The Dead Don't Dance by Charles Martin

month.”
    So Pinky ended up in the barn with her own stall and two permanent slots in our daily calendar. Maggs even painted Pinky in bright-red letters above the gate. I feed her bulk dog food or kernel corn, sometimes a combination, but she’ll eat anything that’s not nailed down—and even some stuff that is. When she first appeared, she weighed maybe eighty pounds and needed a bath and a vet. Now she weighs a little over three hundred and expects to be hosed down weekly.
    I’ll never understand how someone so beautiful and so tender could love something so ugly. But make no mistake, that pig loves her back. Dang thing hates me, craps on my foot every chance she gets, but she just adores my wife. You’ve never heard such grunting and squealing as when Maggie rubs Pinky’s ears and stomach. Pinky rolls and wallows and then rubs up against Maggie’s overalls. Maggie doesn’t care.
    Maggie would squat down in the middle of the stall, and Pinky, holding her curlicue tail high in the air, would nose all the piglets out of the corner and up to Maggie, where she’d rub each one until it squealed with delight. Every now and then, Pinky would stick her nose under Maggs’s hand, get a scratch between the ears, and then shove a piglet under Maggie’s leg. Thirty minutes later, Maggie would walk out of the barn and smell like a pig all day. One morning last summer it was so bad, I had to hose her down. Maggie didn’t care. She just laughed. Squealed just like Pinky.
    Maggie loved the farm. Everything about it, from the creaking floors to the noisy screen door. The chipped paint, the front porch, Papa’s swing, the smell of hay in the barn, the way the cotton bloomed in summer, the short walk through the oaks down to the river, the oak tree spreading across the barn that was bigger around than the hood of my truck, the artesian well and its sulfur water, the corn that waved in rows to the wind that sifted through it.
    Maggie probably loved the corn best. Every night when the breeze picked up off the river, she’d disappear to the front porch with hot herbal tea and stand there, watching the waves rise and fall atop the stalks. And on moonlit summer nights when she couldn’t sleep or Blue woke her up barking at a deer, she’d grab a blanket, tiptoe to the porch, and sit on the steps as the moonlight streamed through the rows like a prism and lit the sandy soil beneath.
    Daybreak would come, and I’d find her asleep against the column at the top step. I’d crack the screen door, Blue would pick his head up off her lap, and without saying a word, Maggie would lift her eyelids, smile, throw off the blanket, and then tear off the front steps with a giggle like a kid let out of church. We’d race through the cornrows all the way to the river, where she’d leap off the bluff and into the deep, black water below. Blue and I followed as if we were trapped in a Mountain Dew commercial.
    One of Maggie’s favorite foods was creamed corn. After our swim, she’d cut ten or fifteen ears, haul them into the kitchen, rub them over the creamer, and come out looking as though somebody had just shot her with corn puree.
    When I was finishing my dissertation, she’d walk in late at night, silently offering a bowl of chocolate ice cream or coffee or whatever I needed to help me continue writing. If she sensed frustration and knew I was about ready to set a match to the whole blasted thing, she’d grab me by the hand, pull me to the porch, set me on the swing, and tell me to breathe deeply and watch the corn roll in waves. Thirty minutes later, she’d put her foot in my back and tell me to get back there and keep writing.
    I miss that.
    When I raised my head, Pinky stopped rooting, perked her ears, and snorted, showering me in pig snot. With her tail sticking straight up into the air, she ran back to the barn with her Charlie Chaplin gait. I have no idea