Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  Tuesday was bright and golden. So was Wednesday. So was Thursday. So was Friday. And tomorrow would be Saturday, with no school. And Opening Day!

  But now the rain pounded down in drops as big, it seemed, as baseballs. Then the wind rose and drove the drops savagely in thin arrows against the walls and windows. The panes were steadily bleared by water, as it cascaded down in clear sheets against the sills. The rain had come about breakfast time, teasingly at first, each big drop making a little dimple in the clean-swept sand of Sheriff Knox’s yard. Then the dimples turned to holes, and then the holes to little gulleys, and finally the gulleys spread to small lakes. Noah never saw a meaner rain than I had to celebrate that Saturday, the Opening Day.

  Breakfast was warm inside me—a big breakfast of oatmeal and ham and eggs and hominy and coffee. The fires burnt bright in the fireplaces, but a steady gust of rain drove through the breezeway that cut the old-fashioned country house in half, and little creeks of water ran in the uneven flooring.

  I opened the front door against the solid wall of sheeting water, and went out on the wide veranda. The rain was not so heavy you couldn’t see across the road to the soybean field where all the doves hung out. The dogs started to follow me out of the warm sitting room, but the wet wind smote them and they huddled back against the door. The guinea fowl that always ran loose committing suicide in the road had crowded under the house, and were standing, ruffled and angry clattering, with their feet hating the wet sand.

  I fought the door open again and the dogs and I went back inside. The Old Man and the Sheriff were sitting companionably in front of the fire, which hissed from the trickles that drove down the chimney. I was dressed for the wars, but neither of the old gentlemen had bothered to put on boots. They both wore the soft-sided Congress gaiters, and you could see the white legs of their long-handled drawers pulled down over their sock tops. They hadn’t even bothered to put on the long red-topped wool hunting socks they wore with their boots. The Old Man shook his head.

  “You might as well take off some of that regalia,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll hunt any birds today. How about it, John?” he turned his head to the Sheriff. “That rain looks like she’s hereto stay, eh?”

  “Yep,” the Sheriff said, spitting an amber arc into the fire. “You won’t see sun today. I thought for a while she might fair off, but I don’t think so now. And even if she did, the woods are too wet. Birds are all in the branches, huddled under some brush. They wouldn’t of fed out, and it’s too wet for the dogs to smell. No scent on a day like this.”

  I was all for dragging the dogs out by main force and fighting my way into the wet, but the Old Man shook his head.

  “Waste of time,” he said. “All you’ll do is rust your gun and catch a death of cold. You might as well resign yourself to the fact that this ain’t your lucky day. Even the dogs got better sense than to go out on a day like this. This day ain’t good for nothin’ but ducks, and the duck season ain’t open yet. Be a Stoic and count your past blessings.”

  The Old Man was right, of course. Some of the best bird shooting in the world happens in the right kind of rain—a slow drizzle that moistens the dry ground and helps a dog’s nose function, like a wet night makes combustion better in an auto-mobile motor. The trailers can trail and the winders can wind, and the coveys hang closer together. Also the singles have a way of sticking to where they hit, so you can make them better, and they don’t flush wild all over the place when you shoot over a point.

  Some of the best shooting I ever had was on a half-wet day, when the boys got separated from the men and the lazy hunters stayed home by the fire, but this was not going to be one of those days. I would have needed a boat to make it to the nearest pea patch.

  The Sheriff and the Old Man kept talking interestingly enough, I suppose, all about war and politics and crops and the last deer drive, but I couldn’t work up an appetite for what they were saying. I was someplace else, with the sun shining and the dogs fanning the fields.

  The Old Man watched me fidget for a while, and then he said, “Why don’t you go do something with the girls and leave us in peace? You’re about to wear out the rug. This ain’t any way to be a Stoic, and anyhow you’re making me and the Sheriff nervous.”

  Now as a rule I ain’t got anything against girls, especially today, when I’m a sight older. But right then the only time I had for women was when they were in the kitchen cooking something that smelled good and that I would eat later. About all girls were good for was to tattle and giggle and cry if you looked cross-eyed at them. I never knew a girl who could throw a baseball without snapping her elbow, and there seemed to be a general suspicion that all girls were good and all boys were bad.

  The Sheriff had a flock of gal children, and Ethel and Sally and Annie Mae and Gertrude were all twittering around about something or other, and all I could think of was that they sounded like a gaggle of geese and didn’t seem to accomplish much outside of confusion. The dogs were no help, either. They just lay by the fire and looked as mournful as I felt. Altogether it was the finest study in frustrated indoor activity I ever run onto.

  Lunchtime came and the rain still walloped down, hitting as hard as hammers. We sat down to eat a big country lunch—dinner, it was called in those days—but I didn’t have much feeling for the fried chicken and the venison and the apple pie, the big sugared tomatoes and all the other stuff I usually loved.

  After lunch the Old Man looked at me sharply, and for one of the few times in his life his voice matched the look. “All right, all right” he said. “Get your gun and the dogs, if you can find one that’s damned fool enough to go with you, and go hunting! Anything to get you out of the house before you drive us all crazy.”

  I put on an old oilskin over my canvas hunting coat, got the gun, and stirred up the dogs with my foot. They were not enthusiastic about leaving the fire, and I had to drag the old boys out the door. Only the puppy thought it was fun enough to come along under his own steam.

  The rain still sloshed down by the bucketful. I trudged through the soybean field, hoping to rouse a dove or so, but nothing was feeding. The gray-topped cotton soil was pure muck, now, and it stuck to my boots like cement, leaving black patches of soil underneath. Just walking in the gumbo was an effort, for your feet weighed a ton each.

  Two things, I learned that day, are not improved by bad weather. One is open ocean. One is woodland. Of the two the weeping woods are sadder than the sea.

  I still don’t know what happens to most outdoor life when it rains. I suppose the rabbits dive into their burrows and the birds perch in the trees or huddle under brush heaps. No sign of life appeared in the dripping woods, in the sodden fields, in the soaked prairies of high grass. The dogs were draggled, cockle-burred, and shivering. My old oilskin provided small protection. Rain got into my eyes and blinded me. My nose ran in time to the dripping of the trees, and the wind howled and the rain slashed down.

  I forced the dogs down into the swamps, figuring it would be dryer under the heavy trees, and perhaps we would stumble on a covey of quail. We stumbled on nothing shootable, although I did manage to slip in the mud while jumping the small creek and made myself a little wetter, but not much.

  After two hours or so I gave up. The dogs and I trudged back to the farm, as cold and miserable as dogs and boys are likely to get. We must have been a sight as we trudged into the breezeway.

  The Old Man must have seen us coming, because he met us in the breezeway. “Get out of them wet clothes,” he snapped, “and then come in to the fire. But mind you dry them dogs off before you turn them into the house. They’ll stink bad enough half-dry, anyhow.” Then he turned and stumped back into the sitting room where the fire was.

  I nearly froze changing from wet clothes to some dry ones, and I was afraid to go in to the fire until I had rubbed the dogs with a couple of dry tow sacks from the smokehouse.

  “Get any birds?” the Old Man asked sarcastically, as I stood with my back to
the fire, waiting for the heat to burn my back-side before I gave it a chance at the front.

  “Nosir,” I said.

  “See anything?”

  “Nosir. Nothing.”

  “I thought not,” the Old Man said. “You feel any better for flounderin’ around in the wet for the past few hours?”

  “Nosir,” I said.

  “Prove anything?”

  “Nosir.”

  “Have a cup of coffee,” the Old Man said, “and listen to the Sheriff tell about that bad field hand that killed his wife with an ax just back there close the road near to the graveyard.”

  After the Sheriff had finished his tale, which was sufficiently gory to hold any boy’s interest, the Old Man got up and walked to the window.

  “Looks like the rain’s slackenin’ off,” he said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sun didn’t set fair. Tomorrow’ll likely be a nice day. Pity it’s Sunday.”

  I muttered something, I dunno what, but it wasn’t very stoical. Then I sneezed.

  “You’re as butt-headed as your mother,” the Old Man said. “And she’s as butt-headed as her mother. I reckon if being butt-headed means anything you got the makings of a pretty good Stoic. I don’t see you handing out any accumulation of laughter, but if an aggregate of wisdom comes from being butt-headed I guess that sneeze tells me you’ve learned something about beating your head against a stone wall. Time and again you’ve heard me say that bad weather’s all right if you know how to make it work for you, but on a day like today the best way to make it work for you is to stay home in front of the fire with a book.”

  I sneezed again.

  The Old Man cocked his head. “Go get one of the women folks to give you some cough syrup and tie a rag around your neck,” he said. “A sneezing Stoic is an abomination before the Lord. And anyhow, if you get sick from being foolish you won’t be able to go hunting tomorrow. Tomorrow’s dead certain to be better, because I can see the clouds lifting and the sun coming out.”

  “But tomorrow’s Sunday,” I said. “And I ain’t allowed to hunt on Sunday.” This time I managed to snuffle back the sneeze.

  The Old Man grinned. “You can carry Stoicism too far,” he said. “We’re out here in the backwoods and you’re visitin’ the Sheriff. You’ve got the Law on your side, and I shouldn’t wonder if the good Lord wouldn’t make an exception in your case this time, if you don’t go telling everybody about how you broke the Law. I reckon with it raining on Saturday and Opening Day you been punished enough, and you got a little something coming from On High.”

  I let out a whoop, which might have been the first symptoms of pneumonia, but I didn’t care. That was the Old Man for you. He was tricky as a pet coon. One thing I had added to my “aggregate of wisdom” this day was that if I lived to be a hundred I’d never figure him out, but right then I wasn’t inclined to argue. I felt so good with my accumulated laughter that I even helped the gals wash dishes that night after supper and didn’t bust but one.

  29—The House Comes Home

  When the Old Man decided to lay down the load, a whole lot of years ago, it was depression time, and he like nearly everybody we knew had stuck a whacking big mortgage on the House. It wasn’t much of a mortgage for these times, but it was computed in thousands and was as hopeless of repayment as if it had been counted in millions. Anybody in those days who had a cent squirreled off in the much-darned sock was a very rich man. Anybody who could command a certain amount of skinny credit at the store for the basic beans and fat back was richer than most folks. The earliest thirties were not a time for mortgage lifting, even if the bank that held the mortgage wasn’t bust.

  So when the Old Man decided that the thing he had would kill him—and it did—and with Miss Lottie already gone ahead of him and everybody broke and discouraged, the rich old fellow who held the mortgage just naturally foreclosed it, as was his right. The man who foreclosed it, some said, was a skinflint, and maybe he was.

  Well, the family busted up and scattered every whichaway, and nobody looked like ever making any money at all, so the old fellow who now owned the House decided to rent it, after a decent period of mourning, but he swore he’d never sell the old place to anybody but a member of the family, so long as he lived. He loved the House, too, most as much as and maybe more than some of the people who had eaten and drunk in it and hunted and fished out of it.

  It was a fine old House, and most of my life with the Old Man was spent in and around it. It was located in Southport, the sleepy little North Carolina town I’ve written about so much; the town with the cedar bench where the old men loafed to whittle and chew tobacco and argue; the Pilots’ Association, where the men sat with spyglasses and gazed out past Battery Island and Caswell to the sea; Mr. Rob Thompson’s pool parlor, where the racier element hung out on the rainy days; Mr. Price Furpless’ picture show, the Amuzu; Watson’s and Leggett’s drug stores, and Gus McNeill’s filling station; all social centers of a town which had an oak grove called The Grove and a street called The Street.

  The House was square and in those days, so long ago, was painted yellow. It sat on a corner next to a smaller oak grove where we played one o’ cat. It was right next door to Uncle Tommy and catty-cornered on the street from Uncle Walker, and right across the street from old Sam Watts, who had the best deerhounds in town. Some people said Sam set more store by his hounds than he did his young’uns.

  The House was set up on brick stilts, and I spent many a rainy day under it, rummaging through the trove of generally non-functional treasure a small boy is apt to find under a house in the days before they had basements to store truck in. There were exciting things like the Old Man’s hunting tents, boats hauled up from the water for a recaulk, busted oars and ragged cast nets, and crates of old yellowing magazines, and even Miss Lottie’s moldy old sidesaddle.

  There were some pomegranate bushes by the front door, and in the back yard behind the kitchen was an arbor with the first big Malaga grapes I ever tasted, although I had plenty of experience with black-and-white scuppernongs—experience which included the bellyache, and later a dipperful of cool, tart, homemade grape wine from the springhouses on the little farmsteads I shot over. Also in the back yard was a fig tree with huge black figs that broke open in sticky white cracks and attracted hordes of birds and June bugs and bumblebees. And a towering pecan, which hailed storms of rich nuts in the fall.

  I never spent much more time inside the House than I could help, but it was very comfortable for that time. It had a big Kalamazoo stove in the parlor, where nobody but the preacher ever sat, and an awful picture of a big St. Bernard dog looking after a little girl. It had a big kitchen where Old Galena, the cook, was queen, and off the kitchen there was a pumpshelf with a graniteware basin and a dirty roller towel. On the ceiling near the pumpshelf was a rafter with two holes bored in it, where my Aunt May had a swing when she was a little girl. The holes are still there.

  As a matter of fact, the whole House is still there. It was made out of fat pine so hard you had to bore holes to drive the nails in. Not being very firmly anchored to the earth it could sway its hips in a storm without sagging out of plumb or blowing away. That House is about a hundred years old, and it has weathered all the hurricanes—Alice, Ethel, Helen, and lately, Donna—that have come along since hurricanes became latterly fashionable along that part of the rugged Carolina coast. Maybe we would lose a gross of shingles, perhaps, while the modern houses with basements were skittering off in the breeze, but the Old Man’s House kept stubbornly standing, as did the handful of other old houses lovingly shaped before man discovered the shoddy speed-up.

  During the depression years, during the war, and after, I had a fixation about that House. It had been rented to a variety of families through the lean and the better years to follow; families careless of the love that went into its construction and the solid fun that was parcel to its planking. I saw it a few years after the war, when I went South on some business or other and took
my dog Schnorkel with me. It was a sad House.

  It was a sad House as so many houses become pathetic, when they are no longer filled with tumbling children and sprawling dogs. The Old Man’s house had been filthed and abused. For seventeen years the strangers who lived in it beat it up. The rosebushes died and the chandelier, with the tinkling glass prisms, fell down—that chandelier which had seen Christmas dinners with loaded boards of wild turkey and venison, standing just a whiff away from Galena’s kitchen, whence came the odors of spicy fruit cake and frizzling ham and baking cookies.

  The ancient slatted shutters were sagging crazily from the broken windows, banging in the wind, and the porch had rotted and fallen in. The roses were gone from the side yard, replaced by sandspurs and dandelions, and the neat borders of perennials were long-withered or shrunken brown stalks. But the magnolia was there, bigger and taller than ever, with one of a succession of mockingbirds still shouting his silver serenade on the moonlit nights. The grape arbor was gone, its framework collapsed, but there was the stump of the fig tree and the tall bole remaining of a sick pecan.

  At the time, the Boy was having his troubles in a man’s world, but the sight of that House made me fair sick. I didn’t have any loose money and I was living in New York and traveling all over the globe. I think having the dog with me did it. I got to thinking about all the things that had happened to me with that House as a base; all the things I had done, all the things I had learned in that House and from that House. Most of the things that I value today had started in that House, started when I was a small, fat, cow-licked boy with lop-ears, spending as much time as I could in it. That House combined Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and summertime, in an ordered world of guns and dogs and boats and fish and ducks and quail. It was a cathedral of ancient times, when children were accorded dignity according to how they earned it, and adults were merely small boys grown older. That was not just a House; that House was Me.