Hogs devour local man

When I was very young I heard the old folks telling a story that was both gruesome and shocking. The story was told at Granddaddy 'Will' Smith's house. I think that he was the one who was telling it. I remember that there were adults around, other family members I'm sure. I was young enough not to know what a skull was. There was the mention of a skull and I remember imagining that a skull would look like an egg yolk. At what age did I come to know what a skull was? Surely by age 5 I would have know. I guess that I heard this story before or around the age of 5. I recounted this little bit of family lore to my dad this year and he said that he had never heard it, but that he had heard of things like this before and he said it might well be true.

The way it was told, the way I remember it, it was as if it was something that had happened very near and I was sure at the time that they were talking about something that had happened long ago just behind the house, in the hog pen or the cow lot. There had been an old colored man, his name was given, but I do not remember that detail. This old man walked through the woods where the hogs were kept on his way to where he often had to go. He was proned to heavy drinking. He was missed by his folks for a time and noone knew where he had gone or where he might be. Eventually someone discovered a gruesome clue to the mystery surrounding the disappearance of this old man. A SKULL !! A skull was found in the hogpen, just a skull and a skull alone. A shining yellowish squishy rounded thing glistening on the dark wet ground. That is what I imagined a skull to be. I didn't know what a skull was, but I understood the implication that this skull was all that was left of that poor man. They speculated at that time and again as the story was recounted, that the man had stumbled and fallen or had passed out or laid down to go to sleep and the hogs had found him and probably had begun to eat him alive. They tore him apart and shredded him to pieces. They devoured him completely, his flesh, his bones, his clothing.....all gone. All gone except the slippery yellowish rounded thing. Why hadn't they eaten it? After all it was soft and squishy. Maybe it didn't taste as good as a bloody, muddy shirt. But for whatever reason, that is all that was left, only the skull.