The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  He looked back. The shore had receded alarmingly. Ahead of him, the open water seemed to stretch without an end. He turned about in a panic and paddled madly for the shore. It would be best, after all, to go back up the creek and get help from Mis’ Nellie Ginright. It might be better even to walk to Fort Gates and make his way from there. The wind behind him helped him, and it seemed to him that he could feel the north-bound current of the great river. He headed for an opening that must be the end of the Salt Springs run. When he reached it, it was a blind opening in the shore that led only into swamp. The mouth of the run was nowhere to be found.

  He was trembling from his exertion and from his fear. He told himself that he was not lost, for the river ran north out of Lake George and came at the end to Jacksonville, and he had only to follow it. But it was so wide, and the shore line was so confusing— He rested a long time, then began to paddle slowly north, close to the thick-cypressed land, following the endless curves and bays and indentations. The gnawing in his stomach was an acute pain. He began to have a feverish vision of the usual Baxter table. He saw slices of ham steaming, brown and dripping in their own juice. He smelled the sweet savor. He saw tawny biscuits and darkcrusted cornbread and swimming bowls of cow-peas, with squares of white bacon floating among them. He smelled fried squirrel so definitely that the saliva ran in his mouth. He tasted the warm foam of Trixie’s milk. He could have fought with the dogs for their pan of cold grits and gravy.

  This, then, was hunger. This was what his mother had meant when she had said, “We’ll all go hongry.” He had laughed, for he had thought he had known hunger, and it was faintly pleasant. He knew now that it had been only appetite. This was another thing. The thing was terrifying. It had a great maw to envelop him and claws that raked across his vitals. He fought off a new panic. He would soon reach a cabin or a fisherman’s camp, he told himself. He would beg food shamelessly before continuing. No man refused another rations.

  He worked his way north along the shore line all day. In the late afternoon he was sick at his stomach from the heat of the sun, but there was nothing to vomit but the river water he had drunk. A cabin showed ahead among trees and he pulled in to it hopefully. It was deserted. He prowled inside, like a hungry ’coon or ’possum. There were cans on a dusty shelf, but all were empty. In a jar he found a cupful of musty flour. He mixed it with water and ate the paste. It was flavorless, even in his hunger, but it stopped the pain in his stomach. There were birds and squirrels in the trees and he tried to hit them with stones, but he only drove them all away. He was feverish and exhausted and the flour in his belly made him sleepy. The cabin offered shelter, and he made a pallet of some rags, from which the roaches scurried. He slept a drugged, nightmare-ridden sleep.

  In the morning he was again conscious of acute hunger, and the cramps were sharp-nailed fingers that twisted his entrails. He found some last year’s acorns that the squirrels had buried and ate them so ravenously that the hard, unchewed pieces were fresh knives in his contracting stomach. A lethargy settled on him, and he could scarcely force himself to take up his paddle. If the current had not been with him, he decided he could have gone no farther. He covered only a short distance during the morning. In the afternoon, three boats passed in mid-stream. He stood up and waved his arms and shouted. They paid no attention to his cries. When they had passed from sight, he was torn unwillingly with sobbing. He decided to cut out away from the shore to intercept the next vessel. The wind had died. The water was calm. The glare from it burned his face and neck and bare arms. The sun was scalding. His head throbbed. Black spots alternated before his eyes with bobbing golden balls. A thin humming whined in his ears. The humming snapped.

  All that he knew when he opened his eyes was that it was dark and he was being lifted up.

  A man’s voice said, “He ain’t drunk. It’s a boy.”

  Another said, “Lay him in the bunk there. He’s sick. Tie his dug-out on behind.”

  Jody looked up. He lay in a bunk on what must be the mail-boat. A lamp flickered on the wall. A man leaned over him.

  “What’s the matter, young un? We near about run you down in the dark.”

  He tried to answer but his lips were swollen.

  A voice called from above, “Try him on somethin’ to eat.”

  “You hungry, boy?”

  He nodded. The boat was now in motion. The man in the cabin clattered at the galley-stove. Jody saw a thick cup thrust in front of him. He lifted his head and clutched at it. The cup held cold soup, thick and greasy. For a mouthful or two it had no taste at all. Then the saliva ran in his mouth and his whole being reached out for it, and he bolted it so ravenously that he choked on bits of meat and potato.

  The man said curiously, “How long since you et?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hey, Cap, the young un don’t even know when he et last.”

  “Give him plenty but feed him slow. Don’t give him too much or he’ll puke in my bunk.”

  The cup came back again, and biscuits with it. He tried to control himself, but he trembled when the man waited too long between feedings. The third cupful tasted infinitely better than the first, then further food was refused him.

  The man said, “Where’d you come from?”

  A languor crept over him. He breathed deeply. The swinging lamp drew his eyes back and forth. He closed them. He dropped into a sleep as deep as the river.

  He was awakened by the stopping of the small steamer. He thought for a moment that he was in the dug-out, drifting with the current. He got to his feet and rubbed his eyes. He looked at the galley-stove and remembered the soup and biscuits. The ache in his stomach was gone. He climbed the few steps to the open deck. Day was breaking. The mail sack was being lowered to a landing. He recognized Volusia. The captain turned to him.

  “You had a close call, young feller. Now what did you say your name was, and where do you think you’re going’?”

  “I was headin’ for Boston,” he said.

  “You know where Boston lies? So far north it’d take you the rest of your life to get there, the way you was travelin’.” Jody stared.

  “Hurry up, now. This is a gov’ment boat. I can’t wait on you all day. Where you live?”

  “Baxter’s Island.”

  “Never heard of no Baxter’s Island in this river.”

  The mate spoke up.

  “’Tain’t a real island, Cap. It’s a place off in the scrub. ’Bout fifteen miles up the road from here.”

  “Then you want to get off here, boy. Boston? Hell. You got folks?”

  Jody nodded.

  “They know where you was goin’?”

  He shook his head.

  “Runnin’ away, eh? Well, if I was a scrawny little bigeyed booger like you, I’d stay home. Nobody but your folks’ll bother with a little ol’ shirt-tail boy like you. Swing him down to the dock, Joe.”

  Brawny arms lifted him down.

  “Turn his dug-out a-loose. Catch it, boy. Let’s go.”

  The whistle blew. The side-wheels churned. The mailboat chugged up-stream. The wake boiled after her. A stranger lifted the mail sack and slung it over his shoulder. Jody crouched on his heels, holding the bow of the dug-out. The stranger glanced at him and walked away toward Volusia with the mail. The first rays of the sun lay on the river. Alligator lilies on the far bank caught them like white cups. The current tugged at the dug-out. His arm was tired, holding it. The stranger’s footsteps faded up the road. There was no place left to go, but Baxter’s Island.

  He dropped into the canoe and took up his paddle. He paddled across to the west shore. He tethered the dug-out to a stake. He looked back across the river. The rising sun lay on the charred ruins of the Hutto house. His throat tightened. The world had discarded him. He turned and walked slowly up the road. He was weak, and conscious again of hunger, but the night’s food had renewed him. The nausea was gone, and the pain.

  He walked west without plan. There was no other di
rection in which to go. Baxter’s Island drew him like a magnet. There was no reality but the clearing. He trudged on. He wondered if he dared go home. Probably they would not want him. He had caused them a great deal of trouble. Perhaps if he walked into the kitchen, his mother would drive him out as she had driven Flag. He was no good to anybody. He had prowled and played and eaten recklessly. They had put up with his impudence and his appetite. And Flag had destroyed the better part of the year’s living. Almost certainly, they would feel they were better off without him, and he would not be welcome.

  He loitered along the road. The sun was strong. The winter was over. He thought hazily that it must now be April. Spring had taken over the scrub, and the birds were mating and singing in the bushes. Only he, in all the world, was homeless. He had been out in the world, and the world was a troubled dream, fluid and desolate, flanked by swamps and cypresses. He stopped to rest in mid-morning at the intersection of the main road and the north road. The low vegetation here was open to the heat of the sun. His head began to ache and he got to his feet and headed north toward Silver Glen. He told himself that he did not mean to go home. He would only go to the spring, and go down between the cool dark banks, and lie a little while in the running water. The north road dipped and rose and dipped again. The sand was scalding under his bare feet. The sweat ran down the grime of his face. At the top of a rise, he could look down and see Lake George far below him to the east. It was pitilessly blue. Thin white lines were the implacable choppy waves that had turned him back to the unfriendly shore. He trudged on.

  To the east, the vegetation became luxuriant. There was water near. He turned down the trail to Silver Glen. The steep bank dropped to the ribbon of creek that ran south of the great spring itself, and had a kindred source. He ached in all his bones. He was so thirsty that his tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. He stumbled down the bank and fell flat beside the cool shallow water and drank. The water bubbled over his lips and nose. He drank until his belly was swollen. He felt sickened and rolled over on his back and closed his eyes. The nausea passed and he was drowsy. He lay in a stupor of weariness. He hung suspended in a timeless space. He could go neither forward nor back. Something was ended. Nothing was begun.

  In the late afternoon, he roused. He sat up. An early magnolia blossom was wax-white over him.

  He thought, “’Tis April.”

  A memory stirred him. He had come here a year ago, on a bland and tender day. He had splashed in the creek water and lain, as now, among the ferns and grasses. Something had been fine and lovely. He had built himself a fluttermill. He rose and moved with a quickening of his pulse to the location. It seemed to him that if he found it, he would discover with it all the other things that had vanished. The flutter-mill was gone. The flood had washed it away, and all its merry turning.

  He thought stubbornly, “I’ll build me another.”

  He cut twigs for the supports, and the roller to turn across them, from the wild cherry tree. He whittled feverishly. He cut strips from a palmetto frond and made his paddles. He sunk the uprights in the stream bed and set the paddles turning. Up, over, down. Up, over, down. The flutter-mill was turning. The silver water dripped. But it was only palmetto strips brushing the water. There was no magic in the motion. The flutter-mill had lost its comfort.

  He said, “Play-dolly——”

  He kicked it apart with one foot. The broken bits floated down the creek. He threw himself on the ground and sobbed bitterly. There was no comfort anywhere.

  There was Penny. A wave of homesickness washed over him so that it was suddenly intolerable not to see him. The sound of his father’s voice was a necessity. He longed for the sight of his stooped shoulders as he had never, in the sharpest of his hunger, longed for food. He clambered to his feet and up the bank and began to run down the road to the clearing, crying as he ran. His father might not be there. He might be dead. With the crops ruined, and his son gone, he might have packed up in despair and moved away and he would never find him.

  He sobbed, “Pa— Wait for me.”

  The sun was setting. He was in a panic that he would not reach the clearing before dark. He exhausted himself, and was obliged to slow down to a walk. His flesh quivered. His heart pounded. He had to stop entirely and rest. Darkness overtook him half a mile from home. Even in the dusk, landmarks were familiar. The tall pines of the clearing were recognizable, blacker than the creeping night. He came to the slat fence. He felt his way along it. He opened the gate and went into the yard. He passed around the side of the house to the kitchen stoop and stepped up on it. He crept to the window on bare silent feet and peered in.

  A fire burned low on the hearth. Penny sat hunched beside it, wrapped in quilts. One hand covered his eyes. Jody went to the door and unlatched it and stepped inside. Penny lifted his head.

  “Ory?”

  “Hit’s me.”

  He thought his father had not heard him.

  “Hit’s Jody.”

  Penny turned his head and looked at him wonderingly, as though the gaunt ragged boy with sweat and tear-streaks down the grime, with hollow eyes under matted hair, were some stranger of whom he expected that he state his business.

  He said, “Jody.”

  Jody dropped his eyes.

  “Come clost.”

  He went to his father and stood beside him. Penny reached out for his hand and took it and turned it over and rubbed it slowly between his own. Jody felt drops on his hand like a warm rain.

  “Boy— I near about give you out.”

  Penny felt along his arm. He looked up at him.

  “You all right?”

  He nodded.

  “You all right— You ain’t dead nor gone. You all right.” A light filled his face. “Glory be.”

  It was unbelievable, Jody thought. He was wanted.

  He said, “I had to come home.”

  “Why, shore you did.”

  “I ain’t meant what I said. Hatin’ you—”

  The light broke into the familiar smile.

  “Why, shore you ain’t. ’When I was a child, I spake as a child.’”

  Penny stirred in his chair.

  “They’s rations in the safe. In the kittle there. You hongry?”

  “I ain’t et but oncet. Last night.”

  “Not but oncet? Then now you know. Ol’ Starvation—” His eyes shone in the firelight as Jody had pictured them. “Ol’ Starvation—he’s got a face meaner’n ol’ Slewfoot, ain’t he?”

  “Hit’s fearful.”

  “There’s biscuits there. Open the honey. There’s due to be milk in the gourd.”

  Jody fumbled among the dishes. He ate standing, wolfing down the food. He dipped into a dish of cooked cow-peas with his fingers, scooping them into his mouth. Penny stared at him.

  He said, “I’m sorry you had to learn it that-a-way.”

  “Where’s Ma?”

  “She’s drove the wagon to the Forresters to trade for seedcorn. She figgered she’d try to plant a part of a crop agin. She carried the chickens, to trade. It hurted her pride turrible, but she was obliged to go.”

  Jody closed the door of the cabinet.

  He said, “I should of washed. I’m awful dirty.”

  “There’s warm water on the hearth.”

  Jody poured water in the basin and scrubbed his face and arms and hands. The water was too dark even for his feet. He threw it out of the door and poured more, and sat on the floor and washed his feet.

  Penny said, “I’d be proud to know where you been.”

  “I been on the river. I aimed to go to Boston.”

  “I see.”

  He looked small and shrunken inside the quilts.

  Jody said, “How you makin’ it, Pa? You better?”

  Penny looked a long time into the embers on the hearth.

  He said, “You jest as good to know the truth. I ain’t scarcely wuth shootin’.”

  Jody said, “When I git the work done, you got to leave
me go fetch ol’ Doc to you.”

  Penny studied him.

  He said, “You’ve done come back different. You’ve takened a punishment. You ain’t a yearlin’ no longer. Jody—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m goin’ to talk to you, man to man. You figgered I went back on you. Now there’s a thing ever’ man has got to know. Mebbe you know it a’ready. ’Twa’n’t only me. ’Twa’n’t only your yearlin’ deer havin’ to be destroyed. Boy, life goes back on you.”

  Jody looked at his father. He nodded.

  Penny said, “You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men. You’ve knowed men to be low-down and mean. You’ve seed ol’ Death at his tricks. You’ve messed around with ol’ Starvation. Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ’Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I’ve been uneasy all my life.”

  His hands worked at the folds of the quilt.

  “I’ve wanted life to be easy for you. Easier’n ’twas for me. A man’s heart aches, seein’ his young uns face the world. Knowin’ they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin’. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever’ man’s lonesome. What’s he to do then? What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.”

  Jody said, “I’m ’shamed I runned off.”

  Penny sat upright.

  He said, “You’re near enough growed to do your choosin’. Could be you’d crave to go to sea, like Oliver. There’s men seems made for the land, and men seems made for the sea. But I’d be proud did you choose to live here and farm the clearin’. I’d be proud to see the day when you got a well dug, so’s no woman here’d be obliged to do her washin’ on a seepage hillside. You willin’?”