The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  It was as if he had kicked the detonator of a land mine. There was a roaring whir as the birds, twenty of them at least, burst from the grass at his feet like hurtling fragments of shell and gouts of exploding earth, flung up and out and rapidly diminishing in a flat trajectory, sailing earthward almost instantly, as if, though small, deceptively heavy and traveling with incredible velocity.

  The gun went automatically to his shoulder, snapped up there more quickly and gracefully than ever before. He had a bird in his eye down the barrel and knew that he had got it there quickly enough to get a second shot easily. But his breath left him as though knocked out by the burst and pounding rush of wings. Fear that he might miss, miss with the shell, paralyzed him. He lowered the gun unfired. Turning to the still-rigid dog, he saw—as one in such case is always liable to see on the face of a good bird dog—his look of bewildered disappointment. In that instant it seemed to Joe that the fear of finding just that look was what had unnerved him, and though he was ashamed of the impulse, all his own disappointment and self-contempt centered in hatred for the dog.

  As soon as he was given leave, Mac went after the singles. He set on one instantly.

  Joe kicked up this single and again the anxiety that he might miss, such that sweat filled his armpits and he felt his mouth go dry, overcame him, and with trembling hands he had to lower the hammer and lower the gun unfired, and was unable to face the dog.

  He tried on three more singles. It got worse. He knew then without looking at him that Mac had given him up and would refuse to hunt any more today. He did not even have to put him on the leash. The dog led the way out of the field. Joe found him lying at the rear of the car, and he did not need even to be told, much less dragged, as usual with him on any shooting day but especially on opening day, to get into the cage to go home.

  The lemon pie was in the refrigerator, the marshmallow-topped whipped yams in the oven and the biscuits cut and in the pan and on the cabinet waiting to go into the oven the moment the birds were plucked—all as it always was when his father returned in the evening of a quail-shooting day, and as it was later when he and his father, and still later when he came home alone and laid the dead birds in her lap, as he had laid the first dollar he ever earned.

  She said, cheerfully, that it was a lucky thing she happened to have some chops in the house. She added that she had learned that long ago. A woman learned, she said, never to trust to a hunter’s luck—not even the best hunter. He was both grateful and resentful of those words. He knew she had never bought meat against his father’s coming home from a hunt empty-handed.

  He rested a day, went to school a week, and practiced, shooting turnips tossed into the air and hitting five out of seven, then he went back. The quail were there, you could hear them, but when he looked at Mac as he was about to loose him and felt himself quaking already, he snapped the leash on again and went back to the car and home.

  And so what it turned into, this season for which he finally had the reach and the size, the endurance, in a word the manliness, was the one in which he fired no shell at all.

  The Thanksgiving holidays came and he spent every day in the field with the shell in the barrel of the gun—a few bright brass nicks in the dull green now where the ejector had gripped pumping it in and out of the breech—and the magazine full behind it of his own waiting shells and with Mac. He hardly spoke to the dog now, gave him no commands and no encouragements, nor did the dog give tongue or whimper or even frisk, a kind of wordless and even gestureless rapport between them, the two of them hunting now in a grim, cold fury of impotence.

  The dog had gone past disappointment, past disgust, past even bewilderment, and seemed now to have divined the reason or else the irresistible lack of all reason behind the coveys kicked up, the boy—almost the man now—raising and cocking his gun, but shaking his head even as he raised it, holding it erect and steady on his mark, then lowering it slowly and soundlessly and releasing him from stand and hunting on. His mother gave up trying to keep him at home, and seemed to have sensed the desperate urgency in him.

  And now as the days passed and closing day of the season neared he could feel the whole town watching him, awaiting the climax of his single-minded pursuit, their curiosity first aroused by what they would have been most certain to observe: the lack of interest which they would think he should have begun to show in girls. The boys had noticed, had taken to gathering in a body on his shift at the Greek’s confectionery at night, ordering him to make sodas for them and their dates, and ribbing him.

  “Haven’t seen much of you lately, Joe. Where you been?”

  “Around.”

  “Yeah, but around who?”

  Guffaws.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “I’ll bet you have, old Joe.”

  Titters.

  “Busy. Yeah.”

  Then he would blush. “I’ve been hunting,” he said.

  “I’ll bet you have!”

  He blushed again and said—he could never learn to avoid that kind of double meaning—“Quail.”

  They roared. “Getting many?” they said, and “Aren’t we all?” and “Watch out for those San Quentin quail,” they said.

  Everybody knew everybody else’s business in town anyhow, and moreover he was a kind of public figure in his way—they could not have helped but watch the coming-of-age of the son of the greatest wing shot the town ever had—so that he felt now that the ear of the whole town was cupped to hear the report of the shell, a sound which to him it had come to seem would have no resemblance whatever to the noise of any other shotgun shot ever heard.

  At nights he studied the shell, trying to discover the source of its charm. He had come to fear it, almost to hate it, certainly to live by and for it.

  How can you, he asked himself—no, he could make the question general, for he asked it not self-ironically but just incredulously—how can a boy want to be better than his father? Not better. It was not that. Not even as good as. That was not what he wanted at all. What was it? It was that you wanted to be your father, wasn’t it? Yes, that was it. That was more what it was. And you weren’t.

  But wasn’t there just a little bit of wanting to be better than mixed in with it? Wasn’t there, in fact, just a little bit of thinking you were better than mixed in with it? All right, yes. Yes, there was. Why? It was because you believed that being half him you had all he was, and being half your mother you had that much again that he wasn’t, that he did not have. And you knew that he would have agreed with this, which did not make you believe it entirely, or stop believing it.

  Then it was closing day. The big covey was long gone from the broom grass meadow now, ranging from the swamps and brier patches to the uplands and the loblolly pines at the thicket edges. You had to work to find them now and any shot you got was likely to be a snap shot, through branches or brush. But this was how he wanted it. Let it get hard enough and it would be the shot and he would take it.

  There were no waiting shells in the magazine of the gun today. He wanted no second shot, at least not on the same flush.

  It was about eight in the morning when Mac got a warm scent. Did he know it was closing day? You would think so from the way he had suddenly taken cheer—or hysteria—determination, certainly. His spirits were not dampened even by the lowering of the unfired gun at the first single he found. He seemed in agreement that this one had been too easy.

  They were hunting in uplands, in blackened stover bent to the ground and frozen, so that it snapped against Joe’s boots. Then Mac headed down out of the cornfield, crossed a fencerow and was in a swamp, in sedge, tall and dead and bent. Joe could follow Mac, as ’way ahead of him the tall stiffened grass parted and closed heavily behind the dog’s passage. Then he could not follow him any more and he whistled, and when he got no answer he knew that the dog had set and could not give tongue.

  He began to rush, though he knew that Mac would hold or follow the birds. Feeding time for the birds was almost o
ver. They would be drifting toward the thickets now and in another hour would go deep into the pines and then the dog could not hunt them, no dog. Then the hunting would not be good again until nightfall and that was the very last chance. It had better be now.

  The bog continued for as far as he could see in the milky mist and he stood for a moment wishing the dog would give tongue just once, knowing that he was too well trained, and then he decided to go left, south. The land soon began to rise and the sedge got shorter and soon he could see where the swamp gave out at a fencerow and beyond that he soon could see a clearing rising out of the fog and rising up into pine woods. He could see no sign of the dog, but that was where he was sure to be.

  He climbed over the barbwire, still looking ahead up into the clearing, and bent to get through the briers and came out with his head still raised looking up and almost stepped on the rigid, unbreathing dog, his nose in the wind, pointed as stiff as a weathervane.

  He cocked the gun and stepped into the brush and kicked. They roared out toward the pines. He swung on his heel, holding the gun half-raised, picking his bird. He swiveled a half-circle, twisted at the waist, and saw the big cock, big as a barnyard rooster, streaking for the pines. He shot. The sound seemed to go beyond sound, one of those the hearer does not hear because the percussion has instantly deafened him, and he felt himself stagger from the recoil. But down the barrel of the gun he saw the bird, pitching for the ground at the thicket edge, winging along untouched, without a feather ruffled, and he knew that he had missed. From old habit he was already pumping the gun, and it was when he saw the big shell flick out and spin heavily into the brush that he realized he had heard no sound but a light dry click. The shell had not gone off. The shell was a dud. He had kept it too long; it had gone dead.

  He said it aloud. “I have kept it too long. It’s a dud.”

  Then he felt himself soaring as though in a burst of wings like the cock bird, as though he had been shot at himself and gone unscathed, free.

  He dropped the shell into his pocket. It would rest permanently on his bureau now, he had time to tell himself. Then he was fumbling for fresh shells, his own shells, and dropping them all over the ground at his feet and getting one into the chamber backwards and saying to Mac in a voice he could just recognize as his own, “All right, don’t stand there! Go get ’em! Go get ’em, boy! Go get ’em!” And he could tell that Mac knew it was his master’s voice speaking now, a hunter’s voice.

  Report Cards

  INSTEAD OF calling the roll, Miss Carpenter peered over the rims of her glasses and said, “I suppose everyone is here.” The groan that arose satisfied her that everyone was. There was a rustle of adjustment; the girls sighed and smoothed down their skirts; the boys coughed and squirmed and shuffled their feet. Only Thomas Erskine sat quietly, knowing he had nothing to fear.

  “Grace Adams,” Miss Carpenter called.

  When Grace, on the way back to her seat, looked at her report card, she could not help smiling. Everyone was pleased for her.

  Miss Carpenter bore hard on Jackie Barnes. Coolly, he put his into his pocket without a glance; that was showing her how much he cared.

  Even Miss Carpenter had to give a smile for John Daniels. It was not how well he had done, just that he had passed was more than anyone expected. He grinned modestly from ear to ear.

  Thomas only wished his mother could have heard the change that came into Miss Carpenter’s voice when she called his name. He went up for his card, trying to look solemn and as though he did not understand the looks of hopeless envy on all the faces.

  Then everyone looked busy or thoughtful to spare Miss Carpenter being watched at an unpleasant chore—it was time for the Hazeltines. Luther clomped up the aisle with his head hanging, took his card without looking up, and clomped back to his seat. Then, without waiting to be called, as though she knew people preferred not to have to speak her name, Sal Hazeltine sidled up the aisle. She took her card and started back, then could not resist a look at it. She stopped. Her cheeks turned red. She began nibbling at the shreds of her chapped lips and blinking her eyes. Finally she remembered where she was, blushed a deeper shade, then hunched herself together and hurried back to her seat.

  Thomas Erskine listened to her snuffling and thought with a shudder of the beating she would get when she got home. After today her parents need never give her another thought; she had lost her right to their affection. From now on even Luther, her own brother, would be ashamed to be seen with her. Her life here, he believed, was ruined; he could think of no way to make up for such a thing as Sal had done. That was what it meant to fail. At last he had seen it happen to someone. He might have known it would be Sal Hazeltine.

  Yet, would such people as the Hazeltines care whether their child passed or failed? They would beat Sal for failing, but only because they never missed a chance to beat her, not because they really cared. Nor would they have cared very much if she had brought home straight A’s. Imagining himself, for a moment, with such parents, seemed to Thomas the worst thing that might have happened to him in life.

  He remembered coming home from school one afternoon and telling his mother, when she asked what happened in school that day, about Sal hemming and hawing and winding her skirt in her hand over a question so simple that probably even Luther knew the answer. They laughed together over the way Thomas imitated her. But one ought not to laugh, and straightening her face, Mother said, “Well, somebody loves her, I suppose.” From the way she looked you could tell she thought it was hard to understand why.

  While Miss Carpenter checked their books, examining the corners and giving the pages a quick but careful going-over, then checking off a name in her roll book, Thomas sat thinking about going to the country in just two days.

  Virginia Tate was going to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Josephine Morris said her folks might go to New Orleans or maybe to Mexico. Everybody was going somewhere. Thomas was going to his grandmother’s. They had talked about it before the bell rang, gathered on the school steps, the girls seated neatly on their handkerchiefs, the boys standing, everybody taking pains with clean linens and white shoes. A few feet away sat the Hazeltines. Everybody knew where they would spend the summer. Everybody could remember turning down the dusty road past the gravel pit, beyond the city-limit sign and driving past the Hazeltines’ and seeing the scrawny razorback pig rooting wearily under the porch, the dusty, weathered old coonskins stretched on the walls of the house, and the Hazeltines stretched out on the front porch. Five or six or seven little Hazeltines would stop playing in the rusty old body of a Model-T Ford to stare at you through the thick white dust.

  Richard Taylor was going to Carlsbad Caverns, and, oh, someone said, they were not so much. Just a lot of stalagmites and stalactites. And those who knew what those words meant took half a look and half a snicker at the Hazeltines, and so did those who no more knew than they.

  Surely, thought Thomas, one day they would wake up, take a good look at themselves and then a look at the other children, and give up coming to school for shame. But they never missed a day. You might come ever so early, there they were—Sal in a molting straw hat and all that was left of a dress that once belonged to Jane Tucker, Luther in a floppy old leather chauffeur’s cap and coveralls that had faded almost completely away.

  Through the winter Luther smelled of stale Vick’s salve, Antiphlogistine, Mentholatum. In the spring when all this lifted he was left smelling strongly of something that town people never ate—hominy. And Sal, because of the asafetida she wore in a little bag on a ribbon round her neck to keep away the croup, no one could get near Sal. At school they hung back and hung around and moved cautiously into a spot after the others had left it.

  The Hazeltines. How could they not see all the things that were wrong with them?

  Now they sat on the bottom step listening with their mouths hanging open while each told of the wonderful things he planned to see and do this summer. Finally, each trying to outdo the rest, every
one had told. A lull came, and the danger was that someone might mention report cards. Bobby Johnson nudged a couple of fellows and edged over toward the Hazeltines.

  They looked up to see what was coming.

  Smiling sweetly, Bobby Johnson said, “And where-all are you Hazeltines going to go this summer?”

  The boys all simply yelped. The girls sniggered politely behind their hands. Some half got ready to run. Bobby Johnson looked like he wished he hadn’t done it. For something down inside him gave a tug on Luther’s Adam’s apple. With his great callused hands, Luther could have wrung Bobby Johnson like a rag. But slowly a smile spread over Luther’s face. He thought it was as good a joke as the rest. Then everybody really whooped. Sal grinned wider and wider; everybody was having such a good time; she was proud of Luther.

  Oh, the Hazeltines! They were so dumb you simply could not insult them.

  Thomas Erskine was miserable, though. No one hated the Hazeltines as much as he; the very sight of them embarrassed him. But he was miserable whenever they were tormented. He prayed that the Hazeltines might simply disappear. He hated the others for drawing attention to them, even if it was to make fun of them. He found himself hating their tormentors so much that he was almost sorry for Sal and Luther. To feel in himself a moment of sympathy for them made him hate the Hazeltines all the more the next moment. On top of everything, he was terrified that someone might notice him not joining in the fun, might think back and realize that he had never joined in, then suspect him of liking the Hazeltines.

  The bell rang. Thomas’s relief was so great it left him feeling weak.

  The Hazeltines’ lunches always looked like something wrapped in newspaper to be disposed of. Across Sal’s thin little bottom as she bent to pick hers up, you could read in faded letters, Bewley’s Best.