Tomorrow he would go into the woods and look for Sounder. “The wind whistlin’ in the pipe is bothersome,” he said. He hated the cold wind. It blew through his clothes and chilled his body inside and made him shiver. He hoped the wind would not be blowing in the woods tomorrow. The wind made the woods noisy. The boy liked the woods when they were quiet. He understood quiet. He could hear things in the quiet. But quiet was better in the woods than it was in the cabin. He didn’t hear things in cabin quiet. Cabin quiet was long and sad.
“Turn the pipe-damper a little and the whistlin’ will stop,” his mother said at last.
The next day he walked the great woodlands, calling Sounder’s name. The wind blew through his clothes and chilled him inside. When he got home after dark, his clothes were torn. His throat hurt with a great lump choking him. His mother fed him and said, “Child, child, you must not go into the woods again. Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose, child. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don’t know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon. But Sounder might come back.”
But weeks went by, and Sounder did not come back.
One night the boy learned why his mother had brought home the bottle of vanilla flavoring. Now it was Christmas and she was making a cake. When the four layers were spread out on the tin-topped table and she began to ice them, the boy noticed that she put three together in a large cake and made a small one of the leftover layer.
“Why we having two cakes?” the boy asked. But she was humming to herself and did not answer him. When she had finished, she put the small cake on the top shelf of the dish cupboard. The big one she put in the cardboard box she had brought from the store.
The sweet smell of baking and vanilla had drawn the smaller children from the stove to the edge of the table. The woman reached over or walked around them as she worked. “I’m done,” she finally said. “You can lick the pans.”
The boy had not moved from his chair by the stove. Today he had searched the oak clumps along the far fencerows for Sounder. He never got the sweet pan till last, anyway. It always went from youngest to oldest, and there was never much left when his turn came.
“You’re tired and worried poorly,” his mother said. And she handed him the icing pan.
In the morning the woman told the boy that she wanted him to walk to town, to the jail behind the courthouse, and take the cake to his father. “It’s a troublesome trip,” she said. “But they won’t let women in the jail. So you must go.” She tied a string around the cardboard box and said, “Carry it flat if your hands don’t get too cold. Then it’ll look mighty pretty when you fetch it to him.” She stood at the edge of the porch until he was far enough away not to be able to look back and see her crying, then called to him, “Whatever you do, child, act perkish and don’t grieve your father.”
On the road, the boy felt afraid. He had been to the town at Christmastime before. Not on Christmas Day, but a few days before, to help his father carry mistletoe and bunches of bittersweet berries that his father sold by the wall in front of the courthouse or on the corner by the bank. And sometimes, when it was getting late and they still had trimmings to sell, his father would go to the back door of houses along the street and say “Ma’am, would you need some trimmin’s?” and hold up the biggest sprig of mistletoe left in his grain sack. They usually sold most of the mistletoe, the boy remembered, but bunches of bittersweet that the boy had carried all day were always left over to be thrown in a fence corner on the way home. “Ain’t no good for nothin’ now” his father would say.
From early fall until gathering time, the father and boy kept their eyes peered for the golden-green clumps with white berries that grew high up in the forks of water elm and sycamore trees. Bittersweet was easy. “Pull down one vine and trim it, and you’ve got as much as a man can carry” his father always said. “But it takes a heap of fearful climbin’ for mistletoe.” They had already started gathering, and half a grain sack of mistletoe was still hanging against the side of the cabin. “If she hadn’t had such a big load, she might have taken it,” the boy said to himself.
The boy’s fearful feeling increased as he got nearer town. There were big houses and behind the curtained windows there were eyes looking out at him. There would be more people now, and somebody might say “What you got in that box, boy?” or “Where you goin’, boy?”
Church bells were ringing in the town. It was Christmas, and some people went to church on Christmas. In town the people he saw were laughing and talking. No one noticed him and he was glad. He looked at the store windows out of the corner of his eye. They were silvery and gold and green and red and sparkling. They were filled with toys and beautiful things. With the Christmas money from peddling, his father had bought what toys he could for the boy and his little brother and sisters. They had worn-out toys too. People in the big houses where his mother worked had given them to her to bring home.
He always wished they would give his mother an old book. He was sure he could learn to read if he had a book. He could read some of the town signs and the store signs. He could read price figures. He wanted to stop and stand and look straight at the windows, but he was afraid. A policeman would come after him. Perhaps the people had offered his mother old books, but she had said “No use, nobody can read in our cabin.” Perhaps the people knew she couldn’t read and thought her feelings would be hurt if they offered her the books their children had used up and worn out. The boy had heard once that some people had so many books they only read each book once. But the boy was sure there were not that many books in the world.
It was cold, but there were a few people standing or sitting along the wall in front of the courthouse. Winter or summer, there were always people there. The boy wondered if they knew it was Christmas. They didn’t look happy like some of the people he had seen. He knew they were looking at him, so he hurried quickly past and around the corner to the back of the courthouse. The front of the courthouse was red brick with great white marble steps going up to a wide door. But the back was gray cement and three floors high, with iron bars over all the windows.
The only door that led into the jail had a small square of glass at about the height of a man, and there were iron bars over the glass. The boy was not tall enough to see through the glass. He clutched the box close to him. He felt that something was about to burst through the door. In the middle of the door there was a great iron knocker. The boy knew he had to knock at the door; he wished he could be back in the great woods. He could hear voices inside the windows with the iron bars. Somewhere a voice was singing “God’s gonna trouble the water.” From one of the windows there came the sound of laughter. Now and then a door slammed with the deep clash of iron on iron. There was a rattle of tin pans. The boy felt very lonely. The town was as lonely as the cabin, he thought.
A large red-faced man opened the door and said, “You’ll have to wait. It ain’t visitin’ hours yet. Who do you want to see? You’ll have to wait.” And he slammed the door before the boy could speak.
It was cold on the gray side of the building, so the boy went to the corner near the wall where the people and visitors stood or sat. The sun was shining there. The boy had forgotten it was still Christmas, the waiting seemed so long. A drunk man staggered along the street in front of the courthouse wall, saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone. He said “Merry Christmas” to the boy, and he smiled at the boy too.
Finally the great clock on the roof of the courthouse struck twelve. It frightened the boy because it seemed to shake the town. Now the red-faced man opened the door and let several people in. Inside, the man lined everybody up and felt their clothes and pockets. He jerked the cardboard box from the boy and tore off the top. The boy could hear iron doors opening and closing. Long hallways, with iron bars from floor to ceiling, ran from the door into the dim center of the building. The man with the red face squeezed the cake in his hands and broke it into four
pieces. “This could have a steel file or hacksaw blade in it,” he said. Then he swore and threw the pieces back in the box. The boy had been very hungry. Now he was not hungry. He was afraid. The man shoved the box into the boy’s hands and swore again. Part of the cake fell to the floor; it was only a box of crumbs now. The man swore again and made the boy pick up the crumbs from the floor.
The boy hated the man with the red face with the same total but helpless hatred he had felt when he saw his father chained, when he saw Sounder shot. He had thought how he would like to chain the deputy sheriff behind his own wagon and then scare the horse so that it would run faster than the cruel man could. The deputy would fall and bounce and drag on the frozen road. His fine leather jacket would be torn more than he had torn his father’s overalls. He would yell and curse, and that would make the horse go faster. And the boy would just watch, not trying to stop the wagon….
The boy would like to see the big red-faced man crumpled on the floor with the crumbs. Besides the red face, the boy had noticed the fat, bulging neck that folded down over the man’s collar and pushed up in wrinkled circles under his chin. The bull neck of the man reminded the boy of the bull he had seen die in the cattle chute at the big house where his father worked. The horse doctor had been trying to vaccinate the bull in the neck, but the rope through the ring in the bull’s nose didn’t keep the bull from tossing his head from side to side, knocking the horse doctor against the side of the chute. Then the horse doctor had gotten mad and said, “Get a chain. I’ll make him stand still.”
When the chain was snapped around the bull’s neck, the farm hands pulled it over the crossbar of the chute posts and hooked it. But when the horse doctor stuck the bull in the neck, he lunged backward, set his front feet with his whole weight against the chain, and choked himself to death before one of the farm hands could jab him with a pitchfork and make him slacken the chain. The legs of the bull folded under him and the chain buried itself in the fat of his neck. When the farm hands finally got the chain unhooked from the crossbar, the bull’s head fell in the dirt, and blood oozed out of its mouth and nostrils….
The bull-necked man would sag to his knees, the boy thought, and crumple into a heap on the floor. Just the way the bull did, the boy thought, and blood would ooze out of his mouth and nose.
“Get up,” the red-faced man said, “you wanta take all day?” The boy stood up. He felt weak and his knees shook, but there were no more tears in his eyes.
The red-faced man took a big iron key on a ring as big around as the boy’s head and unlocked one of the iron gates. He pushed the boy in and said, “Fourth door down.” Passing the three doors, the boy could feel eyes following him. He saw men, some sitting on cots, some standing behind the iron gates with their hands on the bars, looking at him. Each step echoed against the iron ceiling and made him sound like a giant walking. Far down the long iron-grated corridor a sad voice was singing:
Far away on Judah’s plains
The shepherds watched their sheep.
The boy’s father stood with his hands on the bars. He did not have his hands and feet chained together. Seeing the hands that could handle a hot pot lid without a pot rag, open the stove door without using a poker, or skin a possum by holding the hind legs of the carcass with one hand and the hide with the other and just pulling, the boy knew his father could have choked the cruel man with the bull neck.
The father looked at the boy and said, “Child.” On the way, the boy had thought about what he would say to his father. He had practiced talking about his mother selling kernels at the store and buying the cake makings, his little brother and sisters being all right, no strangers coming past, not finding Sounder’s body. And he was going to ask his father where Sounder came to him along the road when he wasn’t more’n a pup. He practiced saying them all over and over to get the quiver and the quiet spells out of his voice because his mother had said, “Whatever you do, child, act perkish and don’t grieve your father.”
But the boy was full of mixed hate and pity now, and it addled him. There was an opening in the bars with a flat, iron shelf attached on the inside. The boy had left the lid of the box on the floor. Now he pushed the box through the opening and said, “This was a cake, before—” But he couldn’t finish. An awful quiet spell destroyed all his practice.
“Sounder might not be dead,” the boy said. He knew his father was grieved, for he swallowed hard and the quiet spells came to him too.
“I’ll be back ’fore long,” said his father.
From somewhere down the corridor there came a loud belly laugh, and a loud voice called out, “Listen to the man talk.”
“Tell her not to grieve.” His father was almost whispering now.
“Sounder didn’t die under the cabin.” But the boy couldn’t keep the quivering out of his voice.
“Tell her not to send you no more.” The quiet spells were getting longer. The man stopped looking through the bars at the boy and looked down at the cake.
“If he wasn’t shot in his vitals,” the boy said, “he might get healed in the woods.” Then there was a long quiet spell that was split in the middle by the loud clank of an iron door banging shut.
“Tell her I’ll send word with the visitin’ preacher.”
The big red-faced man with the bull neck opened the corridor door and yelled, “Visitin’ over.” The boy felt numb and cold, like he had felt standing outside the jail door. He choked up. He had grieved his father. He hated the red-faced man, so he wouldn’t cry until he got outside.
“Come on, boy,” the man yelled, swinging the big key ring.
“Go, child,” the father said. “Hurry, child.”
The boy was the last person through the big iron door. The bull-necked man pushed him and said, “Git, boy, or next time you won’t get in.”
V
THE BOY MOVED quickly around the corner and out of sight of the iron door and the gray cement walls of the jail. At the wall in front of the courthouse he stood for a while and looked back. When he had come, he was afraid, but he felt good in one way because he would see his father. He was bringing him a cake for Christmas. And he wasn’t going to let his father know he was grieved. So his father wouldn’t be grieved.
Now the sun had lost its strength. There were only a few people loafing around the courthouse wall, so the boy sat for a spell. He felt numb and tired. What would he say to his mother? He would tell her that the jailer was mean to visitors but didn’t say nothing to the people in jail. He wouldn’t tell her about the cake. When he told her his father had said she shouldn’t send him again, that he would send word by the visiting preacher, she would say “You grieved him, child. I told you to be perk so you wouldn’t grieve him.”
Nobody came near where the boy sat or passed on the street in front of the wall. He had forgotten the most important thing, he thought. He hadn’t asked his father where Sounder had come to him on the road when he wasn’t more’n a pup. That didn’t make any difference.
But along the road on the way to the jail, before the bull-necked man had ruined everything, the boy had thought his father would begin to think and say “If a stray ever follard you and it wasn’t near a house, likely somebody’s dropped it. So you could fetch it home and keep it for a dog.”
“Wouldn’t do no good now,” the boy murmured to himself. Even if he found a stray on the way home, his mother would say “I’m afraid, child. Don’t bring it in the cabin. If it’s still here when mornin’ comes, you take it down the road and scold it and run so it won’t foller you no more. If somebody come lookin’, you’d be in awful trouble.”
A great part of the way home the boy walked in darkness. In the big houses he saw beautiful lights and candles in the windows. Several times dogs rushed to the front gates and barked as he passed. But no stray pup came to him along the lonely, empty stretches of road. In the dark he thought of the bull-necked man crumpled on the floor in the cake crumbs, like the strangled bull in the cattle chute, and he
walked faster. At one big house the mailbox by the road had a lighted lantern hanging on it. The boy walked on the far side of the road so he wouldn’t show in the light. “People hangs ’em out when company is comin’ at night,” the boy’s father had once told him.
When court was over, they would take his father to a road camp or a quarry or a state farm. Would his father send word with the visiting preacher where he had gone? Would they take his father away to the chain gang for a year or two years before he could tell the visiting preacher? How would the boy find him then? If he lived closer to the town, he could watch each day, and when they took his father away in the wagons where convicts were penned up in huge wooden crates, he could follow.
The younger children were already in bed when the boy got home. He was glad, for they would have asked a lot of questions that might make his mother feel bad, questions like “Is everybody chained up in jail? How long do people stay in jail at one time?”
The boy’s mother did not ask hurtful questions. She asked if the boy got in all right and if it was warm in the jail. The boy told her that the jailer was mean to visitors but that he didn’t say nothing to the people in jail. He told her he heard some people singing in the jail.
“Sounder ain’t come home?” the boy said to his mother after he had talked about the jail. He had looked under the porch and called before he came into the cabin.
Now he went out, calling and looking around the whole cabin. He started to light the lantern to look more, but his mother said, “Hang it back, child. Ain’t no use to fret yourself. Eat your supper, you must be famished.”
“He said not to come no more,” the boy finally said to his mother when he had finished his supper. “He said he’ll send word by the visitin’ preacher.” He poked up the fire and waited for his mother to ask him if he had been perk and didn’t grieve his father, but she didn’t. He warmed himself and watched a patch of red glow the size of his hand at the bottom of the stove. He could see the red-faced man lying on the jail floor with blood oozing out of the corners of his mouth. After a long quiet spell the rocker began to squeak, and it made the boy jump, but his mother didn’t notice. She began to rock as she picked out walnut kernels. She hummed for a while, and then she began to sing like she was almost whispering for no one to hear but herself:
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