They sang a hymn, they said a prayer, and then they let him go.
The Dark Country (1948)
Burley Coulter is bone-tired, thirsty, hungry, lost, and entirely happy. He has his worries and his griefs, but for the time being they are not on his mind, nor is his workaday life. All that is eight or ten hours behind him, a long time yet ahead of him, and a world away.
He is somewhere, he believes, way up in the headwaters of Willow Run, far out of his home territory. Since his hounds last treed, at a branchy white oak where an upland pasture dropped off to a wooded bluff, he has been walking along a seldom-used farm road on the crest of a long ridge. The road has so far led him past a cornfield and a tobacco patch, both sowed in barley, and a big field of grass and clover, mowed early for hay, then pastured, now deserted. That is as much as he knows of where he is.
Except for the ambient glow of the coal oil lantern he carries in his hand, the night is perfectly dark. It is too late, or too early, for a house light to show, and the sky is thickly clouded. Beside him his shadow stretches on the ground, disappearing before it is complete into the greater darkness. Two hounds walk with him, and he is alert to keep them close; he does not want them to start hunting again.
He, his brother, Jarrat, and Jarrat’s son, Nathan—mostly just the three of them—had stood at the stripping room benches from early winter until a few days ago, already February of 1948, preparing the previous summer’s tobacco crop for market. The work had been steady, consoling in a way, for it was always there, but it was confining too, and finally they were weary of it, happy to be done. They had gone, the day before, to the warehouse in Hargrave to see the last of it sold.
When he got home, having for a change nothing else to do, Burley did his chores early, putting out hay for his cattle and his mules, and corn for his hogs. The old house, once he was back in it, felt too empty. As often, now that he was living in it alone, it did not satisfy. After a bright cold spell, the weather had turned cloudy with a warming wind. The snowless frozen ground had thawed on top and grown slick. He did not even bother to build up the fires.
He took off the fairly new work clothes he had worn to the warehouse and put on older ones. He strapped on his long-barreled .22 pistol in its shoulder holster and dropped a few extra cartridges into his pants pocket. He took his everyday felt hat and the hunting coat he wore as a work jacket from their nail by the back door and put them on. Into one pocket of the coat he put a flashlight, and into another, in a paper sack, six cold biscuits made by himself just the way they had been made by his mother and her mother and her mother, except maybe with less shortening so they’d be a little more durable. He felt his pants pockets to make sure he had matches and his knife. The knife was a heavy one with the handle worn smooth and pale; it had two blades that were razor sharp and a dull blade that he used for scraping and digging. The knife as much belonged to his sense of himself as either of his thumbs. He shook the lantern beside his ear to make sure it was full of oil. At the edge of the porch he sat down and pulled on and buckled his overshoes. He stood again, picked up the lantern, called the dogs, and headed down into the woods along Katy’s Branch.
Behind him now was not just the old weatherboarded log house that he had thought of as empty since the death of his mother, who all his life before had been its presiding genius; the old crop year too was at last behind him. It had been a good enough year. The crop had been, he would say, better than the year, and had sold well, thanks to their nearly perfect work, which Burley does not credit to himself. It was owing, as he knows and will readily say, to his brother and nephew, to their love of the work, their sense of the beauty of it, their passion. Burley’s own submission to work was characterized, not by reluctance, let us say, but by a division of mind; he would have settled for less perfection. And yet, in the background of his present eagerness, there was satisfaction with the completed year, the crop beautifully cultivated and beautifully handled.
In this completion he began to feel the opening of what he recognized as freedom, unobstructing by the least taint of guilt or regret his wish to do exactly what he was doing. He went down through the pasture toward the hollow they called Stepstone, which descended steeply to Katy’s Branch. When he reached the woods, the old house and its outbuildings on the ridgetop, and the open slope also, were out of sight. The woods enclosed him, quieted the light, and changed the way he felt. It was as if an old world had passed away and another, forever new, had risen up around him. The air bore the smells of the woods, of leaf mold stirred by his footsteps, of the thawing ground. The new, warmer air was playing its way into the spaces around him as if excited by its own arrival. He seemed to breathe into himself the presence of his country.
Burley was a man always aware of the neighborhood of the people and the creatures—in his thoughts he calls it “the membership”—and of his own living and moving in it. Always when he was outdoors, where he had been in most of his waking hours all his life, and especially when he was in the woods, he was aware that he was more seen than seeing. In the woods he kept company with the original life of the place, a life intricately knowing of itself, even of him, but never to be fully known by him.
Soon after he entered the woods he began checking a line of traps that he kept set and watched over through the winter. He was a man of two worlds: the world that produced crops and animals by his work, and the world that by his knowledge merely, and to his pleasure, gave him pelts, wild meat, fish, wild fruits and nuts, herbs, and good places to be.
He approached the traps only near enough to see that they had caught nothing and were still set. Not until he came to the small pool in Katy’s Branch just at the outfall of the Stepstone hollow did he find a trap gone from its place and a mink caught and drowned in the pool. He reset the trap, quickly skinned the mink, turned the pelt furside out, and flung the water from it before putting it into the game pocket of his coat. He washed his hands in the pool, wiping them dry first on the grass and then his sleeves. That done, he remained kneeling where he was, listening.
The thaw was a little new yet, the ground yet a little cold, for the best tracking. And it was still too early for the night creatures to be stirring. But down the branch crisscrossing between the slopes on either side, he could hear his hounds. They were indulging their daytime hobby of hunting rabbits. As they well knew, he did not approve, and he thought they sounded embarrassed.
He listened a while, telling himself where the dogs were, what they were doing, how they were moving, seeing them precisely in his mind’s eye. They were a large bluetick, a he-dog, with a deep resonant voice, who had a nickname but not a name. From the first bawl out of him when he first opened on a track, Burley had been calling him Frog, wishing at the same time for a name with more dignity, but finding none. By now old Frog had begun looking like a dog whose name was Frog. The other was a black bitch, Jet, sweet-mouthed but of uncertain breeding. Perhaps he had thought, when she was offered to him as a pup, that he himself had no standing from which to disdain off-the-record breeding. He remained on his knees by the little pool. He slowly turned his head to the distances all around. He looked, he listened, he let the quiet come to him.
Down the branch the dogs were speaking from time to time, one here, one there, never together, and there was no excitement in their voices, or even much interest.
Burley got up and brushed off his knees. He set off slowly down the branch. The dogs had gone that way, it was downhill, and one direction was as good as another. He took his time, listening and looking about, breathing and savoring the rich air. Because he was in no hurry, because any direction was as good as another, because it was a good place without a wrong turn anywhere, every breath brought smells that he sorted and recognized, that brought the country into him.
Before too long he met Jet coming down through the trees on the slope to his right, not in much of a hurry. She stopped and looked at him to see what he would have to say.
He said, “Come on,” withou
t changing his pace or direction, and Jet fell in behind him—glad, he thought, of an excuse to quit pretending to hunt.
Raising his voice a little, he said, “Come on, Frog,” and soon the bluetick was walking behind him too.
“You all are out of business,” he said. “It’ll be a while yet, I expect.”
He spoke to the dogs casually, not looking back at them, as if they perhaps were other humans. And they listened, following, glancing up at him, as if he perhaps were another dog. They all three seemed to have concluded to their satisfaction that there was as yet no reason to hurry.
Burley said no more. They took their time, going on down the hollow, finding the least obstructed way. From time to time Burley walked in the creek itself, stepping from stone to stone. Presently they came to a cleared strip of bottomland and beside it a tobacco barn built when Burley was hardly more than a boy. He lingered there, looking carefully about, and then went on.
As they came near the house of Gideon and Ida Crop, to keep from rousing their dogs, Burley turned away from the branch in a slow swerve that finally headed him back upstream along the side of the hollow opposite to his own place. Allowing the dogs to range ahead again and more or less following them, he took a long upward slant through what they would still call for a while the old Merchant place, though Roger Merchant, the last of that line, was dead. When dark had about completely fallen, he lit his lantern.
Not long after that, and hardly bothering to comment, the dogs treed a possum in a little cedar. Burley set down the lantern and took out the flashlight. He walked around the tree, saw what he was looking for, and then, shining the light beam over the sights of his pistol and onto the possum, precisely made the shot. Shortly, working in the light of the lantern, he emptied the possum out of its hide and stuffed that hide also into his coat, adding in his mind the small worth of the possum to the several dollars he would get for the mink. He liked the money he got by his hunting and trapping. He thought of it as “free money,” for one thing, but it seemed to him also to be more real than the money he earned from farming. He would know exactly where every cent of it came from—from what animal and what spot of the country.
Frog and Jet, having in their youth outgrown any great excitement over possums, were long gone. Like the dogs, Burley was not greatly excited by possums, but, also like the dogs, he was hunting now. Everything was changed. The dark was full of possible directions. He was intently listening. He stood, again brushing the leaf litter off his knees, and continued his slanting climb up the slope in the direction he supposed the dogs had gone.
He heard from them presently, but they were on a cold track, of historical interest only. He let them worry at it, glad to be notified from time to time of their whereabouts.
When he had overtaken them a little, he called them to him, this time to make a wide circuit around the Merchant house, which since Roger’s death has been, as Jarrat says, “infested with half the damned tribe of Berlews and a pack of half-wild, half-starved damned Berlew dogs.”
For a while as he made his circuit, dropping back toward Katy’s Branch and crossing the Port William road, he could hear the Berlews’ dogs barking at the Lord knew what threat to Berlew peace and tranquility. Jet and Frog heard them too, and Frog started a low grumble that was ready to become a full-voiced challenge.
“You hush,” Burley said. He remembered one day driving with Jarrat past the old Merchant house, and there were Berlews at every window just like Christmas candles. “What the Hell are they looking for?” Jarrat said. “The end of the world?”
After they no longer heard any commotion from the Berlews, and still a while after that, Burley said, “Go on.”
The dogs left him, and he too went on, walking generally on the level now along the wooded bluff. It grew quiet all around. Listening, he could hear only the sounds of his own steps, just as he could see only within the slowly advancing room of light from the lantern. And yet he knew precisely where he was, for in the dark he was moving also in his mind’s map of the country and his own passages over it. He even had a notion of where his dogs were, but he did not know that exactly, and so the whole darkness and all the silence were of interest to him.
And then, making one place out in the distance exact and paramount, Frog bellowed as though stung, and Burley heard him as with every vein and nerve.
He thought, “Now he knows what he’s talking about. Now he believes what he’s saying.”
Jet agreed. There was a brisk race then, a way through the dark as clear to the dogs as if lighted. Burley stood still to listen. For a while then he was empty of himself, his mind gone out into the dark with the dogs, knowing where they were and how it was with them. He did not move again until their voices told him, “Treed!”
He went to them, their cries growing in excitement as he came up. It was a coon this time, a young one with a nice pelt. Burley added it to those of the mink and the possum, and soon was on his way again.
Burley Coulter is, by nature perhaps, a sympathetic man. He has lived much under the influence of sympathy, and it has taught him much—though, as he has often said, he has never learned anything until he had to. It is possible to feel a certain sorrow for the life of an animal taken by hunting or trapping, just as for the life of a slaughtered hog or chicken. Burley feels this always. He would just as soon not feel it, but it always comes with the same stab of consciousness: This creature loved its life, just as a man loves his. At the same time, from his earliest childhood as from the earliest childhood of humankind, there has been knowledge and acceptance: No life lives but at the cost of other lives.
Invariably the moment of consciousness comes, and the stroke of regret, and then it passes and is replaced by happiness, we could call it thanks, for the acquired good. And the love for what he takes freely from the woods and waters is his particularly and strongly. Some don’t have it. Jarrat, for one, doesn’t have it. He might go along with Burley now and again, for company, but not long after dark he’ll be wanting to be in bed. Nathan is pretty much the same way, though he followed Burley through the woods many a night when he was a boy—until finally he got girls on his mind, and that about ended Nathan’s nighttime walking in the woods.
For a while, in fact for a long time, it would more than likely be women that kept Burley himself out late at night. Come a Saturday night, women would be scattered about out there in the dark, and he would be hunting them, smelling them out, just like a hunting dog. The smells of women, when you got close enough, were almost as good as the look and feel of them. He can remember the smells of certain ones, certain girls, going all the way back maybe to when he started to school. Amongst the smells of paper and paste and ink and pencil shavings and air from the windows or smoke from the stove would drift the smells of girls, fragrant, secret, and warm.
And then it was a woman who was keeping him away from home at night. Kate Helen Branch. After that got started, the woman hunting wasn’t quite what it had been. It wasn’t sport anymore, unless you would call it that when two people are hunting for what they both know they will find. What it was was love, and Kate Helen made him say so.
“Do you love me, Burley Coulter?”
“Why, hell yes! Course I do!”
“Then why don’t you tell me so?”
“Well, Kate Helen, I love you, how does that suit you?”
“Just fine.”
In fact it suited even him just fine. To have found somebody, a woman you loved, who loved you back—oh my! —that was fine. And too it might be that a man with a woman was a good bit freer in the woods at night than a man looking for women. This, he supposed, was what might be called settling down.
Though they were quiet now, the dogs would be ranging ahead of him, and he too went ahead. They had treed on the bluff at the back of what he knew as the Proudfoot place, where big old Tol Proudfoot, hero of many a good story, and his little wife, Miss Minnie, had passed their years together. Tol, who was a good farmer, had been dead five ye
ars, and his “ninety-eight acres more or less” had begun to run down, as farms are inclined to do when devoted care no longer is living on them. And just last summer Miss Minnie too had passed on from this world, leaving the place and her much-loved small house with its steep gingerbreaded gables to a fate not yet settled. Tol and Miss Minnie never had children. Their heirs were mostly strangers, great-nieces and great-nephews they had never seen.
When Burley came up to the feed barn he found the rusty can that Tol had left hanging on the wall of the barn next to the well, and he pumped himself a drink. The water was as fresh and good as he remembered it. He drank his fill, hung the can back in its place, and then, the dogs remaining quiet, he sat down on the well top. He rolled a cigarette, and then turned down the lantern flame to save oil.
The Proudfoot farm adjoined the Merchant land at the back. On the other three sides it was bounded by Katy’s Branch, the Goforth Hill road and the Cotman Ridge road. The house and barn and other buildings stood on top of the ridge in the angle between the two roads. Where Burley sat, the barn was at his back and he was facing the back of the house, which faced the Cotman Ridge road. He could not see beyond the few feet dimly lit by the lantern, but he saw clearly in his mind the layout of the place and the country around. He knew the pattern of Tol’s fields, the barn lots and the garden, the buildings, the driveway turning in off the county road and coming back past the house to the barn, Miss Minnie’s flower patch by the cellar wall.
He said half aloud, “Miss Minnie,” to summon the thought of her into his mind.
Miss Minnie had been his teacher in all the eight grades of his schooling. In that old long time he and Miss Minnie had been, we might say, philosophically opposed. Miss Minnie believed that learning was desirable; she thought that students should love to learn. Burley, on the contrary, believed in not learning a speck of anything until he absolutely had to. She taught him his numbers and letters, she taught him about syllables, she taught him to read words one by one and then whole pages of them, and she taught him to add and subtract and multiply and divide any numbers you might mention. He did not learn any of those things because he wanted to. He learned them because she taught them to him over and over and over again until he realized that, whether he had wanted to learn them or not, he knew them. And that was the way it went for eight long years, in which it seemed to him he experienced eight good days: the last day of school in every one of those years.
A Place in Time Page 14