Hill girl

  Seven

  It was raining the next morning when I looked out, not a sudden shower with a blue sky behind it, but a slow, leaden drizzle that could go on for days.

  It was very early, and Sunday, and no one else was up. I went down to the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee with Rose and then went out to the car. I wanted to go out to the farm today, and I didn’t want to get mixed up in any Monday-morning rehash of the game yesterday. Lee had still been limp and very drunk when we got home, and if he and Mary were going to have an argument about it I wanted to stay in the clear.

  I ate some breakfast at Gordon’s café and drove out to the farm. It lies about seven miles from town, directly across the Black Creek bottom from the Eiler’s place, where Sam lives.

  I pulled up in front of the house and sat there a minute in the car under the sweet-gum trees, looking at the place. It sat back from the road about a hundred yards, with a sandy driveway going back to it, and the tenant house was across the road on a bare sand hill with a big china-berry tree in the front yard.

  The house seemed in better condition than the old house in town. My grandfather had always taken great pride in keeping it up and there had been a renter on the place for three of the four years since he had died. Right now the place looked dead and empty with the dark windows staring vacantly out into the rain and I listened moodily to the sound of water dripping into the barrel at the end of the front porch.

  I ran through the rain and up onto the porch, fumbling for the key. The hallway was dark and I walked slowly down it toward the dining room at the rear of the house, hearing my footsteps echo hollowly and thinking of my grandfather and grandmother and of the fun I had had there in my childhood.

  The room on the left at the front of the hall was the parlor and there was a fireplace in it, while the room across from it was the bedroom that had been mine during the summers I had lived there. The hall went on back to the dining room, and the kitchen was to the right of that, while on the left of it was the back bedroom, which had another fireplace. I went on to the back bedroom and kindled a fire to take the chill dampness off the place.

  My grandparents had died within a few months of each other, my grandmother in April and my grandfather in the following July. He was past seventy-eight, but I had never believed old age had anything to do with his death. They had lived together for more than fifty years and after she was gone he died of loneliness.

  He had left me the farm and some eight thousand dollars that was variously invested in savings bonds, timber land, and some lots in town. It had become mine on my twenty-first birthday, just about a year ago. He had left it all to me, I guess, because we had always been so close and I had lived there so long, and because he knew, of course, that the Major had cut me off entirely when I had left home.

  My father had fought with the Engineers during World War I and had come home a major, and after that he was always called by his rank. It suited him.

  The Major had been a headstrong and violent man as long as he lived, and I guess the one love in his life had been as consuming as his other passions. I had always heard, from the few people who knew him well, but never from the Major himself, that he had been utterly devoted to my mother, who was a frail and gentle girl as completely opposed to him in temperament as it was possible to be. She was considerably younger than he, and when she had died so young—when I was born—it had hurt him far worse than he would ever admit. It had added to his legend of callousness and brutality when he had refused to go into any mourning, but had only gone back to work more profane and hard-driving than ever. It was said he had fired two men for loafing on the job the next day after the funeral, and when they had talked back he threatened to shoot them both if they weren’t off his property in five minutes.

  He had been a big man with a big voice. He had always worked hard, and he drank harder, and he was a difficult man to work for because of his temper. Lee was the only person I ever knew who could handle him. No matter what Lee did—and he did plenty—he could always bring the Major round to his side.

  Lee had been expelled from college in his junior year for a wild week end in Galveston involving a stolen taxi and a girl from Postoffice Street. Lee always claimed he hadn’t stolen the taxi, that it was just that the driver had got even drunker than they were and had wandered off and left them. Anyway, the police had picked up Lee and the girl at dawn on Sunday morning going swimming in the nude out of the cab, which was seventy-five yards out from the beach in a heavy surf. They had driven it out until the motor stalled, at low tide. The Major had paid the damages and got the theft charges quashed and forgave Lee for it, but he never tried to send him back to school. Lee was a junior partner in the firm from then on, a partner whose duties consisted largely of driving a car as fast as it would go over rough country roads. Lee knew how to get along with him, and the Major was always a little proud of him, I think. He wore good clothes with an air, knew how to impress people, and knew a lot of good telephone numbers in a lot of places. The Major was a man who liked parties.

  I don’t know yet why we couldn’t get along together. I had often wondered, during those years, if he didn’t subconsciously hate me because my coming into the world had killed my mother. She had died three days afterward, of complications following my birth. I had never really believed this, though, for he was far too smart a man to go in for any such crackpot morbidity. It was more likely that, as Mary had put it once, we both had too much of the same type of pigheaded stubbornness to live together. God knows, some of the whippings he had given me had been terrible to remember, and some of the provocations I had given him had been enough to try the patience of a saint.

  A lot of things happened that year, the last one I was at home. Grandmother died in April, Lee came home in May, kicked out of college, and that same month the Major and I came to the parting. I graduated from high school the last of May and began packing to go out to the farm for the summer, as I had every year, and knowing that my grandfather would want me more than ever now that my grandmother was gone.

  I will always remember the Major as he was that day. It isn’t a fair picture, because he wasn’t always that way, but it is one of those things that are ingrained in the memory and never come out. I didn’t look any better than he did that day, either, and I would like to forget it if I could, but I probably never will.

  He met me in the living room as I was going out with my suitcase. He had been shaving and had come out of the bathroom in his gray tweed trousers with the suspenders dangling and shaving soap under one ear. His face was dark and I could see the nervous twitching of his right eyelid that always betrayed his anger.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

  “Out to the farm,” I said.

  “Take that bag back upstairs and unpack it. You’re not going to any farm this summer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I say so. No son of mine is going to be a farm hand all his life. That’s finished.”

  “He needs somebody out there.”

  “He doesn’t need you. He’s got plenty of help, and if he needs any more he can hire ‘em, or I’ll hire ‘em for him.”

  I was eighteen then and bigger than he was and I could feel our lifelong argument coming to a head. It was at this point that Lee always pretended to agree with him and turned on the charm and talked him out of it, but I never could do it. At about this time I usually got a whipping or a profane tongue-lashing for my rebellious attitude and the thing ended with my doing what I was told, but today I knew it was finished.

  “I’m going out to the farm,” I said again.

  “God damn you, are you defying me?”

  Without answering, I turned and started to go.

  “Stop where you are,” he roared, and stalked back to the bathroom and returned with the razor strap.

  “You’ve laid that on me for the last time,” I said.

  “We’ll see about that, young man,” he said, and swung i
t viciously. It hit me across the shoulders and hurt, and I caught it and pulled it out of his hand and threw it far down the hall behind me. He drew back as though to hit me with his right hand; his left hand had been amputated during the war.

  “Don’t hit me,” I said. “I’ll slug you. You’ll need both hands if you ever hit me again.” It was something I would regret saying all the rest of my life, but I had said it and he stopped.

  His voice wasn’t loud now. He sounded as if he would choke, and I could see his big chest rise as though he had to fight to breathe.

  “Don’t come back. You’re finished here.”

  “I’m not coming back,” I said. I picked up the bag and went on down the hall and out the front door. I saw him only once after that, for a little while one afternoon in July, at my grandfather’s funeral, but we didn’t speak.

  I had been home once since then, two years ago, but it was while he was out of town.

  When the rain slacked a little I went down to the barn and the mule lot and looked over the buildings and found them in good repair and then crossed the road to the tenant house. It hadn’t been used since my grandfather’s death, for the man who had been farming the place on the third-and-fourth had lived in the big house, and it had at one time been used for storing hay, but it hadn’t deteriorated too badly and could be put back in good condition with a few minor repairs and a half-dozen windowpanes that had been broken.

  I was anxious to begin getting the place in shape again. It was mine now, and I intended to build it up to the way it had been when my grandfather was running it. I had always admired the way he had lived. I guess if someone had asked me, I couldn’t have explained why I wanted to go on being a farmer. There isn’t any money in it, and there certainly isn’t any prestige, as there is in being a doctor or a good lawyer or newspaper editor. But I liked the being outdoors all the time, and the hard physical activity, and the changing seasons, and the independence, and the knowledge—when I remembered my grandfather and the men like him—that I was in good company.

  * * *

  I moved out to the farm the second week in November. I had been pointing toward that ever since I had left New York after that last humiliating fight, and I was glad now to get away from the house in town. Lee was drinking more and more and it was hard to stay there and see what it was doing to Mary and what it was going to do to their marriage, to have to see it and still pretend it wasn’t happening.

  They came out to see me often in December, sometimes bringing me a roast or something else that Mary or Rose had cooked, for they were convinced I would starve or poison myself with my own cooking. And in a way they were right, for that was the one feature about the arrangement I didn’t like. I hated the mess I made trying to cook, and I knew that later on, when the real farming began, I wouldn’t have time even to try to cook.

  They came out every few days that first month, but after the first of the year their visits became less frequent and sometimes Mary would come alone, in a borrowed car. She never said what Lee was doing, or why he didn’t come with her, but I always knew. He wasn’t home. Sometimes he would be gone for a week at a time. He had made one halfhearted effort to go to work; he and another man had bought a filling station, but before they’d been operating a month there had been a party in the back room one night after closing and it had burned down. Somebody had left a cigarette lying around, I guess.

  One bright, cold day in January she drove out and, not finding me near the house, walked on down through the fields to where I was working in the new ground, cutting and piling logs and downed limbs and burning them.

  I was swinging the ax lustily in the thin sunlight of early afternoon. It was cold, only a few degrees above freezing, but I had my shirt off and sweat was glistening on my arms and back. I had forgotten about the soggy and uninspiring cold lunch I had brought from the house this morning and was wrapped up in the acute pleasure I always get out of violent exercise, when I heard an amused voice behind me.

  “You look like Thor. And I guess you haven’t got any brains at all.”

  I turned around and Mary was standing by the burning logs, smiling at me.

  “Hello,” I said. “Where’d you come from?”

  She had on a big wrap-around coat and she pulled it closer now, with the collar turned up about her throat, and shivered.

  “From town. It’s a place where intelligent people live, with heat and comfortable living rooms. It replaced the Stone Age, but I guess you haven’t heard about it yet.”

  I rolled up a short section of log and spread my jacket on it for her to sit on in front of the fire. She stretched her long, silk-clad legs out in front of her and I notice how out of place they looked here and how the sharp heels of her slippers poked into the damp ground.

  “For God’s sake, put on your shirt, you idiot,” she said in exasperation. I slipped into it and squatted down on my heels near her. She opened the paper bag she was carrying and brought out a thermos bottle and some sandwiches and a large piece of cake.

  “I brought you some lunch. I wish you’d get married, so I wouldn’t have to keep on feeding you.”

  She sent me a sly glance as I bit into a sandwich. “By the way, how is Angelina these days?”

  It was a little sudden for me, but I think I was completely deadpan and offhand as I said, “Angelina? Oh, she’s all right, I guess. Why?”

  “I just wondered if you were seeing much of her. She lives right across the bottom over there, doesn’t she?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “The old Eilers’ place.”

  I still couldn’t understand what she was driving at. If she suspected there was something going on between Lee and the Harley girl, she wouldn’t be so happy about it.

  “Can she cook?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, you need a girl who can cook.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Are you really serious about her, Bob? Have you been holding out on us?”

  “No.” I said. “What started all this, anyway?”

  “I heard Lee say something about her one time a couple of weeks ago and the next morning I asked him who she was. He said she was the oldest Harley girl and that you were sort of taken with her.”

  “Oh,” I said. Well, he wiggled out of it that time, I thought. “He’s exaggerating, Mary. It’s nothing like that. I’ve just been—oh—helping her with her schoolwork.”

  “Helping her with her schoolwork? What’s she studying? Blocking? Or off-tackle plays?”

  She went on back to the car after a while and I worked hard the rest of the afternoon trying to get a dead hickory chopped in two so I could roll it into the fire. But I kept thinking about Lee. He still had that girl on his mind, especially when he was drinking. Mary hadn’t said he was drunk when he spilled it, but she didn’t have to; it was obvious.

  Eight

  It was around the middle of January that I first met Jake. It was around seven of a cold night, with a mist of fine rain, and I was sitting before the fireplace in the back bedroom, whittling out a handle for a grubbing hoe and feeling a little low and alone, when I heard a car pull up in front of the house. I stopped to listen.

  “Hello,” came a shout from the front yard.

  I went down the dark hall and looked out. There was an old Ford touring car huddled under the bare trees.

  “Come on in,” I called out

  We went back into the warmth and light of the bedroom and I got a look at him.

  “My name’s Hubbard,” he said, grinning. “Jake Hubbard. Yo’re Mr. Crane, ain’t you?”

  I liked the grin. “My name’s Crane,” I said. “But it’s Bob Crane, not Mister.”

  He laughed and I shoved a chair toward him for him to sit down. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, but smaller, and his movements were fast and decisive and there was an easy assurance about his eyes. He had a big chew of tobacco in his right cheek and now he sat down
on the very front edge of the chair like a bird poised for flight, held his hands out toward the fire, and spat a brown stream into the ashes.

  He had on new overalls and an old leather jacket, patched at the elbows, and a cap of the type that has ear flaps, and he had the flaps pulled down over his ears now. There was a pleasant homeliness about his face, with its oversized bony nose and the stubble of tough black beard and the long sideburns that came down almost to the bottoms of his ears.

  “I hear you goin’ to farm this here place,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s good land. Make a half bale to the acre.”

  I nodded, waiting. I thought I knew what was on his mind and was trying to size him up.

  “I looked her over a couple times,” he went on, rubbing his hands briskly together and holding them out toward the blaze.

  “You live around here?” I asked. I had never seen him before,

  “Nope. I’m from Gregg County. Jest a-visitin’ kinfolks. The Harperses, down the big road about four mile.”

  I lit a cigarette and waited. He refused one, gesturing smilingly toward the swollen lump in his cheek.

  “I’m sorta lookin’ around for some land to farm on the halves. Ain’t made a crop now in a couple years. Been doin’ public work mostly, workin’ on the highway over by Mineola, an’ some shingle-mill work, but it ain’t like havin’ a crop somehow. Now, I see you got a good tenant house over acrost the road, leastwise it would be with a little fixin’ up an’ a few window glasses, an’ you got more land than you can work by yourself. I kinda reckoned we might make a dicker.” He stopped and looked at me questioningly.

  “Sounds all right to me,” I said. “I’ve been looking around for a tenant. You’ve farmed before, I suppose?”

  “All my life except the last couple years. Give me a good pair of mules, ain’t air man I ever seen can plow more ground in a day or do it any better.”