They watched as Burley knelt and drank and went on, and then one by one Tol waved the others forward: Walter, and then the two Hardys, and then Sam.
When Sam had finished, Tol drank and followed after the others, leaving the woods quiet again around the spring.
They would be in the woods now for a long time, for the west slope of the valley was poor land, most of which had been cut over at one time or another but not plowed. They were passing through some stands of large trees, mostly hickory and oak, and it was pretty walking, though too steep to be comfortable. Going along behind the others, Tol thought that if he were not hungry and did not have Nightlife to worry about, he would be having a pretty good time. And then he thought that he was having a pretty good time anyhow.
The evening shade had come to that side of the valley by the time Tol caught up with the others. It was cooling off a little. They would have been grateful for some supper—they were all thinking of things they would like to eat—but they were enjoying the cool. A little breeze had begun drifting down the slope, drying the sweat from their faces.
The light now lost its strength and heat as if detached from its source. Stray glows and luminescences floated among the trees. Sometimes they would hear a wood thrush sing, a flute suddenly trilled and then fading, somewhere beyond or behind. And before all the daylight was gone, there was a moon.
While Tol still had enough light to see them all, he gathered them to him. “We can’t all stay close enough to see him after dark,” he said. “So let Burley follow Nightlife, and we’ll follow Burley. With that moon, we ought to be able to stay together pretty good.”
And that was what they did.
After it got dark, Nightlife wandered a little more than he had earlier; he went a little slower and stopped more often. But he went on and on, Burley followed him, and they followed Burley. They kept always alert, for if Burley lost sight of Nightlife or they lost sight of Burley, anything could happen. Or so they felt. They felt that they could not afford to risk confusion. They certainly did not want to become disoriented and blunder into Nightlife and Old Fetcher in the dark. Enough moonlight filtered down through the foliage to give vigilance an edge over confusion, but barely enough. The light filled the woods with shadows, and at times the very effort of sight seemed to call forth phantoms and apparitions, motions where nothing moved. They lost all sense of where they were except in relation to one another. They forgot their tiredness and their hunger. They would have been thirsty again if they had thought of it, but they had forgotten thirst. They seemed to have become enlarged out of their bodies into sight itself and the effort of sight, and they walked owl-eyed among the confusions of things and the shadows of things.
They knew only what they saw, and they saw only shadows within a shadow. Nightlife led them through a maze that did not exist before he led them through it. They went in silence, for the dew had softened the dry leaves underfoot, and still they walked with care. Now and again, when they passed above a house, dogs would bark. Now and again, way off, they would hear an owl. Once, coming suddenly to the edge of an open field, they seemed to plunge headlong out of the dark into the moon-flooded sky.
The moon shone way into the night. And then, unexpectedly, for they had not seen the sky in a while, clouds covered the moon, and it was suddenly so dark that they could not see to the ends of their own arms; when they held their hands up before their faces and wiggled their fingers, they could not see them. It was, Walter Cotman told Elton Penn, who told me, “as black as a coker’s ass, and all at once.”
They stopped and waited, for that was all they could do. They knew that somewhere in the dark ahead of them Burley was trying out the problem of following Nightlife by sound, or of getting close enough to him to know where he was without touching him. And so they waited.
They waited a long time, and saw nothing at all. They heard anonymous, inexplicable stirrings here and there. They heard a dog bark, way off—not at them this time. They heard a small owl trill sweetly and another answer from farther away. And that was all.
They were beginning to think of sitting down when they saw a dim yellow light suddenly bloom out of a hollow not far behind them. They turned and eased back toward it. When they got close enough, they recognized Burley. He had lit his lantern. They gathered around him.
“He never stopped,” Burley said. “He kept right on going.”
“Course he went on!” Walter said. “A man that can’t see in the daytime, what does it matter to him if he can’t see in the dark?”
“I stayed with him for a while,” Burley said. “I was close enough to him that I could hear him walking, I thought. And then I got to where I couldn’t tell what I was hearing. I was starting to hear things, and I couldn’t tell if they was actually things or not. I got scared I’d walk smack into him, so I held back. And then I lost him. He either stopped or went on, I don’t know which.”
“Well, we don’t want that light, do we?” Tol said.
“He’s too far to see it where he is,” Burley said, “I think, unless he followed me back.” He grinned at Walter Cotman.
The lantern, turned low, sat on the ground at their feet. It showed them their faces, and cast their shadows out around them like the spokes of a wheel.
They fell silent now, for the knowledge of their failure had suddenly come over them. The potency of Tol’s old shotgun entered their thoughts again. They knew that at any time, from somewhere out in the dark, they might hear its one short and final exclamation. And only then would they know where to go.
“Well,” Tol Proudfoot said, after a time that seemed longer than it was, “I reckon we’ve lost him.”
“I reckon if he’s lost, he ain’t by hisself,” Tom Hardy said. “Do you know where we are?”
“I know within three or four miles, I reckon,” Tol said.
“Do you know, Burley?”
“Right here,” Burley said.
They were speaking almost in whispers.
“What’re we going to do, then?” Walter Cotman said. “Stand here till sunup, with that lantern lighting us up for him to shoot at?”
“That lantern ain’t going to burn till sunup,” Burley said, “unless one of you all brought some coal oil.”
“We could build us a little fire, I reckon,” Braymer said.
Tol knew then that they were going to build a fire. He already objected to the lantern—or the caution in him objected to it. But after the darkness, it was a comfort and a pleasure. That they would build a fire he knew because he knew he could not bring himself to stop them from building it.
He was nonetheless relieved to hear Walter Cotman say, “We’re too close to him here to build any fire.”
“Well,” Burley said, “we could drop down through this hollow till we’re out of the woods. He’ll stay in the woods, won’t he? That’s his pattern.”
They made their way slowly down the rocky bed of the stream. They came to a water gap in a rock fence, and crossed into what they knew to be a pasture, for now they saw cattle tracks and smelled cattle, and the foliage had been browsed nearly to the height of a man. There were trees still along the hollow, but here there would be grass fields out on the slopes on either side.
Burley led them up out of the streambed onto a little bench. By the light of the lantern or by feel they gathered up kindling and bigger wood for a fire. They helped the kindling with a tiny splatter of oil from the lantern, and soon they had a small fire going. Burley raised the globe and blew out the lantern flame. The fire cheered them; it forced back the dark and the damp of the night a little, and they were glad to sit down beside it. They were tired, and the fire made them a resting place.
And yet sitting there in the room of light it made was a fearfully simple, almost a brutal, act of faith. It made them visible to all the distances around them, and made those distances invisible to them. All they could hope w
as that if Nightlife saw the light of their fire, he would come into it and not shoot into it. They did not think he would see it, but the chance that he might shaped that odd little hope in them, and it kept them silent for a while, glowing, all of them, in the firelight.
Finally Walter Cotman said quietly, “It’ll rain tomorrow.”
“I’d say so,” Tol said.
“Well, we need a rain.”
“Yes, we do. If it don’t come too hard.”
“It could come hard. It’s been mighty hot.”
“We need one of them good old dizz-dozzlers,” Braymer Hardy said. “This time of year, it would be money in the bank.”
“A good rain now surely would ruin them little cabbages of mine,” Tol said.
“Why?”
“It would make big ones out of ’em.”
What they had said had not made so welcome an effect on the silence around them as their fire had made on the darkness. They let the silence come back. The fire eased them, and they thought of their tobacco. Walter and Burley made cigarettes; Sam and Tol filled and lit cob pipes; the others took chews.
After a while Walter said in the same quiet voice as before, “Tom, you reckon Josie’ll still be at your house when you get home?”
“It ain’t every newly married man that you find wandering about the woods of a night,” Tol said.
“Pore thing,” Braymer said, “it’s just a blessing she don’t care nothing about him, or this sort of doings would break her heart.”
Except for Tom’s, every face around the fire remained solemn. Tom grinned.
Tol said, “You take a young fellow like that, now, ugly and mean and nothing to offer but beans and hard work, and he fools a nice, smart, pretty girl into marrying him—you’d think he wouldn’t leave home, day nor night.”
“It’s a shame,” Walter said. “The women are all talking about it.”
“I growed my crop close to the house, the first year I got married,” Braymer said, “didn’t you, Uncle Tol?”
“Yessir, I did,” Tol said.
“Tom,” Walter said, “when you get up of a morning and you see these little specks floating on top of your coffee and you try to blow them off and they don’t blow off, that’s because they ain’t there.”
And then, way off, on their side of the valley but in a place they had not yet come to, a hound’s voice opened the darkness like a flare.
They hushed to listen.
The hound puzzled for several minutes over the scent he had announced, as if he were cold-trailing, perhaps, or going in the wrong direction. And then his cries rose full and confident.
“Is that your dog, Burley?” Sam Hanks asked.
“It’s him,” Burley said.
“Well, that ain’t no fox he’s running now.”
“No. He’s running a coon now.”
Tol said, “He’s a sweet-mouthed dog, ain’t he?”
They listened. Presently the cries became more urgent. The coon had treed.
“That was quick,” Sam said.
“Probably a sow with young ones,” Burley said.
The hound’s voice now seemed to fill the world with longing. The voice seemed to speak for the world. It spoke for Nightlife. It spoke for them all.
It seemed to them also to be an outlandish breach of propriety—so close and, in the face of their difficulty, so insistent on the normal order of things. The hound was Burley’s, and the others kept quiet for fear that Burley was going to say, in spite of Nightlife’s despair somewhere nearby in the dark, “Well, I reckon we ought to go see if a coon is what it is.” Burley himself kept quiet for fear that one of the others might say it in deference to him. And so for a long time nobody but the hound said anything.
Without warning, a hectoring, humorous voice came out of the nearby dark: “Well, by God, if you fellows is hunting, why don’t you go to your dog?”
The voice lifted them to varying heights above their resting places before they recognized it and let themselves back down again. Lester Proudfoot stepped into the firelight, holding his lantern up as if he had found what he was looking for.
“We ain’t hunting,” Burley said. “We’re just sitting here improving.”
“I don’t reckon you brought anything to eat,” Tom Hardy said. “Or drink.”
“Naw, nor nothing to sleep with neither. What in the hell are you doing, running around in the woods of a night? Something got wrong with young women since my day? Tol, how you making it?”
Lester bore all the distinguishing marks of a Proudfoot. He was Tol’s first cousin, and he looked like Tol, though he was not as big. He possessed to the full the Proudfoot gregariousness, always ready to do anything that could be done in company. Lester would talk to anybody anywhere, under any circumstances, at any time, at any length. A hunter himself, he had been awakened by the hound and then, looking out his kitchen window, had seen the fire up on the hillside.
Tol told him why they were there.
“And Nightlife’s up yonder in the woods somewhere with a gun?” Lester said.
“I reckon. Sit down, Les.”
Lester sat down. He extinguished his lantern. “And you boys is waiting here either for him to see this fire and come to it, or take a shot at one of you all.”
“Or shoot hisself,” Walter Cotman said. “Or wander on from hell to breakfast, the way he’s been doing.”
“He’s done already wandered around equal to Moses,” Tom Hardy said.
“He’s wandered around equal to old Daniel Boone hisself,” Braymer said.
“Well, I hope he discovers Kentucky pretty soon and settles down,” Walter said.
“What the matter with him is he’s a Hample,” Lester said. “Ain’t that his chief difficulty? He don’t fit the hole that was bored for him.”
“Les,” Tol said, “tell about that time Nightlife’s granddaddy swore off drinking.”
“Uncle Norey,” Lester said. “Uncle Norey got to where he would always get drunk and down before the crop was made, and leave the hardest part for Aunt Nancy and the children. Aunt Nancy told him he’d have to stop that, and he did, he swore off. And then when they finally got the crop made and ready for the market, Uncle Norey said, ‘Here I’ve put in a whole crop year from Genesis to Revelation, and nare a drop of liquor has defiled my lips. Hand me that jug!’”
After Lester’s noisy entrance among them, their conversation had been quiet. Now they laughed as quietly as they had spoken. And then, except for the hound still clamoring at the tree, the quiet restored itself.
For some time, where they were, it was silent altogether.
And then Tom Hardy said, “A man would think of killing hisself, he ain’t at hisself, surely.”
“He’s at hisself, all right,” Tol said. “He ain’t nowhere but at hisself. Look at old Nightlife just rambling on, not looking right nor left, going like he knows where, and he don’t know.”
“The way he is now,” Walter said, “he just as well stayed home or stayed asleep. Or never been born. He don’t know where he is.”
“Don’t matter where he is,” Tol said. “He’s just wandering around inside hisself, looking for the way out. In there where he is, it’s dark sure enough.”
“Well, here we are. Or there we were. Right there with him.”
“And what did we do? Or what could we? For he ain’t just wandering around inside hisself; he’s wandering around out of reach—by about the range of that old gun.”
“You got to live whether you want to or not,” Tom Hardy said.
Tol said, “Boy, I think you’ve got to want to.” He said nothing for a long time then, and then he said, “You’ve got to like to live in this world. You can’t just mortal it out from one day to the next for three score years and ten.”
They were quiet again for a while,
and then Lester stood up and relit his lantern. He said, “I reckon being as that keen-eyed fellow’s up there with Tol’s gun, I won’t bother about your dog now, Burley. I’ll slip up there after daylight and bring him down to the house. You get him when you can.”
“I’d be much obliged,” Burley said.
Lester stepped out of the firelight then. For a few seconds they heard his footsteps descending the slope, and then it was quiet. They could hear the hound, and that was all.
When Lester had gone, they began to feel their weariness. One by one they lay down beside the fire and slept.
“Couldn’t you stay awake? Couldn’t you stay awake?”
Gray daylight had come. The fire had burned down to white ash. Now, though the hound was exactly where he had been before, his voice sounded farther away and smaller. But what had wakened them was Nightlife standing over them, one foot in the ashes. He was holding the gun, but not threatening them with it. It dangled from his hand as unregarded as if it had been the bail of an empty bucket.
“Couldn’t you stay awake?”
The lenses of his glasses apparently as opaque as bark, he was looking right at them and not seeing them. They were frightened, astonished, tickled at their own and one another’s fright and astonishment, and most of all ashamed.
“Sit down, Nightlife,” Tol said. “Sit down, old bud. We’ll go home pretty soon and get some breakfast.”
“You think there ain’t no breakfast here?” Nightlife said. “Where the hell you think breakfast is at? I’ve got breakfast right here.”
His voice had grown louder, and now he raised the gun and gestured with it in a way that caused them to make various motions backward. “Couldn’t you stay awake?” he said.
“Well, we thought if you shot yourself it would wake us up,” said Walter Cotman.
Nightlife went on then. He stepped out of the circle of men around the dead fire, and started back up into the woods. They lay there with their heads raised and watched him go.