They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.
Before they had finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs floated up from the night and seeped through the tight walls into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee cup.
“Where are they, Dick?”
“Right back of de spring-house. Dey got’ ’im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.
“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the top of the cupboard and lit it, and the three of them passed out of the room and into the chill darkness, across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing as frosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed, its rambling low wall broken only by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked.
“’Twon’t freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it, Dick?”
“Naw, suh, Gwine rain.”
“Go on,” Bayard said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Pappy said so,” Buddy replied. “Warmer’n ’twas at sundown.”
“Don’t feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon, motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons; and the long rambling stable, from which placid munchings came and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. Then the lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended. The clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them and the ghostly shapes of them shifted In the faint glow, and in a sapling just behind the spring-house they found the ’possum curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tall, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.
Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy swung the lantern in and flashed it on to a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled, furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skull-like faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest captive in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazed over a little, losing some of its brittle scintillation.
The others sat in a semicircle before the blazing fire; at the old man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.
“Git ’im?” Mr. MacCallum asked.
“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”
The old man puffed at his pipe. “We’ll give you a shoo ’nough hunt befo’ you leave.”
Rafe said, “How many you got now, Buddy?”
“Ain’t got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.
“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We won’t never eat fo’teen ’possums.”
“Turn ’em loose and run ’em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.
“Buddy ain’t never started yet,” Rafe said.
“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”
“Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”
The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the wood-box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed, waking itself, and raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without words and with very little movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a single thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe out carefully on his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.
“We ’uns gits up at fo’ o’clock, Bayard,” he said. “But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”
“Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork guilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chill air.
“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, racehorse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though,” he added, and in his voice was just a trace of envy and of longing. Never again after twenty-five will sleep in the morning be so golden. His preparations for slumber were simple; he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard, who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy said. “You want one o’ my heavy ’uns?”
“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks: it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.
“Git that ’ere guilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, expelling his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation. He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.
“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two-three years isn’t it?”
“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered, “last time you and him . . .” Then he added quietly “I seen in a paper when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ’twas him. It was a limey paper.”
“You did? Where were you?”
“Up there,” Buddy answered, “where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever git it drained enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”
“Yes.” Bayard’s nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed to him that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush, and he lay beneath it. . . . He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered, so, that he was breathing in deep, troubled drafts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and filled with stumbling references to places wretchedly mispronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiative or background or future, caught timelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.
“How’d you like the army, Buddy?” Bayard asked.
“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment. “They gimme a charm,” he added in a burst of shy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure.
“A charm?” Bayard repeated.
“Uhuh. One of them brass gimcracks on to a colored ribbon. I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ’ere flo’s too dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance tomorrow when pappy’s outen the house.”
“Why? Don’t he know you got it?”
“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee charm. R
afe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”
“Yes,” Bayard repeated. Buddy ceased talking and presently he sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly on his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk; whenever you close your eyes, the room starts going round and round, and so you lie rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open, not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking and his breathing had become longer, steady and regular. The shucks shifted with sibilant complaint as Bayard turned slowly on to his side.
Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, enclosing him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained, laboring pants, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed deeply and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it with strained attention from the time he had seen the first tracer-smoke until, from his steep bank, he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from the nose of John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived it again as you might run over a printed, oft-read tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his own body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much; that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved for ever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned on to his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision.
The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vise of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering, and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a leaden cast on them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and panting breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.
Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice on his ribs, and he knew where the door was and he groped his way to it on curling toes. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice, and fumbling at it he touched something else beside it, something chill and tubular and upright, and his hand slid down it and then he stood for a moment in the icy pitch darkness with the shotgun in his hands, and as he stood so, his numb fingers fumbling at the breech, he remembered the box of shells on the wooden box on which the lamp sat. A moment longer he stood so, his head bent a little and the gun in his numb hands; then he leaned it again in the corner and lifted the wooden bar from its slots carefully and without noise. The door sagged from the hinges, and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it and lifted it back and stood in the door.
In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay on the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like sad ghosts in the chill corpse-light—the wood pile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation; yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, on the plank roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.
In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks beneath him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily on the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood ran again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for . . . not vindication so much as comprehension; a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.
The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling, in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all . . . Bible . . . some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Sleep. It comes to all.
At last, through the walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable; yet he knew it was of human origin, made by people whose names and faces he knew, waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose; people to whom he was . . . and he was comforted. The sounds continued; unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice which, with a slight effort of concentration, he knew he could name; and best of all, knew that now he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire, where light was, and warmth. And he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise and go to them the next moment, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was untroubled now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept. He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dull; his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was a definite, purposeful sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed to the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his boots in his hand, he crossed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.
“We let you sleep,” Rafe said; then he said, “Good Lord, boy, you look like a ha’nt. Didn’t you sleep last night?”
“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth. In the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots, Bayard said:
“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”
“New breed I’m tryin’,” Jackson answered. Rafe returned with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.
“Them’s Ellen’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ’em after you eat. Here, drink this. You look all wore out. Buddy must ’a’ kept you awake talkin’,” he added with dry irony.
Bayard drank the whisky and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” Rafe said.
“Ellen?” Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night. Y’all raise her?”
“Yes. She growed up with last year’s batch of puppies. Buddy caught her. And now Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom and a fox’s smartness and speed.”
Bayard approached the
corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity. “I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw anything that looked like them.”
“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered.
Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ’em, but they hain’t no more’n weaned, yit. You wait and see.”
“Don’t know what you’ll do with ’em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”
“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’ ’bout a dawg ’twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.
“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe insisted. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”
He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr. MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their comer, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald enjoyment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of hovering concern, like a hen.
“Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared. “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ’ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like any other living creature—neither fox nor hound, partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene, here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears, there limp ears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; and limp, brief tails brushed over with a faint golden fuzz like the insides of chestnut burrs. As regards color, they ranged from reddish brown through an indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast, and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ’em now,” the old man directed.