by James Jones
Not until late in the day did he finally get a bird. After the meal at Castle Finn, they drove back up to the north end of the farm where they had started working on the four coveys Clint had spotted. Still terror-ridden and suffering that horrible aloneness in the midst of friends which is the worst kind, dejected, weary, totally hopeless, Dave had just without thinking flung up the gun and fired as they flushed out three leftovers from a split covey. There was no doubt that it was his bird because he had fired first and the bird had fallen. It was a moment of great triumph, and if he had stopped to think, he would never have been able to have done it. But then, when he—carefully nonchalant—walked up and picked up the little feather-bedraggled lump, he could not help wondering at the ridiculousness of it all. He could not help feeling a sharp pity for the bird, and felt like some kind of huge monstrous oaf blundering and destroying through the woods. Still nevertheless there had been that crashing moment of triumph, and of breathtaking poignant tragic beauty, as the shot column struck the whirring bit of feathers. Sadly and not a little guiltily, he thrust the quail back into the game bag with the others that he had not shot and after being congratulated, went on with the others looking for more birds, his terror not alleviated but actually stronger than before as he straggled along after the others, Clint and Murray happily knocking down more birds, and ’Bama, too, when he could, though he couldn’t compare in shooting with his cropper relatives. Home is the hunter, home from the hill. And the cow’s in the meadow and the sheep’s in the corn. And what earthly good to anybody any of it could be, Dave could only wonder dimly, wishing once again that he was like the others. And had their un-self-conscious manhood that allowed them to shoot birds without stewing about it, instead of what he was. Whatever it was he was.
He found out what earthly good it could be that night, when Ruth and Clint’s wife cooked the quail. Again they had a sort of communal gala supper. They had brought home a grand total of thirty-seven birds, all but six of them (two of which were Dave’s) shot by Clint and Murray. Ruth cooked them all. And not a single bird was left on the platters when they were done. Murray alone ate six. Clint ate five. Most of the kids ate three. And Dave, ravenous, stiff and tired and relaxed with several whiskeys under his belt, almost terror-stricken now at the thought of ever having to leave all this strange and wonderful security but still anxious to get back where he could have a woman for himself again, ate five himself with several generous helpings of delicious slaw and the wonderful mashed potatoes.
Next day, they hunted all day again, and the whole same process was repeated, except that this time the grand total was not so high: Only twenty-six birds. Dave, beginning to get into the shooting a little now at last, managed to kill four birds this time and in a melancholy mournful way was quite pleased with himself. And so for the third night, he went to bed alone with that especially painful feeling of being the pitied bachelor friend of apologetic happy spouses. It was, he felt, getting to be about all of it he could take, although half of him wished fervently that he might just continue to live right here on this farm with its curiously strong sense of rockbed security, for the rest of his whole life, forever.
Of course, he could not say anything about any of this to ’Bama; but on the third day, they went up through Parkman north of Paris after pheasant, just the four of them, and that night he and ’Bama spent at home. Clint and Murray drove the farm pickup so they would have their own way back to the farm, and ’Bama did not invite them to stay at the house in Parkman. And so after a long day’s hunting, they separated at the Route 40 junction and Clint and Murray drove on back to the farm, after first promising to meet them before dawn next day at the junction.
It had been a hard day’s hunting, in which they got only two of the big ringnecks, and saw only four. That far south in Illinois the big birds were pretty scarce, and they tramped the fields all day long just to see the four. Everybody was dog-tired when they finally got in.
“Why didn’t you ask them to stay out at the house with us?” Dave asked as they drove on in from the junction. “Why should I?” ’Bama said. “They’d just clutter up the place and get in the way. Anyway they didn’t expect me to ask them to stay.”
“I noticed that. But they didn’t look like the kind of guys who would rat on you for having another woman around or anything like that.”
“They ain’t. But that Murray’s the biggest slash-hound in the Dark Bend. You know how a guy is at fourteen. And Clint’s just as bad. I just don’t want any precedents gettin started. If I did, they’d be up here all the time. And anyway I like to keep the farm and all them people separate from Parkman.”
When they got back to the house, they found Doris Fredric in the front room with a book and the radio playing popular love music.
“Well,” she said with her slow confident smile. “Home are the hunters, home from the farm.”
It was like another world. And Dave, while he regretted the world of the farm and suffered a nostalgic sense of loss, was nevertheless glad to be back in his own. Tired and sore though he was, he got out the little Plymouth and hustled down to Smitty’s to see if he could locate Ginnie Moorehead and when he did, brought her back home and stayed up half the night in bed, before he sent her home.
Whether ’Bama slept with Doris that night or not Dave didn’t know, but somehow—in his own mind—he was positive ’Bama hadn’t. Even ’Bama, he was sure, couldn’t be that cruel about his wife, Ruth.
But whether they did or not, they stayed up very late, and the next day’s hunting for pheasant, with both of them already pooped for lack of sleep, was even worse than the first. The second day they saw only three birds all day long and only one of these was even close enough for a shot, which happened to be Dave’s, and which he missed.
Driving out to the junction before dawn in the morning, they found Clint and Murray waiting patiently in the pickup parked just on the town side of the raw dirt grade of the new bypass which the big cats and earth movers had been working at since back in September. Neither of them seemed to think anything at all out of the way about not having been invited to spend the night at the house. As far as Dave could judge, it was perfectly understandable to both of them; and once again he had this strange feeling about the odd Southern clan down there on ’Bama’s farm, and of which ’Bama was the openly acknowledged leader. They all of them really knew more about life he felt sometimes—life as it was really lived—knew better how to live it and cope with it in their simple uncomplicated way, than any of the more highly “educated” people—such as Frank, say; or Agnes—whom he knew in Parkman. After a good warming shot of whiskey all around standing beside the road (’Bama announced that this was to be the last day, as far as he was concerned; and Dave heartily agreed, though he never would have said so first), they took off to the North.
Dave’s one shot—the only shot any of them had all day—came just shortly after lunch. Coming down a great long field of downed cornstalks with an unplowed water-coursing running across its middle, they had seen a big cock pheasant get up—too far ahead to get a shot—and bear off to the left and finally settle in the water-coursing. They had not brought their dogs, and were counting on driving the birds to the ends of the fields, although there were only the four of them. When the bird went down, the four of them swung their line about and went over that way after him. Dave was the left end of the line and it was him the cock chose to be near when he went up again. Nobody else had a chance for a shot. He heard the furious panicky cak-cak-cackle and the bombshell explosion of the beating wings as the big cock flushed again—only, it came from behind him! Dave, unable not to be startled by the furious explosion in spite of the fact that he was expecting it at any moment, swung around that way, to his right. Dave was between him and the others who would have been shooting directly over his head. He was carrying a .12 gauge Winchester doublebarrel ’Bama had loaned him, ready to swing it up, his thumb carefully on the safety so he wouldn’t forget it. The pheasant was going s
traight up to get height before leveling out. He had all the time in the world. He thumbed the safety, swung the gun up, got it on the bird, just as the bird leveled out and started to streak away from him. He even remembered to hold a little high because the pheasant would be imperceptibly rising, before he fired. The gun butt slammed his shoulder, and he watched in painful disbelief and startled wonder as the big bird continued to fly right on away from him. For a moment, he was so disbelieving that he didn’t do anything, then he swung the gun on and fired the other barrel, having no idea whether he was leading him or not. The bird flew on and came down in another field a quarter of a mile away. That was the last cock pheasant any of them saw that day.
To have hunted them two whole days like that, walking over the damned rough cornfields all day long, not even getting close enough to one to fire a single shot; and then to miss a shot like that. It was almost physically unbearable, and Dave—like ’Bama had said earlier—had had enough; it was the last day for him, too. When he got home that night, he felt he had been mercifully released from some sadistic self-imposed prison where they forced you to take guns and walk through the fields all day and shoot at birds. Once again Doris Fredric was sitting there waiting for them, and once again he went to town to pick up Old Ginnie and bring her back and prod her in a kind of paroxysm of self-relief, balm to his bruised ego, before he sent her home at midnight.
He had been down to the farm, and he had hunted four days, each single day of which had been a single separate private misery of sore feet, tired muscles, and mental anguish; if there were men who enjoyed doing that, let them. And yet he was glad he had done it, and felt proud and as if he had accomplished something by having deliberately caused himself such pain and mental torment. As for the farm itself, he had discovered exactly nothing; ’Bama’s wife, Ruth, was apparently just exactly what ’Bama had always maintained she was; and all he had come away from there with was a strong envy of ’Bama and a sense of wonder that ’Bama didn’t stay there all the time; these, and that kind of haunting sense of loss for the overwhelming security they all seemed to have down there. And perhaps for the first time in his life, he found himself with a sorrowful wish that he had married a woman like that Ruth himself, back when he was young enough to have got one. Right now, it appeared that the only kind of woman he would ever be able to get to to marry him—if he wanted that kind; which he didn’t—would be a Ginnie. Certainly, he would never be able to get Gwen French to—even if he did succeed in making her.
Doris and Ginnie had taken quite a shine to each other in the past few weeks that he had been bringing Ginnie to the house. They would sit and drink and play cards and listen to the radio together, while he and ’Bama went out to gamble, for all the world like two wives or two mistresses—which last, perhaps they possibly were, though not in any usual way—whose husbands or lovers had to go away on business trips together. For her part, Doris enjoyed having a satellite who worshipped her, and who she could teach and instruct. Twice she took Ginnie to Terre Haute and bought her some halfway stylish dresses and a presentable coat, and had her get her hair done in a new way designed to minimize her round, fat face. Even new dresses couldn’t do very much for Ginnie’s lumpish figure, but she informed both Dave and ’Bama that she had gone on a diet and had lost four pounds in the last two weeks. Doris even got her started reading some books—meaning romantic big-breasted period-piece historical novels.
And for her part, Ginnie worshipped Doris as a sophisticated lady, and with dull, adoring eyes would do just about anything Doris told her. She even went so far as to start drinking her whiskey with 7-Up in it like Doris did, because it was more ladylike. And every so often, and increasingly, she would simper fatly in a grotesque imitation of Doris’s cool, staid, virginal smile.
The whole situation was amusing to all of them, even to ’Bama. And it was plain that Ginnie amused Doris immensely, as she amused Dave himself.
It was just about that time—after the hunt—that Dave had his short-winded, lackadaisical, three-week affair with Mildred Pierce.
Chapter 52
IT WAS IN JANUARY that Mildred Pierce’s marriage took place, and it was only shortly after that that Raymond Cole, Dewey’s older brother, was killed—or rather, just simply died. Looking back on all of it much later, Dave could never decide which of these two events it was the signal for everything to start going to pot—or even whether it was either of them. But from the time that Mildred Pierce married and Raymond died, it seemed that everything began to slide off—at first, only slowly—like the start of an avalanche, the great mass slipping away so gradually and quietly, at first, that nobody is frightened and still all believe they can get back out of it. Dave, both then and later, could not help remembering that strange premonition of something horribly dangerous to all of them that he had had as he sprawled drunk beside Ginnie that time and listened to Lois Wallup weeping.
There was a time lag of several weeks in there, before the first week in December when he and Mildred mutually agreed to quit, and the second week in January when Mildred married her Sternutol laborer, and almost all of it Dave spent with Gwen, in Israel. He and ’Bama still made their poker rounds; but every evening that they didn’t gamble, and almost every weekend, found him at the big brick house in Israel. He was, although he didn’t know it at the time, making his last desperate effort to reach Gwen.
They spent a great deal of time together during that month. He had not started in seeing Ginnie again after Mildred, and Mildred herself was fully occupied with her young man from the Sternutol. When it came her time to marry, Mildred Pierce went about it just in the same way that all the rest of the brassiere factory girls got married. She and her Sternutol man went up to the county clerk’s office in the courthouse and made their application, took their medicals, got their license, paid their two dollars, went down to the JP’s office in the basement for their ceremony, and started living together. That was all there was to it. To Dave it was astonishing. They seemed to be quite happy.
But before any of that happened, there was that month he spent with Gwen. It was all of it in the dead of winter, because the beautiful fall after the first of December gave place to winter with a vengeance. Repeated snowstorms, brittle cold weather, and gloomy sunless days. And yet in spite of that, afterwards, after Raymond had died and the avalanche had slid on down and buried all of them, he always had the impression that it had been summer, that month they spent together.
There was no doubt that she was truly and wholly in love with him, and she looked magnificent and deeply tanned in her shorts and halter although she was wearing a fur coat and galoshes. And he was equally just as much in love with her and felt powerful and slim in his trunks although he was fat and had to keep his head huddled down into the fur collar of his down jacket. They walked along the bank of the summer river with the river-bottom’s scrub brush at the foot of the bluff a making two impenetrable masses of green although there were no leaves on anything and chunks of ice floated in the river. Leisurely summer walks, from which they would have to return to the house quickly sometimes to warm their fingers and numb faces before the huge fire roaring in the big, old fireplace. She drove him along the hot dusty roads, being very careful not to skid on the ice, to all her secret places where when full of anguish and dismay years ago she used to go alone for solace. One of them he especially remembered afterwards was a big bluff on the river; higher even than the bluff at Israel. They drove out south along the hot, dusty gravel road that the community-owned snowplow of Israel had already cleared, out five or six miles along this road. The bluff itself, a high whale-shaped green oasis in the fields of rippling ripe wheat, was set back from the river, so that the road ran tortuously along between it and the high bank. This was where she drove him, through this tunnel of live summer green made by the tall trees arching high over the road. Halfway through it, Gwen pulled off and stopped and got out and led him a little way up the hill to her place, where they brushed the snow off t
he big, flat rock and sat down and looked out through the thick foliage of the trees down at the smoothly flowing summer-cool Wabash River, Terre Haute-corrupted, and rolling on down to Vincennes.
“It used to ease me,” Gwen smiled. “Of something. Of life. Or myself. I only come in the summer. I wouldn’t want to come in the winter. It would be horrible in winter.” They sat so long they had to almost run back to the car to get warm.
She took him to other private places of hers, too, but mostly they spent the evenings—and the days—hugging the huge roaring fire in the big, old fireplace and looking out at the never unfrozen weather, talking interminably of literature, and of life, and how you could never quite seem to pin it down to a reasonability that you could write about, and how the moment you thought you had it it was gone. They worked over his steadily accumulating manuscripts with dogged perseverance, or ate the strange peculiar delicious meals Gwen concocted. It was the worst cold spell for that time of year, everybody said, that Illinois had had in years.
He never spoke to her of sex, at least, not at first. He was content just to be with her and to see that ever-increasing light of personal, explicit love, that shone out of her face and was directed at him—at David Herschmidt.
It was just about this time—the middle of December—that the news came from Gwen’s female editor friend at New Living Literature in New York that NLL (as the lady always referred to it in her letters) was accepting Dave’s story “The Confederate” for publication—both in her own anthology of “novellas” and in the NLL biannual collection of current writing. There was a check for $500 from the NLL biannual collection, and one for $250 from the “novella” anthology.
