by Jeffrey Lent
Foster off to one side, the old man turned at the waist to glare at him. His eyebrows working, a writhe on his forehead. His mouth twitching, some disgust fighting a smile. As a mock at his words, the situation laid out before them. Or only a pleasant hatred, extruded slowly as if long awaited. Foster did not know. The sunlight spread down the side of the whitewashed walls; the open door was a bare oblong of dark.
Foster said, “Can I go inside?”
Mebane took his cane-tip away from the stone below the door. Stepped back, rocking unsteady in retreat. As if what he could not see left him without balance. “Go ahead,” he said. “Help yourself. The ancestral home.”
The cabin was dark inside, empty, the air dull, smelling of mice and little else. The inside walls were not whitewashed but the timbers were dark with soot and old lives. The fireplace small, swept clean. The pale rectangles of a snakeskin on the rough stone hearth. A rough plank platform built into one corner, what had once been a bed. That was all. He stepped up to the fireplace and stood looking at the old rough-laid stones, the crumbling clay mortar. There was fire-stain and soot on the chimney stones above the fireplace. He stood like that, trying to close off the summer day and his own fatigue and the old man wavering outside, stood to allow the lives fallow in the old walls come out, to announce themselves if they would.
“She had that pretty bred-down skin like new saddle leather and the same green eyes as my daddy had,” the old man called. Foster turned and standing back in the shadow looked out at him. “But what you haven’t asked, is how her own mother looked. What she came out of. Where you’ve failed, boy, is thinking back far enough. There is no simple answer otherwise.”
Foster came to the door and looked down at Mebane. The old man standing now with his feet apart, the cane planted between them. His head tilted back to look at Foster.
Foster said, “What happened to her?”
“Who?”
“Her mother. After my grandmother left here. After the war was over. What happened to her mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“She left here is all I know.”
“Then what were you talking about?”
“Before. I was talking about before. Before any of what you even have thought of.”
Foster ran his hand over his face. He said, “I tell you what, Mr. Alexander Mebane. All this is too much for me. I’m beat to pieces from the road. You’re talking riddles around me. I got two dogs in the car likely near dead from the heat. I need to get them some water and find them a place to run. Then I need to get a place to stay and sleep. Think about all this some. All this is brand new to me and I’m trying to sort it out as I go along. You been sitting here sixty-some years waiting for someone to tell all this to. And I’m the one to do it to I guess. But right now, I’m about dead.”
Mebane looked at him. There was no disappointment in the look. He said, “Pret much everbody calls me Lex. Or Mister Lex.”
Foster nodded. “I’ll call you whatever you want. I just need to take care of myself now. Maybe I can see you tomorrow.”
“What sort of dogs are they?”
“Sir?”
“Your dogs.”
“Bird dogs. English setters.”
“Is that so?”
“Yuht. A mother and daughter. Good dogs. The one solid and the other started on partridge and woodcock. I thought, long as I’m coming down here, maybe I can find them some quail to work. Give them something new.”
From the trunk of the car he lifted a tin can of water and poured out what was left into a lard pail and let the dogs out to drink. The lard pail was half full when they started and they might have wanted more but they left a half inch of water sudsy with drool that neither dog would take. They did not want to get back in the car but he coaxed them up onto the backseat. They drove out of town into the country, under the railroad trestle and then turning where Alexander Mebane told him to, onto a narrow road, a wash of red clay dust rising around them, Mebane sitting up square and straight talking as they went.
“My brother Spencer and I hunted birds all out through here when I was a boy. Little boy too because that was before the war. In most ways my childhood stopped when I was twelve and the war came and Spence went off. At least it seemed like it stopped, like it was something just hanging there waiting for when he’d come back. There would be those short sweet times when he’d get a leave and be home a week or two and we’d try and pick things up but it was all changed and we both knew it. So what I have are those sweet sweet memories of the two of us, Spence old enough to be good at what he was doing and so serious about it and because he was that way I tried to be too. We didn’t have a dog because my mother wouldn’t have a dog around the place on account of the fleas and ticks but some one or another of the boys Spencer hunted with always had a dog. Mostly big old hammerheaded pointers is what I recall. It’s mostly still what you see around here. They’s some setters but not many. They can’t stand up to the heat as well as the pointers plus they get all wrapped up with burrs and thorns and such like that. But oh yes those fine days. Seems like most fine memories come out of dawn or evening, I don’t know if that’s just me or not. But some way even cleaner than the moment right in front of me I can see old Spencer in a stand of big pines with a covey of quail going off before him and what I recall is how he always took a little pause as the birds went up to watch them before he’d single out the one he wanted and then that gun would come up and go off at the same time like he wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“Yes,” said Foster. “That’s how it works.”
“I was never that good at it. I was all right and if I’d kept on I probably would’ve gotten better. Although there were men, still a few here and there, lost arms like I did but kept on in the woods and fields like I did not and learned how to shoot one-handed. Always got their deer. Some birds. But it was not like that for me. I lost all taste for it. Wasn’t the war so much because the truth is I didn’t see much of that business. I can’t even say it was some kind of grieving for my brother although if he’d made it back we would likely have picked up where we’d left off—but it wasn’t just him either. It was both those things and more than that. Some men are on a clear course from day one; others make themselves as they go. Then there are those few others who drift along. In the world but just barely. Who kind of nudge their way.”
“Where’re we going here?” Foster said.
“Why, along a bit, just along a little bit. This is all Pettigrews’ anyhow. My sister’s boys’ land. See that there, that stand of pine, it used to be real good in there when it was young but grown up like it is and choked out a man and dog couldn’t hardly get through it. They get around to logging it out and it’ll be some kind of good again though. Those birds they love that new young growth. There now, there’s the house. No, no, don’t pull in there, we don’t need to see those people. Just go on. It’s not far, the place I’ve got in mind. It’s a cornfield and a beanfield with a little bottom between them, little creek there in the bottom. This time of day, that’s where you’ll find the birds.”
The house they passed was set up away from the road under a pair of red oaks with low sheds and barns scattered around it. The house two stories four-square with a deep porch the length of the front, a stamped tin roof painted silver. An older hard-used Ford up under one of the trees. Fields of tobacco spread out either side of the farmyard with a scrub pasture running down to the road. All under the thin pale red-hazed sunlight, the land a muted charcoal with the light over it.
They went on past more fields either side of the road broken by pieces of woodlot; some hardwood bottoms and others pine plantations on the rising land between the fields. They went through a crossroads with a handful of unpainted rough houses with pumps in the bare dirt yards and dull-colored laundry on lines, dust rising up from the passing car to settle down over the clothes. A meager store with cracked yellow blinds pulled against sun. Opp
osite the store was a one-story-long building not much different from the shack houses but for its coat of white paint and the bright blue painted door set in the center of the front. From the peak rose a simple small cross of painted two-by-four. A handpainted sign: MOUNT OLIVE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH. Negro children stopped play to watch the car pass. A man in overalls stood at the roadside, watching the children until the car was past, and then turned to watch until it was gone from sight.
“What’s that called?”
“What?”
“That place we just went through.”
Mebane glanced over at him. Looked back ahead. Straight into the spreading diffuse sun. “Crossroads. Pettigrew Crossroads.”
“What I could see. They all are colored.”
Mebane shrugged, a small gesture of head and one shoulder. “It’s all Pettigrews.”
They went off the road over a culvert into the head of a beanfield and parked there, the rows of beans stretching down the fall of land before them, the hedges of the beanplants stricken with the light and the rows between dark shadow. What was left of the sunlight came filtered through the poplars and locusts and sweetgum growing up along the bottom. Foster took the silver whistle from the glove box and let the dogs out and the three of them went down through the beanfield, leaving Alexander Mebane sitting up in the car. The dogs raced quickly, leaping the rows of beans and then calmed and began to quarter, their heads up high in the still air for any feather of scent riding along there. Foster walked slow, his legs sore from the long sitting of the drive and the afternoon with the old man. He felt awkward and stiff, the man sitting up there watching him. He wished he’d saved some of the water for himself. He guessed whatever they’d find down in the bottom it would be no brook he’d want to dip water up from.
The dogs were working the beanfield now and he let them, although he guessed Mebane was right and the birds would be over at the edges or even down in the cover of the woods as dusk came on. Maybe even along the little creek down in there. But he wanted the dogs to learn something about where they were before they ran right into birds.
He did not like Mebane. And as he walked and loosened he understood it was at least part that he felt dependent where he had not expected or wanted to. And realized this was more than the vague threat the man had offered up to him earlier but was also some threat he felt from the place itself. As if he did not know exactly who he was or how to explain himself. In a place where clearly he would be expected to do so. And walking out then in that strange soft dusk that felt as if it rose right up out of the ground he felt lost, for the first time felt truly alone, missing everything he knew. He kicked his way through the rows of beans toward the trees with his throat and chest tight and he brought up the whistle and blew two short bleats and when the dogs turned, their heads popped up high over the beans as they arrested, he lifted his arm and signaled them down toward the woods and for a moment they both turned their heads to look where he directed and then they were gone, bounding over the rows to cut across in front of him and down into the woods and he loved them so.
The woodsfloor was strewn with thickets of berry canes and ropes of vines and twisted black-barked trees with spiked thorns and he made his way down to the bottom with the dogs around him, the white of their coats and their speed a flaring brightness in the ocher of the woods. Then he untangled himself from a last vine and stepped down a short bank and knelt by the small stream, the water unmoving but clear and he dipped up handfuls of it. It was warm and faintly brackish but tasted good, tasted of the place, and this simple thing, that he could find water to drink, made him feel better. As if he might be able to find his way around more than just the woods. He looked up then, still crouching by the water, and saw both dogs locked up with their tails flagged at the edge of the cornfield above him. He called out a low whoa to them and stepped up the bank and went through the last of the trees, learning how to part the brush with his shoulders and backside rather than his hands and came out behind the dogs and paused a moment. Both of them steady. Glow rolling her eyes back to try and see him, to urge him along. Her quivering. The sun over the cornfield was gone into beetroot haze. He stepped past the dogs into the low hummocks of grass that lay between them and the corn. The quail went up then, whistling and bursting into the air, coming up everywhere it seemed in a cluster and then breaking off into long gliding separate planes.
Glow broke and went off into the corn after the mass of birds. Foster too flushed to care, not wanting to call her back. Old Lovey still on point, waiting for him. Her whole body shivering. He went up to her and stood with her between his legs and bent down to run his hands along her sides.
They went out through the cornfield after the singles and Lovey found three and Glow one or perhaps others that she’d flushed but not pointed and Foster flushed one just walking by. They could have gone on from there but the dusk was fast and deep, the woods line already forming up into a solid thing. And he was aware of the old man sitting waiting up in the car. Who had brought them to this place, had given them this thing. And whom Foster would now understand he had no choice but to trust. Not greatly, not overmuch, but some little bit. So he walked the dogs along the edge of the cornfield to the road rather than fight back through the woods and stopped and waited in the dust where the stream ran under the road while the dogs went down to drink and then they went up the short hill where he could see the Chrysler sitting out among the beans. A shape up against the blueblack sky.
They rode back in silence but for Mebane giving directions. Still, Foster did not mind—he knew the old man had not run out of words and so knew the silence was for him, some small token. He decided he needed to pay attention to such things.
Coming into town Mebane spoke up. “What I was thinking was you should eat some dinner with me. There’s not a place open to eat this time of day as it is. At least, no place you’d want to eat at.”
Foster said, “I’m all right.”
“No you’re not. I know a hungry boy when I see one. And more than that, I think you should stay at the house as long as you’re here. It’s not like there’s not room.”
Foster had let the car slow way down. It was full dark, the windows still open, the air still warm. He said, “Well, sir. I appreciate it. But it’d be better, I think, I was to stay elsewhere.”
Mebane had the cane planted on the floorboards, his hand capped over it. He twisted it a little bit but did not look over. “You’re sixteen years old, is that right?”
“Yes sir.”
Mebane nodded. “What you think, some boy like yourself he tries to get hisself a room? What you think those people going to do? With this great old fancy car? And that Yankee speech of yours. You think they’re just going to leave you be? You think that?”
“I’ve got the money to pay. So far that’s been enough.”
“What about those dogs? You going to turn this car into a kennel?”
Foster let the car drift slow along the curb to a stop under the live oaks. Small electric streetlights at great distances threw poor pods of sifted light. He looked over at Mebane. Who was looking at him now. Foster said, “They’re happy enough in the car.”
Mebane said nothing.
The cicadas were up singing. There was no other place to go. After a time Foster said, “I’d be grateful for some supper. As far as spending the night, what I’d be comfortable with, is if me and the dogs were to stay out in that little cabin. Be out of your way.”
“The slave cabin.”
“Yes sir.”
“We’d have to haul out a mattress for you. There’s a feather tick or two could be spared. And you’d want a pillow.”
“I don’t need anything. There’s a bedroll in the trunk of the car. And a pillow too. I camped my way down here.”
Mebane nodded. “You’ll need light. A lantern at least. Go on then, pull off from here. I’m about starved I don’t know about you. What you want to do is go all the way past the house until there’s a li
ttle opening off to the right, a little alley. You want to pull up there and that’ll put us right behind the house. Now, that’s a good place to park.”
They sat squeezed by the stacks of papers and ledgers at the dining room table to eat a supper of tinned soup and saltines. Mebane had opened two cans of the soup and heated it in a rinsed pot on the electric coil of the hotplate and then just poured off a skim of soup into his own bowl and filled the one set out for Foster so that Foster had to use both hands and a slow stride to carry it without spilling in to where they would eat. A box of saltines under his arm. Mebane behind him, the cane hooked over his elbow as he carried his own bowl. Then they sat and ate. Tomato soup made with water because there was no milk but delicious. He made himself slow down for the last third so it would be enough. Mebane broke crackers into his bowl and stirred them and Foster waited a spoonful or two and then did the same. It was awful good.
Mebane said, “It’s not much but it’s what I have.”
“It’s just fine. It’s good.”
“I know how sad and thin most things are compared to what you expect them to be. I haven’t answered the first question that you had. What answers I do have may not bring any satisfaction at all either. The thing is, what answers I have are my own. They’re what you get. Anything beyond that, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
Foster took up the last soaked cracker piece with his spoon and ate it. Put the spoon down in the empty bowl and looked at the old man. “I can tell you this. Time comes you’re talking and I feel like you’re holding back, I’ll tell you.”
Mebane said, “I guess you will. I guess most certainly you will.”
He took the lighted lantern and tick mattress to the cabin and then went out to the car. He released the dogs and opened the trunk for the bedroll and blankets and his old withered valise. He went back across the dark yard into the cabin and set the lantern on the floor where it spread a small low pillage of light up the walls. He dumped his belongings on the sleeping platform and went to the open door where he could see the dogs, out roaming in the fenced yard, pale shades in the dark. There was an upstairs light on in the house and that was all. He wondered how the old man would sleep and wondered the same for himself. He turned back into the cabin and took the valise off the bed and spread out the bedroll and the blankets. And turned then to regard the snakeskin on the hearth. He only knew grass-snakes. This was bigger than he wanted to think about. He didn’t want to pick it up, to touch it. He called the dogs in and shut the door. There was a latch, a bar on the inside to drop into a worn piece of angle-wood set into the timbered wall. He slid it to. The wood was dry and smooth under his fingers. He wondered if there had been nights it had been left off. Or how easily a penknife could slip in to lift it up.