by James Jones
The twelve-year-old took a great, deep breath. “Dad, can I go huntin, Dad, can I go huntin,” he cried out.
“No,” ’Bama said. “You don’t know how to handle a gun yet.”
“I’ve been practicin with my .22,” the boy said hopefully.
“A .22’s not a shotgun. It’s no good for birds, and there’ll be other men along all around you. You can’t go.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, his hopeful face settling into a stoic impassivity. He stepped back to the door.
’Bama watched him.
“You get any squirrels?”
“I got two,” the little boy said, coming forward. “And a rabbit. Settin.”
“You do all yore chores this week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Schoolwork?”
“I got ninety-eight in g’ography.”
A look almost of amusement seemed to flicker over ’Bama’s coldness, then was gone. “All right, I’ll let you go. But you can’t take a gun.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
“You can take yore wooden gun and practice with it. But if I hear gettin in the way—or if I see you not handlin it right—” he said, “I’ll send you right back home by yoreself.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, “I will.”
“Okay,” ’Bama said, and turned back to his drink. For a moment, his eyes flickered up at Dave and then back down. The little boy stepped back to his place in the doorway, not entirely happy, but impassive with his disappointment.
“Mrs Dillert, this is the best pumpkin pie I’ve ever eaten,” Dave said, feeling a kind of awe for his sidekick, and a mixture of sympathy for, and pride in, the little boy.
“I believe I did get a pretty good do on it,” Ruth said shyly. “You don’t need to call me Mrs Dillert. You just call me Ruth, Mr Hirsh.”
“Then you must call me Dave,” Dave grinned.
Ruth Dillert smiled in a shy, pleased way and for a moment looked as though she were actually blushing. “Why, thank you very kindly, I’m sure,” she said, her eyes shining. Then, abruptly, she sat down at the table with them, gliding the baby around off her hip so it sat on her thigh. Up till then, she had remained standing by the stove. The baby, whose head just appeared above the table edge, stared at Dave, innocent of all conscious knowledge, and Dave looking into those wide, deep grave eyes, suddenly had the distinct impression that he was looking through two holes in the space warp into the deep, untraveled heart of the Universe. Two openings which had not been completely closed up yet by personality. He had the same feeling about the two older boys, too, several times, he noticed later. It seemed to him that almost none of the children he saw anywhere had that look anymore, especially town children, but were instead little images graven of ulterior self-awareness, even when still babies. And he noted, too, that none of Clint’s children, when they came over that evening, had that look, either.
It was not long after Ruth sat down with them that they heard Clint coming. Clint and his boy Murray, led on by little Ted. Ruth had been asking them about the election just before, anxious to learn who had been elected to all the county offices. Dave, who couldn’t have cared less, fumbled around trying to remember some of them, helped by ’Bama when he faltered. The county election had been predominantly Republican, of course, in spite of the fact that Truman had been reelected; and Clark Hibbard and the rest of the ones who ran again had been reelected, naturally.
“We all voted then went to Israel,” Ruth said, talking excitedly about what was obviously a thing of great importance to her. “All except Clint, of course. And we followed the national returns over the radio. But we hadn’t heard about the county yet.” She was glad that Mr Truman had beaten that Dewey. “It was very excitin. Of course, we’re all Democrats here,” she said in an apologetic tone which implied she was not trying to force her own opinions on anybody else, “from Mother Dillert and William’s brother Emmett right on down to little Taylor here,” she said, indicating the baby. The way she said it made it sound almost as if they were a clan or tribe of settlers set down in some alien landscape.
If they were a clan, there was no doubt whatever about who was the leader of it. It was plain that Clint deferred to ’Bama’s opinion, whenever opinions were necessary, and ’Bama accepted this with the same gentle but absolute authority that was his attitude toward his wife and children. It was almost like some sort of ritual play that they engaged in, the way they all acted. And if he seemed cold and unbending, he nevertheless never imposed on any of the others’ sense of their own dignity. Dave watched and listened in silence.
Later on, after they were back in Parkman, Dave spoke to him about it. ’Bama only grinned. “It’s all an act. Like some kind of play script that everybody has memorized their part in because their families been playin it for generations. It lets them all feel they’re important. That they mean something.”
“Maybe they are important,” Dave said.
“Maybe they are,” ’Bama said, and then with that chilling grin of his, “and then maybe they’re not. We don’t any of us rightly know, do we? We all just like to hope it. So we convince each other to believe it.”
Dave could not help feeling a little shocked at such cold-bloodedness.
“Well, if I were you, I’d move myself back down there and live there with them all the time.”
“I would,” ’Bama said, “but it bores me. I don’t like to play the same act all the time. And you are full of crap,” he said. “Yore a sentimental slob, and someday it’s liable to catch you up and tear off yore whole head. You wouldn’t stay down there all the time no more than I would.”
But whatever his later comments, he played his “part” to perfection down there on the farm. Clint was a squat blocky man with a dusty black patch over one eye and tremendous arms and shoulders that elided down into a tremendous paunch. His oldest boy, Murray, who was only an inch or so taller but looked much taller because he was so slim, was a level-eyed, well-trained boy who said little and, at fourteen, wore that harassed haunted—and triumphant—look of one who has just passed through puberty and feels he had discovered a secret no one in the world has ever learned. The two of them sat down at the table with them, were served coffee by Ruth, helped themselves at ’Bama’s invitation to the whiskey, and talked about the hunting prospects.
Dave wondered how ’Bama was going to handle the matter, as regarded young Ted, about letting his older brother, Johnny, go along tomorrow. But he did not have to wonder long, because as soon as the three were inside the door ’Bama had taken it up.
“I’m lettin Johnny go out with us tomorrow,” he said to all three together. “He’s too young to go, but I told him he could take his wooden gun and practice. I told him he’ll be goin out with men and he’ll have to act like one, and if he don’t, I’ll send him right back home.”
“He’ll do jes fhahn,” Clint said, patting the towhead.
“Sure he will,” Murray said.
Ted said nothing, but walked over to where his older brother stood by the door and stood beside him. Dave had the same feeling of sympathy for, and pride in, him that he had had about Johnny a while before. Ted did not say—or show in his actions—anything that might be construed as envy or disappointment. And Johnny did not say or do anything that might be marked as triumphant over this slightly smaller edition of himself. The two of them stood in silence by the door, their faces closed, like two small soldiers.
After they had talked about the prospects, the males—all six of them—went down to the barn to look at the dogs; and here again Dave felt there was something of the played-out ritual. The two dogs, both good-looking pointers, were kept in a run beside the barn to keep them from taking up the chasing of rabbits and other game. The men leaned their elbows in the mesh wire of the tall fence and put one foot up on the bottom wire. The two towheaded little boys in accurate imitation also leaned their elbows in the fence—at about the height of the crotches of the men—and placed on
e foot up on the wire. And the dogs, as if they knew just exactly what was taking place, came whimpering to the fence and panted at the men pleadingly, while Ted and Johnny reached through the fence and rubbed their ears and the redbone coonhounds in their own run came to their fence and barked enviously. Clint had said before that he had seen three, and possibly four, coveys around the place. Murray had said that he had seen two others in the south end. Now Clint said he had had the dogs out several times to sharpen them up. After a while, they all went back to the house.
That night, they had a gala supper party. Clint’s wife and other four children—two young girls of nine and ten, a smaller boy, and a baby—came over from the other house, each of them but the baby carrying an armload of crocks or mason jars or boxes of food. Again there was that feeling of the played-out ritual. The men—whom Murray uncontestedly took his place among—sat out in the side yard on cane bottom chairs with the whiskey and got pleasantly half-drunk, while the women and two girls worked themselves red-faced in the kitchen. The three smaller boys, told off to mind the babies, sat quietly on the porch as close as they could get to the men without being ordered to move off. When over the whiskey the talk turned to sex, Dave noted that young Murray’s face got sharper, even cruel, though not in any very unpleasant way. And in the kitchen, where the women worked, the talk was all about the prayer meeting they had been to two nights before. Dave knew what the women were talking of, because once he had gone in and offered to help. He did not do it again. When he offered to help the women with their meal, it embarrassed everybody. Though, of course, everyone did not say anything. Only ’Bama laughed.
“You ain’t in the city now, old sock, where the women have the men to do the dishes for them.”
Once ’Bama had turned it into a joke the others were able to laugh, too. Ruefully, Dave laughed with them. He could not escape the feeling he had had once before in Florida that time: that he had been moved backward in time to another (would you say stronger?) America of a hundred years ago. And strangest of all was to see the cynical, sneering eminently sophisticated ’Bama sitting in the middle of it very much at home.
The meal itself was tremendous. There was fried chicken, and fried squirrel, and mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, skillet-fried cornbread, also biscuits, home-canned green beans, home-canned asparagus, and another dish of beans called “shucky” beans, which when Dave asked about it he was informed by Ruth were fixed by stringing green beans on needle and thread and hanging them up to dry. There was also a dish of home-canned Southern squash. Then for dessert, there was home-canned peaches, apple pie, and rhubarb served in a side dish with hot biscuits, and more pumpkin pie with home-whipped cream. As a fat man who was trying to lose weight, Dave was glad he did not eat down here very often. ’Bama himself ate nothing except some chicken, and presided at the head of the table with his never-empty glass of whiskey and water. “That’s just the way some men are,” Ruth said smiling; “they’d rather drink than eat.” But the rest of them, including the kids and women, put away amounts of food that were astonishing.
After the boys had been put to bed, ’Bama had shown Dave over the house with Clint and Murray trailing along, and when it came time to go to bed and all the rest were gone, Ruth went up and spent a half hour fixing Dave’s room up for him. She had not seen her husband for over three weeks, and yet she would take an extra half hour to appoint Dave’s room for him. There even was, he felt, an air almost of apology about her, as if she was pitying him because he was a bachelor. And so he had gone to bed, with that peculiarly painful, twisting loneliness of a man who sleeps alone in a guest bed while his host is ensconced with his lady. He had lain awake quite a while. And mostly he had thought about all he had observed today. Everything was apparently just exactly as ’Bama had described it to him beforehand. It seemed unbelievable. Christ, you’d think a man who had it would stay right here with it the rest of his whole life! And he could not help remembering all of this next morning, when he watched Ruth who stood at the big stove with her flushed bright excited face and cooked and ladled out the hunting breakfast for them. It was clear to him that Ruth had an instinctive understanding of what men were like; and if ’Bama drank whiskey and ran around, it did not upset her in the least. The whole damned thing was, as far as he was concerned anyway, just about phenomenal.
They took the farm pickup, ’Bama driving and Dave on the seat beside him, Clint and Murray and young Johnny in the back with the excited dogs. Not until they had reached the furthest limits of the farm to the south, did they stop and get out and in the chill first light begin to tramp the cornfields and the alfalfa fields and the edges of the woods, the happy dogs ranging closely out before them.
“We really made a mistake,” ’Bama said to Dave. “We should have gone up north after pheasant first, and saved our own farm back until we’d done all the huntin we wanted to do other places first. That’s the way to really do it.”
Dave had not shot a shotgun since before the war, but the Sunday previous and several other days before they came down to the farm he and ’Bama had gone out to the Parkman Gun Club and practiced up on both skeet and trap. That made it almost six years since he had fired one. He was in for a rude awakening at the Gun Club. Shot after shot, he would stare in painful disbelief as clay bird after clay bird would fly away from him untouched. The truly satisfying relief of seeing one explode into smoke was a great many more times in the minority. He was not doing anything wrong. He just could not shoot. Not having practiced, he could no longer shoot at all. It was mortifying. Here was a man who while he had never amounted to much as a rifleman—in the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company, had nevertheless accounted for eleven personal Germans in the Battle of the Bulge—and he couldn’t even hit a clay bird with a shot column as wide as your arm! He reminded himself that rifle shooting and shotgun shooting was totally different skills, but it did him little good. He felt totally ridiculous. ’Bama, who evidently did a little shooting every once in a while, was considerably better and that did not help Dave, either.
Out in the field after the quail, it was almost as bad. After they had flushed out the first covey, he fired shot after shot, hitting nothing. And all this time, of course, both Clint and Murray were knocking down bird after bird. Nonchalantly, indifferently, with his clean, new white eye patch and his enormous belly, Clint would walk up and pick up his bird or take it from the dog and stuff it behind him in his steadily thickening game bag. Murray was almost as bad, shooting quickly with the superb coordination of youth, and accurately with the eye of an old hunter. They both had kept an eye out for the birds all year long as they worked the fields, and knew exactly where to go to look for them. It was the kind of hunting quail-shooters like to reminisce about afterwards—except that Dave was never the one who hit any of them; and the fact that both Clint and Murray went about it in such a matter of fact inexcitable way as if it were an everyday commonplace. By noon when they quit to eat, they both had their limit of twelve and had—at ’Bama’s suggestion—started working on his and Dave’s. Consequently, Dave found himself carrying eight birds he had not shot in his new game bag, and hating both of them with such grinding murderous hatred that every tired step he took was a pleasure—just to imagine mashing both of their indifferent faces into the ground. He had never hated any of the Germans he had killed in the war one-twentieth so much, and he was so miserable that he could not even enjoy the really beautiful day or the truly magnificent scenery of the hills and hollows of the bottoms woods. In addition, his feet were sore and his legs weary.
They ate their lunch at a strange, little settlement in the bottoms which was known as Castle Finn. Three houses and two stores, Castle Finn crouched athwart a dusty gravel road, not a single tree around it anywhere within a quarter of a mile though there were woods visible on all sides. Of the two stores, one was a bar and a restaurant of sorts, and the other was a general store. Sitting in the dingy little bar, they gorged themselves on hot deliciously greasy-smelling
hamburgers and drank beer interspersed with shots of whiskey and talked to the general store owner who had come over from next door to loaf. Murray, of course, was not of age; but this was Castle Finn down in the Dark Bend River bottoms, the backwoods, where the county law almost never came unless requested, and so Murray was served beer and whiskey right along with the others and nobody thought a damned thing about it.
Sitting there with them, hungry, weak, footsore, weary, and birdless, Dave suddenly envied all of them again, as he had last night. They were together, and they had a pattern, and a place, and they were—living. He wasn’t living, even when hunting with them. He was, at best, an outsider. He was a writer, and so he didn’t—couldn’t—live. He sat rootless, cut off, without foundation. Nowhere—but most especially in the great United States of America—was there any pattern or social framework for a writer to be a working part of. Even when they congregated together, like a covey of nervous peep-peeping birds, writers were only a collection of outsiders being outside each other right along with being outside everything else. But it went even deeper than that. By its very nature, being a writer meant being an outsider, meant not living. Like these people lived. To live meant to act, and the very act of writing was itself an un-act—a putting of it down on paper instead of doing it. Bob French had a saying for it, which Gwen was always quoting: “You can’t work and live, too.” Every other man in the world, even a painter, could at least live while he worked. But not a writer. You had to be every-body, and every-thing, and hence you were no-body, and no-thing.
Savagely, sitting there with them, he wished that goddamned bitch of a nymphomaniac Gwen French had never gotten him into this. But even that was no help; because what had gotten him into this wasn’t really Gwen. It was himself. His own nature, which had always been that of an outsider who could not live. Why else had he gotten into writing in the first place, out in California? She couldn’t be blamed for that. Christ! He wanted to live! To do! Loneliness and an odd objectless terror that reminded him of that time he had lain by Ginnie and listened to Dewey and Lois arguing, assailed him as, dead, he sat amongst the living as they drank their beer and talked.
