Nathan Coulter

  I set the lantern down and climbed, feeling my way up in the dark while Uncle Burley held the light on the coon. The dogs whined and barked, trotting back and forth under the tree.

  I got to the limb where the coon was and eased out on it, holding to the limb above my head. Uncle Burley caught Sawbuck by the collar and moved down the hill. He called Joe into the place where the coon would fall, and I shook the limb.

  Joe was on the coon by the time he hit the ground, and they went growling and snarling down the slope toward Uncle Burley. He held the light on them, following them where they rolled and fought in the leaves. The ground was too steep for Joe to get a foothold, and the coon was having a fairly easy time of it. He’d wrapped himself around Joe’s head, and Joe couldn’t stand up long enough to shake him loose. Sawbuck howled and reared against the collar, trying to get into the fight; and Uncle Burley slid and plunged after him, trying to hold him out of it. The coon kept his hold on Joe’s head as if he’d decided to spend the night there; and Joe bucked and rolled and somersaulted through the underbrush, the leaves flying up around them. Sawbuck jerked Uncle Burley off balance, and the two of them scrambled in with Joe and the coon. I saw Uncle Burley’s hat fly off, and then the beam of his flashlight began switching around so fast that I couldn’t tell what was happening. I could only hear them crashing farther down the hillside, Uncle Burley yelling, and the dogs growling, and the coon hissing and snarling—the beam of light flickering and darting this way and that through the trees like lightning flashes.

  Then the light steadied and I saw Uncle Burley dragging Sawbuck out of the fight. Joe caught the coon behind the forelegs and held. That was all of it.

  “Whoo,” Uncle Burley said.

  He picked up the coon and found his hat, then turned the light up into the tree to help me down. The dogs trotted off into the woods again. Uncle Burley slung the coon over his shoulder and I took the rifle and lantern; we climbed to the top of the bluff and started across the ridge.

  We were walking parallel to the river again, the valley dark on our left, and three or four miles behind us a few lights were still burning in town. It was easier walking on the ridge, and there were a lot of stars. But the wind was strong up there, and cold. We could hear it moving through the grass and rattling in the woods below us.

  At the top of the ridge we went through an old graveyard. When we’d gone halfway across it Uncle Burley stopped and told me to bring the lantern closer. He pointed to a set of false teeth lying on the edge of a groundhog hole that ran down into one of the graves. “God Almighty,” he said.

  He picked up the teeth and we looked at them. They were covered with dirt and one of the eyeteeth was broken off. “I wonder who these belonged to.” He took the flashlight out of his coat and turned it on the headstone, but it was so badly weathered we couldn’t read the name. He dropped the teeth back into the hole and kicked some dirt in after them, and we went on toward the woods on the far side of the ridge.

  “We’re all dying to get there,” Uncle Burley said.

  After we killed the first coon things were slow for a long time. We went into the woods again and sat down. Once in a while we’d hear the dogs, their voices flaring up as they fumbled at a cold trail, then quiet again while we waited and talked beside the lantern. Finally we got cold and built a fire, and Uncle Burley lay down beside it and slept. He woke up every time one of the dogs mouthed; but when they lost the trail and hushed, he turned his cold side to the fire and went back to sleep. I watched the flames crawl along the sticks until they glowed red and crumbled into the ashes, then piled on more. It was quiet. The country was dark and filled with wind. And in the houses on the ridges behind us and below us in the river bottoms the people were asleep.

  About midnight the dogs started a hot track and ran it down the hillside, and treed finally out in the direction of the river. We went to them. They were treed at a white oak that was too tall and too big around to climb. So I held the flashlight over Uncle Burley’s rifle sights and on the coon, and he shot it.

  After that he said he was ready to call it a night if I was, and I said I was. We were a long way from home, and since Jig Pendleton’s shanty boat was tied up just across the bottom we decided to go and spend the rest of the night with him.

  The boat was dark when we got there. We stopped at the top of the bank and quieted the dogs.

  Uncle Burley called, “Oh, Jig.”

  “I’m coming, Lord,” Jig said.

  We heard him scuffling and clattering around trying to get a lamp lighted.

  “It’s Burley and Nathan,” Uncle Burley said.

  The shanty windows lighted up and Jig came out the door in his long underwear and rubber boots, carrying a lamp in his hand.

  Uncle Burley laughed. “Jig, if the Lord ever comes and sees you in that outfit, He’ll turn around and go back.”

  “Aw, no He won’t, Burley. The Lord looketh on the heart.” Jig stood there shivering with the wind blowing through his hair. “You all come on down.”

  We went down to the boat, the dogs trotting after us across the plank.

  “We thought we’d spend the night with you, Jig,” Uncle Burley said, “if you don’t mind.”

  “Why, God bless you, Burley, of course you can,” Jig said. He asked us if we’d like some hot coffee.

  Uncle Burley said we sure would if he didn’t mind fixing it. Jig built up the fire in his stove and put the coffee on to boil, and Uncle Burley and I sat down on the side of the boat to skin the coons.

  When we finished the skinning, we cut one of the carcasses in two and gave a half of it to each of the dogs. They ate and then curled up beside the door and licked themselves and slept. The coffee was ready by that time. We washed our hands in the river and went inside, ducking under the strings of Jig’s machine.

  The coffee was black and strong; we sat at the table drinking out of the thick white cups and feeling it warm us. Jig asked how our hunt had been, and Uncle Burley told him about it, Jig nodding his head as he listened and then asking exactly where the dogs had treed. When Uncle Burley named the place he’d nod his head again. “The big white oak. I know that tree. I know the one you’re talking about, Burley.”

  Then Jig mentioned that ducks had been coming in on the slue for the last couple of days. They talked about duck hunting for a while, and Uncle Burley said we’d cross the river early in the morning and try our luck.

  Jig gave us a quilt apiece when we’d finished our coffee. We filled the stove with wood and stretched out on the floor beside it. Jig sat at the table reading the Bible for a few minutes, then he blew out the lamp, and we slept.

  Uncle Burley woke me the next morning while it was still dark. The lamp was burning on the table again, and Jig was making us another pot of coffee. It seemed darker and quieter outside the windows than it had been when we went to sleep. While we drank the coffee a towboat passed down the river, its engine humming and pounding under the darkness.

  Uncle Burley borrowed Jig’s shotgun and a pocketful of shells.

  “There ought to be plenty of ducks up there,” Jig said. “I expect you’ll have luck, Burley.”

  We led the dogs up the bank and tied them to trees, and went over to the slue. The air was cold and brittle, the sky still full of stars. A heavy frost had fallen toward morning; the ground was white with it, and our breath hung white around our heads. When we got away from the trees that grew along the riverbank the wind hit us in the face, making our eyes water. We buttoned our collars and walked fast, hurrying the sleep out of our bones.

  We got to the slue and made ourselves as comfortable as we could in a thick patch of willows near the water. Uncle Burley smoked, and we waited, hearing the roosters crow in the barns and henhouses across the bottoms. The sky brightened a little in the east; and we could make out the shape of the slue, the water turning gray as the sky turned, the air above it threaded with mist. While it was still too dark to shoot, four or five ducks came in. Their wings whist
led over our heads, and we saw the splashes they made as they hit the water.

  The sun came up, the day-color sliding over the tops of the hills; and we heard Gander Loyd calling his milk cows. Then a big flock of mallards circled over our heads and came down.

  Uncle Burley raised the gun and waited, and when they flew into range he shot. His shoulder jerked with the kick of the gun, and one of the ducks folded up and fell, spinning down into the shallow water in front of us. Uncle Burley grinned. “That’s the way to do it,” he said.

  He reloaded the gun and we waited again, watching the sky. The rest of the morning the flocks came in, their wings whistling, wheeling in the sunlight down to the water. And the only thing equal to them was their death.

  5

  After Uncle Burley and I saw Brother in town at the beginning of the winter, he came home every two or three Sundays to eat dinner and spend the afternoon with us. When we’d finished eating all of us sat around the table and talked a while, then Uncle Burley and Brother and I usually went out to hunt rabbits or wander around together and look at things. We always enjoyed ourselves when Brother was there, and we began to think of him as part of the family again.

  When Daddy and Brother were together they were friendly, but they never had much to say to each other. In the months that had gone by since their fight Brother had got to be his own man. He wasn’t asking any of us for anything, and that made a difference. While he’d been a boy living with us at home he and Daddy had known how to think about each other. They had known themselves in Daddy’s authority. But their fight had ended that; and the old feeling had been too strong and had lasted too many years to allow them ever to know each other in a different way. They were always a little uncomfortable when they tried to talk to each other. Still I could see that both of them were relieved when they were on speaking terms again.

  We finished stripping the tobacco crop in the first week of January and shipped the last truckload to the market. And from then until the last of February the cold days came one after another without a thaw. Grandpa said it was the hardest winter he’d ever seen. And for him it was. It seemed to us that every day of the cold left him older and weaker. He could never get warm enough. While we kept ourselves busy feeding the stock and cutting and hauling wood to burn on the plant beds in the spring, he sat in the house bundled up in a sheepskin coat, throwing coal into the stove and poking the fire with his cane until it roared.

  When spring came and the warm days began he didn’t get stronger as we’d thought he would. Daddy and Uncle Burley and I put out the crops and plowed them and looked after them through the spring and early summer, but Grandpa didn’t go to the field with us as often as he always had. He still got up every morning before daylight, but more and more often when we went to work we’d find him asleep again, sitting in the sun in front of the barn. And he began talking about his death.

  One day he told Daddy, “I reckon another twenty years’ll see me out.” That got to be a kind of byword with us. Daddy or Uncle Burley would repeat it while we were at work, and we’d laugh.

  Another day when the four of us were sitting in the door of the barn watching it rain, he pointed toward a corner of the lot and said, “When I die I want you to bury me there.”

  Uncle Burley laughed and told him, “You’ve got to go farther away from here than that.”

  He never mentioned it often, and he tried to keep from showing that he grieved about it. But talking about his own death was a new thing for him, and it saddened us.

  It seemed to us that we’d never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he’d cursed his weakness and his age, he’d either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He’d only thought of himself as living. But now that he finally admitted that he would die we thought about it too. We couldn’t get used to the feeling it gave us to go to work in the mornings without him. He stayed in our minds, and on the days when we left him sleeping at the barn we talked about him more than anything else. We wished he could have enjoyed his sleep now that he was old and nobody expected him to be at work. But he always woke up bewildered and ashamed of himself, and we felt sorry for him.

  Uncle Burley was more troubled by the change in Grandpa than any of us. Daddy and Grandpa had argued and fallen out at times, but that had happened because the two of them were alike. They had fought when their minds crossed because they were stubborn and proud, and because they couldn’t have respected themselves if they hadn’t fought. And Daddy had made himself respectable on Grandpa’s terms. But Grandpa and Uncle Burley were as different as he and Daddy were alike. They never had been at peace with each other, and there never had been any chance that they would be. Their lives had run in opposite directions from the day Uncle Burley was born. Grandpa’s life had been spent in owning his land and in working on it, the same way Daddy was spending his. But Uncle Burley had refused to own anything. When he was young he worked only because he had to, and Grandpa never had forgiven him for it. They’d been able to live together in the same place mostly by being quiet, and because Grandma and Daddy had stood between them. And although Uncle Burley was a kind man and had as much need to be sorry for Grandpa as Daddy and I, he didn’t have a right to. That embarrassed him, and when he wasn’t able to joke about it he didn’t say anything.

  One morning toward the end of July Grandpa rode with us on the wagon to help Gander Loyd put in a field of hay. We’d been held up nearly a week by wet weather; and when it had cleared off two days before, Daddy had helped Gander mow the field. The air was still fresh and clear from the rain, and as we started down to Gander’s place we could hear other wagons all around us rattling out to the fields—everybody behind in his work and hurrying.

  A heavy dew had fallen, covering the trees and bushes along the sides of the road, and the sun glittered on the wet leaves. The mules were skittish and Daddy leaned back against the lines. They set their heads high and pranced sideways.

  “I’ll cure you of that nonsense when I get a load behind you,” Daddy told them.

  Uncle Burley stood up, slack-kneed against the jolt of the wagon, and rolled a cigarette, singing,

  “Down along the woodland, through the hills and by the shore, You can hear the rattle, the rumble and the roar . . .”

  After he rolled the cigarette he lit it and sat down again, dangling his feet over the edge of the hay frame.

  Grandpa sat beside us, watching the land open in front of the wagon and close behind it, his eyes on it as if it had some movement that only he knew about and could see. The land was what he knew, and it comforted him to look at it. Since he’d been too old to work we’d noticed that he spent more and more of his time watching it, forgetting what was going on around him. Now and then he turned away from it to speak to us of his death, as if hearing himself talk about it could make it real, and turned back to his watching again to be comforted. His hands held the cane across his lap, the skin brown and thin over the knuckles and blue veins.

  When we pulled into the hayfield Gander was already there with his team hitched to the rake. “It’s too wet,” he called to us when we stopped. “We’ll have to wait for the dew to dry off.”

  He and Daddy walked across the field together, picking up wisps of hay and twisting them in their hands to test the moisture. After they came back we sat on the wagon and talked. Once in a while Gander or Daddy got up to see if the hay had dried, but it was past ten o’clock before we could begin work.

  Gander drove the rake, putting the hay in windrows. And Daddy and Uncle Burley and I followed him with pitchforks, shocking it. We sweated; the wind blew dust and chaff into our faces and down our necks, and it stuck to the sweat and stung. Now and then we’d see a meadowlark fly up and whistle—a clear cool sound, like water—and drop back into the stubble.

  Before long Uncle Burley began to sing. He’d gather a fork load of hay and as he lifted it onto the shock sing, “Ohhh
hhhh, ‘down along the woodland ...’ ” And as he strained at the fork again: “Ohhhhhhh, ‘through the hills and by the shore . . .’ ”

  “You must be happy,” Daddy said.

  “I was thinking about the good old days,” Uncle Burley said, “when I was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey’s circus. You didn’t know about that, did you?”

  “Never heard of it before,” Daddy said.

  Uncle Burley had invented the story about driving a team for Barnum and Bailey to tell to Brother and me when we were little, and all of us had heard it a hundred times. But when the work got hard he’d usually tell it again to make us laugh, and because he enjoyed hearing it himself. He said he’d driven a team of eight black horses with silver harness and red plumes on their bridles. His team had drawn the calliope at the head of all the parades, and it had been a glorious sight. He told about the girl bareback riders on their white horses and the tightrope walkers and the trapeze men and the lion tamers. Finally he got fired, he said, because he whipped one of the elephants singlehanded in a fair fight. He tied the elephant’s trunk to his tail and ran him around in a circle until he passed out from dizziness. Barnum and Bailey told him that he was the best teamster they’d ever had, but they just couldn’t stand for him mistreating their elephants.

  Daddy said he supposed it must make Uncle Burley awfully sad at times to have such fine memories of his past.

  Uncle Burley shook his head. “I tell you, back in those days when I had three flunkies to polish my black boots and brush my red forked-tail coat, I never would have believed that I’d end up here, sweating on the handle of a pitchfork. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.”

  While we worked Grandpa sat in the shade at the edge of the field, nodding off to sleep, and waking up to carry us a fresh jug of water when we needed one.

  “Look at him sleep,” Uncle Burley said. “He’s living the good life, ain’t he? When I get that old I want somebody to wake me up every once in a while just so I can go back to sleep again.”