chair, and then threw himself down into his own seat, panting in the day's heat. He ordered from the waiter -- a beer, of course -- and I asked for a cup of tea.

The man wreathed in light approached and sat at the table next to ours. The waiter brought our order to us. My husband reached out and snatched his beer off the waiter's tray and took a swig from the bottle, ignoring the frosty glass.

The waiter seemed taken aback, but kept his composure. He poured my tea and left the glass on the table for my husband, who continued to ignore it.

The man who wore light all about him watched. "You know, you could treat your lovely lady a little better," he told my husband, who glared back and seemed about to reply angrily. "I just hate to see someone so nice being treated so rudely," the light-wreathed man added, before my husband had collected his wits for a retort.

"And," the light-cloaked man continued, standing now and crossing to our table, "I'd hate to have to press the point. But I will if I need to."

He didn't raise his voice or make any threatening motion, but something about him -- something in his demeanor, or his tone, or maybe the light that surged around his slender form -- something communicated that pushing back at him would be a very bad idea. My husband shrank back slightly, and buried his attention in his beer.

The man turned toward me. "I've been cruel to women in my time," he said more softly, "and let's just say... I lived to regret it. But I learned from it, too." He smiled at me, the air around him ever more bright, his eyes joyful. I felt something radiant in myself brighten as though in answer.

He reached out and I took his hand, expecting him to shake, expecting a name, an introduction. But none were needed. I knew him already. We knew each other.

"Pig in the orchard," he dubbed me.

For J. Tiger