“Well, I don’t know, Hank. That’s five already.”
“Aw, let me, Bob. One more won’t hurt.”
“Well, what do you say, Dick? Can we let old Hank in?”
“Well, I don’t know. They’s five already.”
“Aw, come on, Dick. You know me.”
“Well, all right. But no more now.”
And then we waited for the fish to nibble. But we had overdone it; he was so impressed he did not dare. So George said, “Oh, tarnation!” We had learned to use innocent cuss words in his presence and now thought it was just killing sport to utter them with much force, as if conscious of using a mighty hard word. “Tar-nation!” said George. “I can’t. I forgot, I got to see a man about a dog.”
So then Theron worked up his courage and said, “Mr. Macaulay, you don’t suppose—” And then he gave up, conscious of all the eyes upon him and overcome with awe at his own presumption—or perhaps stung in advance at the prospect of being denied.
“What’s that, son?” said Dick Macaulay.
“Oh, never mind.”
But he wanted to go too bad not to give it another try. “I was going to ask if you would please let me come along, Mr. Macaulay. I’d just watch and keep out of the way, and with Mr. Stradum not going after all it wouldn’t be any more than you had meant to take. But I don’t suppose you all would want … just a boy … tagging along. Would you?”
For the longest time Mr. Macaulay said nothing. As a matter of fact, Dick himself said afterwards—but that was afterwards—that he had been considering calling the whole thing off. But to Theron he looked as if he was trying, with difficulty because it was such a shock, to find a kind way of saying no.
He turned to Bob. “Mr. Edsall, would you mind very much if I was to come along?”
Mr. Edsall said it was all right as far as he was concerned, and interceded with Mr. Macaulay for him. “Let the boy come along, Dick. He won’t take up any extra room.”
“Sure, Dick,” said one of the others. “Let him come. Remember your own first snipe hunt.”
At last Mr. Macaulay said well, all right. But for them to remember he had been against it, in case it turned out like he expected it would.
You went hunting for snipe at sundown, around water-holes, stockponds, he was told. He agreed to meet us. We did not have to tell him not to tell anybody. This was a secret he was delighted to keep. Bring no gun, he was told, and he was not surprised that on his first hunt he was not to be allowed to shoot. He met us on the square as the sun was sinking behind the west side buildings, and we drove out to a farm four or five miles from town.
Nobody, he observed, carried a gun. He did not want to seem over-curious, and certainly not critical, and every fresh evidence of his green-ness seemed to cause Mr. Macaulay acute disgust and to confirm him in his belief that a great mistake had been made in letting that boy tag along. But it was some distance from the road down to the pond, and on the way he could not resist asking about the guns. You didn’t use a gun to hunt snipe, he learned, and was made to feel ridiculous that he had not known it, but for the moment he learned nothing more.
It was just getting dusk when we reached the pond.
Suddenly Bob Edsall came out with, “Dick, why don’t we let Theron here be catcher.”
“Catcher!” cried Mr. Macaulay in astonishment. “Let him be catcher! I wasn’t even sure he ought to have been brought along in the first place, now you ask me why don’t we let him be catcher!”
Obviously “catcher” was the choice job, and Theron did not resent Mr. Macaulay’s outrage, but rather agreed with him that he had been done favor enough this first time just to have been brought. Nor did he want there to be any quarrel over him. “It’s all right, Mr. Edsall,” he said. “I’m happy just to be here. I don’t mind if I’m not catcher.”
But Mr. Edsall wouldn’t hear of it. “Aw, gee whillikers, Dick!” he expostulated.
“Now watch your language,” said Mr. Macaulay sternly.
We others were fit to bust.
“I apologize, men,” said Mr. Edsall. “But I swear, Dick! Excuse me again. I mean, I swear! You seem to have forgot you was ever a boy yourself. This is his first snipe hunt. Come on now, let him be catcher. So what, if he don’t get quite as many birds as you or me would? There’ll still be enough for all.”
“But, Mr. Edsall, I don’t mind a bit,” Theron implored. “I’d rather not be catcher. Really.”
And just then, with a weary sigh, Mr. Macaulay gave in. Theron, realizing the degree to which he was acting contrary to his better judgment, was mighty grateful to him.
He felt somewhat skeptical when told that we would all go down into the woods and drive the birds up and that all he had to do was stand on the edge of the pond and whistle—like this: Mr. Edsal whistled to show him—short, rapid little peeps—and hold the towsack open wide and the driven birds would fly right into it. But the jacksnipe was a very slow-witted bird, he was told, and who was he, a mere boy, only there on sufferance and now being allowed to be catcher, to doubt the word of grown men and experienced snipe hunters?
So we left him holding the bag and went down through the woods and cut back to the car, and half an hour later joined the gang on the corner in town. It was a little after eight. Your usual snipe hunter took just about fifteen minutes of listening to himself whistle like a fool to catch on, and an hour to get back; but this was one gullible boy, so we figured double the time for him, and figured it would be about nine-thirty when he came in. The word had been passed around earlier in the day—we had picked a Saturday night when the Captain was known to have business—and quite a crowd was waiting to see Theron come home with his tail between his legs.
But by a quarter of ten he had not shown up; nor had he by ten-fifteen. It was decided that he had taken the long way home rather than face us by coming through the square. He was that proud.
At ten-thirty the Captain appeared, a worried look on his face which made it almost unnecessary for him to say, “Any you men seen my boy? He hasn’t come home, and his mama is worried.”
We were afraid to tell, but more afraid to think what might happen if any harm had come to the boy on his way home. So we told, and offered to go with him to pick Theron up.
He was nowhere on the road. We stole glances at each other in the light from the dashboard. Nobody said a word. When we reached the gate of the farm, the Captain stopped the car and switched off the ignition and let us sit there for a minute listening to each other breathe before saying, “Well?”
It was just to start moving again and as a way of stalling, or maybe it was just to say anything at all, not because there was any sense in it, now, going on three hours since we had left him there, that somebody suggested going back down to the pond. It was a dangerous suggestion to make to the Captain, that his boy was so slow he would still be waiting for us there. But he said nothing and started the car and would simply have crashed through the gate if Ben had not jumped out of the back seat and run to open it, and jumped aside barely in time, then leapt on to the running-board, knowing he was not going to be stopped for, but knowing better than to let himself be left behind as a way of getting out of it. We bounced down the cow lane like a ship in a storm, the headlights shooting out over the ground, then flung against the sky. We bumped our heads on the top, and one of us held on to Ben out on the running board.
The land began to dip, and, dropping down, the lights picked up the dark water. The land levelled and the beam of light rose and swung across the pond and as the Captain spun the wheel the beam ran along the water’s edge until it found Theron. He was sitting. Now he got to his feet and drew himself up straight and proud. The Captain switched off the ignition, but did not move, so we did not either.
He slowly spread open the mouth of the sack and holding it towards us, commenced to whistle—short, rapid little peeps. His face, very white in the glare and against the blackness into which his black hair melted, showed nothing. Perhaps we sa
t in the car watching him and listening to his whistling for a minute; it seemed longer. We stole a glance at the Captain’s face. He was absorbed in the spectacle and very faintly smiling.
We got out at last and slunk through the beam of light and followed the Captain around the edge of the pond. The boy did not budge, and only when we had all come to him did he leave off whistling. Dick Macaulay relieved him of the sack, and before dropping it to the ground, looked into it, as if half expecting to find it full. The Captain put his arm around his son’s shoulder and they began to walk back to the car. We started, but Macaulay stood still, so we all stopped. The Captain heard us stop, turned and looked at us and said, “Well?”
None of us spoke.
“Well?” he said.
“Thanks, Cap,” said Macaulay. He looked around at the rest of us in the glare of the headlights, and satisfied with what he read in our faces, turned back. A grin spread across his face. “I reckon us snipe’ll walk,” he said.
It was Pritchard, speaking for all of us, the next time Theron came downtown afterwards, who called him “Lieutenant.”
He liked that. But, “Sergeant will do for now,” he said.
Not “Private,” you’ll notice.
8
He was Mrs. Hannah’s only child, but he was his father’s son. From this distance in time it is possible to say that perhaps there was nothing so very self-sacrificing about it, but rather more self-satisfaction; but whatever her motive, true to her word, Mrs. Hannah said nothing to the boy against his father. If on the other hand she did not say quite as much for him as she liked to think, and as she had told her mother she did, why, this must have struck Theron as the only fitting praise for a man to whom no words could have done justice.
Growing up meant just one thing: he thought always of the time when he would sit beside his father in that ring of men, hunters—the two words were synonymous for him—on the corner of the town square on Saturday afternoons, or above a smouldering fire deep in the woods listening to the hounds run foxes, of the time when he would have a gun of his own, when he would shoot over the fine bird dogs, read the animal signs, know the weather, find his way in the big woods.
He lived out of doors, in all weathers, from the time he could dress himself; when in the house, making his model airplanes or mounting his stamps or just dreaming, he was in his father’s den. It was too rough a room and his father too plain a man to call it a den; that was his mother’s word. It was a big room, forty feet long, and had no ceiling. From the exposed beams hung all manner of hunting gear. In the center of the room hung a two-man boat, a double-pointed duck punt, and scattered throughout the room hung trotlines and steel traps, boat oars and a fish seine like a giant spider’s web spun between two beam struts, and in clusters of a dozen or so strung together by the necks hung over a hundred wooden duck decoys: greenhead mallards, redheads, pintails, canvasbacks—hens and drakes.
In the gun cabinet were five guns, two shotguns, two rifles, and a pistol. The bird gun was English, a Purdey, a famous make, a double barrel 12 gauge, and had been custom built for his father at a cost of over a thousand dollars. But it was the other shotgun that was really fabulous. It too was a Purdey. It too had been custom built. It had cost nearer two thousand dollars. It was a magnum 10 gauge double with barrels thirty-three inches long and weighed just under fourteen pounds. No man but the Captain, it was said, could take the punishment it dealt the shoulder in a day in a duck blind, and on the still damp foggy air of a good duck day in the marshes it could be heard for miles, like the boom of a cannonade. The rifles were a Model 94 Winchester .30-30 carbine with the blue worn completely off, and a Remington hammerless pump .22 squirrel rifle. The pistol was a .22 revolver, a Colt Single Action Army, that had killed untold rattlers and cottonmouth moccasins, and with which Theron had seen his father hit a bottletop spun high into the air.
Over the floor of the room were scattered deer hide rugs, and in front of the gun cabinet was a black bearskin rug with the head attached. There were foxhides, gray and red, and polecat, bobcat, and coon skins stretched and tacked on the walls. Beside the fireplace hung his father’s shapeless, blood-stiffened old hunting coat. Beside the coat stood an old chiffonier with the drawers hanging permanently open, containing relics which as a boy his father had dug from the Indian burial mounds, and on top of which stood the skull of an Indian with a hole in his right temple. Until he was ten years old Theron had the idea that his father had shot that Indian.
But it was glory enough that he had shot the wild boar whose head was mounted over the mantel, looking as if he had charged through the wall, covered with black, white, and gray bristles like porcupine quills, the long blunt black snout drawn back in wrinkles baring the long yellow tusks. And to have shot the deer whose antlers were mounted over each of the room’s ten windows—all prizes, one of eighteen points.
It was a disorderly but clean room, man-kept, with things left lying about to be seen and handled and enjoyed rather than put away in closets and drawers. It was rich in smells, the banana odor of nitro gunpowder solvent, the manly smells of leather and steel and gun oil and boot grease, the smells his father brought in, of the woods, damp and mouldering, the strong, hot, rutty reek of game, and the odor of dogs, for there were always three or four dogs there, brought in from the pens outside to recover from scratchings got in a coon fight, or retired there full of scars and honors, too old to run the foxes or point the birds anymore.
Even in a place where everybody kept lots of gun dogs, the Captain’s kennels were notable. He kept a pack of about fifteen foxhounds, and he liked to have one or two of all breeds on a chase for the harmony of their differently pitched voices. He had Black and Tans, Redbones, Goodmans, Blueticks and Redticks, Walkers, Triggs, a pair of Plott hounds that he had sent Chauncey after all the way to North Carolina, and even one of the fabulous, blue-spotted, glassy-eyed Catahoula hog dogs, sometimes called leopard dogs, which he had hired stolen for him, named Deuteronomy, after the passage, 23:18: Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore or the price of a dog into the house, which the people of the Catahoula Lake district in Louisiana interpret to forbid the selling of a dog. Separated from these trail dogs in pens of their own were the bird dogs, the Captain’s own bred line of rangy, smoky-gray pointers and his milk-white setters lightly flecked with black.
Theron began early to help Chauncey give the bird dog pups their yard training. Then they were taken by his father for their training in the field. He saw them return from each hunt having made a gain in dignity and control, saw them become hunters. He would become a hunter worthy to shoot over them only after going through a training much more rigorous than theirs. But first he too must have his yard training. There were things he could teach himself, things his father would expect him to know when his time came. The street the house was on, Main Street, the oldest street in town and paved with bois-d’arc bricks, came to an end not many houses beyond, so that near at hand were woods and fields. There he could find not just boy’s game—butcher birds and tree lizards and jays; nor just big boy’s game—mourning doves and cottontails; but real game, men’s game: gray and fox squirrels, a few, occasionally a coon hungry enough to come marauding that close to town, coveys of quail out of season that he could watch, learn about, but knew he must not molest with his slingshot or blow-gun or homemade crossbow or his air rifle. But he could observe them, learn what kinds of trees they favored, what nuts and grasses they ate, where they spent the different seasons of the year and the different hours of the day, and he could bring back the seedpods and the berries they fed on and learn from Chauncey their names and how to recognize them in leaf, in blossom, and in fruit. He could try to imitate their calls. One warm morning in early fall in his twelfth year, answering the whistles of a covey of bobwhites, he was able to bring one up to within ten feet of where he sat with his back against a pecan tree on the edge of a brown field where peas had grown in summer.
He taught himself the trick of skinn
ing squirrels and trained himself not to mind the blood and the entrails. He rose at daybreak on wet Sunday mornings in the fall and watched his father’s preparations, helped chain the frisking bird dogs in the car trunk. On those mornings he awoke early as surely as if his own day had come. Chauncey, whose age kept him at home now, was up at three to get Cap’m’s breakfast, and Theron was up then too, ate with the two of them silently in the lighted kitchen, held his father’s waders for him, and helped sling the two ropes of decoys over his shoulders, carried the big heavy duck gun to the car while his father strode ahead in the dark with the decoys clacking woodenly together with a sound like the far-off call of a flight of ducks. In the evening when his father returned, Theron would empty the game from his hunting coat, the ducks or the squirrels or the quail, and his father would tell him the details of the killing of the biggest one or the one with the odd markings, and he would smell that peppery, strong, hot, bloody smell, which seemed to belong to his father now rather than to the game, and feel it send down his spine a tremor of awe and excitement, of intolerable longing and of secret dread for his own approaching time.
For he knew, had always known, that it was not just being able to line up the front sight in the rear one, not just the meat you brought home for the table. It was to learn to be a man, the only kind of man, to learn it in and from the woods themselves and from the woodsmen, the hunters, who had learned it as boys from their fathers there—and so back through the generations, making you a link in the long strong chain of men of courage and endurance, of cunning and fairness, of humility as well as becoming pride. It was not to be confused with sportsmanship. He knew that too without being told. They were not sportsmen, those men in whose midst his father reigned there on the corner of the square on Saturday afternoons; they were hunters. He had a scorn for sportsmen. For among the hunters, he knew without ever having sat amongst them, was a bond of fellowship which no mere sportsman could ever know or share in, since for him hunting could at best be the thing he enjoyed most in life, while for the hunters it was life itself.
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