“And what have you got left?” Boyd said. “Half the people without jobs and half the factories closed by strikes. Too much cotton and corn and hogs, and not enough for all the people to wear and eat. Too much not-butter and not even the guns.…”
“We got a deer camp—if we ever get to it,” Legate said. “Not to mention does.”
“It’s a good time to mention does,” McCaslin said. “Does and fawns both. The only fighting anywhere that ever had anything of God’s blessing on it has been when men fought to protect does and fawns. If it’s going to come to fighting, that’s a good thing to mention and remember.”
“Haven’t you discovered in sixty years that women and children are one thing there’s never any scarcity of?” Boyd said.
“Maybe that’s why all I am worrying about right now is that ten miles of river we still got to run before we can make camp,” McCaslin said. “Let’s get on.”
They went on. Soon they were going fast again—that speed at which Boyd drove, about which he had consulted neither of them just as he had given neither of them any warning when he had slammed the car to a stop. McCaslin relaxed again, watching, as he did each recurrent November while more than fifty of them passed, the land which he had seen change. At first there had been only the old towns along the river and the old towns along the edge of the hills, from each of which the planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired labor had wrested from the impenetrable jungle of waterstanding cane and cypress, gum and holly and oak and ash, cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations, the paths made by deer and bear becoming roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them and along the rivers Tallahatchie and Sunflower which joined and became the Yazoo, the River of the Dead of the Choctaws—the thick, slow, black, unsunned streams almost without current, which once each year actually ceased to flow and then moved backward, spreading, drowning the rich land and then subsiding again, leaving it still richer. Most of that was gone now. Now a man drove two hundred miles from Jefferson before he found wilderness to hunt in; now the land lay open from the cradling hills on the east to the rampart of levee on the west, standing horseman-tall with cotton for the world’s looms—the rich black land, imponderable and vast, fecund up to the very cabin doorsteps of the Negroes who worked it and the domiciles of the white men who owned it, which exhausted the hunting life of a dog in one year, the working life of a mule in five and of a man in twenty—the land in which neon flashed past them from the little countless towns and constant this-year’s cars sped over the broad plumb-ruled highways, yet in which the only permanent mark of man’s occupation seemed to be the tremendous gins, constructed in sections of sheet iron and in a week’s time though they were, since no man, millionaire though he be, would build more than a roof and walls to live in, with camping equipment to live with, because he knew that once each ten years or so his house would be flooded to the second story and all within it ruined;—the land across which there came now no scream of panther but instead the long hooting of locomotives: trains of incredible length and drawn by a single engine since there was no gradient anywhere and no elevation save those raised by forgotten aboriginal hands as refugees from the yearly water and used by their Indian successors to sepulchure their fathers’ bones, and all that remained of that old time were the Indian names on the little towns and usually pertaining to water—Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homachitto, Yazoo.
By early afternoon they were on water. At the last little Indian-named town at the end of the pavement they waited until the other car and the two trucks—the one containing the bedding and tents, the other carrying the horses—overtook them. Then they left the concrete and, after a mile or so, the gravel too, and in caravan they ground on through the ceaselessly dissolving afternoon with chained wheels in the lurching and splashing ruts, until presently it seemed to him that the retrograde of his recollection had gained an inverse velocity from their own slow progress and that the land had retreated not in minutes from the last spread of gravel, but in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he first knew it—the road they now followed once more the ancient pathway of bear and deer, the diminishing fields they now passed once more scooped punily and terrifically by axe and saw and mule drawn plow from the brooding and immemorial tangle instead of ruthless mile-wide parallelograms wrought by ditching and dyking machinery.
They left the cars and trucks at the landing, the horses to go overland down the river to a point opposite the camp and swim the river, themselves and the bedding and food and tents and dogs in the motor launch. Then, his old hammer double gun which was better than half as old as he between his knees, he watched even these last puny marks of man—cabin, clearing, the small and irregular fields which a year ago were jungle and in which the skeleton stalks of this year’s cotton stood almost as tall and rank as the old cane had stood, as if man had had to marry his planting to the wilderness in order to conquer it—fall away and vanish until the twin banks marched with wilderness as he remembered it; the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable even to sight twenty feet away, the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had rung to no axe save the hunter’s, had echoed to no machinery save the beat of old-time steamboats traversing it or the snarling of launches like their own of people going into it to dwell for a week or two weeks because it was still wilderness. There was still some of it left, although now it was two hundred miles from Jefferson when once it had been thirty. He had watched it, not being conquered, destroyed, so much as retreating since its purpose was now done and its time an outmoded time, retreating southward through this shaped section of earth between hills and river until what was left of it seemed now to be gathered and for the time arrested in one tremendous density of brooding and inscrutable impenetrability at the ultimate funnelling tip.
They reached the site of their last year’s camp with still two hours left of light. “You go on over under that driest tree and set down,” Legate told him. “Me and these other young boys will do this.” He did neither. In his slicker he directed the unloading of the boat—the tents, the stove, the bedding, the food for themselves and the dogs until there should be meat in camp. He sent two of the Negroes to cut firewood; he had the cook-tent raised and the stove set up and a fire going and a meal cooking while the big tent was still being staked down. Then in the beginning of dusk he crossed in the boat to where the horses waited, backing and snorting at the water. He took the lead-ropes and with no more weight than that and his voice he drew them down into the water and held them beside the boat with only their heads above the surface as though they actually were suspended from his frail and strengthless old man’s hands while the boat recrossed and each horse in turn lay prone in the shallows, panting and trembling, its eyes rolling in the dusk until the same weightless hand and the unraised voice gathered surging upward, splashing and thrashing up the bank.
Then the meal was ready. The last of light was gone now save the thin stain of it snared somewhere between the river’s surface and the rain. He had the glass of thin whiskey-and-water and they ate standing in the mud beneath the stretched tarpaulin. The oldest Negro, Isham, had already made his bed—the strong, battered iron cot, the stained mattress which was not quite soft enough, the worn, washed blankets which as the years passed were less and less warm enough. Wearing only his bagging woolen underclothes, his spectacles folded away in the worn case beneath the pillow where he could reach them readily and his lean body fitted into the old worn groove of mattress and blankets, he lay on his back, his hands crossed on his breast and his eyes closed while the others went to bed and the last of the talking died into snoring. Then he opened his eyes and lay looking up at the motionless belly of canvas upon which the constant rain murmured, upon which the glow of the sheet-iron heater died slowly away and would fade still further until the youngest Negro, lying on planks before it for that purpose, would sit up and stoke it again and lie back down.
They h
ad had a house once. That was twenty and thirty and forty years ago, when the big bottom was only thirty miles from Jefferson and old Major de Spain, who had been his father’s cavalry commander in ’61 and –2 and –3 and –4 and who had taken him into the woods his first time, had owned eight or ten sections of it. Old Sam Fathers was alive then, half Chickasaw Indian, grandson of a chief, and half Negro, who had taught him how and when to shoot; such a November dawn as tomorrow would be and the old man had led him straight to the great cypress and he had known the buck would pass exactly there because there was something running in Sam Fathers’ veins which ran in the veins of the buck and they stood there against the tremendous trunk, the old man and the boy of twelve, and there was nothing but the dawn and then suddenly the buck was there, smoke-colored out of nothing, magnificent with speed, and Sam Fathers said, “Now. Shoot quick and shoot slow,” and the gun leveled without hurry and crashed and he walked to the buck lying still intact and still in the shape of that magnificent speed and he bled it with his own knife and Sam Fathers dipped his hands in the hot blood and marked his face forever while he stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though the boy of twelve had been unable to phrase it then, “I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death.” They had the house then. That roof, the two weeks of each fall which they spent under it, had become his home; although since that time they had lived during the two fall weeks in tents and not always in the same place two years in succession, and now his companions were the sons and even the grandsons of those with whom he had lived in the house and the house itself no longer existed, the conviction, the sense of home, had been merely transferred into the canvas. He owned a house in Jefferson, where he had had a wife and children once though no more, and it was kept for him by his dead wife’s niece and her family and he was comfortable in it, his wants and needs looked after by blood at least related to the blood which he had elected out of all the earth to cherish. But he spent the time between those walls waiting for November, because even this tent with its muddy floor and the bed which was not soft enough nor warm enough was his home and these men, some of whom he only saw during these two weeks, were more his kin. Because this was his land.…
The shadow of the youngest Negro loomed, blotting the heater’s dying glow from the ceiling, the wood billets thumping into it until the glow, the flame, leaped high and bright across the canvas. But the Negro’s shadow still remained, until after a moment McCaslin, rising onto one elbow, saw that it was not the Negro, it was Boyd; when he spoke the other turned his head and he saw in the red firelight the sullen and ruthless profile. “Nothing,” Boyd said. “Go on back to sleep.”
“Since Will Legate mentioned it,” McCaslin said, “I remember you had some trouble sleeping in here last fall too. Only you called it coon-hunting then. Or was it Will Legate that called it that?” Boyd didn’t answer. He turned and went back to his bed. McCaslin, propped on his elbow, watched until the other’s shadow sank down the wall and vanished. “That’s right,” he said. “Try to get some sleep. We must have meat in camp tomorrow. You can do all the setting up you want to after that.” Then he too lay back down, his hands crossed again on his breast, watching the glow of the heater. It was steady again now, the fresh wood accepted, being assimilated; soon it would begin to fade again, taking with it the last echo of that sudden upflare of a young man’s passion and unrest. Let him lie awake for a little while, he thought. He would lie still some day for a long time without even dissatisfaction to disturb him. And lying awake here, in these surroundings, would soothe him if anything could, if anything could soothe a man just forty years old. The tent, the rain-murmured canvas globe, was filled with it once more now. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing quiet and peaceful as a child’s, listening to it—that silence which was never silence but was myriad. He could almost see it, tremendous, primeval, looming, musing downward upon this puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after a single brief week would vanish and in another week would be completely healed, traceless in the unmarked solitude. Because it was his land, although he had never owned a foot of it. He had never wanted to, even after he saw its ultimate doom, began to watch it retreating year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and tractor plows, because it belonged to no man. It belonged to all; they had only to use it well, humbly and with pride. Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress. It was because there was just exactly enough of it. He seemed to see the two of them—himself and the wilderness—as coevals, his own span as a hunter, a woodsman not contemporary with his first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by him gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that old Major de Spain and Sam Fathers who had taught him to hunt, the two spans running out together, not into oblivion, nothingness, but into a scope free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world peoples to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both—the shades of the tall unaxed trees and the sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal animals ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like before the soundless guns.
Then he had slept. The lantern was lighted, the tent was full of the movement of men getting up and dressing and outside in the darkness the oldest Negro, Isham, was beating with a spoon on the bottom of a tin pan and crying, “Raise up and get yo fo clock coffy. Raise up and get yo fo clock coffy.”
He heard Legate too. “Get on out of here now and let Uncle Ike sleep. If you wake him up, he’ll want to go on stand. And he aint got any business in the woods this morning.” So he didn’t move. He heard them leave the tent; he listened to the breakfast sounds from the table beneath the tarpaulin. Then he heard them depart—the horses, the dogs, the last voice dying away; after a while he might possibly even hear the first faint clear cry of the first hound ring through the wet woods from where the buck had bedded, then he would go back to sleep again. Then the tent flap swung in and fell, something jarred against the end of the cot and a hand grasped his knee through the blanket and shook him before he could open his eyes. It was Boyd, carrying a shotgun instead of his rifle. He spoke in a harsh, rapid voice. “Sorry I had to wake you. There will be a.…”
“I was awake,” McCaslin said. “Are you going to shoot that today?”
“You just told me last night you want meat,” Boyd said. “There will be a.…”
“Since when did you start having trouble getting meat with your rifle?”
“All right,” the other said, with that harsh, restrained, furious impatience. Then McCaslin saw in his other hand a thick oblong, an envelope. “There will be a woman here some time this morning, looking for me. Give her this and tell her I said no.”
“What?” McCaslin said. “A what?” He half rose onto his elbow as the other jerked the envelope onto the blanket in front of him, already turning toward the entrance, the envelope striking solid and heavy and soundless and already sliding from the bed until McCaslin caught it, feeling through the paper the thick sheaf of banknotes. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.” The other stopped, looking back. They stared at one another—the old face, wan, sleep-raddled above the tumbled bed, the dark handsome younger one at once furious and cold. “Will Legate was right,” McCaslin said. “This is what you called coon-hunting. And now this.” He didn’t lift the envelope nor indicate it in any way. “What did you promise her that you haven’t the courage to face her and retract?”
“Nothing,” Boyd said. “This is all of it. Tell her I said no.” He was gone; the tent flap lifted on a waft of faint light and the constant murmur of the rain and fell again while McCaslin still lay half-raised on his elbow, the envelope clutched in his shaking hand. It seemed to him later that he began to hear the approaching boat almost immediately, before Boyd could
have got out of sight even. It seemed to him that there had been no interval whatever: the mounting snarl of the engine, increasing, nearer and nearer and then cut short off, ceasing into the lap and plop of water under the bows as the boat slid in to the bank, the youngest Negro, the youth, raising the tent flap beyond which for an instant he saw the boat—a small skiff with a Negro man sitting in the stern beside the upslanted motor—then the woman entering, in a man’s hat and a man’s slicker and rubber boots, carrying the blanket-and-tarpaulin-wrapped bundle and bringing something else, something intangible, an effluvium which he knew he would recognize in a moment because he knew now that Isham had already told him, warned him, by sending the young Negro to the tent instead of coming himself—a face young and with dark eyes, queerly colorless but not ill and not that of a country woman despite the garments she wore, looking down at him where he sat upright on the cot now, clutching the envelope, the soiled underclothes bagging about him and the twisted blankets huddled about his hips.
“Is that his?” he said. “Don’t lie to me!”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“He’s gone,” he said. “You won’t jump him here. He left you this. He said to tell you no.” He extended the envelope. It was sealed and it bore no superscription. Nevertheless he watched her take it in one hand and manage to rip it open and tilt the neat sheaf of bound notes onto the blanket without even glancing at them and then look into the empty envelope before she crumpled and dropped it.
“Just money,” she said.
“What did you expect?” he said. “You have known him long enough or at least often enough to have got that child, and you don’t know him that well?”
“Not very often,” she said. “Not very long. Just that week here last fall, and in January he sent for me and we went West, to New Mexico, and lived for six weeks where I could cook for him and look after his clothes.…”