“Beaver.”
The boy moved like a released spring, like a heeled dog freed. “Oh, damn you!” he cried. “Oh, you putt! It’s the Ergenstrasse! Oh, confound you! I’m just one down now!” He had stepped in one stride completely over Bogard, and he now leaned down over Ronnie. “What?” The boat was slowing in toward the wharf, the engine idle. “Aren’t I, Ronnie? Just one down now?”
The boat drifted in; the seaman had again crawled forward onto the deck. Ronnie spoke for the third and last time. “Right,” he said.
- 9 -
“I want,” Bogard said, “a case of Scotch. The best we’ve got. And fix it up good. It’s to go to town. And I want a responsible man to deliver it.” The responsible man came. “This is for a child,” Bogard said, indicating the package. “You’ll find him in the Street of the Twelve Hours, somewhere near the Café Twelve Hours. He’ll be in the gutter. You’ll know him. A child about six feet long. Any English M. P. will show him to you. If he is asleep, don’t wake him. Just sit there and wait until he wakes up. Then give him this. Tell him it is from Captain Bogard.”
- 10 -
About a month later a copy of the English Gazette which had strayed onto an American aerodrome carried the following item in the casualty lists:
MISSING: Torpedo Boat XOOI. Midshipmen R. Boyce Smith and L. C. W. Hope, R. N. R., Boatswain’s Mate Burt and Able Seaman Reeves. Channel Fleet, Light Torpedo Division. Failed to return from coast patrol duty.
Shortly after that the American Air Service headquarters also issued a bulletin:
For extraordinary valor over and beyond the routine of duty, Captain H. S. Bogard, with his crew, composed of Second Lieutenant Darrel McGinnis and Aviation Gunners Watts and Harper, on a daylight raid and without scout protection, destroyed with bombs an ammunition depot several miles behind the enemy’s lines. From here, beset by enemy aircraft in superior numbers, these men proceeded with what bombs remained to the enemy’s corps headquarters at Blank and partially demolished this château, and then returned safely without loss of a man.
And regarding which exploit, it might have added, had it failed and had Captain Bogard come out of it alive, he would have been immediately and thoroughly court-martialed.
Carrying his remaining two bombs, he had dived the Handley-Page at the château where the generals sat at lunch, until McGinnis, at the toggles below him, began to shout at him, before he ever signaled. He didn’t signal until he could discern separately the slate tiles of the roof. Then his hand dropped and he zoomed, and he held the aeroplane so, in its wild snarl, his lips parted, his breath hissing, thinking: “God! God! If they were all there—all the generals, the admirals, the presidents and the kings—theirs, ours—all of them.”
Shingles for the Lord
PAP GOT UP A GOOD HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT AND CAUGHT THE MULE and rid down to Killegrews’ to borrow the froe and maul. He ought to been back with it in forty minutes. But the sun had rose and I had done milked and fed and was eating my breakfast when he got back, with the mule not only in a lather but right on the edge of the thumps too.
“Fox hunting,” he said. “Fox hunting. A seventy-year-old man, with both feet and one knee, too, already in the grave, squatting all night on a hill and calling himself listening to a fox race that he couldn’t even hear unless they had come right up onto the same log he was setting on and bayed into his ear trumpet. Give me my breakfast,” he told maw. “Whitfield is standing there right this minute, straddle of that board tree with his watch in his hand.”
And he was. We rid on past the church, and there was not only Solon Quick’s school-bus truck but Reverend Whitfield’s old mare too. We tied the mule to a sapling and hung our dinner bucket on a limb, and with pap toting Killegrew’s froe and maul and the wedges and me toting our ax, we went on to the board tree where Solon and Homer Bookwright, with their froes and mauls and axes and wedges, was setting on two upended cuts, and Whitfield was standing jest like pap said, in his boiled shirt and his black hat and pants and necktie, holding his watch in his hand. It was gold and in the morning sunlight it looked big as a full-growed squash.
“You’re late,” he said.
So pap told again about how Old Man Killegrew had been off fox hunting all night, and nobody at home to lend him the froe but Mrs. Killegrew and the cook. And naturally, the cook wasn’t going to lend none of Killegrew’s tools out, and Mrs. Killegrew was worser deaf than even Killegrew. If you was to run in and tell her the house was afire, she would jest keep on rocking and say she thought so, too, unless she began to holler back to the cook to turn the dogs loose before you could even open your mouth.
“You could have gone yesterday and borrowed the froe,” Whitfield said. “You have known for a month now that you had promised this one day out of a whole summer toward putting a roof on the house of God.”
“We aint but two hours late,” pap said. “I reckon the Lord will forgive it. He ain’t interested in time, nohow. He’s interested in salvation.”
Whitfield never even waited for pap to finish. It looked to me like he even got taller, thundering down at pap like a cloudburst. “He ain’t interested in neither! Why should He be, when He owns them both? And why He should turn around for the poor, mizzling souls of men that can’t even borrow tools in time to replace the shingles on His church, I don’t know either. Maybe it’s just because He made them. Maybe He just said to Himself: ‘I made them; I don’t know why. But since I did, I Godfrey, I’ll roll My sleeves up and drag them into glory whether they will or not!’ ”
But that wasn’t here nor there either now, and I reckon he knowed it, jest like he knowed there wasn’t going to be nothing atall here as long as he stayed. So he put the watch back into his pocket and motioned Solon and Homer up, and we all taken off our hats except him while he stood there with his face raised into the sun and his eyes shut and his eyebrows looking like a big iron-gray caterpillar lying along the edge of a cliff. “Lord,” he said, “make them good straight shingles to lay smooth, and let them split out easy; they’re for You,” and opened his eyes and looked at us again, mostly at pap, and went and untied his mare and clumb up slow and stiff, like old men do, and rid away.
Pap put down the froe and maul and laid the three wedges in a neat row on the ground and taken up the ax.
“Well, men,” he said, “let’s get started. We’re already late.”
“Me and Homer ain’t,” Solon said. “We was here.” This time him and Homer didn’t set on the cuts. They squatted on their heels. Then I seen that Homer was whittling on a stick. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I make it two hours and a little over,” Solon said. “More or less.”
Pap was still about half stooped over, holding the ax. “It’s nigher one,” he said. “But call it two for the sake of the argument. What about it?”
“What argument?” Homer said.
“All right,” pap said. “Two hours then. What about it?”
“Which is three man-hour units a hour, multiplied by two hours,” Solon said. “Or a total of six work units.” When the WPA first come to Yoknapatawpha County and started to giving out jobs and grub and mattresses, Solon went in to Jefferson to get on it. He would drive his school-bus truck the twenty-two miles in to town every morning and come back that night. He done that for almost a week before he found out he would not only have to sign his farm off into somebody else’s name, he couldn’t even own and run the school bus that he had built himself. So he come back that night and never went back no more, and since then hadn’t nobody better mention WPA to him unless they aimed to fight, too, though every now and then he would turn up with something all figured down into work units like he done now. “Six units short.”
“Four of which you and Homer could have already worked out while you was setting here waiting on me,” pap said.
“Except that we didn’t,” Solon said. “We promised Whitfield two units of twelve three-unit hours toward getting some new shingles on the church roof. We been her
e ever since sunup, waiting for the third unit to show up, so we could start. You don’t seem to kept up with these modern ideas about work that’s been flooding and uplifting the country in the last few years.”
“What modren ideas?” pap said. “I didn’t know there was but one idea about work—until it is done, it ain’t done, and when it is done, it is.”
Homer made another long, steady whittle on the stick. His knife was sharp as a razor.
Solon taken out his snuffbox and filled the top and tilted the snuff into his lip and offered the box to Homer, and Homer shaken his head, and Solon put the top back on the box and put the box back into his pocket.
“So,” pap said, “jest because I had to wait two hours for a old seventy-year man to get back from fox hunting that never had no more business setting out in the woods all night than he would ‘a’ had setting all night in a highway juke joint, we all three have got to come back here tomorrow to finish them two hours that you and Homer—–”
“I ain’t,” Solon said. “I don’t know about Homer. I promised Whitfield one day. I was here at sunup to start it. When the sun goes down, I will consider I have done finished it.”
“I see,” pap said. “I see. It’s me that’s got to come back. By myself. I got to break into a full morning to make up them two hours that you and Homer spent resting. I got to spend two hours of the next day making up for the two hours of the day before that you and Homer never even worked.”
“It’s going to more than jest break into a morning,” Solon said. “It’s going to wreck it. There’s six units left over. Six one-man-hour units. Maybe you can work twice as fast as me and Homer put together and finish them in four hours, but I don’t believe you can work three times as fast and finish in two.”
Pap was standing up now. He was breathing hard. We could hear him. “So,” he said. “So.” He swung the ax and druv the blade into one of the cuts and snatched it up onto its flat end, ready to split. “So I’m to be penalized a half a day of my own time, from my own work that’s waiting for me at home right this minute, to do six hours more work than the work you fellers lacked two hours of even doing atall, purely and simply because I am jest a average hard-working farmer trying to do the best he can, instead of a durn froe-owning millionaire named Quick or Bookwright.”
They went to work then, splitting the cuts into bolts and riving the bolts into shingles for Tull and Snopes and the others that had promised for tomorrow to start nailing onto the church roof when they finished pulling the old shingles off. They set flat on the ground in a kind of circle, with their legs spraddled out on either side of the propped-up bolt, Solon and Homer working light and easy and steady as two clocks ticking, but pap making every lick of hisn like he was killing a moccasin. If he had jest swung the maul half as fast as he swung it hard, he would have rove as many shingles as Solon and Homer together, swinging the maul up over his head and holding it there for what looked like a whole minute sometimes and then swinging it down onto the blade of the froe, and not only a shingle flying off every lick but the froe going on into the ground clean up to the helve eye, and pap setting there wrenching at it slow and steady and hard, like he jest wished it would try to hang on a root or a rock and stay there.
“Here, here,” Solon said. “If you don’t watch out you won’t have nothing to do neither during them six extra units tomorrow morning but rest.”
Pap never even looked up. “Get out of the way,” he said. And Solon done it. If he hadn’t moved the water bucket, pap would have split it, too, right on top of the bolt, and this time the whole shingle went whirling past Solon’s shin jest like a scythe blade.
“What you ought to do is to hire somebody to work out them extra overtime units,” Solon said.
“With what?” pap said. “I ain’t had no WPA experience in dickering over labor. Get out of the way.”
But Solon had already moved this time. Pap would have had to change his whole position or else made this one curve. So this one missed Solon, too, and pap set there wrenching the froe, slow and hard and steady, back out of the ground.
“Maybe there’s something else besides cash you might be able to trade with,” Solon said. “You might use that dog.”
That was when pap actually stopped. I didn’t know it myself then either, but I found it out a good long time before Solon did. Pap set there with the maul up over his head and the blade of the froe set against the block for the next lick, looking up at Solon. “The dog?” he said.
It was a kind of mixed hound, with a little bird dog and some collie and maybe a considerable of almost anything else, but it would ease through the woods without no more noise than a hant and pick up a squirrel’s trail on the ground and bark jest once, unless it knowed you was where you could see it, and then tiptoe that trail out jest like a man and never make another sound until it treed, and only then when it knowed you hadn’t kept in sight of it. It belonged to pap and Vernon Tull together. Will Varner give it to Tull as a puppy, and pap raised it for a half interest; me and him trained it and it slept in my bed with me until it got so big maw finally run it out of the house, and for the last six months Solon had been trying to buy it. Him and Tull had agreed on two dollars for Tull’s half of it, but Solon and pap was still six dollars apart on ourn, because pap said it was worth ten dollars of anybody’s money and if Tull wasn’t going to collect his full half of that, he was going to collect it for him.
“So that’s it,” pap said. “Them things wasn’t work units atall. They was dog units.”
“Jest a suggestion,” Solon said. “Jest a friendly offer to keep them runaway shingles from breaking up your private business for six hours tomorrow morning. You sell me your half of that trick overgrown fyce and I’ll finish these shingles for you.”
“Naturally including them six extra units of one dollars,” pap said.
“No, no,” Solon said. “I’ll pay you the same two dollars for your half of that dog that me and Tull agreed on for his half of it. You meet me here tomorrow morning with the dog and you can go on back home or wherever them urgent private affairs are located, and forget about that church roof.”
For about ten seconds more, pap set there with the maul up over his head, looking at Solon. Then for about three seconds he wasn’t looking at Solon or at nothing else. Then he was looking at Solon again. It was jest exactly like after about two and nine-tenths seconds he found out he wasn’t looking at Solon, so he looked back at him as quick as he could. “Hah,” he said. Then he began to laugh. It was laughing all right, because his mouth was open and that’s what it sounded like. But it never went no further back than his teeth and it never come nowhere near reaching as high up as his eyes. And he never said “Look out” this time neither. He jest shifted fast on his hips and swung the maul down, the froe done already druv through the bolt and into the ground while the shingle was still whirling off to slap Solon across the shin.
Then they went back at it again. Up to this time I could tell pap’s licks from Solon’s and Homer’s, even with my back turned, not because they was louder or steadier, because Solon and Homer worked steady, too, and the froe never made no especial noise jest going into the ground, but because they was so infrequent; you would hear five or six of Solon’s and Homer’s little polite chipping licks before you would hear pap’s froe go “chug!” and know that another shingle had went whirling off somewhere. But from now on pap’s sounded jest as light and quick and polite as Solon’s or Homer’s either, and, if anything, even a little faster, with the shingles piling up steadier than I could stack them, almost; until now there was going to be more than a plenty of them for Tull and the others to shingle with tomorrow, right on up to noon, when we heard Armstid’s farm bell, and Solon laid his froe and maul down and looked at his watch too. And I wasn’t so far away neither, but by the time I caught up with pap he had untied the mule from the sapling and was already on it. And maybe Solon and Homer thought they had pap, and maybe for a minute I did, too, but I jest wi
sh they could have seen his face then. He reached our dinner bucket down from the limb and handed it to me.
“Go on and eat,” he said. “Don’t wait for me. Him and his work units. If he wants to know where I went, tell him I forgot something and went home to get it. Tell him I had to go back home to get two spoons for us to eat our dinner with. No, don’t tell him that. If he hears I went somewhere to get something I needed to use, even if it’s jest a tool to eat with, he will refuse to believe I jest went home, for the reason that I don’t own anything there that even I would borrow.” He hauled the mule around and heeled him in the flank. Then he pulled up again. “And when I come back, no matter what I say, don’t pay no attention to it. No matter what happens, don’t you say nothing. Don’t open your mouth a-tall, you hear?”
Then he went on, and I went back to where Solon and Homer was setting on the running board of Solon’s school-bus truck, eating, and sho enough Solon said jest exactly what pap said he was going to.
“I admire his optimism, but he’s mistaken. If it’s something he needs that he can’t use his natural hands and feet for, he’s going somewhere else than jest his own house.”
We had jest went back to the shingles when pap rid up and got down and tied the mule back to the sapling and come and taken up the ax and snicked the blade into the next cut.
“Well, men,” he said, “I been thinking about it. I still don’t think it’s right, but I still ain’t thought of anything to do about it. But somebody’s got to make up for them two hours nobody worked this morning, and since you fellers are two to one against me, it looks like it’s going to be me that makes them up. But I got work waiting at home for me tomorrow. I got corn that’s crying out loud for me right now. Or maybe that’s jest a lie too. Maybe the whole thing is, I don’t mind admitting here in private that I been outfigured, but I be dog if I’m going to set here by myself tomorrow morning admitting it in public. Anyway, I ain’t. So I’m going to trade with you, Solon. You can have the dog.”
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