He got them all facing forward; then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one became aware of its presence; he swept it back and forth just above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any personal interest whatever, and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.
“You can’t tell nothin’ about dawgs—” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.
“Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained a sort of scrambling lope. Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without swerving the puppies blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson crossed the floor and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.
“Now, what do you think of them, fer a pack of huntin’ dawgs?” the old man demanded. “Can’t smell, can’t bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”
“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson essayed patiently.
“Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral in hyer.”
Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry. “Come hyer,” Mr. MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in mid stride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror; then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr. MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.
“You can’t tell about dawgs—” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and rose.
Mr. MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I don’t blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself, ‘Them’s my boys’—” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with heavy enjoyment. “Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ’bout as proud as Gen’ral does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”
All that day it rained, and the following day and the one after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning to sprawl before the fire drowsing and malodorous and steaming until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ellen, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard. With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtime they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry fetched the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.
Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in two hours or six or twelve or forty-eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of desertion, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent also. Hunting, they told him, when Buddy had been missing since breakfast.
“Why didn’t he let me know?” Bayard demanded.
“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keer to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.
“Buddy don’t mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”
“Nothin’ ain’t anything to Buddy,” Lee said, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding over the fire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’d spend his whole life in that ’ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawn bread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.” He rose abrubtly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount Vernon, six miles away. He spent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.
Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after the departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”
“Him and Rate was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.
Bayard said “Well, I won’t melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?”
They pondered tor a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last. “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ’im next time befo’ he starts out.”
After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the skeletoned fields in the rain in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; or, accompanied now and then by Rate, hunted ’coon and wildcat in the bottom. At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “There goes Ellen,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well on the wet earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.
All through the night the ringing, bell-like tones quavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill in anticipating the course of the race. Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparently anticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their mounts on a hill and sat in the frosty starlight until the dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past, not halt a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the silence again.
“Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, on his white horse. “Ain’t that music fer a man, now?”
“I hope they git ’im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much ever’ time he fools ’im.”
“They won’t git ’im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”
“I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed, “unless they’ll refuse to run they own granddaddy. They done refused ever’thing else except vittles.”
“You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies gits old enough to—”
“Listen.”
The talking ceased. Again across the night the dogs’ voices rang among the hills, long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained; by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the dark hills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.
“Too bad Johnny ain’t here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”
“He was a feller fer huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”
“John was a fine boy,” the old man said.
“Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated, “a right warm-hearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”
“He never sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how cold and wet it was, even when he was a little chap, with that ’ere sing
le bar’l he bought with his own money, that kicked ’im so hard ever’ time he shot it. And yit he’d tote it around, instead of that ’ere sixteen old Colonel give ’im, jest because he saved up his own money and bought it hisself.”
“Yes,” Jackson agreed, “ef a feller gits into somethin’ on his own accord, he’d ought to go through with hit cheerful.”
“He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,” Mr. MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he up and headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and the next we knowed, here him and the fox come afloatin’ down river on that ’ere drift lawg, and him singin’ away loud as he could yell.”
“That ’uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’thing that come up.”
“He was a fine boy,” Mr. MacCallum said again.
“Listen.”
Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up on the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself might have found voice, grave and sad, and wild with all regret.
Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and the wagon was going into town, and although with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.
It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small embers that leaped out on the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily, his tired muscles relaxed in cumulate waves of heat as in a warm bath and his stubborn, wakeful heart glozed over too, for the time being. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without even offering that explanation which would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.
Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother had been the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped close to his round head was a noticeable contrast to his brothers’ brown eyes and black hair. But the old man had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as anyone of the other boys’, and despite its youth it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave, though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.
The others were at medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lankness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s—Raphael Semmes he was—and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery restlessness; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his seventy-seven years as though they were a thin coat, “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old man would say, with bluff derogation. “Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s jack-knifed length with the same identical thought; a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.
Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at seventeen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes: at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger. In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by Authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he called it. What it was he did, he could never be brought to say, and the gaud not only tailing to placate his lather’s anger over the tact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects, and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle: and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.
“Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ’possums, and a river bottom full of squir’l and ducks, and a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”
“Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little some thin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.
“You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”
“How ’bout town folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”
“Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped, “livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up again’ the next feller’s back do’, eatin’ outen tin cans.”
“’Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you know it.”
“Buyin’ turkeys,” Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’ ’em. I mind the time when I could take a gun and step out that ’ere do’ and git a gobbler in thutty minutes. And a ven’son ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is sto’ winders full of cocoanuts and Yankee popguns and sich.”
“Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard. “That was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”
The old man snorted. “I be damned ef I ain’t raised the damnedest, smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ’em nothin’, can’t learn ’em nothin’, can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ’em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”
Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid sunrise, and looked after the wagon with its four muffled figures and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever. The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing at the trees from beyond which the dry rattling of the wagon came unimpeded upon the clear and soundless morning.
“Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall. The hounds surged about them with eager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to their pen and huddled them inside and fastened the door on their astonished protests. From another kennel he unleashed the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to lift their baffled and mellow expostulations.
Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming air. The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor, and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like
arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.
“I’ve got to go back, Buddy,” he said. “I’m going home this afternoon.”
“All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”
Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy was saddling Perry, Bayard went into the house, where he found Henry laboriously soling a pair of boots and the old man reading a week-old newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.
“I reckon yo’ folks will be lookin’ fer you,” Mr. MacCallum agreed, removing his spectacles. “We’ll be expectin’ you back next month though, to git that ’ere fox. Ef we don’t git ’im soon, Gen’ral won’t be able to hold up his haid befo’ them puppies.”
“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered, “I will.”
“And try to git yo’ grandpappy to come out with you. He kin lay around hyer and eat his haid off well as he kin in town thar.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
Buddy led the pony up, and the old man extended his hand without rising. Henry put aside his cobbling and followed him on to the porch. “Come out again,” he said diffidently, giving Bayard’s hand a single pump-handle shake, and from a slobbering inquisitive surging of half-grown hounds Buddy reached up his hand.
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