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thick grayish mud along with maybe a dozen piglets. A plywood hut, like a large doghouse, stood in the back right corner of the pen. Along the front fence was a big metal trough full of water and another full of slimy food scraps.
    I stopped and leaned against the top of the fence, my feet on the bottom rail, trying to get a good look at the piglets. The ammonia stench of pig excrement made my nostrils twitch. I was staring into the tiny eyes of a large sow with swollen teats, thinking that I’d heard somewhere that pigs were smart, smarter than dogs even, when Del snuck up behind me and gave me a shove. It was a hard push, no playful little messing around kind of tap on the back. My stomach slammed against the top rail, my head and shoulders falling forward. I nearly toppled headfirst over the fence into the mud.
    “Careful,” Del teased. “Pigs’ll eat ya. You fell in there, they’d pick you clean.”
    I jumped off the fence and swung around to face Del, thinking I’d clock her one, but she quickly distracted me and the urge passed.
    “See that mama pig right there,” Del said, pointing to the sow I’d just been watching. “She ate three of her babies just last week. Pigs’re savages.”
    I unclenched my fists, let myself breathe.
    Del led me toward the back of their white house, at the crest of a small hill, as she described the scene of the mama pig gobbling up those babies.
    “Teeth like razors,” she said. “When she was done, there wasn’t nothing left but three little tails.”
    About fifty feet from the house, we came to a wooden door tilted into the hillside. It reminded me of the metal cellar door that led to the basement of our old rented house in Massachusetts. Del leaned down and unlatched the heavy door, pulling it open. Rough wooden steps led down into a dark pit that could have been a dungeon or a bomb shelter.
    “Go on. You first. I gotta close the door behind us.”
    I began making my way down the steps, and saw that it was a root cellar: a small room, probably eight by eight feet, with cinder-block walls and sagging wooden shelves that went from floor to ceiling. On the shelves were rows and rows of canned goods and bushel baskets full of spongy, sprouted potatoes, bruised apples, and limp carrots. Del closed the door and everything went black. I wondered if she’d stayed outside and locked me in, leaving me to die in that damp place. Maybe it was a dungeon after all, some kind of torture chamber. I took a nervous breath. The air smelled of moist earth, forgotten vegetables. It was Del’s smell.
    “Del?”
    “Hang on, I’ll light a match.” I felt her brush by me, heard her feel around along the shelves, shake a box of matches, open it, and strike one. The small room glowed orange. Del pulled an old jelly jar with a candle in it from off a shelf and lit it. She blew out the match, then held the stubby candle in the jar up to my face like she was studying me, unsure of who I might turn out to be.
    “Okay, if I show you my secret, you gotta promise not to tell. You gotta swear.” Her pale eyes seemed to look right through my own eyes, reaching all the way to the back of my skull.
    “Okay.”
    “Swear on your life?”
    “Yes,” I muttered. She pulled the candle back from my face and set it on a shelf next to a row of dust-covered canned tomatoes.
    “Cross your heart and hope to die?”
    “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.
    “I’ve got a tattoo,” she told me. Then she started to unbutton her dirty yellow shirt, which was embroidered with colorful little lassos, hats, and horses.
    I wanted to tell her to stop, to say that I believed and didn’t need to see, but it was too late. The shirt was off. To my relief, she wore a soiled white cotton undershirt with a tiny pink-petaled flower stitched at the center of the neckline. But then she peeled this off quickly, without hesitation, and I looked down, embarrassed, thinking that maybe the stories I had heard were