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“No.”
“Every day you will carry the pig up the mountain. It will get a little bigger, but you will get a little stronger. After you give the pig to Myra’s father, I want you to do one more thing for me.”
“Anything,” said Elya.
“I want you to carry me up the mountain. I want to drink from the stream, and I want you to sing the song to me.”
Elya promised he would.
Madame Zeroni warned that if he failed to do this, he and his descendants would be doomed for all of eternity.
At the time, Elya thought nothing of the curse. He was just a fifteen-year-old kid, and “eternity” didn’t seem much longer than a week from Tuesday. Besides, he liked Madame Zeroni and would be glad to carry her up the mountain. He would have done it right then and there, but he wasn’t yet strong enough.
Stanley was still digging. His hole was about three feet deep, but only in the center. It sloped upward to the edges. The sun had only just come up over the horizon, but he already could feel its hot rays against his face.
As he reached down to pick up his canteen, he felt a sudden rush of dizziness and put his hands on his knees to steady himself. For a moment he was afraid he would throw up, but the moment passed. He drank the last drop of water from his canteen. He had blisters on every one of his fingers, and one in the center of each palm.
Everyone else’s hole was a lot deeper than his. He couldn’t actually see their holes but could tell by the size of their dirt piles.
He saw a cloud of dust moving across the wasteland and noticed that the other boys had stopped digging and were watching it, too. The dirt cloud moved closer, and he could see that it trailed behind a red pickup truck.
The truck stopped near where they were digging, and the boys lined up behind it, X-Ray in front, Zero at the rear. Stanley got in line behind Zero.
Mr. Sir filled each of their canteens from a tank of water in the bed of the pickup. As he took Stanley’s canteen from him, he said, “This isn’t the Girl Scouts, is it?”
Stanley raised and lowered one shoulder.
Mr. Sir followed Stanley back to his hole to see how he was doing. “You better get with it,” he said. “Or else you’re going to be digging in the hottest part of the day.” He popped some sunflower seeds into his mouth, deftly removed the shells with his teeth, and spat them into Stanley’s hole.
Every day Elya carried the little piglet up the mountain and sang to it as it drank from the stream. As the pig grew fatter, Elya grew stronger.
On the day of Myra’s fifteenth birthday, Elya’s pig weighed over fifty stones. Madame Zeroni had told him to carry the pig up the mountain on that day as well, but Elya didn’t want to present himself to Myra smelling like a pig.
Instead, he took a bath. It was his second bath in less than a week.
Then he led the pig to Myra’s.
Igor Barkov was there with his pig as well.
“These are two of the finest pigs I’ve ever seen,” Myra’s father declared.
He was also impressed with Elya, who seemed to have grown bigger and stronger in the last two months. “I used to think you were a good-for-nothing book reader,” he said. “But I see now you could be an excellent mud wrestler.”
“May I marry your daughter?” Elya boldly asked.
“First, I must weigh the pigs.”
Alas, poor Elya should have carried his pig up the mountain one last time. The two pigs weighed exactly the same.
Stanley’s blisters had ripped open, and new blisters formed. He kept changing his grip on the shovel to try to avoid the pain. Finally, he removed his cap and held it between the shaft of his shovel and his raw hands. This helped, but digging was harder because the cap would slip and slide. The sun beat down on his unprotected head and neck.
Though he tried to convince himself otherwise, he’d been aware for a while that his piles of dirt were too close to his hole. The piles were outside his five-foot circle, but he could see he was going to run out of room. Still, he pretended otherwise and kept adding more dirt to the piles, piles that he would eventually have to move.
The problem was that when the dirt was in the ground, it was compacted. It expanded when it was excavated. The piles were a lot bigger than his hole was deep.
It was either now or later. Reluctantly, he climbed up out of his hole, and once again dug his shovel into his previously dug dirt.
Myra’s father got down on his hands and knees and closely examined each pig, tail to snout.
