Crenshaw shook his head. “Yes, sir, he’ll do that if he can. Seems like they could feed him.”
Although a part of Joey’s mind was still moving around the catalogue and what to do about it, the rest of it fixed upon Crenshaw.
“Schoolteacher all moved in?” Mr. Ben asked.
“Yes, sir. Her name’s Mandy. She came from up yonder around Blackstone, somewhere. I reckon she feels sort of lonely. It’s the first time she’s ever been away from home.”
“You’ll have to help her get over that,” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir, I reckon I’ll try.”
He smiled shyly again, and suddenly Joey began to like him. He was obviously poor and worked hard for what little he got; he seemed unaggressive and diffident compared to Joey’s father and his enterprising friends; but somehow there was a feeling of trustworthiness and decency about him.
“How did your crop turn out, finally?” Mr. Ben asked.
“Not very good, I reckon,” Crenshaw said, and several lines appeared on his forehead. “I worked hard at it, but seems like my land’s just gettin’ too poor for much.”
“My potatoes aren’t any better than they ought to be, either,” Mr. Ben said. “Nobody did any great shakes, the way I hear it.” He added, encouragingly, “Well, maybe next year will be better and we’ll get more rain.”
“I sure hope so,” Crenshaw said, and looked toward the kitchen. He had heard something, and then the others heard it. There were footsteps on the porch, the door opened and closed, and two boys appeared in the living room doorway. The oldest was a year or two younger than Joey, and the other a year younger than that. They were both small for their ages and not very clean; the eldest appeared to be wearing his father’s cast-off clothing to which the other had fallen heir in his turn. They stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting. They both bore a resemblance to Sam White: the eldest had his thin face and close-set eyes; the other’s face was rounder and softer.
“Come in, come in,” Mr. Ben said, a little impatiently. “Odie, Claude. This is Joey and Bud.”
The four boys looked at one another with careful appraisal, trying to be casual; only the eyes of Odie and Claude indicated a wistful envy as they noted the good clothes of the other two. They walked over to the sofa against the window and sat down, and became as immobile as two rabbits crouching in their nests. Only their eyes moved.
The two men took up their interrupted conversation, paying scant attention to the four boys. Their voices rose and fell; Crenshaw was so diffident that Mr. Ben had to keep asking questions to keep the conversation going. Most of it seemed to be agricultural, and Joey’s attention wandered from it after a while and moved to the White boys. He became aware that they were not quite so immobile as they seemed. They communicated with small twitchings and an almost imperceptible poking of elbows; Joey realized that they would stop even that if they caught him watching them, and pretended his interest was elsewhere. By their movements they seemed able to direct one another’s attention to the guns in the corner, the clothes hanging on hooks in the wall, or anything else that interested them. They would frequently turn their attention to Crenshaw, and when they did this the twitchings would increase; once or twice secret half-smiles crossed the face of Odie, the older one.
Crenshaw finally said something about turkeys, and Joey’s attention immediately fixed on him again. A turkey meant a wild turkey, a fabled bird, so shy, elusive, and clever that it was the ultimate goal of every hunter. Joey had heard a lot of turkey talk from his father and his father’s friends, and although he was sure they would be too smart for him for a long time to come, he had, deep within him, an intense secret longing to get one. The White boys heard the word too; they became completely immobile again, listening.
“You saw them, then?” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir. It was a right big flock. They were—”
Mr. Ben, glancing at the White boys, interrupted him. “I’m glad there are some around,” he said. “You better see if you can get a shot at them before somebody else breaks the flock up or scares them out of the country.”
Crenshaw, a little belatedly, got the point. “I reckon that’s right,” he said. He looked ill at ease for a moment, and then stood up. “I better go along,” he said, and smiled at Joey and Bud. “It pleasured me to meet y’all.”
They stood up and smiled back at him. Mr. Ben got out of his chair and went into the kitchen with him; they heard him light the lantern and go out the door, and Mr. Ben came back into the room. “Well, now,” he said to the Whites, “what have you two been up to?”
Their eyes slid toward one another and the small one, Claude, said in a deep voice, “We reckoned they might want to go coon huntin’ tomorrow night.” By “they” he meant Joey and Bud, beings from a different world; the deep voice, coming from such a small boy, seemed incongruous and funny. Joey and Bud, caught unaware, almost laughed at it.
“Thank you,” Joey said, “but we won’t be here. We have to go home.” Not knowing what else to say, the four boys stood looking at one another; Joey suddenly remembered that they hadn’t eaten the other cake yet. “Do you want some cake?” he asked.
The eyes of Odie and Claude gleamed; Joey could almost see them licking their lips. They nodded, and Joey went out to the kitchen, cut the cake into fifths, put the pieces on plates, and brought the plates in on an old tin tray. Odie and Claude could hardly wait to get hold of it; their hands started to come up while Joey was still in the doorway, but they remembered their manners and let the hands drop again. Everyone sat down at the table and began to eat. The two country boys licked the rich chocolate icing first, and looked at one another; thereafter they ate with intense concentration, and didn’t look up until all their cake was gone. They both sighed, wiped their mouths with their sleeves, and reluctantly stood up.
“Reckon we better go,” Claude said. “Sure was good cake. Maybe you can go next time.”
“I’d like to,” Joey said. “Next time I’ll bring another cake.”
Odie and Claude exchanged a swift, hopeful glance, and Claude said, in his deep voice, “I hope it’s real soon.”
The other poked him with an elbow, he winced, and they both bobbed their heads, murmured what must have been a “good night,” and, turning quickly, went out. Mr. Ben and Bud went out after them; Joey stayed in the living room, for a plan had suddenly formed in his mind. When the other two came back in he said, “They sure seemed to like the cake, didn’t they?”
“It was nice of you to think of the cake,” Mr. Ben said. “I wonder how long it’s been since they had any.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s too bad, it’s just too bad.”
“Do you think they’ll tell their father about the turkeys?” Joey asked.
“Not them. He’d beat them for not finding out where they were, so they won’t mention it. They have to be pretty careful. Did you see them nudging one another? They’ve had to develop a language of their own. Now you’ve seen them, maybe you can see how lucky you are.”
“Yes, sir. If you’d let Mr. Crenshaw tell where he saw the turkeys, you reckon Mr. White would go after them?”
“Why, he’d have been out there before light.”
“But they were Mr. Crenshaw’s turkeys, weren’t they?”
“They’d be Sam White’s if he could find out where they are.”
“You reckon I’ll ever get a turkey?” Joey said.
“Maybe. If you ever run into a flock and break them up, you come right in here and get me. Turkeys call to one another when they get scattered. I’ve got a turkey call, and we’ll get where they were and see if we can call them to us. You better go to bed now. That’s where I’m going.” He took one of the lamps, waved at them, and went out of the room.
They undressed down to their underwear, took the other lamp, and went into the cold bedroom. They put their pajamas on, and Bud jumped into bed. Joey acted as though he was going to do the same thing.
“Oh, heck,” he said, ta
king up the lamp as though to blow it out. “I forgot to leak.”
He saw that Bud was not going to get up again, and taking the lamp he went into the dining room. Walking softly, he picked up the catalogue, took it into the kitchen, hurriedly found the page with the Kalamazoo swimming frog on it, and tore out the page. He crumpled the page and put it into the stove; there were a few embers left, and the page caught fire and burned. He stood there a moment, took the catalogue back into the living room, put it where it belonged, and went into the bedroom again. Bud didn’t stir; he was already asleep, hunched up on his side of the bed, and Joey raised the lamp a little and looked at his sleeping face. It didn’t look happy; there were lines across the forehead, as though Bud was worrying about something in his sleep. Looking at it, Joey suddenly felt unhappy too and confused. He didn’t want to feel that way; he blew out the lamp and crawled into the cold bed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mr. Ben woke them early the next morning, as they had asked him to do, and they emerged reluctantly from sleep. It was dim in the room, and the world outside seemed gray and one-dimensional, still shadowed by night. “It looks like rain,” he said. “You better go do your fishing and then come back for breakfast. Maybe you’d better start home right after that. If that road gets much rain you’ll be in trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
They got up and dressed silently in the living room, collected their gear, and went down to the wharf. The first streaks of color were coming into the sky, dyeing the overcast; they both felt half-awake and a little remote from the world, as though they were still dreaming. Although it had got a little warmer during the night, thin wisps of mist came off the water and thickened and trailed languidly over the Pond, giving their surroundings an unsubstantial and faintly eerie air. Neither of them spoke. Bud took the paddle and got into the stern of the boat.
“You fish,” Joey said.
Bud shook his head.
“You venched on him.”
Bud shook his head again, and Joey climbed into the bow, picked up his rod, put the spotted wiggler on his line, and sat down. The seat was wet from the night’s dew and soon soaked through his trousers. They shoved off and slid silently through the trailing mist; presently the clump of cypresses materialized fragmentarily through it, Bud stopped paddling, and Joey cast. The excitement that he should have felt wasn’t in him, and he wasn’t surprised when the big bass didn’t appear. He cast mechanically several more times and laid the rod down on the bottom of the bateau. The whole thing had been an anticlimax, without savor, and he wished that he hadn’t come out. “Let’s go back,” he said.
“Okay,” Bud said, and paddled back to the wharf.
They caught the fish in the live box, strung them on a small tree branch, and took them up to the house, wrapped them in newspaper, and put them into the Model T. They cooked breakfast, ate it, and packed up. They said so little to one another that Mr. Ben looked at them searchingly several times but didn’t say anything. They had lost touch, Joey because of his scheming about the frog and Bud because he felt that something was wrong between them and couldn’t define it, and he wasn’t going to ask. They finished their packing, stowed their gear into the Model T, and shook hands with Mr. Ben.
“Maybe you’ll see the alligators next time,” he said, grinning at them. “What will I tell Charley when he comes over for breakfast?”
“Tell him I’ll … we’ll bring some dog food next time,” Joey said. “We sure thank you, Mr. Ben.”
“Yes, sir,” Bud said. “Thank you very much.”
Mr. Ben stood on the porch watching as Bud cranked the Model T, and waved as they turned the corner of the house and went out the lane. At the gate they saw Charley trotting down the road; he stopped when he saw the car, watched it come through the gate, and turned home.
* * *
They stopped at Pitmire’s store and left a fish, and after a muddy but uneventful trip got to Richmond. It began to rain as they reached the city limits, so they decided to leave their gear in the Model T until after it had stopped. Joey dropped Bud at his house, which was close to Joey’s; their parting was a quiet one.
“Thank you, Joey.”
“Okay. I’ll see you.”
“I’ll see you.”
Joey drove around the block to the alley, put the Model T in the garage, picked up the fish and walked through the long backyard to the kitchen door. The maid, Mary, a small, skinny Negress whose age no one had ever been able to guess, let him in.
“Hi, Mr. Joey. Your maw’s been worryin’ you get stuck in them roads and fall in the lake and get lost in the woods. You do any of ’em?”
“Not any,” Joey said, and put his package on the table.
“What’s that? You got fish in there? You gon’ mess up my kitchen with fish?”
“I have to clean them. One’s for Bud.”
“You ain’t goin’ do any such thing. Lawd, Lawd. Fish scales an’ fish guts … No, suh. Anybody cleans ’em I cleans ’em. You go on, now. Your ma be home presently.”
She shooed him out of the kitchen. He went into the dining room, with its big, glass-domed, fringed lamp hanging over the center of the golden oak dining table, pausing to throw the wall switch rapidly six times to see the opalescent colors of the glass. Mary stuck her head in the door.
“You quit that, you hear? You had any lunch? You better take a bath. I bet you ain’t washed your face since you been gone. You take a bath, and I fix you some lunch.”
“Okay,” he said, and went through the living room and up the stairs, into his father’s “study” at the rear of the house. It was a disorderly room crowded with overstuffed chairs, a big leather-covered couch, bookcases, a flat-topped desk, and a gun cabinet; the closet was full of outdoor clothes and fishing tackle and the desk and bookcases were piled with sporting magazines and catalogues. Joey’s father was in the insurance business, but his heart belonged to the quail, the ducks of lower Chesapeake Bay, and all fish that showed spirit. Joey rooted about until he found the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, opened it to the page showing the Kalamazoo frog, and placed it in the middle of the desk. Then he went to his own room and changed his clothes; he wet his hair, washed his face and hands with a minimum of water in the bathroom, and went downstairs again. The fish had disappeared and his lunch was ready; he sat down at the kitchen table and ate it.
He was just finishing it when his mother came in. She was a pretty woman, tall and fair; there was an air of quiet good humor about her, and she smelled good when she kissed him. She had been downtown, and had on a big flowered hat and the suit that Joey liked; her umbrella was wet. “I didn’t expect to see you so early, honey,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes’m. Mr. Ben thought we’d better come back before it rained too much on the road.”
She put her umbrella in the sink. “I’m glad he thought of it. Were you polite to him?”
“Yes’m.”
“I hope you got enough to eat.”
“Yes’m.”
She glanced at Mary and shook her head with humorous resignation; she had long since given up any hope of getting more than a very bare report of his activities from him.
“I tole him to take a bath,” Mary said. “He comes in smellin’ like coal oil and smoke an’ I don’t know what, but he jus’ wet his hair an’ thought he fooled me.” She snorted.
“I don’t need a bath,” Joey said. “How could I get dirty down there, for gosh sake? We didn’t even have to wash the dishes. Mr. Ben washed them, because he had dirt in his hands and the dishwater takes it out.”
Mary cackled. “Miz Moncrief, you hear that? He been washin’ in dishwater when he wash at all. Ain’t no dishwater get very dirty from him, I reckon.”
“Take a bath, Joey.”
Joey saw that the battle was lost. “Heck,” he said and went upstairs again. He undressed, ran the tub full of water, and stretched out in it. Presently, lying quietly in the warm water, he fell into a semi-somnolent
state and lived over again the excitement of the squirrel hunt and the first attacks on the bass, and moved on. In the reverie that engaged him there was nothing unpleasant like his falling-out with Bud; Bud was forgotten, and didn’t even appear. As his reverie progressed only he and the splendid things he was going to do in the future were in it; for now that he had been to the Pond without grownups and got an intimation of what it could hold for him, his reaction to the world about him was changing, or had already changed.
He fell asleep in the warm water after a while, and only waked up when his father came into the bathroom and gently shook his shoulder.
“Wake up, boy,” his father said. “You’ll drown in all that water if you’re not careful.”
“Hi, Dad. Dad, can I have a Kalamazoo frog?”
His father, tall, lean, dark-haired, and ruddy, looked at him in puzzlement. “A what frog?”
“Kalamazoo, Dad. It only costs sixty-eight cents. It kicks when you pull it.” His father still looked puzzled. Joey stood up in the tub, reached for a towel, and began to dry himself. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He finished drying himself, ran naked into the study, and came back with the catalogue. “Here,” he said. “This is it.”
His father looked at the frog, and read about it. “I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about,” he said. “Do you think it’s any good?”
“Yes, sir. Could you get it tomorrow?” He began to put on his underwear.
“Get some clean underwear.”
“Yes, sir.” He ran into his bedroom, grabbed a clean union suit from a bureau drawer, put it on, and came back to the bathroom again. His father wasn’t there, so he went into the study and found him sitting at the desk. “I can have it. Can’t I? Please, Dad?”
“What’s all the rush, Joey?”
Joey squirmed. “It’s a sort of a secret,” he said. “I want to go down again soon, and I have to have it. And a hunting license. We didn’t have hunting licenses.”
“Did you hunt?”
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