Tabitha and her man lived down the ashen road in a hut of mud brick and thatch roof that cracked with cicadas on summer nights and sounded the whole house of fire. Tabitha listened and wanted her own children to teem the hut. She had a son by her man Olin. It was a start.

Living was mean in the village. Winter teethed, hunger ribbed and wood lice teemed the bed. No one ate first of his labor. Either the blight or the bug kept the farmer from firsting his crop.

Tabitha was a washerwoman. She went through the bower and stopped at the slim rods of honeysuckle, the years that they grew, to rub the wax from their spider blooms over her fingers in advance of the day’s sores. Then she crouched over the river and beat the sins from the linens with rocks and sticks. She wore her yellow wool wedding dress in boast of her man and the family she would get by him. Over time the sweat of toil faded the crocus dye from her sides, but the skirt remained bright and fit her through lying in. So Tabitha was known, the proud washerwoman. Even as the river dwindled in draught, lowered and lured her from the rocks to the bracken, she was lovely as a bride over the thinning vein of water.

Her man Olin rooted for turnips among the other bent lads in the patterned field. He had eyes like cut glass in a face red and taut as the rest. He was not known as his wife was.

They had married in hard years and struggled to conceive. When their son came, the cries of its hunger, a voice to their own, trembled their hearts. Tabitha chewed bark to keep her milk flowing. When the snow hemmed them in, they started on Olin’s left boot. Spring bloomed the fields while the young couple shrank gaunt and gray from the fledgling sun. They outlasted the summer on crabapples and squirrels and hoped for a kinder harvest. It did not deliver.

Tabitha despaired for her babe. Olin sulked. In the throes of his failure, he looked to the neighbors. They hadn’t such ill luck. They ate bread and mutton and danced on the Sabbath, tired from the week but not wasted from it. Their neighbor the swineherd sang with a full belly that racked each breath like a mighty drum, and his hymns carried the sweetness of pork and wine. Olin watched, weakened and dark with envy. It was the hunger that tipped his heart.

He came home one night with a burlap bundle. Tabitha had been boiling stew and jogging the cradle, hoping to earn a cry from her babe. It mewed dimly every now and then and did not protest the bang and chill of Olin’s return.

Tabitha saw him, flushed with mischief, and left the cradle to tend to her man. She coaxed the wriggling bundle from his arms and found it warm and lively against her breast. She unwrapped it and stared into the wet, black eyes of the swineherd’s piglet.

Tabitha shuddered. Her belly clawed after the piglet. She imagined its pink wrinkles charred and salted.

Her hands shook as she set the piglet down and turned to her man. Why did you take it? she asked, knowing she might have taken it also, had she gone without saving. But saved she was, with her guilt to compass her down the honest path where the trees grew stunted and brown.

Olin did not answer. Bones of iron, his wife had, to question fresh meat.

Olin was baptized but not saved. He carried the mark of the river when once it had run, but he did not fear as Tabitha did the gray moors where sinners wandered starving and directionless, unseeing of each other, until eternity. He laughed at her worries, having taken the piglet to feed her and the babe. That was saving, he said.

Tabitha saw he would toss her over his shoulder and skip them both to the devil’s pit if they broke the animal’s flesh. She told him to return the piglet to the swineherd before he woke and counted one head fewer in the sty. But secretly she wondered, as long as they were hungry and hellbound, why he had swiped the small one. How many meals could they get off its back? She covered a laugh and had to ask Olin as he wrangled the piglet why he had not taken a sow.

Olin thought a moment. Sows are big, he reasoned. A piglet takes longer to miss than a sow. And by then the swineherd mightn’t bother over a runt.

And Olin feared the swineherd in all his singing, thumping life. Tabitha sighed. For all their trouble, they might have robbed the baker instead. The baker guarded his loaves with a hound that could hobble a giant. It snapped at passersby and whined after the oven, jealous of the bread it was not allowed except in burnt heels and crumbs.

Didn’t want to get caught, thought Tabitha, but risked it all for a wee wriggling thing which would mar their souls anyway. She swore her man had no sense. Tabitha convinced him to give the piglet back. Olin had it in the burlap when the door sounded three fell knocks.

The babe in the cradle began to cry.

Wife and man locked spookhorse eyes. Olin trembled. Tabitha snatched the piglet and darted to the door. Through the draft-crack in the pine planks, she saw the constable. Over his shoulder was the red-faced swineherd. Behind him, a hungry village.

She stole into the bednook and laid the piglet with the babe in the cradle. She was draping her mother’s blanket over the piglet’s niggling snout when the shepherd pushed through the door. The constable and magistrate followed him, and what villagers fit followed. The din of their righteousness masked the piglet’s sniffle. Tabitha prayed it would not split Mother’s blanket on its baby hooves. She did not flinch at the angry men but noted in terror the torches they carried and the smoke that sweetened and turned the thatch roof.

While her man wrung his hands, she stared them down each. They dropped like flies off her look of stone. If her hardness were not righteousness, if underneath were the quivering heart of the guilty woman, then she was something other than washerwoman.

The crowd thinned and left. The floor had become a mud slick and the roof a black miracle. Olin did not see, cowed as he was to have twice failed Tabitha. He trembled in thanks to his gods as she drifted toward the bednook, dreading the damage to Mother’s blanket.

But the blanket had not been ruined. The babe was quiet as ever and the piglet slept sound, piping warm, wet breaths on Tabitha’s hand. She touched its warmth and slavered. Perhaps they could carry on Olin’s fancy. They were safe and the sun was setting and the onions and carrots boiled through all of it. She covered a sinful smile and froze. On her fingertips was the sweet, coppery taste of baby’s blood.

They dug a hole in the woods. The preacher was out of the question, but even the crossed sticks Olin denied. The sticks would reveal their loss as well as their crime, if the turned earth did not. Olin had found his sense.

They could not kill the piglet. The smell of its meat would betray them. So would their full bellies. And how could they resent the poor thing its meal? Olin continued working the fields. Tabitha stayed in the hut to rock the sticky cradle and comfort the piglet’s wriggling snout. She turned gray and dead-eyed as her grief and the demands of the piglet wasted her. Hatred stole over Olin’s heart for the ugly babe that had taken so much from him.

Often he would wake to find it snorting in Tabitha’s arms. He’d give her a skelp to put the little monster back. She would not return to bed. One morning he found her cold on the floor, one hand in the cradle. Her knuckles showed to the bone from the piglet’s sleep-feeding. Olin draped the blanket over his wife. Her eventual stirring did not ease him as he left for the day.

Tabitha knew she was lost to Olin. But she was a mother and would not leave her ward again.

Olin could no longer watch. He hated the piglet and hated Tabitha, hated the swineherd, the village and God. He took his spare hose to the hickory tree and slept in the low bough instead of the bed. He corded himself to the limb, knotting the hose over his knees, and slept back against trunk, bloodless and cold in his upright pose.

The village thought him mad. They saw him go out the first night and shrugged. A man needed to roam. He slept in the tree a second night. A man needed space from a suckling babe. He went out a third night. A madman he must be to forego the hearth and hold of a faithful wife. Surely he communed with evils and slept high for the witches to light his lap under the miserly harvest moon.

The villagers knew what to do. They wadded their torches and wended down the ashen road. They would catch the man in unclean communion and burn the fiend from his lap. Then they would hang him by the hose to the low bough where he would kick like a fish as they opened his belly by the harvest sickle. His legs would go still and shining under the slick of his own substance.

Olin heard their voices down the ashen road and stole down the rockslid hill with the snakes and voles. He spent the dawn hiding in the dead bulrushes by the brown vein of river.

The search did not last long, but when Tabitha woke to find the bed cold and the tree empty, she knew she had been abandoned the last time. The cradle creaked as her babe, fattened off the milk from her breast, grunted for more. Its pinched face, unlike her man’s, broke the mourning spell that kept Tabitha. She knew her place and it was not here. Quitting the hut, Tabitha ran to join her man and firstborn on the wandering moors.

She climbed the swineherd’s pen where the mighty sows snorted and stirred. She let the mothers of the mudslick take her among them, opening her inner flesh to the nurture of their tickling snouts and gruff jowls.

They picked her clean, leaving dull white splinters that scattered the sty like feathers. When the swineherd came at first light, he noticed nothing amiss.

Olin passed morning and noon on the hill. As the sun lowered hot and red, the villagers sore from the day’s labor but fixed as fiends to tie one more sheaf, the man stole into the hut and found his wife gone. She must have gone to wash by the river, though the bedclothes remained, as did her washbasket. And the piglet, the cause of their strife.

Quickly he wrapped the piglet and carried it to the sty. The mud had sharp bits that poked Olin’s feet as he set the piglet down and watched it sniff for its mother in the empty pen.

For the sows had not yet returned and Olin knew, heartsunk, that the swineherd would find the piglet sudden and lone and set to rave again, reminded of the theft. He would gather his friends and their torches and come calling again.

Olin could not stand the villagers alone. He bundled the piglet once more, taking from its scavenging snout a slip of soiled wool. By the hard bars of sunset he divined the yellow it once was and understood. He crept back to the hut and returned the piglet where Tabitha would want it still, leaving mudprints down the ashen road.

Olin cleaned the wool as best he could by the vein of mud that was once river. He tied the yellow slip over the cradle and rocked the piglet inside, wondering what was best, what was just, and what was due. His eye fell upon his shucking knife.

He took it and, ready, entered the bednook. The piglet cried as his shape darkened the cradle. The cries pierced Olin’s ears like needles that met points in his mind’s center. The agony was perfect. In its fiendish pitch he heard the will to live and be loved. He heard indignation at the land and its flat, brown face. He heard the secret accusation of an untended wife and the accusation with which he had all along answered it.

He heard the chorus of accusation louder and louder, transfigured in points of light that danced along the knife. Olin sat by the cradle, mollified by the rattle and glare of it all, like the final burst of song before silence.