“Yes, sir,” Joey said, immensely relieved that Mr. Ben had taken over and that he wouldn’t have to face Crenshaw again. “Crenshaw is nice, Mr. Ben. Why would Mr. White do that? I thought the teacher liked Crenshaw; she let him help her move in and he was bringing her here and everything.”
“It’s complicated,” Mr. Ben said. “It’s one of those grownup things that only grownups can fix. Don’t spend too much time thinking about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said.
Mr. Ben got into motion. “Let’s clean up this mess and fix some supper. Tom Powers from up the road brought this piece of meat, but we can’t eat it now. Just scrape it up and we’ll throw it out. What else did you do this afternoon?”
Joey told him while they were cleaning up the floor. He captured again the excitement with the weasels and the rabbits in the pine thicket, and Mr. Ben skillfully asked a few questions as he went along; soon, telling about the thicket, Joey forgot for the time the affair at the schoolhouse and Crenshaw.
Mr. Ben kept Joey interested with hunting talk until dinner was finished, but after the boy said good night and went off to the bedroom, he began to think about White, Crenshaw, and the teacher again. Despite Mr. Ben’s efforts to distract his mind from the affair, he remembered the old man’s grim expression when he was talking about it and his remarkable presence of mind in letting the pan fall to drown out what Joey was saying. He realized that Mr. Ben was worried, and so he began to worry too. Crenshaw’s shocked expression had impressed him; he wondered what Crenshaw was going to do. He didn’t think that Crenshaw was going to be diffident and mild, for he obviously had a great interest in the girl, and he had heard enough snatches of conversation at home to know that grownups sometimes got very violent about such things. Joey had seen grownups fight, and the fury of it had frightened him. Would Crenshaw fight White? Would he even shoot him? If he did, would it be his, Joey’s fault? The more he thought about it in the lonely darkness of the bedroom the more worried he became.
He began to wonder, being responsible, whether he would be allowed to come to the Pond again alone if the worst came of it and somebody got hurt, for he was still young enough to find grownups and their decisions often incalculable. What would his father say when he heard about all this? The last thing in the world that Joey wanted was to be put back to coming only with his father; the freedom of being on his own had been wonderful.
After what seemed to be hours of worry he heard the confused sound of voices in the next room. He got out of bed, crept across the room, and put his ear to the door. “ … glad you could come,” Mr. Ben was saying. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Crenshaw.”
“Thank you,” the girl said, and there were sounds of everyone sitting down. “I’ve heard a lot about you too, Mr. Ben. You’re famous. All the children tell me about you.” Her tone of voice, even to Joey’s ear, was a little too effusive; it was like the voices of several of his mother’s friends, the ones Joey didn’t like very much, when they were talking too loudly and not really meaning all they said. “You’ve been so kind to all of them, and so helpful,” she went on. “You haven’t any children of your own?”
“None, Miss Emma,” Mr. Ben said. “Only by proxy.”
“I think it’s a shame,” the girl said. “You seem to be so good with them. Don’t you think so, dear?”
She apparently asked this of Crenshaw, and Joey got his ear even closer to the door to hear what Crenshaw would say, but he didn’t say anything; apparently he nodded, for the girl’s voice went on again.
“He’s been so strong and silent all evening,” she said, “that I’ll just talk to you. But I think it’s so clever of you to think of being a father by proxy. Are you being a proxy father for the little boy who’s with you now?”
“Yes,” Mr. Ben said. “I wish you could have met him this evening. He’s an interesting boy, but he was tired from a big day and went to bed early. He was up near the schoolhouse this afternoon, hunting rabbits. You didn’t happen to see him?”
There was a short silence and things seemed to be crawling around in it; Joey held his breath, and couldn’t have moved if he wanted to, but he felt a sudden thrill of admiration for Mr. Ben and his cleverness.
“This afternoon?” the girl asked, and her voice went up just a little. It was not very much, but Joey didn’t have his eyes to distract him, and he heard it. “This afternoon? No, I didn’t see him. It’s vacation, you know, and I wasn’t there very long.”
“Did you see anybody?” Crenshaw asked suddenly, and to Joey there was no diffidence in his voice this time. It was almost flat, but in the flatness Joey heard, or thought he heard, an odd little note of entreaty.
“No, dear,” the girl said, and her voice was under control again. “Should I have? Were you there too?” She apparently turned and addressed herself to Mr. Ben. “Wouldn’t you think that if he were anywhere near he would have stopped in and helped me?”
Joey marveled at her duplicity, and hated her for it; then Mr. Ben spoke again. “Maybe he wouldn’t want to disturb you,” he said, “but there are times when it’s better to be disturbed.” There was another silence, and then Mr. Ben said, “I’ll get us some coffee. It’s all ready; it won’t take a minute.”
Joey heard him get up and walk across the room, and crept back to the bedroom again. He was limp with relief and full of a rather awed admiration for Mr. Ben. He crawled into bed, and almost at once was asleep.
CHAPTER NINE
When Joey awoke he heard Mr. Ben in the living room, got up, and went in there to dress. The old man was setting the table.
“Morning, Joey,” he said. “How did you sleep?”
“Hi, Mr. Ben. I was sort of worried in the night.”
“I can see why, but there’s no earthly reason for you to worry, Joey. None of this is your fault, nothing can happen to you because of it, and I’m glad it happened the way it did. Last night I had a chance to suggest to that … the teacher that she had better be careful.”
“Do you think she will?” Joey asked. “Crenshaw likes her, and he’s good, Mr. Ben.”
“Yes, he’s a good man even if he is a little slow. I think her trouble is that she came from a very small town, no man paid her much attention, and now that she’s here and two men are paying her attention it’s gone to her head. Probably no one paid her attention at home because they grew up with her and knew what a sidewinder she was.”
“What’s a sidewinder?” Joey asked. The word intrigued him.
“It’s a rattlesnake, but I meant it as a sort of troublemaker.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. “Sidewinder. Sidewinder.” It was a good word, and he said it several more times to himself; it engaged him for a moment, and then he returned to his preoccupation. “What do you reckon she’ll do, Mr. Ben?”
But Mr. Ben had had enough of it. “I don’t know,” he said, “and I don’t think you need bother about it. Forget it and enjoy yourself. Let’s have breakfast.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and his heart sank. He had come to the end with Mr. Ben, and knew that there was no use trying to go farther.
“I forgot to tell you,” Mr. Ben said as they went into the kitchen, “that I got a letter from your father yesterday. He’s coming down to pick you up when you go home. He wants to bring a few things.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and although he always enjoyed being with his father, he wished that it might have been some other time.
Mr. Ben had taken some eggs out of the cabinet, and broke them into a pan. “I wrote your father back and I wrote a note to Ed Pitmire,” he said as he began to beat the eggs. “I wish you’d get the letters on the dining table and take them out to the mailbox so they’ll go right away this morning. Mailman will be here pretty soon.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and went and got the letters and took them down the lane.
Joey put the letters in the box, raised the little red metal flag, and closed the box again. He was very depressed and wa
lked slowly back to the house. Mr. Ben had the scrambled eggs on the table, and they sat down to eat. Joey didn’t feel very hungry, but Mr. Ben had a fine appetite and was quite cheerful; it was almost as if a load had been taken off his mind all of a sudden.
“What’s your program for today?” he asked. “Charley hasn’t showed up, has he?”
“No, sir, he hasn’t,” Joey said. “I looked for him when I came back from the mailbox.” He swallowed some scrambled eggs, not liking them, and then decided to try Mr. Ben out once more. “Mr. Ben, you reckon my father will come down sooner than he thought he would?”
Mr. Ben looked at him, and a small, secret grin appeared on his face. “I don’t see why he should,” he said. “He’s a busy man. He has to work twice as hard now as he used to just to keep you in shells. Do you want to still-hunt?”
“I reckon so,” Joey said, but without much enthusiasm.
“You could go back and try those rabbits again.”
Joey didn’t want to do that; the schoolhouse was that way. “No, sir,” he said. “I thought I’d save that and take my father there.”
“That’s a good idea. Why don’t you go with me to visit my traps later this afternoon? We might even hear some turkeys go to roost.”
For the first time that morning Joey began to take an interest in life. “Turkeys?” he asked. “You reckon we might?”
“Could be,” Mr. Ben said. “We’ll be up around the head of the Pond late in the afternoon, easing along quiet and slow, and the chances should be pretty good.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. “I reckon I’ll do that. I’ll go out this morning somewhere and come back for lunch, and then we can go.”
“Good,” Mr. Ben said, and they got up and took the dishes out and washed them.
When this chore was finished, Joey went into his bedroom and put on his hunting shoes and got his gear together. While he was doing it he wondered where he would go. He considered paying a visit to Horace and talking to him about his problems; there was no one else he could talk to, and somehow he felt close to the crippled boy. But he abandoned this idea after a moment, for he might encounter Sam White and he shrank from having to talk to the man, of looking into his close-set, inattentive eyes and thinking of him reaching for the teacher and beating Odie and Claude and Charley and the mule. The thought of these things brought a hollow feeling to his stomach; he couldn’t do it.
He stood in the middle of the room feeling isolated and lost, and then a recollection of the swamp came into his mind. Silent and still, other-worldly and remote, it suddenly seemed the place for him to go. He nodded, went through the living room and picked up his gun and told Mr. Ben where he was going, took his casting rod from the porch, and went down the hill. The day was windless and quite still; the Pond lay dreaming and flat as a mirror in the sun. He felt better just looking at it, so untroubled and serene, without problems, ready to bear him up and ask nothing of him but that he enjoy being upon it. He stowed his gear in the bateau, got in, and shoved off.
He paddled along a few yards off shore, pausing occasionally to drop his plug between the cypress butts, and caught two nice bass before he came to the close-growing cypresses where the stream emptied into the Pond. Here he stopped paddling for a moment and looked around as though to orient himself, and then went on. The cypresses began to close in around him, like a multitude of columns in a great hall whose lofty ceiling was the blue of the sky darkened by a fretwork of branches; the dark cedar water was the glimmering floor. The feeling came upon him, as it had before, that he was in another world quite different from the open, sunny world of the Pond; it was like the fairy-tale world of children that no grownups nor any hostile thing could enter. He paddled so slowly and carefully that there was hardly a ripple about him.
He recalled for a moment how frightened he had been the other time, and it seemed a far-off thing; he wasn’t frightened now. Somehow the experience of getting lost had awakened, in its mysterious way, the sense of orientation, the intangible compass in the mind that some people have, that, even in a country unknown to them, holds them subconsciously in the direction they want to go. He didn’t have to think about it; he knew he would get out; his mind was free to listen in the brooding quiet and his eyes were free to watch. The gray drooping Spanish moss grew thicker; the solution to the mystery of what might be there around the next bend continued to elude him.
He recalled the otter and suddenly found himself wishing for it. He wanted to see it again—not to shoot at; the thought of shooting at it never occurred to him—but to watch, unseen, as it moved about its concerns in fluid beauty. He went on for a while longer, silently and in expectation, but he didn’t see it. Finally he turned back, still hoping that the otter would appear and bring the movement of life to the great columned hall of the swamp, but it did not.
Mr. Ben had a little upright round sheet-metal stove with a square base, which he set in front of him in the bateau when the weather was cold. He used it mostly to dry and warm his hands after pulling a trap out of the water to take out a drowned muskrat. Joey collected an armful of sticks for firewood while the old man built the fire in the stove; when he had it going he put the stove in the boat, sat down in the stern seat, and they started out.
It was late in the afternoon and shadows were growing long as they paddled up the north shore of the Pond; there was a chill in the air. Mr. Ben had a string of muskrat traps around the Pond, set under water near the entrances of muskrat holes, and occasionally he would head into shore and they would both lean over the side and check the trap. By the time they reached the head of the Pond they had three muskrats, fished up drowned in the traps; the traps had been reset and lowered to the bottom again.
The sun was not far from setting when they started back down the southern shore, and the silence-that comes toward sundown, when whatever wind there is tends to die with the dying sun and the woods prepare for night, held the world. The rhythm of Mr. Ben’s paddling grew slower and Joey stopped paddling altogether; Mr. Ben lighted his pipe, and they slid along slowly not far off shore at the head of an oily V of ripples. As they came around a point, missing the cypress knees a little offshore, a sudden flutter and flapping came to them across the water from the next point several hundred yards ahead; a big dark shape flew up into a tree on the shore.
Joey half rose from his seat; Mr. Ben began to back water at once.
“A turkey!” he whispered. “A turkey!” The paddle made a swirling ripple, the water sucked at it, and the old man, digging into the water, got the bateau stopped and slowly backed it behind the point again. “Did you see him?” he whispered. “He’s in the tree!”
Joey stared at him, excitement running along his nerves like an electric current. “I saw him!” he whispered. “I saw him, Mr. Ben! What do we do now?”
Mr. Ben was excited too, although he tried to appear blasé. “We’ll keep still for a while,” he said. “Then we’ll cross and go down the other shore.”
“Aren’t we going to shoot him? Are we just going to let him sit there? Mr. Ben—”
“Shhhhh!” Mr. Ben said. “He won’t move again now unless we frighten him. We’ll come back early in the morning and just knock him out of the tree.” He grinned at Joey. “I can taste him already.”
“Are you sure he’ll stay?” Joey asked. “Couldn’t we sneak up when it gets dark?”
“We couldn’t see him, and he might fly off if he heard us coming. He’s roosted now; he’ll stay there.”
Joey wasn’t convinced; he was very much afraid that the turkey might move during the night, but Mr. Ben knew more about turkeys than he did, and he finally accepted the old man’s decision. They sat quietly, occasionally grinning at one another, as the sun went down and the light faded from the sky. When it was dark Mr. Ben paddled across the Pond and they crept down the far shore.
As they went up the hill in the dark Joey began to think about his father again, wondering whether he had come down sooner than he expected
to and would be waiting at the house for them. He hoped not; he wanted with all his heart to have the turkey hanging triumphantly on the porch when his father got there. He could hardly wait until they reached the top of the path to see whether there was a light in the house. There was.
“Somebody’s here,” Mr. Ben said, and sounded surprised.
Joey didn’t reply; he was too cast down. He followed Mr. Ben silently as they climbed the steps and went into the kitchen.
There were footsteps in the living room and then a form in the doorway, but instead of being Joe Moncrief it was Crenshaw. Joey could hardly believe his eyes. Crenshaw stood in the doorway with his head forward a little, looking rather wildly at them.
“They took her away,” he said. “Mr. Ben, they came and brought another teacher and took her away.”
“Took who away?” Mr. Ben asked. “Miss Emma? They took Miss Emma? Who took Miss Emma?”
“Yes, sir,” Crenshaw said. He looked distraught. “Yes, sir.” He started to raise his right hand, and lowered it again in his agitation. “Yes, sir,” he said again.
“Well, well,” Mr. Ben said. He put the muskrats on the table and started for the door. “Let’s go in the living room, Crenshaw. Sit down in there and tell me about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Crenshaw said, and turned.
Mr. Ben followed him into the living room, and Joey followed them to the door and stood there looking at them. He was so relieved that he felt a little detached.
“Now, then,” Mr. Ben said as they both sat down. “Tell me what happened. I haven’t got it straight yet.”
Crenshaw scrubbed at his face with one hand. “Along about a couple of hours ago Miss Emma came to my house with a man from Williamsburg—I reckon he’s the principal there—and said the man got a call on the telephone from the State Board in Richmond to come get her and put her on the evenin’ train. They said they needed her right away at the school in Blacksburg. That’s where she come from, I reckon I told you.”
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