Sounder
Page 7
The head of the man was pulled to the side where a limp arm dangled and where the foot pointed outward as it was dragged through the dust. What had been a shoulder was now pushed up and back to make a one-sided hump so high that the leaning head seemed to rest upon it. The mouth was askew too, and the voice came out of the part farthest away from the withered, wrinkled, lifeless side.
The woman in the still rocker said, “Lord, Lord,” and sat suffocated in shock.
“Sounder knew it was you just like you was comin home from work,” the boy said in a clear voice.
Half the voice of the man was gone too, so in slow, measured, stuttering he told how he had been caught in a dynamite blast in the prison quarry, how the dead side had been crushed under an avalanche of limestone, and how he had been missed for a whole night in the search for dead and wounded. He told how the pain of the crushing stone had stopped in the night, how doctors had pushed and pulled and encased the numb side of his body in a cast, how they had spoken kindly to him and told him he would die. But he resolved he would not die, even with a half-dead body, because he wanted to come home again.
“For being hurt, they let me have time off my sentence,” the man said, “and since I couldn’t work, I guess they was glad to.”
“The Lord has brought you home,” the woman said.
The boy heard faint laughter somewhere behind the cabin. The children were coming home from the creek. He went around the cabin slowly, then hurried to meet them.
“Pa’s home,” he said and grabbed his sister, who had started to run toward the cabin. “Wait. He’s mighty crippled up, so behave like nothin’ has happened.”
“Can he walk?” the youngest child asked.
“Yes! And don’t you ask no questions.”
“You been mighty natural and considerate,” the mother said to the younger children later when she went to the woodpile and called them to pick dry kindling for a quick fire. When she came back to the porch she said, “We was gonna just have a cold piece ’cause it’s so sultry, but now I think I’ll cook.”
Everything don’t change much, the boy thought. There’s eatin’ and sleepin’ and talkin’ and settin’ that goes on. One day might be different from another, but there ain’t much difference when they’re put together.
Sometimes there were long quiet spells. Once or twice the boy’s mother said to the boy, “He’s powerful proud of your learnin’. Read somethin’ from the Scriptures.” But mostly they just talked about heat and cold, and wind and clouds, and what’s gonna be done, and time passing.
As the days of August passed and September brought signs of autumn, the crippled man sat on the porch step and leaned the paralyzed, deformed side of his body against a porch post. This was the only comfortable sitting position he could find. The old coon dog would lie facing his master, with his one eye fixed and his one ear raised. Sometimes he would tap his tail against the earth. Sometimes the ear would droop and the eye would close. Then the great muscles would flex in dreams of the hunt, and the mighty chest would give off the muffled whisper of a bark. Sometimes the two limped together to the edge of the fields, or wandered off into the pine woods. They never went along the road. Perhaps they knew how strange a picture they made when they walked together.
About the middle of September the boy left to go back to his teacher. “It’s the most important thing,” his mother said.
And the crippled man said, “We’re fine. We won’t need nothin’.”
“I’ll come for a few days before it’s cold to help gather wood and walnuts.”
The broken body of the old man withered more and more, but when the smell of harvest and the hunt came with October, his spirit seemed to quicken his dragging step. One day he cleaned the dusty lantern globe, and the old dog, remembering, bounced on his three legs and wagged his tail as if to say “I’m ready.”
The boy had come home. To gather the felled trees and chop the standing dead ones was part of the field pay too. He had been cutting and dragging timber all day.
Sometimes he had looked longingly at the lantern and possum sack, but something inside him had said “Wait. Wait and go together.” But the boy did not want to go hunting anymore. And without his saying anything, his father had said, “You’re too tired, child. We ain’t goin’ far, no way.”
In the early darkness the halting, hesitant swing of the lantern marked the slow path from fields to pine woods toward the lowlands. The boy stood on the porch, watching until the light was lost behind pine branches. Then he went and sat by the stove. His mother rocked as the mound of kernels grew in the fold of her apron. “He been mighty peart,” she said. “I hope he don’t fall in the dark. Maybe he’ll be happy now he can go hunting again.” And she took up her singing where she had left off.
Ain’t nobody else gonna walk it for you,
You gotta walk it by yourself.
Sounder’s scratching at the door awakened the boy. It was still night, but the first red glow of dawn was rising in a faint crescent over the pine woods.
“Sounder just couldn’t poke slow enough for your father,” the mother said to the boy as they stood in the doorway, straining and sifting the dark for some movement.
“Lantern wouldn’t burn out in this time,” the boy said. “No sign of light. He must have fallen or got tired. Sounder will show me.”
Sounder was already across the road into the stalk land, whining, moving his head from one side to the other, looking back to be sure that the boy was following.
Across the stalk land, into the pine woods, into the climbing, brightening glow of the dawn, the boy followed the dog, whose anxious pace slowed from age as they went. “By a dog’s age, Sounder is past dying time,” the boy said half aloud. Fear had always prompted him to talk to himself.
Deep in the pine woods, along a deserted logging road, the boy and dog came to a small open space where there had once been a log ramp. The sun was just beginning to drive its first splinters of light through the pines, bouncing against tree trunks and earth. At the foot of one of the trees the boy’s father sat, the lantern still burning by his side.
“So tuckered out he fell asleep,” the boy said to himself.
But the figure did not move when Sounder licked his hand. The boy put his hand on his father’s good shoulder and shook ever so gently. The chin did not lift itself; no eyes turned up to meet the boy. “Tired, so tired.”
When the boy returned to the cabin and told his mother, her lips grew long and thin and pale. But when she finally spoke, they were warm and soft as when she sang. “When life is so tiresome, there ain’t no peace like the greatest peace—the peace of the Lord’s hand holding you. And he’ll have a store-bought box for burial ’cause all these years I paid close attention to his burial insurance.”
They buried the boy’s father in the unfenced lot behind the meetin’ house. The preacher stood amid the sumac and running briars before the mound of fresh red earth and read:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
“There’s plenty of wood, and I must go back to school,” the boy told his mother several days after they had buried his father. “Sounder ain’t got no spirit left for living. He hasn’t gone with me to the woods to chop since Pa died. He doesn’t even whine anymore. He just lies on his coffee sacks under the cabin steps. I’ve dug a grave for him under the big jack oak tree in the stalk land by the fencerow. It’ll be ready if the ground freezes. You can carry him on his coffee sacks and bury him. He’ll be gone before I come home again.”
And the boy was right. Two weeks before he came home for Christmas, Sounder crawled under the cabin and died. The boy’s mother told him all there was to tell.
“He just crawled up under the house and died,” she said.
The boy was glad. He had learned to read his book with the torn cover better now. He had read in it: “Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead.” He had asked the teacher what it meant, a
nd the teacher had said that if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever. It blooms on for whoever has seen it blooming. It was not quite clear to the boy then, but it was now.
Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.
The pine trees would look down forever on a lantern burning out of oil but not going out. A harvest moon would cast shadows forever of a man walking upright, his dog bouncing after him. And the quiet of the night would fill and echo again with the deep voice of Sounder, the great coon dog.
PRAISE FOR
Sounder
“A rarely beautiful, understated novel about a black sharecropper and his family in the 19th-century American South. The human characters’ namelessness lends them universality as oppressed people, while the author’s authentic, detailed descriptions assure their individuality. An extraordinarily sensitive book.” —School Library Journal
“Written with quiet strength and taut with tragedy. Grim and honest, the book has a moving, elegaic quality that is reminiscent of the stark inevitability of Greek tragedy.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“There is an epic quality in the deeply moving, long-ago story of cruelty, loneliness, and silent suffering. The power of the writing lies in its combination of subtlety and strength.”
—The Horn Book
“The writing is simple, timeless, and extraordinarily moving. An outstanding book.” —Commonweal
“The main characters, though nameless, are sharply etched and the portrayal of the quiet dignity with which the boy and his parents face adversities not of their own making is powerfully moving.” —ALA Booklist
Copyright
Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Sounder
Text copyright © 1969 by William H. Armstrong
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-10556-1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armstrong, William Howard, 1911-1999
Sounder / by William H. Armstrong; illustrated by James Barkley.
p. cm.
Summary: Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and through his relationship with his devoted dog Sounder.
ISBN 0-06-440020-4 (pbk.) - ISBN 0-06-073946-0 (special ed. pbk.)
1. African Americans—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Family Life—Fiction. 4. Poverty—Fiction. [1. African Americans—Juvenile fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.A73394 So 1969 70-85030
[Fic] CIP
AC
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Revised Harper Trophy edition, 2002
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