“I’m glad it’s started now,” he whispered. He did not move to speak; only his lips shaped the expiring words: “Then it will be gone when I raise the gun——”
Nor did Sam. “Hush,” he said.
“Is he that near?” the boy whispered. “Do you think——”
“Hush,” Sam said. So he hushed. But he could not stop the shaking. He did not try, because he knew it would go away when he needed the steadiness—had not Sam Fathers already consecrated and absolved him from weakness and regret too?—not from love and pity for all which lived and ran and then ceased to live in a second in the very midst of splendor and speed, but from weakness and regret. So they stood motionless, breathing deep and quiet and steady. If there had been any sun, it would be near to setting now; there was a condensing, a densifying, of what he had thought was the gray and unchanging light until he realised suddenly that it was his own breathing, his heart, his blood—something, all things, and that Sam Fathers had marked him indeed, not as a mere hunter, but with something Sam had had in his turn of his vanished and forgotten people. He stopped breathing then; there was only his heart, his blood, and in the following silence the wilderness ceased to breathe also, leaning, stooping overhead with its breath held, tremendous and impartial and waiting. Then the shaking stopped too, as he had known it would, and he drew back the two heavy hammers of the gun.
Then it had passed. It was over. The solitude did not breathe again yet; it had merely stopped watching him and was looking somewhere else, even turning its back on him, looking on away up the ridge at another point, and the boy knew as well as if he had seen him that the buck had come to the edge of the cane and had either seen or scented them and faded back into it. But the solitude did not breathe again. It should have suspired again then but it did not. It was still facing, watching, what it had been watching and it was not here, not where he and Sam stood; rigid, not breathing himself, he thought, cried No! No!, knowing already that it was too late, thinking with the old despair of two and three years ago: I’ll never get a shot. Then he heard it—the flat single clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle which never missed. Then the mellow sound of the horn came down the ridge and something went out of him and he knew then he had never expected to get the shot at all.
“I reckon that’s it,” he said. “Walter got him.” He had raised the gun slightly without knowing it. He lowered it again and had lowered one of the hammers and was already moving out of the thicket when Sam spoke.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” the boy cried. And he would remember that—how he turned upon Sam in the truculence of a boy’s grief over the missed opportunity, the missed luck. “What for? Don’t you hear that horn?”
And he would remember how Sam was standing. Sam had not moved. He was not tall, squat rather and broad, and the boy had been growing fast for the past year or so and there was not much difference between them in height, yet Sam was looking over the boy’s head and up the ridge toward the sound of the horn and the boy knew that Sam did not even see him; that Sam knew he was still there beside him but he did not see the boy. Then the boy saw the buck. It was coming down the ridge, as if it were walking out of the very sound of the horn which related its death. It was not running, it was walking, tremendous, unhurried, slanting and tilting its head to pass the antlers through the undergrowth, and the boy standing with Sam beside him now instead of behind him as Sam always stood, and the gun still partly aimed and one of the hammers still cocked.
Then it saw them. And still it did not begin to run. It just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at them; then its muscles suppled, gathered. It did not even alter its course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of them, its head high and the eye not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid, and Sam standing beside the boy now, his right arm raised at full length, palm-outward, speaking in that tongue which the boy had learned from listening to him and Joe Baker in the blacksmith shop, while up the ridge Walter Ewell’s horn was still blowing them into a dead buck.
“Oleh, Chief,” Sam said. “Grandfather.”
When they reached Walter, he was standing with his back toward them, quite still, bemused almost, looking down at his feet. He didn’t look up at all.
“Come here, Sam,” he said quietly. When they reached him he still did not look up, standing above a little spike buck which had still been a fawn last spring. “He was so little I pretty near let him go,” Walter said. “But just look at the track he was making. It’s pretty near big as a cow’s. If there were any more tracks here besides the ones he is laying in, I would swear there was another buck here that I never even saw.”
3. It was dark when they reached the road where the surrey waited. It was turning cold, the rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to blow clear. His cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson had a fire going. “Did you get him?” Major de Spain said.
“Got a good-sized swamp-rabbit with spike horns,” Walter said. He slid the little buck down from his mule. The boy’s cousin McCaslin looked at it.
“Nobody saw the big one?” he said.
“I don’t even believe Boon saw it,” Walter said. “He probably jumped somebody’s straw cow in that thicket.” Boon started cursing, swearing at Walter and at Sam for not getting the dogs in the first place and at the buck and all.
“Never mind,” Major de Spain said. “He’ll be here for us next fall. Let’s get started home.”
It was after midnight when they let Walter out at his gate two miles from Jefferson and later still when they took General Compson to his house and then returned to Major de Spain’s, where he and McCaslin would spend the rest of the night, since it was still seventeen miles home. It was cold, the sky was clear now; there would be a heavy frost by sunup and the ground was already frozen beneath the horses’ feet and the wheels and beneath their own feet as they crossed Major de Spain’s yard and entered the house, the warm dark house, feeling their way up the dark stairs until Major de Spain found a candle and lit it, and into the strange room and the big deep bed, the still cold sheets until they began to warm to their bodies and at last the shaking stopped and suddenly he was telling McCaslin about it while McCaslin listened, quietly until he had finished. “You don’t believe it,” the boy said. “I know you don’t——”
“Why not?” McCaslin said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you don’t have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you can’t be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth don’t want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they—” the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “—they don’t want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”
“But we want them,” the boy said. “We want them too. There is plenty of room for us and th
em too.”
“That’s right,” McCaslin said. “Suppose they don’t have substance, can’t cast a shadow——”
“But I saw it!” the boy cried. “I saw him!”
“Steady,” McCaslin said. For an instant his hand touched the boy’s flank beneath the covers. “Steady. I know you did. So did I. Sam took me in there once after I killed my first deer.”
This is how Herman Basket told it:
In the old days, the steamboat came all the way up the River, right to the Plantation. In the winter, when the water was high, it swam almost to the door of the House, though sometimes in the spring, as the water went down, it would have to walk a little now and then. Then one summer it waited too long and this time it could not even walk back to Vicksburg. So it crawled up on a sand-bar and died and the white men who owned it removed the swimming machinery and carried it back to Vicksburg and now the steamboat belonged to anyone who wanted it, assuming anyone was that foolish.
Or so the People thought then, right up to the very moment in fact when one day the House became too small for all who wished to sleep inside and almost before the People could complain, the Man said, “Tomorrow we will fetch the steamboat.” That sand-bar was twelve miles away and that steamboat was almost as large as the House so the next morning there was no one in the Plantation except the Man and the black people. It took the Man all that day to find the People. He used the dogs; he found some of the People in hollow logs in the bottom. That night he made all the men sleep in the House. He kept the dogs in the House too. So the next morning all the men were able to go to the steamboat.
Every night the Man would make all the men sleep in the House, with the dogs in the house too, and each morning they would return to the steamboat. They would go in the wagons, since the Man did not wish them to be so tired from the twelve-mile walk that they would not pull strongly on the ropes. Though he would not let them ride in the wagons back to the Plantation at night because he wished the mules to be fresh also for tomorrow.
Finally the steamboat was out of the river bottom. It had taken five months to get it out of the bottom, because they had to cut down the trees to make a path for it. But now it could walk faster on the logs, with all the men pulling on the ropes and the Man sitting in his chair on the front gallery of the boat, with one boy to hold over him the purple parasol which the white New Orleans trader calling himself the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry said came from Paris beyond the Stinking Water, and another boy with a branch to drive away the flying beasts. The dogs rode on the boat too and sometimes the Man would wear the red slippers too though after only an hour even he would begin to sweat. Then after another hour he would take them off and sit in his bare feet looking down at the People and the black men pulling the ropes which made the steamboat walk.
Then it was winter. The Man did not need the parasol now and the flying beasts had departed also; now both of the boys could tend the fire in the chimney which the Man had caused to be built on the front gallery of the steamboat so that now even on the coldest days the Man could sit comfortably in his chair before the hearth and watch the People and the black men drawing on the ropes which made the steamboat walk.
Then at last the steamboat reached the Plantation, where it could die again. Or so the People thought. Indeed, the Man always said afterward that he had a great deal more trouble arranging with the People to move it that last few feet to the House than he had with all the twelve miles from the sand-bar. But at last the steamboat was beside the House to suit him, and now the People could sit down again and go about their own affairs. (Until, that is, the Man thought of something else arduous and unpleasant for them to do. Because Doom had no sense of humor. He was always saying things like, since the people wished him to be the Man, he supposed he would have to be the Man, and that the only way he knew to be a king was to be one.) Axes were used to chop through one side of the House and through the side of the steamboat next to it and now anyone who wished could go from the House to the steamboat or vice versa without having to come outdoors, and now there was room for all to sleep inside. But (Herman Basket said) not he. As soon as he lay down inside the House or the steamboat either, he would become so nervous just remembering how tired the steamboat had used to make him that he would have to rise and take up his blanket and go outside and find a thicket so dense and distant that he couldn’t see either one of them. Only then could he compose himself for sleep.
3
A BEAR
HUNT
RATLIFF IS TELLING THIS. He is a sewing-machine agent; time was when he traveled about our county in a light, strong buckboard drawn by a sturdy, wiry, mismatched team of horses; now he uses a model T Ford, which also carries his demonstrator machine in a tin box on the rear, shaped like a dog kennel and painted to resemble a house.
Ratliff may be seen anywhere without surprise—the only man present at the bazaars and sewing bees of farmers’ wives; moving among both men and women at all-day singings at country churches, and singing, too, in a pleasant baritone. He was even at this bear hunt of which he speaks, at the annual hunting camp of Major de Spain in the river bottom twenty miles from town, even though there was no one there to whom he might possibly have sold a machine, since Mrs. de Spain doubtless already owned one, unless she had given it to one of her married daughters, and the other man—Lucius Hogganbeck—with whom he became involved, to the violent detriment of his face and other members, could not have bought one for his wife even if he would, without Ratliff sold it to him on indefinite credit.
Lucius Hogganbeck was one of the children of that Boon Hogganbeck who had been the utterly loyal and completely unreliable man-Friday of old Major de Spain and Mr. McCaslin Edmonds back in the time when they and Uncle Isaac McCaslin and Walter Ewell and old General Compson who was my grandfather (and old Ash Wylie too, the father of this Ash who figured in Ratliff’s affair, and of whom only Uncle Ike remains) were the hunting club. But Lucius is forty now and most of his teeth are gone, and it is years now since he and two brothers named Provine were known in Jefferson as the Provine gang and terrorized our quiet town after the unimaginative fashion of wild youth by letting off pistols on the square late Saturday nights or galloping their horses down scurrying and screaming lanes of churchgoing ladies on Sunday morning. Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group, and who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children.
There are other men among us now whose families are in want; men who, perhaps, would not work anyway, but who now, since the last few years, cannot find work. These all attain and hold to a certain respectability by acting as agents for the manufacturers of minor articles like soap and men’s toilet accessories and kitchen objects, being seen constantly about the square and the streets carrying small black sample cases. One day, to our surprise, Hogganbeck also appeared with such a case, though within less than a week the town officers discovered that it contained whisky in pint bottles. Major de Spain (not the old one: he was dead. This was his son, a banker, called Major in memory of his father and the rank and title which his father had earned and bore valiantly by 1865) extricated him somehow, as it was Major de Spain who supported his family by eking out the money which Mrs. Hogganbeck earned by sewing and such—bearing the burden of Lucius for the same reason as the gallant one of his father’s military title: because old Major de Spain (along with Mr. Edmonds) had supported Boon all his life; or perhaps, we liked to believe, as a Roman gesture of salute and farewell to the bright figure which Lucius had been before time whipped him.
For there are older men who remember the Butch—he has even lost somewhere in his shabby past the lusty dare-deviltry of the nickname—Lucius of twenty years ago; that youth without humor, yet with some driving, inarticulate zest for breathing which has long since burned out of him, who performed in a fine frenzy, which was, perh
aps, mostly alcohol, certain outrageous and spontaneous deeds, one of which was the Negro-picnic business. The picnic was at a Negro church a few miles from town. In the midst of it, Lucius and the two Provines, returning from a dance in the country, rode up with drawn pistols and freshly lit cigars; and taking the Negro men one by one, held the burning cigar ends to the popular celluloid collars of the day, leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon. This is he of whom Ratliff is talking.
But there is one thing more which must be told here in order to set the stage for Ratliff. Five miles farther down the river from Major de Spain’s camp, and in an even wilder part of the river’s jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us—children though we were, yet we were descended of literate, town-bred people—it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets which we associated with Indians through the hidden and secret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with boody jaws—this, perhaps, due to the fact that a remnant of a once powerful clan of the Chickasaw tribe still lived beside it under Government protection. They now had American names and they lived as the sparse white people who surrounded them in turn lived.
Big Woods: The Hunting Stories Page 11