The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  He said, “Don’t skeer him. There he lies——”

  Buck was not as satisfying as Penny in his response. He had seen so many of Fodder-wing’s pets come and go.

  “He’ll likely go wild and run off,” he said, and went to the water-shelf to wash his hands before dinner.

  A chill came over Jody. Buck was worse than his mother to take away pleasure. He lingered a moment with the fawn, stroking it. It moved its sleepy head and nuzzled his fingers. Buck could not know of the closeness. It was all the better for being secret. He left the fawn and went to the basin and washed, too. The touch of the fawn had left his hands scented with a faint grassy pungency. He hated to wash it away, but decided that his mother might not find it as pleasant.

  His mother had wet and combed her hair for dinner, not with coquetry, but with pride. She wore a clean sacking apron over her brown calico.

  She said to Buck, “With only Penny to do, we ain’t got the rations plentiful like you folks. But we do eat clean and decent.”

  Jody looked quickly to see if Buck would take offense. Buck ladled grits into his plate and scooped a hole in the center for the fried eggs and gravy.

  “Now Miss Ory, don’t fret about me. Jody and me’ll slip off this evenin’ and git you a mess o’ squirrels and mebbe a turkey. I seed turkey sign the fur edge o’ the pea field.”

  Ma Baxter filled a plate for Penny, and added a cup of milk.

  “You take it to him, Jody.”

  He went to his father. Penny shook his head at the plate.

  “Hit look jest plain nasty to me, son. Set up there and feed me a spoon o’ the grits, and the milk. Hit wearies me to lift my arm.”

  The swelling had left his face, but his arm was still three times its normal size, and his breath came heavily. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of the soft hominy and drank the milk. He motioned the plate away.

  “You gittin’ along all right with your baby?”

  Jody reported on the moss bed.

  “You picked a good place. What you fixin’ to name him?”

  “I jest don’t know. I want a name is real special.”

  Buck and Ma Baxter came into the bedroom and sat down to visit. The day was hot and the sun high and there was no hurry for anything.

  Penny said, “Jody’s in a tight for a name for the new Baxter.”

  Buck said, “Tell you, Jody, when you see Fodder-wing, he’ll pick a name. He’s got a ear for sich things, jest like some folks has got a ear for fiddle music. He’ll pick you a name is purty.”

  Ma Baxter said, “Go eat your dinner, Jody. That spotted fawn has takened your mind off your rations.”

  The opportunity was choice. He went to the kitchen and heaped a plate with food and went to the shed. The fawn was still drowsy. He sat beside it and ate his dinner. He dipped his fingers in the grease-covered grits and held them out to it, but it only snuffed and turned its head away.

  He said, “You better learn somethin’ besides milk.”

  The dirt daubers buzzed in the rafters. He scraped his plate clean and set it aside. He lay down beside the fawn. He put one arm across its neck. It did not seem to him that he could ever be lonely again.

  Chapter XVI

  THE fawn took up much of Jody’s time. It tagged him wherever he went. At the woodpile, it interfered with the swing of his axe. The milking had been assigned to him. He was forced to bar the fawn from the lot and it stood by the gate, peering between the bars, and bleated until he had finished. He stripped Trixie’s teats until she kicked in protest. Each cupful of milk meant more nourishment for the fawn. It seemed to him that he could see it growing. It stood firm on its small legs and leaped and tossed its head and tail. He romped with it until they dropped together in a heap to rest and cool themselves.

  The days were hot and humid. Penny sweat in his bed. Buck came dripping from the fields. He discarded his shirt and worked naked to the waist. His chest was thick with black hair. The perspiration glistened on it like rain drops on black dried moss. When she was sure he would not call for it, Ma Baxter washed and boiled the shirt and hung it in the scalding sunshine.

  She said with satisfaction, “There’s that much of him, now, won’t stink.”

  Buck filled the Baxter cabin until it bulged.

  Ma Baxter said to Penny, “First sight I catch o’ that beard and chest in the mornin’s, I take a start, for I think a bear’s got in the house.”

  She was appalled at the amount of food he bolted three times a day. She could scarcely complain, since he more than made it up with the work he was doing and the game with which he supplied her. In the week he had been at the clearing, he had worked out the corn, the cow-peas and the sweet potatoes. He had cleared two acres of new ground to the west, between the pea-field and the sink-hole. He had cut down a dozen oaks and pines and sweet gums and innumerable saplings, burned the stumps and trimmed the fallen trees, so that Jody and Penny on the cross-cut saw might cut the limbs and trunks for fire-wood.

  He said, “You plant Sea Island cotton on that new ground, come spring, and you’ll make you a crop.”

  Ma Baxter said suspiciously, “You-all has got no cotton.”

  He said easily, “Us Forresters ain’t farmers. We’ll do the clarin’, we’ll plow a field now and agin, but it’s our nature to make a livin’ what I reckon you’d call rough and easy.”

  She said primly, “Rough ways lands folks in trouble.”

  He said, “You ever know my granddaddy? They called him Trouble Forrester.”

  She could not dislike him. He was as good-natured as a dog. She could only say to Penny in the privacy of night, “He works like a ox, but he’s so tormented black. Ezra, he’s black as a buzzard.”

  “Hit’s his beard,” Penny said. “Did I have a black beard like that un, I mought not look like no buzzard, but I’d shore look like a crow.”

  Penny’s strength was slow in returning. The swelling from the poisoning had gone down. The skin was sloughing away where the rattler had struck him and he had cut the wounds to make the envenomed blood flow more freely. But at the least exertion, he was nauseated, and his heart pumped like the paddle-wheels on the river steamers, and he gasped for breath and must lie flat to recover himself. He was all wiry nerves, strung like harp-strings on a frail wooden body.

  To Jody, the presence of Buck was a stimulation so great that he was feverish with it. The fawn alone would have had him delirious. The two together kept him in a daze, wandering from Penny’s room to wherever Buck was working, to wherever the fawn might be, and around again.

  His mother said, “You’d ought to be noticin’ all what Buck is doin’, so you kin do it when he’s gone.”

  There was a tacit understanding among the three of them that Penny was to be spared.

  The morning of the eighth day that Buck had been at the clearing, he called Jody to the cornfield. Vandals had visited it during the night. Half a row of corn had been stripped of its ears. Mid-way of the row lay a pile of corn-husks.

  Buck said, “You know what done that?”

  “’Coons?”

  “Hell, no. Foxes. Foxes love corn gooder’n I do. Twothree o’ them bushy-tailed scapers come in last night and had them a pure picnic.”

  Jody laughed out.

  “A fox picnic! I’d love to of seed it.”

  Buck said sternly, “You’d ought to be out at night with your gun, keepin’ ’em out. Now we’ll git ’em tonight. You got to learn to be serious. And this evenin’ we’ll rob that bee-tree by the sink-hole, and that’ll learn you how to do that.”

  Jody went through the day impatiently. A hunt with Buck had a different quality from a hunt with his father. There was an excitement in anything the Forresters did that made him nervous and high-keyed. There was noise and confusion. A hunt with Penny held a satisfaction that was of more than the chase. There was always time to see a bird fly over, or to listen to a ’gator, bellowing in the swamp. He wished that Penny were able to be about, to rob the bee-tree w
ith them; to go on the trail of the robber foxes. In mid-afternoon, Buck came from the new ground. Penny was sleeping.

  Buck said to Ma Baxter, “I’ll want a lard-pail and a axe and a heap o’ rags to burn for smudges.”

  There were not many rags in the Baxter household. Clothes were worn and patched and mended until they dropped in ribbons. Flour sacks went into aprons and dishtowels and chair-backs that she embroidered on winter evenings; into backs for her patch-work quilts. Buck looked disgustedly at the small handful she gave him.

  He said, “Well, reckon we kin use moss.”

  She said, “Don’t you-all git stung, now. My grand-pappy got hisself stung oncet to where he was in the bed a fortnight.”

  “If we git stung, hit shore won’t be o’ purpose.”

  He started across the yard with Jody beside him. The fawn was close behind.

  “You want your blasted baby to git stung to death? Then shut him up.”

  Jody led the fawn reluctantly to the shed and closed the door. He hated to be separated from it, even for honey-hunting. It seemed unjust that Penny should not be along. He had had his eye on the bee-tree all spring. He had waited for the proper time, when the bees should have gathered their nectar from the yellow jessamine, from the mulberry and the holly, the palmetto bloom and the chinaberry, the wild grapes and the peaches, and from the hawthorn and the wild plum. There would still be bloom from which they might make their own winter store. The red bay and the loblolly were in full blossom. There would soon be sumac and goldenrod and asters.

  Buck said, “You know who’d purely love to be gittin’ honey with us? Fodder-wing. He’ll work amongst the bees so quiet, you’d figger they was makin’ him a present o’ the honey-comb.”

  They reached the sink-hole.

  Buck said, “I don’t see how you-all have made out, totin’ your water so fur. If I wasn’t about to be leavin’, I’d shore he’p you dig a well nigh to the house.”

  “You fixin’ to leave?”

  “Well, yes. I’m fretted about Fodder-wing. And I ain’t never lived this long without whiskey.”

  The bee-tree was a dead pine. Mid-way up its height, the wild honey-bees flew in and out of a deep cavity. It stood at the north edge of the sink-hole. Buck stopped by the live oaks to pull down armfuls of green Spanish moss. At the base of the pine he pointed to a pile of dried grass and feathers.

  “The wood-ducks tried to nest there,” he said. “They’ll see a hole in a tree, and don’t matter do it belong to a Lord God woodpecker, or one o’ them big woodpeckers with a ivory bill, or a swarm o’ bees, they’ll take a notion to it and they’ll try to nest in the hole. The bees has done drove these uns out.”

  He began to chop at the base of the dead pine. High in the air a humming sounded like a den of rattlers, far distant and turbulent. The blows of the axe echoed back and forth across the sink-hole. Squirrels, quiescent in the oaks and palm trees, began to chatter at the disturbance. Scrub jays cried shrilly. The pine shook. The humming grew into a roar. The bees sung across their heads like small shot.

  Buck called, “Light me a smudge, boy. Be peert.”

  Jody made a loose ball of moss and rags and opened Buck’s tinder horn. He struggled with flint and steel. Penny was so expert at starting a fire that it occurred to Jody in a panic that he had never done it himself. The sparks flashed to the scorched rags that constituted the tinder, but he blew them so violently that they flickered out almost as soon as they touched the cloth. Buck dropped the axe and ran to him and took the materials from him. He rubbed flint and steel together as vigorously as Jody had done, but he blew on the spark-touched rags with a judiciousness amazing in a Forrester. The rags blazed and he touched the fire to the moss. It began to smoke without blazing.

  Buck ran back to the pine and put his muscles behind the axe. Its bright blade ate into the decayed center of the tree. Its long fibers split and ripped and shivered. The pine roared in the air as though a voice had come to it to cry out with in its falling. It crashed to earth and the bees were a cloud across its dead gaping heart. Buck snatched up the smudge and darted in as quick, for all his size, as a weasel. He stuffed the smoking ball into the cavity with one thrust and ran madly. He looked more than ever like a lumbering bear. He let out a howl and slapped at his chest and shoulders. Jody had to laugh at him. Then a needle-point of fire stabbed his own neck.

  Buck shouted, “Git down the sink-hole! Git to the water!”

  They scrambled down the steep bank. The seepage pool at the bottom was shallow for lack of rains. The water did not quite cover them when they lay in it. Buck scooped up handfuls of mud and plastered Jody’s hair and neck with it. His own thatch was a thick enough protection. A few bees followed and swung back and forth persistently. After a time Buck raised himself cautiously.

  He said, “They’re due to be quiet now. But ain’t we a pair o’ hogs.”

  Their breeches, their faces, their shirts, were caked with mud. It was not yet wash-day and Jody led the way up the south wall of the sink-hole to the wash-troughs. They sousled their clothes in one and washed themselves from the other.

  Buck said, “What you grinnin’ about?”

  Jody shook his head. He could imagine his mother saying, “If it takes bees to git a Forrester clean, I’ll hive ’em a swarm.”

  Buck had half a dozen stings but Jody had escaped with two. They approached the bee tree cautiously. The smudge had been properly placed. The bees were drugged with the heavy smoke. They swarmed slowly around the cavity, searching for their queen.

  Buck split a wider opening and used his sheath knife to hack away the edges. He cleaned away trash and splinters and reached in with the knife. He turned, amazed.

  “Great day! They’s a wash-tub o’ honey here. The tree’s full.”

  He brought out a slab, golden and dripping. The comb was rough and dark, but the honey was paler than fine syrup. They filled the lard-pail and carried it between them to the house. Ma Baxter gave them a cypress tub to take back with them.

  Buck said, “Now a wash tub o’ biscuits is all more is needed.”

  The return load was heavy. It was the largest yield, Buck said, he had ever seen from a bee-tree since he was a boy.

  He said, “When I go home tomorrer and tell my folks, they’ll not believe me.”

  She said slowly, “I reckon you’ll want to carry some back with you.”

  “No more’n I kin carry in my belly. I got my eye on twothree trees in the swamp. Do they fail me, I’m like to come beggin’.”

  Ma Baxter said, “You’ve been mighty neighborly. Mebbe some day we’ll have a plenty and kin do for you.”

  Jody said, “I wish you’d not go, Buck.”

  The big man shoved him playfully.

  “With me gone, you’ll not have no time to nuss that fawn.”

  Buck was plainly restless. He shuffled his feet at supper and paced up and down afterward. He looked at the sky.

  He said, “A good clare night for ridin’.”

  Jody said, “How come you anxious all to oncet?”

  Buck paused in his pacing.

  “I git that-a-way. I like to come and I like to go. Wherever I be, I’m content a while, and then I jest someway ain’t content no more. When me and Lem and Mill-wheel goes off hoss-tradin’ to Kentucky, I’ll swear, I figger I’ll bust ’till I git home agin.” He paused and stared into the sunset. He added in a low voice, “And I’m right smart fretted about Fodder-wing. I got a feelin’ here—” he thumped his hairy chest—“he ain’t doin’ good.”

  “Wouldn’t somebody of come?”

  “That’s it. If they didn’t know your Pa was bad off, they’d of ridden over jest to say Howdy. They figgered your Pa needed he’p and they’d not like to toll me away, was the news bad or worrisome.”

  He waited nervously for dark. He wanted to be done with his job, and gone. Penny was as good a night-hunter as any Forrester. Jody was tempted to brag of the varmints his father had disposed of, but th
at might cut him out of a night-prowl with Buck. He held his tongue. He helped Buck prepare the fatwood splinters for the fire-pan.

  Buck said, “My Uncle Cotton had red hair. They was a heap of it, stood up like a haystack, and red as a fightin’ cock’s comb. He was fire-huntin’ one night, and the handle was a mite short, and a spark from the pan set his hair afire. And you know when he hollered to Pa for he’p, Pa didn’t pay him no mind. He jest thought the moon had done rose and was shinin’ through Uncle Cotton’s hair.”

  Jody gaped.

  “Is that true, Buck?”

  Buck whittled busily.

  “Now if you was to tell me a tale,” he said, “I’d not ask you no sich of a question.”

  Penny called from his bedroom.

  “I cain’t stand it. I’m o’ good notion not to leave you go without me.”

  They came to his room.

  “If ’twas a panther hunt you was goin’ on,” he said, “I’ll swear I’d feel good enough to go with you.”

  Buck said, “Now I’d jest carry you on a panther hunt, did I have my dogs.”

  “Why, my pair’ll out-hunt your whole pack.” He asked innocently, “How did you-all come out with that sorry dog I traded you?”

  Buck drawled, “Why, that dog’s proved out the fastest and the finest and the hardest-huntin’ and the fearlessest of ary dog we’ve ever had on the place. All he needed was men to train him.”

  Penny chuckled.

  He said, “I’m proud you was smart enough to make somethin’ outen him. Where’s he now?”

  “Well, he was so blasted good, he put t’other dogs so to shame, Lem couldn’t abide it, and he hauled off and shot him and buried him in the Baxter cemetery one night.”

  Penny said gravely, “I noticed the new grave and I figgered you-all had give outen buryin’-ground. I’ll whittle a head-stone, time I git my strength. I’ll carve on it, ’Here lies a Forrester, mourned by all his kin.’”

  He grinned broadly and slapped the covers of his bed.