The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  He stumbled to the kitchen.

  “Pa wants you, Ma.”

  He went out of the house. He called Flag, quaveringly. The deer came to him from the black-jack. Jody walked down the road with his arm across his back. He loved him more than ever, in his sin. Flag kicked up his heels and invited him to romp. He had no heart for play. He walked slowly as far as the sink-hole. It was lovely as a spring flower garden. The dog-wood had not finished blooming. The last blossoms were white against the pale green of the sweet gums and the hickories. He was not even tempted to walk around it. He turned back to the house and went inside. His mother and father were still talking. Penny called to him to come in beside the bed. Ma Baxter’s face was flushed. She was hot with defeat. Her mouth was a tight line.

  Penny said quietly, “We’ve come to a agreement, Jody. What’s happened is powerful bad, but we’ll have a try at a remedy. I take it you’re willin’ to work extry hard to fix things.”

  “I’ll jest do ary thing, Pa. I’ll keep Flag shut up ’til the crops is made—”

  “We got no earthly place to shut up a wild thing like that. Now listen to me. You go now and git corn from the crib. Pick the best ears. Your Ma’ll he’p you shell it. You go then and plant it jest like we done before, right where the first lot was put. Drill your holes like I done, and go back over and drop the seed and kiver it.”

  “I know jest how.”

  “Then time you git that done, likely along tomorrer mornin’, you hitch Cæsar to the wagon and go yonder to the old clearin’ on the way to the Forresters, where the road turns off. You tear down that old rail fence there and load the rails on the wagon. Not too heavy a load, for Cæsar cain’t pull too much on that piece of up-grade. You make as many trips as you need to. Pile the rails here and yon along our fence. Dump your first loads along the south side o’ the cornfield and along the east side, borderin’ the house yard. Then you build up that fence—workin’ first on them two sides—jest as high as you got the rail to do it. I been noticin’ your yearlin’ allus takes the fence on this end. If you kin keep him out up here, he’ll mebbe stay out ’til you kin build up the rest.”

  It seemed to Jody that he had been shut up in a small black box and now the lid was off, and the sun and light and air came in across him, and he was free.

  Penny said, “Now when you git your fence higher’n you kin reach, if I ain’t on my feet by then, your Ma’ll he’p you with the riders.”

  Jody turned joyously to embrace his mother. She was patting one foot ominously on the floor. She stared straight ahead and did not speak. He decided that it was probably best not to touch her. Nothing could alter his relief. He ran outside. Flag was feeding along the road near the gate. Jody threw his arms around him.

  “Pa’s fixed it,” he told him. “Ma’s pattin’ her foot, but Pa’s fixed it.”

  Flag’s mind was on the tender sprigs of grass and he shook free. Jody went whistling to the crib and sorted over the corn for the ears with the largest kernels. It would take a good many ears of the remaining corn for seed for the second planting. He carried it in a sack to the back door and sat down on the stoop and began the shelling. His mother came and sat beside him. Her face was a frigid mask. She picked up an ear and went to work.

  “Huh!” she snorted.

  Penny had forbidden her outright to scold Jody. He had not forbidden her to talk to herself.

  “’Spare his feelin’s!’ Huh! And who’s to spare our bellies this winter? Huh!”

  Jody swung around so that his back was partly turned on her. He hummed under his breath, ignoring her.

  “Hush that racket.”

  He left off his humming. It was no moment to be impudent or to argue. His fingers flew. The corn popped from the cobs. He wanted to be away from her and at his planting as quickly as possible. He gathered up the sack of seed and slung it over his shoulder and went to the field. It was nearly dinner time, but he could get in an hour’s work. In the open field he was free to sing and whistle. A mocking-bird in the hammock sang, whether in competition or harmony, he could not tell. The March day was blue and gold. The feel of the corn in his fingers, the feel of the earth that reached out to enclose the corn, was good. Flag discovered him and joined him.

  He said, “You do your rompin’ right now, ol’ feller. You goin’ to git barred out.”

  He bolted his dinner at noon and hurried back to the planting. He worked so fast that a couple of hours would finish it the next morning. He sat at Penny’s bedside after supper, chattering like a squirrel. Penny listened gravely, as always, but his responses were sometimes detached and vacant, and his thoughts were elsewhere. Ma Baxter kept stonily to herself. Dinner and supper had both been meager and indifferently cooked, as though she took her revenge from behind her own citadel, the cook-pot. Jody paused for breath. In the hammock, a whip-poor-will called. Penny’s face brightened.

  “’When the first whip-poor-will calls, the corn had ought to be in the ground.’ We still not too late, boy.”

  “Ever’ last bit’ll be in tomorrer mornin’.”

  “That’s good.”

  He closed his eyes. Relief from acute agony had come, as long as he lay quiet. When he moved, the pain was excruciating. He was wracked constantly with his rheumatism.

  He said, “You go on to bed now and git your rest.”

  Jody left him and washed his feet without being told. He went to bed, peaceful of mind and tired of body, and was asleep in an instant. He awakened before dawn with a feeling of responsibility. He got out of bed and dressed immediately.

  Ma Baxter said, “Pity hit take a thing like this to make you put out.”

  In standing between her and Flag during the past months, he had learned the value of his father’s trick of an unarguing silence. It annoyed his mother more for the moment, but she stopped scolding sooner. He ate heartily but hurriedly, slipped a handful of biscuits inside his shirt for Flag, and went at once to his work. He could scarcely see, at first, to plant. He watched the sun rise beyond the grape arbor. In the thin golden light the young leaves and tendrils of the Scuppernong were like Twink Weatherby’s hair. He decided that sunrise and sunset both gave him a pleasantly sad feeling. The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color of dried corn husks. He went at his work vigorously. Flag came to him from the woods where he had evidently spent the night. He fed him the biscuits and let him nose inside his shirt bosom for the crumbs. He tingled with the sensation of the soft wet nose against his bare flesh.

  When the planting of the corn was finished in the early morning, he bounded back to the lot. Old Cæsar was pasturing south of it. He lifted his grizzled head from the grass with a mild astonishment. Jody had seldom had the harnessing of him. He behaved meekly for the hitching and stepped backward politely between the shafts of the wagon. It gave Jody an agreeable sense of authority. He made his voice as deep as possible and gave unnecessary orders. Cæsar obeyed humbly. Jody took his seat alone, slapped the reins and set off to the abandoned clearing to the west. Flag was pleased with the business and trotted ahead. Now and then he stopped dead in the middle of the road, for mischievousness, and Jody had to stop the horse and cajole the deer into moving.

  “You mighty biggety now you’re a yearlin’,” he called to him.

  He flicked the reins and made Cæsar jog-trot, then remembered that he would have many trips to make, and allowed the old animal to slow down to his usual walk. At the clearing, it was no job at all to pull the old split-rail fence apart. The stakes and riders collapsed conveniently. The loading seemed easy for a time, then his back and arms began to ache and he had to stop and rest. There was no danger of over-loading, because it was too difficult to pile the rails past a certain height. He tried to coax Flag to jump up on the seat beside him. The yearling eyed the narrow space and turned away and could not be induced. Jody tried to lift him
in, but he was astonishingly heavy and he could no more than get his front legs over the wagon wheel. He gave it up and turned around and drove home. Flag went into a sprint and was waiting ahead of him when he reached there. He decided to begin dumping his piles at the fence corner near the house and working in both directions, alternately. In that way, when the rails gave out, he would have built up the fence highest across Flag’s favorite crossing places.

  Jody Lost (p. 389)

  The hauling and unloading took longer than he dreamed of. Midway, it seemed an endless and a hopeless task. The corn would be up before he had begun the fencing. The weather was dry and the corn was slow in germinating. Each morning he looked fearfully for the pale shoots. Each morning he found with relief that they were not yet showing. He was up each day in the dark before dawn and either ate a cold breakfast without disturbing his mother, or hauled a load before he came to the table. He worked at night until the sun had set, and the red and orange faded through the pines, and the split rails merged with the color of the earth. He had dark circles under his eyes for lack of enough sleep. Penny had not had time to cut his hair, and it hung shaggily in his eyes. He made no complaint when, his eyelids drooping after supper, his mother asked him to fetch in wood that she could easily have brought in herself during the day. Penny watched him with a pain keener than the rupture in his groin. He called him to the bed one night.

  “I’m proud to see you workin’ so hard, boy, but even the yearlin’, much as you think of him, ain’t wuth killin’ yourself over.”

  Jody said doggedly, “I ain’t killin’ myself. Feel my muscle. I’m gittin’ powerful strong.”

  Penny felt of the thin hard arm. It was true. The regular and heavy lifting and heaving of the rails were developing his arms and back and shoulders.

  Penny said, “I’d give a year o’ my life to be to where I could he’p you with this.”

  “I’ll git it done.”

  On the fourth morning he decided to begin building up the fence at the end Flag had been using. Then if the corn was up before he had finished, Flag would not take him unaware. He would even tie him by the legs to a tree, day and night, and let him kick and flounder, if necessary, until the fence was done. He found to his relief that the work went rapidly. In two days, he had raised the south and east fence lines to a height of five feet. Ma Baxter, seeing the impossible materialize, softened. On the morning of the sixth day, she said, “I got nothin’ to do today. I’ll he’p you git another foot on that fence.”

  “Oh, Ma. You good ol’ Ma——”

  “Now ne’ mind squeezin’ the life outen me. I never figgered you had it in you to work this-a-way.”

  She gave out of breath easily, but the work itself, while arduous, was not heavy with a pair of hands at each end of the light rails. The swing of it was rhythmic, like the swing of the cross-cut saw. She grew red in the face and panted and sweat, but she laughed and stayed with him most of the day and part of the next. There were enough rails piled at the corner to go even higher, and they built it well over the six feet that Penny had said would be high enough to keep out the yearling.

  “If ’twas a full-growed buck now,” he said, “he could clear eight feet easy.”

  That night Jody discovered the corn breaking the ground. In the morning he tried to put a hobble on Flag. He tied a rope from one hind shin to the other, with a foot of play between. Flag bucked and kicked and threw himself on the ground in a frenzy. He stumbled to his knees and fought so wildly that it was plain he would break a leg if he were not released. Jody cut the rope and let him go. He galloped away to the woods and was gone all day. Jody worked furiously at the west fence line, for that would be the yearling’s most logical line of attack on the field when the south and east ends turned him. Ma Baxter gave him two or three hours of help in the afternoon. He used up all the rails he had dumped to the west and north.

  Two showers of rain pushed the corn. It was more than an inch high. On the morning that Jody was ready to return to the old clearing for more rails, he went to the new high fence and climbed to the top to look over the field. His eye caught sight of Flag, feeding on the corn near the north hammock. He jumped down and called his mother.

  “Ma, will you go he’p me haul rails? I got to hurry. Flag’s done come in the north end.”

  She hurried outside with him and climbed part-way up the fence until she could peer over.

  “North end nothin’,” she said. “He takened the fence right here at the highest corner.”

  He looked down where she pointed. The sharp tracks led to the fence and appeared again on the other side, inside the cornfield.

  “And he’s got this crop, too,” she said.

  Jody stared. Again, the shoots had been pulled up by the roots. The rows were bare. The yearling’s tracks led regularly up and down between them.

  “He ain’t gone fur, Ma. Look, the corn’s still there, yonder. He ain’t et but a leetle ways.”

  “Yes, and what’s to keep him from finishin’ it?”

  She dropped back to the ground and walked stolidly back into the house.

  “This settles it,” she said. “I was a fool to give in before.”

  Jody clung to the fence. He was numb. He could neither feel nor think. Flag scented him, lifted his head and came bounding to him. Jody climbed down into the yard. He did not want to see him. As he stood, Flag cleared, as lightly as a mocking-bird in flight, the high fence on which he had labored. Jody turned his back on him and went into the house. He went to his room and threw himself on his bed and buried his face in his pillow.

  He was prepared for his father to call him. The talk between Penny and Ma Baxter this time had not taken long. He was prepared for trouble. He was prepared for something ominous that had dogged him for days. He was not prepared for the impossible. He was not prepared for his father’s words.

  Penny said, “Jody, all’s been done was possible. I’m sorry. I cain’t never tell you, how sorry. But we cain’t have our year’s crops destroyed. We cain’t all go hongry. Take the yearlin’ out in the woods and tie him and shoot him.”

  Chapter XXXII

  JODY wandered west with Flag beside him. He carried Penny’s shotgun over his shoulder. His heart beat and stopped and beat again.

  He said under his breath, “I’ll not do it. I’ll jest not.”

  He stopped in the road.

  He said out loud, “They cain’t make me do it.”

  Flag looked at him with big eyes, then bent his head to a wisp of grass by the roadside. Jody walked on again slowly.

  “I’ll not. I’ll not. I’ll jest not. They kin beat me. They kin kill me. I’ll not.”

  He held imaginary conversations with his mother and father. He told them both that he hated them. His mother stormed and Penny was quiet. His mother whipped him with a hickory switch until he felt the blood run down his legs. He bit her hand and she whipped him again. He kicked her in the ankles and she whipped him once more and threw him in a corner.

  He lifted his head from the floor and said, “You cain’t make me. I’ll not do it.”

  He fought them in his mind until he was exhausted. He stopped at the abandoned clearing. A short length of fence was left that he had not yet torn down. He threw himself in the grass under an old chinaberry tree and sobbed until he could sob no more. Flag nuzzled him and he clutched him. He lay panting.

  He said, “I’ll not. I’ll jest not.”

  He was dizzy when he stood up. He leaned against the rough trunk of the chinaberry. It was in bloom. The bees buzzed in it and the fragrance was sweet across the spring air. He was ashamed of himself for having taken time to cry. It was no time to cry. He would have to think. He would have to study his way out of it, as Penny did out of things that threatened him. At first he conjectured wildly. He would build a pen for Flag. A pen ten feet tall. He would gather acorns and grass and berries and feed him there. But it would take all his time to gather feed for a penned animal—Penny was on his back
in the bed— The crops would have to be worked— There was no one but himself to do it.

  He thought of Oliver Hutto. Oliver would have come and helped him work the crops until Penny was better. But Oliver had gone to Boston and the China Sea, away from the treachery that had swooped down on him. He thought of the Forresters. He regretted bitterly that they were now the Baxters’ enemies. Buck would have helped him. Even now— But what could Buck do? A thought struck him sharply. It seemed to him that he could endure to be parted from Flag if he knew that somewhere in the world the yearling was alive. He could think of him, alive and mischievous, carrying his flag-like tail high and merry. He would go to Buck and throw himself on his mercy. He would remind Buck of Fodder-wing, talk of Fodder-wing until Buck’s throat choked. Then he would ask him to take Flag in the wagon, as he had taken the bear cubs, to Jacksonville. Flag would be taken to a broad park where people came to look at the animals. He would bound about and be given plenty of food, and a doe, and every one would admire him. He, Jody, would raise money crops of his own, and once a year he would go and visit Flag. He would save his money and he would get a place of his own, and he would buy Flag back, and they would live together.

  He was flooded with excitement. He turned from the clearing up the road to the Forresters’, trotting. His throat was dry and his eyes were swollen and smarting. His hope refreshed him and in a little while, when he swung up the Forresters’ trail under the live oaks, he felt all right again. He ran to the house and up the steps. He rapped at the open door and stepped inside. There was no one in the room but Pa and Ma Forrester. They sat immobile in their chairs.

  He said breathlessly, “Howdy. Where’s Buck?”

  Pa Forrester turned his head slowly on his withered neck, like a turtle.

  “Been a long time since you was here,” he said.

  “Where’s Buck, please, sir?’

  “Buck? Why, Buck and the hull passel of ’em has rode off to Kentucky, hoss-tradin’.”