I live, part-time, on a small piece of land in a rural county outside Fort Worth, Texas. It’s nice there: there are staggered hills; cows graze in adjacent fields; the cantaloupe-colored sunsets are very, very wide. Aside from a small rosemary bush, we don’t grow anything there, but I’ve taken up woodworking, and try to break away from my small child every now and then to go out to the shop to cut up pieces of wood and then attempt to fasten them back together. Usually, while I do all that cutting and fastening, I listen to the fuzzy radio. I stop sometimes, coated in flakes of sawdust, to watch the wind rattle through the limbs of the oaks. Again, it’s nice there.
But I know, of course, that I’m an intruder. When we bought this land, a friend who grew up in rural Oklahoma, told me that it would be hard to live there full-time, because my family, as intruders, would never really be accepted. She told me this as a piece of practical advice, but it’s hard not to read it as a threat. We are strangers; people don’t like strangers.
The strangest thing: since we’ve moved out there, I’ve developed a fear of hogs. I’ve never come across one, but I know they’re there. I’ve seen the trails they make through the grass, their tracks in the mud —their hooves are slightly smaller and more pointed than deer hooves —and I’ve seen the iris beds they’ve smashed after they’ve rooted through and eaten all the fallen acorns around the base of the oaks. One night —and I swear this happened —I was up late getting a class of water, and I heard one by the house, again rooting, scraping with those sharp hooves right up against the siding.
Perceiving a threat, hogs get violent. They are known to burst from the underbrush and charge at people. They attack with their tusks, which are so sharp they can tear open calf muscle, thigh muscle, right down to the bone. In the early mornings, when I walk on the trails with my three year-old son, I’m on the lookout, braced. Because of both their violent tendencies and the damage their rooting can do to crops, it is legal in Texas, to kill a hog that is on your property, and I have this violent fantasy —not of shooting one dead, which is typical —but of literally wrestling one to the ground and tearing off its legs if it were to come near my child.
I will protect what’s mine: my son, on my land. But this land belongs to the hogs, and we are the intruders. This is where my fear comes from, I think —the fear that comes along with knowing you’re not in the right place, even though you put yourself in that place as you had the right. I cannot stop thinking this. And about hogs. I think about them when I am walking with my family on beautiful summer mornings, and in the middle of the night when I’m thirsty. I think about them when I am writing. The novel I’m working on is basically set in the same county I live in (part-time), and it’s about space, isolation, intrusion, ownership, strangers.
Is it a horror story? Well, sort of. There’s a house in the woods.
The novel I’m working on wasn’t inspired by a horror story, though. One day, a movie I’d never seen was on TV. It’s called Bad Day at Black Rock and stars Spencer Tracy. It’s about a man who comes to an unfamiliar and hostile town, and is stuck there for twenty-four hours (until the one train that runs through Black Rock arrives again). It’s a story about intruders and the kinds of violence inflicted on intruders. It’s also about isolation.
I loved this story. I thought I could make it my own by putting some hogs in it.
___
Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter, West to Write, which I first started four years ago during the publication season of my second novel, All the Wind in the World. Since then, I have had a child and published another novel. Here is where I talk about things.
.