The Vain Conversation

  More people arrived, sliding down the bank, slick now from their tramping. Two men brought down a chest of beers, and when they were noticed, people left the circle around the body to buy beer. Someone shot again, followed by a volley.

  The boy did not look. He was trying to find a way to climb the bank without being seen. Darkness was settling in the woods, and he could see the patches of the sky over the crown of the hill. He started on his hands and knees, crawling and then scrambling through the leaf litter with the musk of the humus filling his nose and mouth. He slipped and lay flat until he had regained his senses. He could hear hooting and shouting from the crowd below and he sensed that no one was looking at him. Quickly he found a tree trunk wide enough to hide him. He was only halfway up to the road. He could see the crowd still, a tight circle of men next to the river, the three women still standing to one side. There were children, too, at least two boys. He thought he might know them. Probably he went to school with them, but then he focused on the top of the hill where the sky was pale blue, almost white in contrast with the gloom of the woods.

  He reached the top of the hill and squatted again. All seemed quiet; the crowd was out of sight, behind him. Before him, and a little below him lay the road. On one side, it went up, cutting through the hill and curving out of view, the gravel looking nearly as white as the sky. On the other side, it went down to the bridge. He gazed at the top of the hill for a moment, calculating the shortest and safest path home. He would continue uphill, he knew, crossing the roadbed, and going back to the bramble where he would find the old spring path. Another volley of gunfire made little pops and one gun boomed. He knew it was Bertrand, and a scene flashed through his mind as clearly as if he were witnessing it. “Bertrand,” he said. He was unaware that he shivered until he looked at his hands in front of him and clasped them in his armpits. Tighter and tighter he drew into a ball, trying to control the shaking. When he could stop shaking, he would run uphill and cross the road just where it curved. Releasing a heavy breath, he stood, started to run, and stopped again, nearly throwing himself to the ground.

  A yellow dog stood in the middle of the road. It was mud-spattered and lean, and it crouched with its tail between its legs when it saw him. “Toby,” he said aloud. Then he ran toward the dog, forgetting for the moment about the killings. It was Toby, his dog from long ago, he thought. The dog cowered, flattened itself into the road as he approached, and then with a growl, it shot past him running up the hill. He staggered a few steps, not sure now which direction to go. Then he heard the coarse sound of a car grinding down the gravel road on the other side of the bridge. It would have been someone coming from the direction of Bethany, he thought. He was tempted to look to see if it would be someone who could rescue Bertrand. But soon there was hooting and gunfire, and the boy clenched his fists, swallowed hard. He took several steady breaths, began to climb the embankment toward the field where he had left the blackberries. The sun was gone and the light was swooning towards blue-black. Stars were beginning to flicker in the sky above the road. From higher ground, he could see the bridge and in the failing light make out people, boys mostly, watching. They climbed the diagonals or sat on the roadbed and swung their legs over the side of the bridge. Two boys had climbed high into the truss and swung like monkeys from the struts. He knew some of the boys from school and felt now it would be okay to join them. That way, he told himself, he could see what was going on, and he would be with a group and no one would bother him.

  He started down the embankment, losing sight of the boys. As he landed beside the roadbed, the lights of a car shone on him. His muscles tensed and he went up on his toes, ready to dive for the bush. But he didn’t move. Though poised to spring, flexed so tightly they ached, his muscles failed him. The car approached, slowed as it went by. It was Mr. Jacks’ Buick wagon, now appearing purple in the dim light. Mr. Jacks was alone in the car, and as he drove by he peered out at the boy. Their eyes met momentarily, and the vacant, black look in Jacks’ face—nearly the look of a snake, the boy thought—sent a shiver through him. After the car passed, he ran.

  When he was at the top of the hill, he thought he was far enough away that he no longer had to run. Now, the gurgling of the river, echoing up the ravine, and the rustling of the breeze through the woods predominated, though when he listened he could hear occasional shouting and laughing from the bridge. He walked blindly at first, until he realized he was following the path through leaf litter where the woman’s body had been dragged. He followed it until he came to the place where she had been shot. He did not recognize the place, until his foot slipped in the bloody leaves and roused a swarm of flies. Now, he began to run, crazily, not caring the direction. Branches cut across his face. He stubbed his toes on stones. He tripped, got up, kept running downhill, and he thought he was nearing the road. He heard the groan of a car, and knew to be safe he had to get away from the road.

  Suddenly, he ran into a wall of vines. His legs tangled in the vines and when he tried to draw them back, they tangled even more. He tore at the leafy strands, but the vines seemed alive, wrangling and writhing and entrapping his body the more he fought to get through them. Finally, he gave up and let his body fall forward. He breathed heavily and slowly became aware of a faint floral odor, like a sour lilac. Kudzu. He was trapped in a drapery of kudzu vines that hung from trees over the road. Once again, he struggled to free himself, but exhausted he resigned himself to hang, like an insect in a web. “Oh, Bertrand!” he said over and over. “Why Bertrand?”

  TWO

  In the spring of the year before—the last year of the war, 1945—Lonnie’s great Aunty had come from Savannah to live with him and his mother. His father had been in the army for nearly three years, first at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and then in Africa, Italy, and Germany. The war had consumed everything—meat, milk, sugar—and Lonnie’s eight-year-old imagination. He saw the war pictures in the newspapers and newsreels when they went to the movie house, but in his mind he saw gigantic dirigibles shooting ray guns down on people fleeing through crowded city streets and robotic goons in hand-to-hand combat with muscular GIs and comic book supermen. “You too young to worry about war,” his mother would tell him, but he wasn’t worried. He only wanted to know where his daddy was and when his daddy was coming home. “He’ll be back right soon, right soon indeed, but I can’t say when, though. He’s got to kill some bad men,” his mother said. “Like Tom Mix and Superman.”

  Great Aunty wasn’t so hopeful. “Only the good Lord knows what’s true,” she would say. She chewed tobacco and used a blue pee pot for a spittoon. Lonnie’s job was to empty it, as well as all of the chamber pots. He also had to bring in wood for the stoves and to take care of Toby, his daddy’s dog. “War,” Aunty said, “is a” bomination in the eyes of the Lord. Lord said ‘Love your enemies, as yourself.’”

  “But what you go’ do, Aunty, if they attack you? Whole country can’t turn the other cheek. We turn the other cheek, you go’ be learning to speak German, if they don’t kill you …” Lonnie’s mother said. She turned to him. “God on our side, so don’t fret none ’bout your daddy. He’ll be home, come next year. Lord willing.”

  These exchanges were frequent and Aunty never pushed, always allowing the boy’s mother the last say for soon, his mother left also. She went to Marietta, just outside of Atlanta, to work in an airplane factory. It was only two hours away by train, and she came home once every month or so. When she was gone, the old woman reigned, even though some days her arthritic hips prevented her from getting out of bed.

  One Sunday at suppertime, they sat at the kitchen table eating cabbage and bread and a rare serving of pork. Toby sat just outside the screen porch door on the stoop with his bowl of scraps. He was a yellow mutt, old as Methuselah, still trim and able to trample through the woods.

  “I tell you this now because you’re going to have to learn it,” Aunty declared, her finger pointing toward the ceiling, “and your momma ain’t about to tell yo
u. God’s truth is a hard truth, little boy. Hard, but you learn it and you learn to live with it.”

  He didn’t understand her talk, coming as it did in her wheezy, phlegmy voice, directed at the air around him as much as at him. She told him that she had been born during a war, The War Between the States. She, of course, could remember none of it, but she did remember the limbless men in her family who had survived it, their stories of carnage. She said they talked of battlefields where, for as far as they could see, from one horizon to the next, lay bodies and parts of bodies, and a man couldn’t take two steps without stepping on a body. “And I had always wondered why men would do such a thing to one another and why God would allow it. Does God care that a man puts a bullet through another man and widows his wife and orphans his children? Don’t think that He does?”

  Lonnie picked the pork out of his cabbage. He liked both cabbage and meat, but he didn’t like them together. He found a piece of boiled bacon and slipped it into his mouth. The fat was smooth on his tongue, and the cabbage flavor made it sweet and he found it hard to chew.

  “But war still didn’t have much of a meaning to me. Of course I have never been a soldier. Thank God I didn’t live when there was war in this country, and praise God it won’t come here today. But in ’82 I lost my beau to war with the Indians out in Dakota. Ralph Hughes was his name. Handsomest boy there ever was, at least was to me. Straight, thick black hair and black eyes. And tall and lean as a stick. A black Irishman.” She closed her eyes and Lonnie stopped chewing the bacon and looked at the old woman’s quivering wrinkled cheeks. When she opened her eyes, she seemed not to see him. “I always did like a man with pretty hands—and we had plans.” Now, she regarded Lonnie. Her finger wagged. “Plans. You would’ve grown up in the West, young man, if I’d had my druthers. We both would have been Westerners. Pioneers! There was nothing for us poor folks here in Georgia.” She paused and looked down to her lap, wrung her hands. “That was long ago.” Slowly, she rose from the table and removed the dishes to a wash pan on the stove. After she had cleaned the kitchen, they sat on the back stoop, Toby beside them and, as if the cleaning had been just a mere pause in her story, she resumed: “I should have made a family for myself, a good one. But I always bore a hard feeling for the Indians. Luckily you don’t see too many of them around in Georgia anymore, but when I see one, it makes ice come up on my skin and I go cold to the bone, too, just thinking about Ralph and thinking about what all, not just Ralph, but everything—the life that was taken from me. Somebody should pay for it. I still think that. The Bible does say, ‘Love your enemies,’ and funny thing is, I don’t even think of Indians as my enemy. I mean, I don’t feel at war with them. I just get cold and I want them to pay for what they did to Ralph—”

  “What did they do to him?” Lonnie interrupted. She looked up at him, as if surprised that he was there. “Oh, why child, they killed him! Just twenty-three years old, but they killed him.”

  “He was a cowboy.”

  “He was a soldier. In the cavalry. A horseman.” Toby yawned wide and wagged his tail against the boy’s leg. “I ought to forgive. Lord knows the Indians have suffered in this country ’til you hardly see one. Even if you go out West, you’d hardly see one. I need to forgive, for the Bible tells me this.” She stroked the boy’s shoulders. He felt her wrinkled hand against his neck and he wondered about how old she must be. “But son, how can we redeem ourselves so that He might redeem us? We live in the way of sin from which none is free. We all travel that road, the same as our forebears.” Her voice trailed off and for a long moment she was quiet. “He makes it so hard.”

  “Maybe it’s supposed to be hard.”

  “Live long enough, you’ll know for sure.”

  Had he understood them, her words might have seemed prophetic to the boy.

  The next morning, while bringing water up from the spring hole, the boy heard a car braking and sliding in the loose gravel on the road. He put down the bucket and ran to the front of the house, and there he saw a tall man standing over Toby and wiping his brow. Toby lay in the road, breathing heavily, but otherwise still. Even from the distance of a few yards, Lonnie saw Toby’s pupils were fully opened, the expression in his eyes blank.

  “Why did you kill my dog, Mister?” Lonnie asked. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed. Toby was leaving. His daddy had left. His ma was gone. And, now, Toby. He didn’t know what to say, so he repeated himself. Then his words became garbled, he sat in the middle of the road and bellowed.

  “Fuck,” The man said and wiped his palm across his mouth. He looked at the boy and back to the dog and then to the weathered house.

  Toby whimpered and now began to drag himself into the ditch. His hind legs had been crushed. Blood squirted from his chest. When he’d eased his quivering frame in the low grass of the ditch, he lay still except for an occasional wag of his tail.

  “Why did you hit my dog, Mister?” Lonnie followed the dog. “Why did you?”

  “It was an accident, son.”

  “Why did you, Mister? Why did you hit Toby?” Lonnie kneeled to the dog, reached out for him but did not touch him. He wanted to hold him, to draw him into his lap as he had done many times, but he felt that to touch the animal would break him.

  “I hate to see an animal suffer,” Lonnie heard the man say. “God, I hate to see it. But accidents happen.” The man was quiet for a moment, and then he called to Lonnie, “Look.”

  Lonnie looked to see the man fingering though his wallet. “Look, I’ll bring you some money. Now, just hush up, and I’ll make it right for you.”

  Until then, Lonnie hadn’t realized that he was crying. Shaking, he stood, stamped his feet. “You didn’t have to hit him. You didn’t have to kill him.” Behind the man, Lonnie saw Aunty coming across the yard, hobbling on a cane. Her long dress and apron brushed against the white heads of plantain and set them bobbing on their stalks in a trail behind her. She carried a shotgun in her free hand. When Lonnie saw the gun, he stamped again and ran to Aunty, pulling at her dress. “No, Aunty, please. No.”

  “Shut up,” Aunty said. But he bellowed and she propped the gun against her hip, and with her free hand slapped him in the face. “Children ain’t got no obedience these days,” she said to the man, who seemed surprised by her sudden violence.

  “Well,” the man said, “He … He lost his dog.”

  “Every old dog has got to go sometime, Mister,” the woman said and held out the gun to the man. “Least you can do is to let him not suffer so.”

  “I hate to see an animal suffer,” the man said, but did not move until Aunty pushed him with the stock of the gun.

  Lonnie turned his face into Aunty’s apron, but smelling its sourness, he turned again to look at the man and Toby. Aunty held him by the shoulder. “You run along back inside,” she said, but did not loosen her grip. “Ok, then. Watch. It won’t hurt you to see. He’s a poor dog, but in a minute, he will be at peace. That’s is what a life is, just a roiling and a scuffling until at last God sees fit to bring you to your rest.”

  The man lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. He swayed a bit. Lonnie looked at Toby, now lying quietly in the ditch, his rib cage rising and falling rapidly. He looked at Aunty, her lips set firmly in a web of wrinkles, her eyes, black, glossy. He pulled away from her, and came to where the man stood. He breathed through his mouth. Snot ran down his nose. The man lowered the gun. “I’ll buy you another one,” he told the boy. I’ll buy you any kind you want. I got a boy about your age. I’ll buy you whatever you want.”

  Lonnie tried to stop the quivering in his cheeks. “Do it then. Kill him, then, won’t you?”

  Again the man lifted and lowered the gun. “You reckon the boy ought to see this?”

  Aunty snorted. “Boy will see worse if he lucky enough to live long.” Then she directed Lonnie to go back to the house and when Lonnie didn’t move, she said, “You can throw him over there in the woods. Let him feed the buzzards.” She point
ed across the road to a drapery of dust-covered kudzu and poison ivy. “And leave my gun on the front porch.” She turned and began to hobble back to the house.

  Once again the man put the gun to his shoulder. “God,” he said, “why doesn’t he just hurry up and die?” The dog’s chest kept swelling and falling rapidly. “I hate to see the thing suffer. I’ll make it up to you, son. Nothing like a boy and his dog. It’s American like apple pie.”

  One blast from the gun and Toby’s breathing stopped. In spite of his swaying and trembling, the man’s aim had been true and the shot had torn into the dog’s head. Of what Lonnie could see of the dog’s eyes, they seemed dull, and he imagined that Toby’s soul had stepped outside of his body and was floating up into the air towards heaven.

  Then he turned to the man who was handing him the gun. “Well, now, that’s better,” the man said and looked around. “Look here.” He breathed heavily. “I’ll bring you some money. How about that? I got to get down to the bank, but I’ll bring you some money.” The man lit a cigarette and threw the still flaming match to the roadbed. “Who lives here, anyway? Who’s your daddy, boy?”

  Lonnie told him.

  “Wayne Henson?” The man looked at the boy. “I reckon I can see that. This where he lives. Your daddy’s a good man. Good worker. I reckon he’ll be home soon.”

  “He’s in the war.”

  “Like I said, he’ll be home soon.”

  The boy was puzzled, and then he lost his breath in anticipation.

  The man took a long drag on his cigarette. “Like I said boy, the war is over.”