There was another silence; the two White boys stared at one another, and Joey said, “It’s not a coon, is it? It doesn’t look like a coon.”
“Possum,” Odie said, and turned back to his brother. “Go git him. Hurry up.”
“I’m scairt, Odie,” Claude said.
“You git him, or I’ll bop you,” Odie said, and moved toward his brother. Claude fell back a few steps and Odie went after him; while Joey watched, puzzled and uncomprehending, the larger boy suddenly jumped at the other and gave him a punch that knocked him off his feet. He stood over him and drew back one foot to kick; the other scrambled up off the ground and ran to the base of the tree. Joey could see that he was crying now, and then Odie went up to him and hit him again.
Claude cried out in pain, and started to swarm up the trunk of the tree. He reached the lower branches and began to climb, and Joey, still appalled at what he had seen, tried to help him with the light. The boy reached the limb that had the possum on it, carefully stood up, and holding a branch above him with both hands inched out toward it. The possum grinned at him, showing sharp white teeth, and retreated toward the end of the limb.
Odie raised his voice again, shouting, “G’on out! G’on out and shake him!”
Claude inched farther out, and began to move up and down. The limb rose and fell with an accelerating rhythm; the possum started back toward him, changed its mind, and scrambled back out again. It almost fell off several times. Claude increased his efforts and Odie whooped like a lunatic and the limb gave an ominous crack. Claude’s face was white and frightened in the darting light, and Joey’s stomach crawled with apprehension for him.
The limb let go; Claude hung by his hands and managed to get back to the tree trunk. Charley seized the fallen possum with a snarl, shook it several times, and began to run around the tree with the whooping Odie after him. Claude appeared in the lantern light as though he had got down the tree by magic. They both ran after the dog and fell on him; Claude picked him up roughly by the tail, and Odie snatched the possum out of his mouth by its tail. He held the possum head down, with its head on the ground, and Claude picked up the ax, laid its handle across the possum’s neck, and stood on each side of the handle. Odie gave a mighty upward heave; there was a sharp ugly crack as the possum’s neck broke, and both boys whooped again. They looked like a pair of bedraggled minor devils at some horrid rite.
Claude stepped off the ax handle and the possum slowly rolled over as it died, grinning. The two boys stood looking down at it and became still. All of the wild energy had gone out of them, and in the coppery light their faces were a little drawn, tired and empty; their shoulders slumped and Claude’s face was smeared where he had wiped the tears off it with his dirty hands.
Joey stood in the background, staring at them in their sudden transformation and still hearing, like an echo inside his skull, the crack of the possum’s backbone. That chilling sound, the crazy kaleidoscopic scene in the flickering light, the whooping, and Odie’s sadistic thumping of his smaller brother showed him that he could never get together with them now. It was not only the incident of the cake that separated him from them; it was an entirely different way of life. The tensions that had been built up in them by their father and their lives which required the kind of outlet he had just seen were completely beyond his experience.
Odie turned to Claude. “Pick it up,” he said. “We got to go home.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Joey slept late the next morning. It hadn’t been very late when he got back to the house the night before, and he had first waked at his usual time, but a reluctance to get up and face the world had been in him, and he had gone back to sleep again. In the light of morning the experience of the night before seemed more remote than when he had gone to bed, but he still felt a little queasy about it. When he finally appeared in the living room Mr. Ben had finished his breakfast and was sitting before the stove reading an old magazine, puffing on his pipe. He looked up and grinned.
“Those two run you to death?” he asked.
“No, sir. We didn’t go very far. We got a possum. I thought we were going to hunt for a coon.”
“They usually end up with possums. That Charley’s too smart to tangle with a coon if he doesn’t have to. He usually lets them alone unless there’s somebody with a gun along. Did you have a good time?”
Joey didn’t say anything for a moment. He was afraid that Mr. Ben would think he was a fool if he told the truth, but the affair had puzzled him so much, and been so distasteful to him, that he wanted to share it with someone and talk it out. “No, sir,” he said, finally. “I reckon I didn’t.”
“I wondered if you would.”
“They were quiet until Charley treed a possum and got to the tree, and then they began to whoop and holler and Odie hit Claude and knocked him down, and kicked at him, and hit him again and made him climb the tree. Why did Odie hit him, Mr. Ben? He’s littler than Odie is, and he was scared.”
Mr. Ben took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at Joey for a moment. “I guess I should have warned you that something of that sort might happen,” he said. “What else went on?”
“Claude had to go out on the limb and jump up and down. I thought he was going to fall and hurt himself, for the limb broke. And then when they got the possum they put the ax handle over his neck and pulled him up and broke it. His neck, I mean. I reckon I wouldn’t have minded so much if they hadn’t acted so … so … I mean, they yelled and jumped around, they were … well, they acted like they were crazy.”
“So,” Mr. Ben said. “I know what you mean. I guess Sam must have been giving them a hard time.” He struck a match on the chair and lit his pipe again. “I’ll try to explain it to you. In the first place, their lives are different from yours. You have a nice house and nice clothes and your father’s good to you. You don’t really have many worries. Their father isn’t like that. He’s a mean sort of man, and having to try to get along without any money on land that’s worn out has made him meaner. He’s got a grudge on the world, and takes it out on anybody he can. Most people fight him back, but the boys can’t. He beats them whenever he feels like it, often for no reason except that he feels like beating somebody, and they have to take it. After they take a certain amount of it, it piles up on them, they build up a head of steam, and they’d blow up if they didn’t find something they could take it out on, like the possum. … The possum’s a sort of safety valve. You see what I mean?”
Joey stared at Mr. Ben, rather appalled at the pictures the old man’s words had conjured up. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I reckon I do, but why does Odie act so mean to Claude? He was even going to kick Claude.”
“Odie’s a lot like Sam,” Mr. Ben said. “He’ll be just like him by the time he’s grown up. Sam bullies them both, Odie bullies Claude, and Claude’s soft like his mother. I don’t know what will happen to him. I wish I could fix it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The pipe had gone out again and Mr. Ben relit it. “Now, then,” he said, puffing clouds of smoke. “I know that the business last night made you feel a little sick and you probably don’t ever want to see those boys again, but you will. They live too close, and we have to go over there sometimes, and they’ll be over here. They’re worked hard and never go anywhere, they have to wear old hand-me-downs and don’t get enough to eat, and you’re an object of great interest to them. Now that I’ve tried to explain some things to you, don’t you think you can make some allowances and get along with them?” He knocked out the pipe on the edge of the stove. “Incidentally,” he said, “a possum’s skull’s so thick that you can’t kill it by knocking it on the head. The way they killed it is the best way.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. He still didn’t like the affair of the possum, but he was beginning to understand the rest of it and was already feeling some sympathy for Odie and more for Claude. Mr. Ben had got through to him, although he didn’t think he wanted to go possum hunting with them again.
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, pleased that the dog was there. “I’ll go feed him.”
He went outside. The dog was sitting near the steps and his tail wagged slightly when he saw Joey. The boy got four biscuits out of the can and descended the steps and sat down on the bottom one. He wanted to make the dog come to him this time, to have Charley acknowledge that he realized how Joey felt toward him and to show that he trusted him. Now that Joey was able to fully understand Charley’s life, from what he had heard about the lives of Odie and Claude, his heart went out to the dog more than ever, for Charley didn’t even have the scant resources of the two boys. Even they bedeviled the dog, jumping on him and yanking him about by the tail; he was the most oppressed of them all.
Joey extended a biscuit, crooning, “Come on, Charley, come on, boy. I won’t hurt you, you know that. You know it.”
The dog cocked his head. He stood up, took a step, and sat down again; it was obvious that a struggle was going on within him. He wanted the biscuit, but like any normal dog he craved affection too, and he had never had any. He had long since accepted the fact that he wasn’t going to get it, had done his work and maintained his dignity as well as he was able; now he was being asked to change the viewpoint of a lifetime. He wanted to do it but the habit of caution was so strong in him that he still couldn’t quite conquer it. He whined softly, got up and took another step, and sat down again. He had never been so close to Joey before; two more steps would have brought him to the biscuit, but he couldn’t make them.
Joey kept talking to him, softly, hoping that this would be the time that Charley would come all the way, and finally realized that he would not. He knew that Charley wanted to, for his eyes and the set of his ears showed it; another low whine confirmed the impression. He leaned forward as far as he was able without getting up and laid the biscuit on the ground. Charley wagged his tail widely, to show his own feeling, lay down, and stretched out his neck and took the biscuit. This time, however, he didn’t go off with it. He ate it where he was, wagging his tail meanwhile. Joey gave him the other three biscuits in the same fashion and sat watching as he ate them, smiling. He knew that he had gained a little more, and decided to go squirrel hunting for a while.
He went back into the house, put on his hunting shoes and coat, got his gun, told Mr. Ben what he was going to do, and went out. He stood for a moment wondering where to go, for he had hunted along the north side of the Pond several times now and wanted to get into new country. He finally decided to hunt between the Pond and the Chickahominy Swamp, for he had never been in that territory and wanted to see what it looked like. He whistled to Charley, and they moved off past the barn and down the path which descended through the woods to the road in that direction. Once on the road he followed it through the avenue of tall cypresses that grew along the south shore of the Pond until he came to the spillway, crossed that, and turned along the stream that came out of the Pond and ended up, miles away, in the Chickahominy River.
Charley moved out, and Joey followed a somewhat southeast direction in the valley of the stream. The country was rather flat and low there, with a good deal of old cypress in it; it had a different feel from the higher, gently rolling land on the Pond’s north shore and he wasn’t sure he liked it as well. There were occasional thickets of greenbrier, tangled and impenetrable, and a different sort of quietness; presently he began to come to swampy areas that he had to go around, and the greenbrier increased. It was not an open woods; the farther he went the less he could see around him, the shorter his vistas were, and the more he felt closed in. He consciously kept his direction in mind, watching the sun; he had learned that much. He hadn’t heard Charley; the dog had been gone for quite a long time, and Joey wondered what had happened to him. He stopped and stood still for a while, listening, with his mouth slightly open.
It seemed to him that he had stood there for a long time, half hypnotized by the silence, when he heard the dog. Its voice was different; instead of the usual rolling bay there was a chop, an excited barking, in it, and it seemed to be moving. Joey was puzzled, for he had heard nothing like this from Charley before. He stood in indecision; he didn’t know whether to start for it at once or wait until it settled into something familiar, and while he waited a large dark bird came sailing in from the direction of the dog and dropped into the woods a hundred yards or so in front of him.
It had appeared with such unexpectedness, and dropped into the thick woods so quickly, that his view of it had been fragmentary; nevertheless, he had an impression of dark, barred wings and a snaky neck, a tail spreading and tipped with a lighter color. It couldn’t be a hawk, he thought, looking like that. For a moment he was puzzled, and then his heart began to pound. It was a turkey! A wild turkey!
A turkey, and close to him; even now it might be coming his way. He began to shake, and his mind was suddenly full of confusion. All of the methods to kill a turkey he had ever heard whirled around together in his head. He wanted to run toward it, he wanted to stand still, and he wanted to do both of these things at once. There was a greenbrier thicket between himself and the turkey, so thick that he could see nothing. He finally decided to stay where he was for a moment, watching, and just as he decided to do this the turkey came around the right-hand side of the thicket.
His breath caught in his throat, for it was a beautiful thing, shimmering with a dark iridescence, its head moving, taking slow steps. It came a few yards farther and Joey exploded out of his frozen state. His gun came up in a single motion, and he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; he had forgotten to push off the safety in his excitement, and as he stood there desperately pulling on the trigger the big bird wheeled and with darting quickness ducked behind the greenbriers again. Joey finally realized what the trouble was, and as he started to run shoved the safety forward. He reached the side of the thicket half sobbing with anxiety and excitement, ready to shoot on the instant, but the turkey was gone. The woods were as silent and empty as before.
His feet dragged as he climbed the hill to the house again, and he carried the gun over his shoulder like a stick of wood; all of the pleasure of being in the woods, of being in the world at all, had gone out of his life. He had had that desire of all hunters, a turkey, over his gun barrels, and through his own ineptness it had got clean away. He had acted like the most amateurish of all amateurs, and been so cast down by his defeat that he had given up any further thought of hunting squirrels, of hunting anything, and turned home. He was so disorganized that it was not until he got to the old barn that he recalled Mr. Ben’s advice, to the effect that if he ever got into a flock of turkeys and broke them up he was to come home at once and get the old man so that they could return to the spot and call the flock together. He stopped dead when this thought occurred to him, for it was like a revelation from Heaven. All was not lost; there was still a chance. He had not shot and scared them; they would still be trying to get together again, and if Mr. Ben went back with him, with the turkey call, they might still get a shot. “Great day!” he exclaimed, and started to run.
He came running around the corner of the barn, expecting to see Mr. Ben there waiting for him, and instead saw the two White boys sitting on the steps and Charley lying in his usual place in the yard. Charley, with his odd prescience, had known he had to quit and had taken a short cut back to the house; what had brought the White boys was a mystery. They were looking the other way and fortunately didn’t see him; he had time to drop to a walk before they realized he was there. He wouldn’t tell them about the turkey for the world. It was to be a secret between Mr. Ben and himself, for he remembered what Mr. Ben had said about White and the turkeys Crenshaw had found; he was vexed that the boys were there now, for he couldn’t say anything.
Odie and Claude saw him then, and got up from the steps.
“Hi!” they said together. “We thought you’d like to go squirrel hunt
in’, so we came over.”
“Hi!” he said and added, craftily, thinking that Mr. Ben could get rid of them somehow, “I reckon I better ask Mr. Ben first. I was going someplace with him.”
“He ain’t here,” Odie said. “He was gone when we come in. They was car tracks in the lane, so I reckon somebody got him and took him somewhere.”
All was lost, then, at least for now; the turkeys would doubtless flock together again before Mr. Ben got back, and they would have to get them another time. He didn’t want to go squirrel hunting again, particularly with Odie and Claude, but it occurred to him that if he didn’t they might go off and blunder into the place where the turkeys were and either frighten them away, tell their father, or—worst of all—kill one themselves. After his own performance he couldn’t bear to think of this possibility. He would have to go with them.
“I’d like to go,” he said. “We can go up this side of the Pond.”
Both boys began to grin, and Odie walked over to the porch and picked up a shotgun that Joey hadn’t noticed before. It was by way of being a museum exhibit; it was a hammer gun, double barreled, so rusty that it looked extremely dangerous, and the stock had been broken at one time or another and wound around with brass wire. The barrels must have been thirty-two inches long, and the entire gun was a little taller than Claude when the butt rested on the ground. It was old, very old, a twelve-gauge. Joey decided to be a long way from it when it was fired, for it was the most untrustworthy-looking gun he had ever seen.
As they started out Joey hoped there would be no performance like the one with the possum, but when Charley treed the first squirrel it appeared that he need not have worried. The two boys seemed to be in a state of grace and without tensions. The dog was at the foot of a huge beech, and as if by agreement the three of them took positions that more or less surrounded it and all stood looking up, each searching his own sector of the tree. Joey wanted to be the one to find the squirrel, but he couldn’t see it; he was a little chagrined when Claude gave tongue.
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