“I love to hear you talk about it,” said Margaret warmly. But he sensed her turning from him to the sight which momently drew her eyes: Mr. Papenmeyer’s meat-and-grocery emporium; he felt the link existing between a woman and her market. “Look dear—now prices are going up again,” she said absently. “You make it,” she came loyally back to him, “as fascinating—both as real and unreal—as O’Neill does in his plays.”
“O’Neill,” Miles said, piling up on him the lack he felt in Margaret, “didn’t get my people straight. He made them far too Irish, almost quaint; and too explicit. My Uncle Daniel would have sneered at ‘Beyond the Horizon’; even my father would have walked out on it—staggered out, to the nearest saloon.” The thing was, he thought—and did not bother saying, for he knew that Margaret, and perhaps anyone of urban birth, could never understand—that they at once despised the soil for giving them a living and respected it for making that living a hard one. They couldn’t stand rich, easy earth; they needed the stones in their fields—but how could he ever make that clear to Margaret who would gladly spend her life on her hands and knees plucking the stones up out of his path!
But she saw his background, and would never see it otherwise, as picturesque—O’Neill; a little Freud; a little Yeats dragged in from somewhere; and the whole made a curious travel book to her. She pieced it together and it looked very neat; he admired Margaret’s ingenious puzzle-map. But the blood was left out of her picture. For to call Uncle Daniel, as Margaret blandly did, “pathological,” did not materially affect his uncle’s ghost. To talk of the “incest pattern” that had kept his three aunts from marriage, that had driven Aunt Fan cuckoo till she lived like a leper up over the barn. . . . He had accomplished all that, for himself, in his mind; but like rationally dismissing God—it didn’t cover the ground.
“Shall we go the long way round, Maggie?” he said—and was not sure whether he thus postponed her meeting with Jeffrey, or whether, because he had got back in his mind to home and himself, he would find it unbearable to break the thread. “Or do you think, since they expect us—” He inquired of himself: no, the thought of Margaret meeting Jeffrey was perfectly endurable, meaningless now in fact, since he had worked his way back to where his present life meant nothing.
“Of course, dear—it’s such a lovely evening. Norah won’t mind our being late; and I wonder about Mrs. Salvemini’s snow, it’s possible.” He smiled; he felt she avoided the use of Jeffrey’s name to spare him pain; and he guided her easily toward the openness of Washington Square, which at the moment did not exist for him except in its faint resemblance, from the distance of one block, to the square in Galloway opposite Town Hall.
He wondered for a minute if his struggle must not end where it began, on that New England farm; if he could ever go back; if it were not implacably too late—now that God, like Uncle Daniel, was so rationally buried. His Uncle Daniel, whose approval he had struggled for and never won (whose approval even now he desired and could never win) had died because of him; that thoroughly irrational fear, laid many times by Miles in cold and adult thought, remained, emotionally, a fact. He lay ill, and the people in his house crept guiltily from stair to stair with frightened faces. The little boy had cried to God in his attic Please let him die! In the morning they broke it to him gently—as though they did not know that he had killed him. The look on his own father’s face haunted him still; obscurely he had known that his father too had helped to kill, had wished his strong and righteous brother dead; a shame existed between father and son from that morning until the father died. Did not some sort of justice point . . .
Margaret had wondered if one could ever be transplanted; it struck him now that he had never been—that his roots had stayed behind in the stony soil, and that what of him had come on down (to live with Margaret in New York, to work for Mr. Pidgeon in an office) was an aberration, a part of himself that was scarcely valid, which must flounder and die unless he traced back his course to his roots and his home again. Was it possible, he thought with a crazy hope, a longing that touched him to life as nothing these days was able to, to go back some day? (but he was no farmer!) and could that life still hold the meaning this one lacked, in spite of God and Uncle Daniel being gone?
For those early days—and all his later life he failed to make it clear—had held something (which he now supposed was God) that made living, if terribly painful, meaningful. Something was there, in black and white. One was damned or one was saved; and in between there were no finer shadings. There was always the rough soil to be struggled with; and in the fall there was either enough food or less than enough. One faced the problems daily; there was no drugging oneself from the final issues, either of the earth or of heaven—one lived, as one’s neighbors did, by some guiding rote combined of practical and spiritual.
They reached the Square. One certain memory caught him by the throat, a memory that contained, he thought, the essence of his childhood, half understood and never to be outgrown. He slowed his pace, drawing Margaret back beside him; he addressed her politely, as though she were the stranger she had suddenly become.
“Do you mind? I feel like walking slowly. . . .”
“Of course, darling! It’s such a grand old night! It’s so exhilarating—fall always is to me. It makes me look ahead so eagerly. . . .” But with that seventh sense she had acquired, born of marriage, that seemed to tell her what was wanted of her, her words trailed into grateful silence.
She could look ahead, he thought, because she was finished with what was past, and grew without transplanting out of childhood; but Miles must go back and go back because he had been torn out, leaving his roots behind. . . .
Walking slowly beside her, he abandoned himself utterly to that nostalgic memory.
The air, rain-sodden that memorable summer’s day, added its weight to the burden of guilt already borne by a little boy of seven. Looking back he felt that even before the thing took place the air had told some hint of it. So many days dawned in his childhood with the pregnant horror of Judgment Day; but afterward he saw so clearly all their faces, heard on the air the ring of their prophetic voices . . . yes, surely the morning air had known something of what the afternoon would bring.
They were picking berries, the little boy and the Limb of Satan, his mother, condemned by Uncle Daniel and convicted in her own and her son’s eyes for her sin of being pretty; Aunt Mart was with them. They set out accompanied by Uncle Daniel’s dog; but King grew tired quickly and deserted; they thought perhaps he’d run back home. The little boy was ashamed of the woman’s occupation of berrying forced on him because he was young, not yet a man. But unlike King, he was not free to desert. The Flinders women and the Flinders child wandered into Brown’s Lane, not far from home.
Brown’s Lane was named for Old Man Brown who held what was left of him from the Civil War on a porch austerely facing back. The “Italians” had already begun to invade the Lane. The “Italians” were always referred to in a special voice, as though the word implied description, not mere nation; one said “Italians” as one said “the boogey men.” And a piece down the Lane from Brown lived the Picketts, frowned on by all around as trash; they fraternized, one said, with the “Italians.”
Brown’s Lane lay buried in a valley; farm-land sloped down to it, Old Man Brown’s tobacco fields hid from the potatoes of the “Italians” by stony fences. The Flinders place was a quarter of a mile above, just out of sight.
The berrying took them to the end of the Lane, right by the Picketts’ barn. All at once Aunt Mart shrieked: “The chickens—look!” then covered her mouth in fright, for Uncle Daniel’s dog had been suspected once before. They looked. The ground before the Picketts’ barn was strewn: a dozen strangled chickens lay there.
“Let’s say we never saw!” Miles’s mother, limp, held weak hands before her pretty, sinful face.
The little boy felt sick at sight of the chickens, although he had witnessed killings of fowl that left him cold. But this
was different; something unnatural, blasphemous, in the way these chickens sprawled.
Aunt Mart was Flinders-born, closer to her brother Dan than mother; and somehow she was on closer terms with God. “It’s our duty, Hester,” she said.
The little boy felt vaguely threatened. If th2as a crime around, he was sure to feel himself guilty, born cursed, as he was, of a mother who was pretty and a father blinded by beguiling sin. So now, he crouched; he had wanted to run away with King: did that mean, before God and Uncle Dan, he shared King’s sin?
A Pickett boy approached. His mouth opened wide in horror; then, his hands in his blue jeans’ pockets, he surveyed the Flinders standing there in guilt. “I bet it’s that there dog of yourn,” he sneered, identifying them with King. “I’ll go git Pa. He said, the next time . . .” And he was off across the Pickett field.
“Oh Martha! what shall we do!” his mother whimpered. “Poor King! I’d rather they shot me.” It seemed her evil prettiness had made her soft; Aunt Mart might be weak with fear, but she was born a Flinders and she was never soft.
The Pickett boy was like the rain. Wherever he ran, the ground was fertile, and people sprang up at his words. And soon the Lane was full. “Who did it?” “Sure, it must have been the Flinders dog.” “Where is he now?” “Once a dog’s got chicken on the brain!” “Dern right: they can’t be cured.” “Best to kill ’em off.” “Does Dan’l Flinders know?”
This was the snag on which caught all their thoughts. “Does Dan’l Flinders know?” The Flinders women and the Flinders child cowered together.
John Pickett, summoned, came at last; angry, but pleased in spite of himself that such an audience was gathered there.
“Where’s that damn dog?”
But the dog must not be killed in anger. This the people in the Lane seemed to know. He must be killed in cold blood, for doing wrong. Just act of a just God.
They wavered now; hummed uneasily in the valley of the Lane; hostile a little toward John Pickett. “Might be one of them dogs belonging to the ‘Italians’ ” someone spitefully called. “We mustn’t act in haste,” he was supported.
“Go get Old Man Brown,” John Pickett ordered his son. This was right and felt to be. It was Brown’s Lane; Brown had fought the Civil War; Brown was the oldest man in Galloway. The Pickett boy sped up the Lane.
The “Italians” gathered shyly; clustered together gesticulating mildly. The Hired Men, drawn democratically, flocked to the Picketts’ barn. Soon there were twenty in all in Brown’s Lane: a brilliant crowd.
“What, Flinders dog?” “I saw him; noon.” “Made off, did he?” “One thing sure, he wouldn’t have gone home.” “No, that he wouldn’t dare.” “Flinders dog? well, he’ll come skulkin back, you wait.” “They never do go far, you know.” “No, chicken’s stronger in their blood than fear.”
As if born from this conjecture, in the road suddenly King appeared. (A little moan of pity went to him from the “Italians.”) There was no doubt about King’s guilt. His tail hung low; his head was ducked. He slunk, rather than walked; and he eyed the people weakly. He would not come too close. But he would not run away. A good New England dog, he stayed for punishment.
The people in the Lane grew still. Only John Pickett, whose chickens lay dead, could hate the slinking culprit.
Miles’ mother sobbed. “I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it! King, here Kingie-boy! I’d rather they shot me!” The “Italians” moaned their grief.
Miles knew the dog would die; he thought the dog knew it too. He was proud of King, not because he had killed the Picketts’ chickens, but because he stayed to meet his death. No one made a move to catch him. He could have run away. Everybody knew he would not. He was a good New England dog. But Miles was puzzled by his own kind, by the people. He could feel that they did not want to kill old King; King was a fine dog. They could banish him, send him down to Galloway where there were no chickens loose to kill; or Uncle Dan could keep him tied. They didn’t want to kill him. But they were going to. All of them together, because not one cried out to spare him. Why, if they didn’t want to kill him, must they? Even his soft mother, snivelling her weak disgust, was not protesting; she was merely voicing grief for a King already dead.
The Pickett boy came running back. In his wake Old Man Brown came hurrying, as fast as his Civil War leg let him. By his side he carried his old gun, which everyone knew was the gun he had used in the War.
Old Man Brown was in a fine state of excitement. He cackled on ahead of himself, “Wait for me! Wait until I git there. I’m acomin, fast’s I ken.”
He was a little man. Old age had shrunk him smaller than his gun. He had no teeth. But he had fine white gums with bloody scallops where his teeth had been.
“Where’s that dern dog? where is he?” he croaked, arriving in their midst, and peering with his blue, blind eyes. “I’ve brought my gun. Reckon I can’t lift it, though. Not and hold it steady. Reckon it’s for John Pickett to do the shootin anyhow.”
“You figure there ain’t nothin else to do but shoot?” respectfully inquired one.
“Why sure, there ain’t no curin dogs once they got chicken on the brain.” Old Man Brown snapped his head in certain affirmation.
“Reckon he’s right, sure enough.” “Why sure, there’s nothin else to do.” “What ken you do with dogs got chicken on the brain!”
The dog with chicken on the brain lurked, self-condemned, before them all. It was his last hour. He let it be.
Then Aunt Mart sprang to her full, scrawny height, the man’s felt hat on her head pushed back. She had been seeking help, perhaps in prayer, or perhaps had found it in her Flinders pride. “Nobody is goin to shoot that dog!” she said, speaking in a loud clear voice. “Nobody will tech that dog unless Dan’l Flinders tells ’em to. It’s Dan’l’s dog, and Dan’l’s got it to say what happens to him.”
It seemed the last word had been spoken. “That’s right, Marty.” “You’ve spoke right there, old Miss Flinders.” “Why sure it’s up to Dan’l.” “You don’t go killin a man’s dog without you ask him first.” “Flinders’ll know what’s right.” “Dan’l will do what’s right.”
“Who’ll fetch him?” “Who’s goin to tell Flinders?” No one stirred.
“Go fetch your uncle, Miles.” Aunt Mart spoke proudly.
The little boy cowered against his mother’s skirt. She soothed him apathetically. Uncle Dan would be in the tobacco field now. King was the only living thing he loved—he couldn’t tell him.
Aunt Mart gave him a little push. “He’ll take it better from the family, son,” she whispered. “You go, now. Let him go, Hester; it’ll do him good.” His mother released him with a sob.
He felt important running over the hill, taking the shortcut from Brown’s Lane to the Flinders place. Never had he run so fast. He was for the moment not afraid of Uncle Daniel; he was his equal. They both were Flinders-born; they both must do God’s will.
He found him in the backer patch, the leaves shoulder-high to Miles. He floundered through to Uncle Dan, weeding under the cloths stretched pole-to-pole to keep the leaves in shade. He would never forget Uncle Daniel’s straightening back as Uncle Dan reared himself like God above the leaves. His blue eyes, used to taking in horizon vistas, narrowed as they focussed on the boy.
He didn’t say a word; slapped down his tools and pulled his straw hat lower on his head. Then, his face not changing, he spoke: “You go on down. Tell them I am coming”; and stalked with giant’s paces toward the house.
Miles knew he must not wait. He turned his eyes from Uncle Daniel’s form and they streamed tears as he ran blindly down the hill, important with his message.
The people took the message silently. King took it flattening down his ears in fright. He ran to and fro, unhappy, like a condemned man spending his last minutes in his cell. Miles clung with both his arms to Aunt Mart’s waist; she was stronger than his mother, she could give him help; also, like himself and Uncle Daniel, she ha
d Flinders blood.
“He’s coming.” “Look!” “Look what Dan’l Flinders’ bringin!”
Miles saw, and knew before he saw. Till then he had not been sure; now he knew it was the Judgment Day. The crest of the farm-hill held his first vision; Uncle Dan was God; behind him the clouds broke and the sun streamed in angry mercy; it was the Day of Judgment; and Uncle Daniel strode to it with his gun across his shoulder.
Moving in just wrath he slipped closer, his black shape descending from the sky and climbing fiercely down the side of the hill. “Dan’l will do what’s right.” “Flinders knows what to do.” The people stood proudly, waiting his coming. The “Italians,” quivering, hemmed in closer.
The dog left off his guilty pacing; turned and faced his master. He made a movement forward, as though straining at the leash of memory; then stood still, his ears flat back, his tail lifting in a single wag of recognition.
Uncle Daniel never stopped until he stood on a little hillock, fifty paces from his dog. There was nothing readable in his face; but at that moment, if at no other in his life, Miles knew he loved him, more than any person living. He lifted the gun to his shoulder; it was already primed; and squinted down its length.
“Brother Daniel! Oh for God’s sake!” Miles’ mother fell to the ground and wept.
The little boy took his last look at King, standing a knowing target in the road. He saw King’s tail move slowly up and down. Then he buried his eyes and his ears in Aunt Mart’s skirt. He felt her body stiffen. Through the folds of calico and his own layers of fear he heard the shot: one single sound, booming in the valley. He thought he heard a yelp; it blended with his mother’s weeping.
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