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The only other sound, until about 2:00 in the morning, was the occasional twang from the tin roof contorting -- as it writhed free of the barn. About 2:00 the roof fell in; it made a whispering noise. By 3:00 there were no walls standing. The surrounding melted snow had formed a lake that seemed to be rising on all sides of the fire, almost reaching the level of heaped coals. As more snow melted, the fire was being extinguished from underneath itself.
And what did we smell? That cooked-barnyard smell of midsummer, the conflicting rankness of ashes in snow, the determined baking of manure -- the imagination of bacon, or roast pork. Since there was no wind, and we weren't trying to put the fire out, we suffered no smoke abuse. The men (that is to say, the veterans) left us boys to watch after things for an hour before dawn. That is what men do when they share work with boys: they do what they want to do; they have the boys tend to what they don't want to tend to. The men went out for coffee, they said, but they came back smelling of beer. By then the fire was low enough to be doused down. The men initiated this procedure; when they tired of it, they turned it over to us boys. The men went off again, at first light -- for breakfast, they said. In the light I could recognize a few of my comrades, the Front Street children.
With the men away, one of the Front Street children started it -- at first, very softly. It may have been me. "Piggy, Piggy," one of us called. One reason I'm a writer is that I sympathized with our need to do this; I have never been interested in what nonwriters call good and bad "taste."
"Piggy! Piggy! Piggy! Piggy! OINK! WEEE!" we called. That was when I understood that comedy was just another form of condolence. And then I started it; I began my first story.
"Shit," I said -- because everyone in the Stratham Volunteers began every sentence with the word "shit."
"Shit," I said. "Piggy Sneed isn't in there. He's crazy," I added, "but nobody's that stupid."
"His truck's there," said one of the least imaginative of the Front Street children.
"He just got sick of pigs," I said. "He left town, I know it. He was sick of the whole thing. He probably planned this -- for weeks."
Miraculously, I had their attention. Admittedly, it had been a long night. Anyone with almost anything to say might have easily captured the attention of the Stratham Volunteers. But I felt the thrill of a rescue coming -- my first.
"I bet there's not a pig in there, either," I said. "I bet he ate half of them -- in just a few days. You know, he stuffed himself! And then he sold the rest. He's been putting some money away, for precisely this occasion."
"For what occasion?" some skeptic asked me. "If Piggy isn't in there, where is he?"
"If he's been out all night," another said, "then he's frozen to death."
"He's in Florida," I said. "He's retired." I said it just that simply -- I said it as if it were a fact. "Look around you!" I shouted to them. "What's he been spending his money on? He's saved a bundle. He set fire to his own place," I said, "just to give us a hard time. Think of the hard time we gave him," I said, and I could see everyone thinking about that; that was, at least, the truth. A little truth never hurt a story. "Well," I concluded. "He's paid us back -- that's clear. He's kept us standing around all night."
This made us Front Street children thoughtful, and in that thoughtful moment I started my first act of revision; I tried to make the story better, and more believable. It was essential to rescue Piggy Sneed, of course, but what would a man who couldn't talk do in Florida? I imagined they had tougher zoning laws than we had in New Hampshire -- especially regarding pigs.
"You know," I said, "I bet he could talk -- all the time. He's probably European," I decided. "I mean, what kind of name is Sneed? And he first appeared here around the war, didn't he? Whatever his native language is, anyway, I bet he speaks it pretty well. He just never learned ours. Somehow, pigs were easier. Maybe friendlier," I added, thinking of us all. "And now he's saved up enough to go home. That's where he is!" I said. "Not Florida -- he's gone back to Europe!"
"Atta boy, Piggy," someone cheered.
"Look out, Europe," someone said, facetiously.
Enviously, we imagined how Piggy Sneed had gotten "out" -- how he'd escaped the harrowing small-town loneliness (and fantasies) that threatened us all. But when the men came back, I was confronted with the
general public's dubious regard for fiction.
"Irving thinks Piggy Sneed is in Europe," one of the Front Street boys told the captain.
"He first appeared here around the war, didn't he, sir?" I asked the captain, who was staring at me as if I were the first body to be recovered from this fire.
"Piggy Sneed was born here, Irving," the captain told me. "His mother was a half-wit; she got hit by a car going the wrong way around the bandstand. Piggy was born on Water Street," the captain told us. Water Street, I knew perfectly well, ran into Front Street -- quite close to home.
So, I thought, Piggy was in Florida, after all. In stories, you must make the best thing that can happen happen (or the worst, if that is your aim), but it still has to ring true.
When the coals were cool enough to walk on, the men started looking for him; discovery was a job for the men -- it being more interesting than waiting, which was boys' work.
After a while, the captain called me over to him. "Irving," he said. "Since you think Piggy Sneed is in Europe, then you won't mind taking whatever this is out of here."
It required little effort, the removal of this shrunken cinder of a man; I doused down a tarp and dragged the body, which was extraordinarily light, onto the tarp with first the long and then the short gaff. We found all 18 of his pigs, too. But even today I can imagine him more vividly in Florida than I can imagine him existing in that impossibly small shape of charcoal I extricated from the ashes.
Of course I told my grandmother the plain truth, just the boring facts. "Piggy Sneed died in that fire last night, Nana," I told her.
"Poor Mr. Sneed," she said. With great wonder, and sympathy, she added: "What awful circumstances forced him to live such a savage life!"
What I would realize, later, is that the writer's business is both to imagine the possible rescue of Piggy Sneed and to set the fire that will trap him. It was much later -- but before my grandmother was moved to the old people's home, when she still remembered who Piggy Sneed was -- when Grandmother asked me, "Why, in heaven's name, have you become a writer?"
I was "her boy," as I've told you, and she was sincerely worried about me. Perhaps being an English Literature major had convinced her that being a writer was a lawless and destructive thing to be. And so I told her everything about the night of the fire, about how I imagined that if I could have invented well enough -- if I could have made up something truthful enough -- I could have (in some sense) saved Piggy Sneed. At least saved him for another fire -- of my own making.
