Joe R. Lansdale - The Boar

Ive always liked coming of age stories, and have written several. Some of them were for adults, a few, like this one, were designed, at least on the surface, to be for younger readers. But the theme is the same, and the way I write is the same, so I like to think this novel is for anyone willing to read it, adult, or young adult.

I became passionate about young adult fiction in the eighties, and because of that, I wrote this. For a while it was called Get Back, Satan , Satan being the wild boar in the novel, but that title didnt stick, and the publisher who planned to publish it under that title didnt publish it at all. Thats a long story and this isnt the place for it.

I turned around several years later, intending to revise the novel, reread it, and found I liked it as it was. It was published under the current title, and published again some years later by another publisher, and like most of my work, published overseas. There is currently interest in it for a film and I co-wrote the screenplay.

I think of it as a novel of the thirties more than I think of it as a Young Adult novel. Frankly, all those categories just make me tired. A book is a book is a book. It either works for you or it doesnt.

I didnt grow up in the Great Depression, but my father and mother did, being somewhat older than most parents when I was born. They told me about the Great Depression, as did my grandmother on my mothers side, my uncles, and people that my parents knew from that time. My brother, who is almost seventeen years older than me, was born during that era.

Due to my parents experiences we saved string, rubber bands, were fanatic about not wasting food, clothing, or anything, for that matter. This was all a holdover from the Great Depression, and from my view, good common sense.

Anyway, I knew about this era almost as if I had been there. I did do some research, but so little was necessary. The Great Depression was in my DNA. I had always wanted to write about it, and this was my first crack at it. Later I wrote The Bottoms , Sunset and Sawdust , and All the Earth Thrown to the Sky , another novel marketed as Young Adult, and I am currently working on another title that takes place during this era, The Edge of Dark Water .

All that matter is this: is it a good book.

I think it is. Im prejudiced about that, Im sure. But it seems to be a book that continues to garner positive attention from readers, year after year.

So, what I offer you is that book. The decision as to its worth is yours.

As a side note, I should mention that some of the characters in this novel appear briefly in my better-known novel, The Bottoms . I liked them and couldnt let them go, so they have a brief moment on stage in that novel.

Happy reading.

This happened in the summer of 1933 in the Sabine River Bottoms of East Texas. Those that still remember call it the year of The Devil Boar.

It was also the year that Richard Harold Dale became a man at the not-so-ripe-age of fifteen.

I know, because I probably recall that year and The Devil Boar better than anyone else. I should. Im Richard Harold Dale, and I still bear the scars.

Times were hard then. Real hard. The Depression was going on, and there just wasnt much of a way to make a living.

I suppose, in many respects, us country- and river-bottom folk had it better than the city slickers. Wed always been poor, so when times got bad we didnt notice quite as much as those whod had steady jobs and lost them. Our family pretty well lived off the land, and always had, raising all we ate and selling the extra.

The extra was our main problem in the thirties. You couldnt get much for it. People just didnt have the money anymore.

Course, 33 wasnt all that good a year for our crops either. What the heat didnt kill, the insects ate. It was like all kinds of bugs from everywhere in the world had been passed the word that there was a free lunch being served in our fields and they ought to come on down, bring a friend and sit a spell, take in as much as they could eat.

And they did. They ate and ate and ate.

What was left was just enough to get by on, and if it was too tough for the heat to kill, and too untasty for the bugs to eat, you can bet we werent all that thrilled with it either. But it beat an empty belly.

For our meat supply we depended on hunting and fishing. The woods brought us squirrels, coons, rabbits, and possums. The Sabine supplied us with perch, bass, catfish, crawfish, and an occasional turtle. In other words if it could be eaten, we ate it.

In the past wed raised a hog or two, but not that year. There just wasnt enough extra to go around for feeding a pig. Stuff we might have thrown out for it to eat the year before we were eating and had pretty well convinced ourselves it was mighty good.

Just putting food on the table from meal to meal kept the entire familywhich was Mama, and she was pregnant, Papa, Ike, my little brother, and mehopping like toad frogs. It was that way for near everybody. In fact there was an old joke that went something like this: Fellow looks out the window and says, Ma, times must be getting better. And the lady asks, Oh, whys that, Pa? And the fellow says back, There aint but one man out there chasing a rabbit this morning.

To tell the truth, I dont remember those days as bad times. Busy maybe, but not bad. I was young and had the entire river bottoms of East Texas at my fingertips. I didnt just read about adventures like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had, I lived them. Our house isnt there anymore, but in those days it was deep in the woods at the end of a narrow, rutted, clay road about half a mile from a shallow spot in the river. If anyone came down that road, they were either coming to see us, or they were going to stop at our place to ask permission to leave their car or wagon and do some fishing. Papa always told them they could. And as he used to say, The river aint ours to give permission about. The water you put a claim on today will have gone on down to Louisiana tomorrow.

Since anyone coming down that road was going to have to stop and see us, we always got excited when we heard a car or wagon coming. Living where we did, we didnt always make it to town regularly, and since we didnt own a radio then, anyone that might be bearing gossip and news was always welcome.

In fact, thinking back on that year of 1933, the first thing I really remember about it was Doc Travis and his noisy Model B Ford.

Something he brought me that day, and the news he told us, changed my life forever.

Papa, Ike, and me were outside, chopping wood. Papa was cutting some of the bigger logs into lengths, and I was using a hatchet to cut some of the smaller stuff into kindling. Ike was gathering up what we cut and stacking it in separate piles.

Ike was ten years going on thirty. Most of the time he seemed near grown. He was spunky as the dickens and as determined as a billy goat. Some of the logs Papa split were near big as Ike, even with them halved, but Ike would wrestle them into place like they were enemies that had to be whipped, or hed die trying.

Mama used to say Ike was born to consider, and I reckon he was. He seldom said anything unless he had something to say.

Me, Id blabber all day long about next to nothing. Every now and then when I got going, Papa would look over at me and say, Take a break, boy.

That would shut me up for a while, but pretty soon Id be at it again, popping my lips together faster than a hummingbird could beat its wings. I loved talking better than anything, except reading. We didnt own many books. The Bible, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and a book of his short stories, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Kipling, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and my all time favorite, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. (It used to drive me wild that someone would give their son the middle name Rice. I wondered if he had brothers and sisters with the middle names Oats, Wheat, Corn, and Barley.) There was also a book on flower gardening.