By Tim Sanders

I will admit, when Inez Spivey called last Thursday, I was surprised. I’d never met her, but I’d met her husband Virgil several years ago.

"I wish you could come out and see him," she said. "I think maybe you could cheer him up some."

I asked her what she meant by that, but she said I’d see when I got there. "We ain’t living in the old place no more; we moved in town to Little Nose Drive. We got us what used to be a waterfront lot." She gave me directions, and I drove right over. I was curious.

Virgil Spivey had raised hogs on his rural Cherokee County farm, and in 1991 I’d visited him to investigate his claims that his hogs could fly. He’d given me a fascinating lecture on the aerodynamic qualities of various breeds of hogs, referring to wingspan, rudders, landing gear, tailspin and such, but when I asked if I could see a demonstration, he told me that his entire flock of Berkshires had flown south to Sarasota for the winter.

A few years later Virgil had brought me a cassette of his hog quartet, The Berkshire Boys, singing Christmas carols and gospel tunes. He’d asked me if I could help him find an agent for his porcine quartet. When I suggested Jimmy Dean, country singer and pork sausage magnate, Virgil took offense and left. I never heard from him again.

Inez Spivey met me in the driveway of their lakefront home, which was no longer a lakefront home, but did offer a really nice view of the Weiss mud flats. She was an elderly woman, slim, with sallow skin and dark circles under her eyes.

"I tried to call you back, but you’d already left. He’s at it again, and this probly ain’t a good time. I s’pose you know that Virgil wasn’t never quite right."

"You mean–"

"I mean there weren’t never no flying hogs, nor no singing hogs, neither. Virgil he’d get an idear in his head and turn it around and get to telling tales ‘til they kinda took root, and sprouted, and he’d spread that molasses of his whenever he could find some poor soul who didn’t have good sense–"

"You mean a journalist like me, for example?"

"I didn’t want to say nothing, but a journalist like you was just the kind of fool he went looking for. It was harmless, and there was always a kernel of truth in there somewhere. He did try to launch a spotted swine piglet out of our hayloft, once, but it caught a downdraft and crash landed into the backhoe. And as for that tape, there was a feller name of Chester White who sung in a gospel quartet at the church, and Virgil did call ‘em Chester White and the Berkshire Boys, but they weren’t hogs, only Congregationalists."

I wasn’t surprised.

"A year ago we sold the farm and moved into town," Inez said. "Virgil said he was tired of farming and ’specially the hogs, which he said had been a big disappointment to him. All he wanted to do was get him a lakefront lot with a nice house and a boat dock where he could tie a pontoon boat and go fishing whenever he took the notion. Now look at him!" She pointed to the vast expanse of sun-dried mud stretching past their pier. There, some two hundred yards from the old shoreline, was a tall, thin man digging frantically with a shovel.

"He’s fishing," she said.

"Aha, digging for worms?"

"WORMS? He’s digging for catfish! He’s got it into his head they’re still out there, burrowed down in the muck. He told me the other day there wasn’t no yeller cat going to outsmart him!"

I was incredulous. "You mean he actually believes–"

"That ain’t the half of it. He loitered around out there for three hours last night with a flashlight, waiting for a crappie to walk by so he could thump it with a golf club. Now that things is all dried up, sometimes he gets the notion that the fish is all holed up waiting for nightfall to migrate across the mud flats to fresh water in the old river channel. I seen a couple of dead crappie near the end of the boat dock last week. ‘You see, Virgil,’ I says, ‘once they’re out of water, they just die!’ But he said no, they wasn’t dead, only resting. Nossir, I took all those tall tales of his about the hogs in stride, but this here is different. This time he’s really come unhinged. He hung all his hopes on this here lakefront property, and now that it’s all up the flume, so to speak, he can’t face it."

At this point we heard Virgil scream "I GOT ONE!" and watched as he threw his shovel aside and dropped to his knees. But it wasn’t a catfish he’d unearthed, only an old boot. Inez shook her head.

"It’s pitiful," she said. "There’s times you can talk to him, and other times, like now, when you can’t get through at all. Last Wednesday we was sitting on the deck, watching the moon reflect off the washtub full of water he’d set out there where the lake used to be. He was making perfectly good sense, talking about politics and religion and first one thing and then another, when he all of a sudden snatched my hand and started for the boat dock. ‘Where are we going, dear?’ I asked him. And he said we was going fishing on the pontoon. Of course I knew good and well that pontoon was mired in two feet of sludge, but I didn’t say nothing. We climbed on board and he told me to cast off, so I loosed the ropes. ‘Forty fathoms. Looks deep enough now,’ he said after awhile. ‘I think we’ll drop anchor here.’ So he tossed the anchor out into the mud right next to the dock, KERPLOP, and there we sat for another hour or so, with his favorite little Slick Willie chartreuse crappie jig laying there not three feet from the pontoon. Every once in awhile he’d holler ‘THAR SHE BLOWS OFF THE STARBOARD BOW!’ and jerk that jig up into the air and send it flying over our heads onto the canopy top. After awhile he convinced himself that either the fish was all too small, or the hook was too big, so he tied up to the dock again and up the hill and into the house we went. He said that come first light he was going to set sail for Wal-Mart and get him a harpoon with a sharper barb. I swear, he’s getting worser every day!"

On Thursday, September 27, Weiss Lake water level was measured at 557.9 ft. above sea level, which is 6.1 ft. below normal summer pool. It is all due to the severe drought, the Army Corps of Engineers, the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina, Chinese toy manufacturers, the Republicans, and of course a battalion of Georgians bent on diverting water from the Coosa River across state lines for immoral purposes. I didn’t try to explain all of that to Virgil Spivey. By the time I left he was sitting on the dock, putting on his swim fins and snorkel.

Inez said he was probably going pearl diving again. "Sometimes he thinks there’s a coral reef out there in that mud, just past those wilted tomato plants he set out last week."