Mead studied the two young men with pensive amusement. His face looked as if it had been drawn on an egg, the narrowing side down, the forehead broad and bulbous.
“Fifteen years in a town that never heard of Firdausi or Tilly or Vico or Dwight,” said Mead.
“Have another one,” Sheridan said.
“But this really has to be the nightcap,” Mead said. “I’ve got a conference with Slocum at ten.”
After the third nightcap, Mead said, “When I was your age, at least I used to stand for something. I was a Socialist. I voted for Debs. Now I haven’t got enough freedom of speech to talk back to Birdie Slocum.”
The young men were ready to call it a night, but neither would make a move. After all it wasn’t every day in the week that they could sit down with Elliot Mead, former historical scholar, now thirty-five hundred a week.
The waiter yawned and turned off as many lights as he could with ostentatious discretion. The old writer and the two young ones sat there in the empty bar.
“Don’t make so much noise turning off those lights,” Mead reprimanded. “Remember, there are people here trying to sleep.”
The waiter laughed joylessly and Sheridan and Peters looked at each other in mutual acknowledgment of Mead’s reputation for repeatable quips.
Mead smiled with them. He was not going to keep that ten o’clock date in the morning. He was going to sit up with these boys, impress them with his wit and knowledge, get good and drunk, and have his secretary call the studio to say he was sick.
“I know what let’s do,” Mead suggested. “Let’s play one quick game. I am somebody whose name begins with C. Now, who am I?”
“Are you a brilliant French economist of the mercantile period?” Sheridan began, reaching back into freshman history.
“No,” Mead said, smiling, warming to the game, “I am not Jean Baptiste Colbert. …”
OUR WHITE DEER
ONE AFTERNOON, EARLY LAST fall, we were back at the far end of our property having a meeting in our underground clubhouse. My brother Davy and I had dug it out that past summer and covered it over with pine branches and tar paper. We were just climbing out of our secret tunnel when along came Mr. Jeliffe on horseback, riding his side of the fence. Mr. Jeliffe is very rich and has a mustache and a big red face and a house that’s about ten times as big as ours.
People around where we live don’t put on much dog; they just do their writing or their painting, stuff like that, and mess around in their gardens and go for long walks across the fields. The simple life, that’s what we always hear them calling it. Well, Mr. Jeliffe, he leads the simple life in a pretty rich kind of a way. I mean he rides to the hounds and gives hunt breakfasts and big deals like that. It’s sort of funny in a way because when he first came out here only two or three years ago he couldn’t even ride a horse. He still flops around on his buhwhosis but nobody laughs at him to his face because he’s so rich. He cornered the market on copper or cotton or something like that when the army needed it real bad to win the war and Dad says that’s about the only way to get rich any more. You’d think that having all that money would make a fella nicer, that he’d sort of relax and smile at everybody and just enjoy his money. But not Mr. Jeliffe. Mr. Jeliffe is—even if Dad says he wishes we wouldn’t use the word—a jerk.
Like the time he caught us in his orchard eating a few of his apples. Dad says it doesn’t pay to spray our orchard so our apples are all wormy. That’s why, once in a while, we have to go over and try some of Mr. Jeliffe’s apples. They’re Mackintosh, and I guess all the worms must have come over to our place because they sure don’t mess around with Mr. Jeliffe’s apples. Well, this time Mr. Jeliffe caught us—red-apple-handed, says Dave, who’s ten years old and still likes to pun. He reined in his horse and looked bigger than God and he said, “Boys, I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to be over here. I raise Dobermans and they’d sooner bite you than look at you and I wouldn’t be responsible for your safety.”
See what we mean? He didn’t come right out and tell us to get the H off his property or he’d sick the dogs on us. He made it sound like he was trying to do us a favor by getting us out of his lousy old orchard without those Dobermans eating us up. Lousy is another word Dad doesn’t like us to use; in fact he fines us a nickel every time he hears it, only there are some words that are bad words but there just aren’t any good words that mean the same thing. Like the jerky way Mr. Jeliffe went about ordering us out of his orchard.
Well, anyway, we were just climbing out of our clubhouse, which is a swell hideaway nearly four feet deep and just big enough for the three members of our club, when there sits Mr. Jeliffe on his big white horse Captain, making like he’s Teddy Roosevelt or something.
“Howdy, boys,” he says. He’s getting pretty Western since he’s been riding around on that horse. He’s about to ride on and then he remembers something and leans his horse around.
“Say, Steve, that ram of yours—does he have any horns?”
Davy and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “Not that we ever noticed, why?”
“Well, maybe I was imagining things but seems to me when I was riding along your meadow fence the other day, I thought I saw a white ram with a beautiful set of horns, trotting right along with the ewes. Of course I was about a hundred yards away, so …”
“Sure, maybe it just looked like it, an optical delusion or something.” I looked at Davy and we were both embarrassed because everyone knew Mr. Jeliffe liked his whiskey—that’s the way Mom says it—and from what I hear you can see some pretty strange sights when too much whiskey gets inside of you.
“I’ll admit it was only for a second I saw him and then he saw me and took off pronto. But still, I was pretty sure …” He broke off and suddenly guffawed for no good reason. “Maybe it was one of Schofield’s rams got in with your flock. Well, I was just wondering—you don’t think it could’ve been a white deer, do you? The head of a ten-point white buck would look pretty nice over the mantle-piece in my study.”
He dug his heels into the big belly of his horse and rode off. Davy put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers at him. A white deer, and over his mantlepiecel. In the first place every autumn since we were little kids someone has told us about someone else who’s pretty sure he’s seen a white deer. But I am almost twelve years old now and I had never seen one and I had still to meet anybody who had honest and truly seen one with his own eyes.
And in the second place, if that thousand-to-one shot came in and there really-truly was a white deer wandering around our place, what would his head be doing over Mr. Jeliffe’s mantelpiece? He was in our meadow with our sheep, wasn’t he? If there was such a thing as a white deer, and if he was anybody’s white deer, he was ours, wasn’t he? Mr. Jeliffe just better keep his greedy old hands off him. Even if our white deer didn’t exist, we didn’t like Mr. Jeliffe even thinking about him.
We spread more pine branches over the tar-paper roof and filled the tunnel up so nobody would know we had a clubhouse there at all and then we ambled over to the lower pasture where there was an old dead apple tree that had been our first clubhouse when Davy was still going to nursery school. Our initials were carved in that tree, and the secret sign of our club, and we still used the ladder to the tree-house to climb up once in a while to see if any enemy was approaching. Well, this time as soon as we got to the tree we noticed something funny. Where the carving had been, the trunk was almost bare and there were slash-marks all up and down this one side, as if—we looked at each other and wondered—as if the horns of some animal had been slicing at it to sharpen his points. Plenty of times we had seen bulls do that, and rams—but we didn’t have any bulls and our ram Hector had only those two little hard bulges where his horns ought to be. And yet these slashed-off places on the tree were fresh as anything.
Well, naturally we knew better than to pay attention to anything Mr. Jeliffe had to say, but just to make double-sure we kept checking on the flock. We watched
them come in every evening and quite a few times we even went out after supper and walked up as far as the pine woods that run along the west line of our place and the Jeliffes’. But we didn’t see any white deer. In fact we had just about given up and decided that Mr. Jeliffe was talking through his hat, as usual, when we happened to be picking up some groceries for Mom at the country store. Billy, whose pop runs the store, is a big kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and a pretty good friend of ours. He lets us go with him when he sets out his muskrat traps and he lets us play with his hunting dogs and once in a while he even takes us along when he goes gunning. Billy was an Eagle Scout and he pitches on the school baseball team and when he says something you can bet it’s true. Well, anyway, while Billy is picking out some oranges for us, he says, “Say, you fellers haven’t got a new ram up at your place, have you?”
Davy and I looked at each other. This was getting mysterious and kind of exciting. “Uh-uh. Why, Billy?”
“Well, when I was setting up traps last night, I thought I saw a ram in your meadow, with great big horns.”
“Billy, could it’ve been a deer—a white buck?”
“Well, it ain’t exactly impossible. They do turn up every now and again. My old man saw one around here when I was a kid, maybe ten or twelve years ago.”
That white deer—how can I explain it?—he was our white deer. Whether he was for real, or just a fragment of our imagination, like Dad says sometimes, he belonged to us. We wanted to see him and try to make a pet out of him. We didn’t want anybody to hurt him. Mr. Jeliffe just better keep his dirty hands to himself.
“Say, Billy, this white deer, when gunning season starts, you don’t think anybody’d try to shoot him, do you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, for one,” Billy said. “You know what they say about killing a white deer? It’s twice as unlucky as bustin’ a mirror.”
“Mr. Jeliffe better remember that.”
“That joker,” Billy said. “Last season I saw him open up on a hen pheasant on the ground. He’s from the city and I guess he don’t know any better. He’s liable to do anything.”
“Well, he better stay away from our white deer or I’ll shoot him in the kiester with my bee-bee gun,” Davy said. Davy likes to use words like that.
“Let me know if you spot ’im, fellers,” Billy said as he handed us the grocery bags.
We went out after supper that night and we looked and looked and we got in so late that Mom said what on earth were we doing out there in the meadow two hours after our bedtime. We didn’t tell anybody but we set our alarm for three o’clock, with the clock under our pillow so it wouldn’t ring but just buzz in our ear. There was almost a full moon and it sure was beautiful, only a little chilly when the wind came up, and finally we had to go in without seeing anything that even looked like a white deer. We did the same thing the next night and the next and the next and we were getting so pooped that we were yawning all over the place and Davy fell asleep right in the middle of his arithmetic. But we still hadn’t seen our white deer.
That Friday after school we asked permission to go up to our clubhouse and camp out overnight. The moon was full and awfully close, like it was out there to light the meadow for us so we’d be sure not to miss him if he came down. We made up stories to tell each other to keep ourselves awake but by around one o’clock Davy was so sleepy that he’d slip off into little cat naps while he was talking. We were just about to call it a night and crawl into the clubhouse when all of a sudden I saw something that looked like branches moving out of the woods.
“Davy, look! Look over there!”
You could only see his antlers and the front of his head poking out of the woods, but there wasn’t any doubt about it—the head was white. It was our white deer all right.
Davy shouted, “Oh, boy, there he is—isn’t he a beaut!” and sort of clapped his hands without meaning to. The head of the white buck popped back into the pines and we could hear him taking off through the woods.
The next night we were all ready for him. We took some corn from the crib and made a trail of it from the pine woods to the middle of the meadow. Then we got down behind the fence and we tried not to move, even when we itched. The moon threw a path of light across the meadow and the stars looked cold and bright. The only sound in the world was the breeze blowing in from the river. We kept our eyes on the spot where we had seen him poke through the night before. Maybe two hours went by, or maybe it was only twenty minutes. It was hard to tell, out there in the moonlight with Davy and me not saying a word to each other and hardly even breathing. And then, there he was again, in the same spot where we had seen him the night before.
This time we didn’t say a word and we didn’t move a peg. We froze like hunting dogs and now we were really holding our breaths. He pushed his head out and looked around, and then we could see his neck and his haunches, and they were white, as white as first snow in December. He nibbled the nearest ear of corn and we held our breaths as long as we could and loved the sight of him. With another slow and careful look he moved on to the next ear of corn. Now, for the first time, we could see all of him. He was big and lean as a racehorse and you could see how proud he was of those wonderful antlers. Davy swore he was a sixteen-pointer, and he had at least twelve, anyhow, and the way they stood out in the moonlight against the black green of the pines was one of the most elegant sights we ever hope to see. He stood right out there in front of us for at least five minutes, or it could have been half an hour, and he moved with his head high, wearing those antlers as proud as a king. We stood still, so still that we ached, and then Davy couldn’t hold it any more and shifted his feet.
Snowy—that’s what we had decided to call him—jerked his head and sniffed the air and looked straight at us, right into our eyes, it seemed, and the moonlight made his eyes glow like a lit-up reindeer we had seen in the window of a big city store at Christmas time. He watched us for maybe a minute and we watched him, and then he was off, sailing over the meadow, a white streak of deer-speed that would have outrun Man o’ War.
Every night after that we left corn for Snowy and almost every night he came down from the pine woods. Each time he was a little bolder and more sure of himself. I think he knew we were there. I think he was sort of showing off for us. He would finish the corn and look over to where he had seen us the first time and lower his head two or three times as if he was bowing to us. We planned to get closer and closer to him, and one of these days, when he learned where his food came from and who his friends were, we hoped maybe we could get him to eat right out of our hands. Yes, and maybe we would have, if the darned gunning season hadn’t come along.
We hadn’t told anybody about our white deer, not even Mom or Dad or Billy, for fear the news would get back to Mr. Jeliffe and he’d get after Snowy with his rifle and try to bag him for that mantelpiece in his den. It didn’t seem right that anything as proud and handsome as Snowy’s twelve- or fourteen-point antlers should end up on the wall of a loudmouth like Mr. Jeliffe. So every time we heard a shot up on the hill we were awfully nervous, for we knew that Mr. Jeliffe and some of his friends were gunning over there near the pine woods. We asked Dad not to let Mr. Jeliffe gun on our side of the line but Dad said that was rather hard to do because after all we were neighbors and it was local custom for neighbors to gun each other’s places even when they were posted. So all we could do was hope and pray and that night when we snuck down to the meadow we felt like cheering out loud because Snowy showed up as usual. The night was a little darker now because the moon was beginning to shrink again but he was still one beautiful sight. We watched him go trotting off into the woods proud as a king and I think if Mr. Jeliffe had showed up with his gun just then and shot old Snowy down, we’d of grabbed that gun away from him and murdered him in cold blood.
Late the next afternoon we heard a shot up in the woods, from the far end of our line and we ran out with our fingers crossed and our hearts twisting up. There at the boundary line of our place
and his was Mr. Jeliffe, peering into the woods.
“So you kids didn’t believe we had a white deer up here?” he said. “Well, I just got a shot at him and I think I nicked him but he ran off into the woods. You c’n come along and help me look for him if you want to. He might be dying somewhere in there. How would you like a nice venison steak to bring home to Dad?”
He thought he was so great, standing up there with his gun.
“Don’t you know it’s bad luck shooting a white deer, Mr. Jeliffe? Billy Yeager says it’s even worse’n busting a mirror.”
Mr. Jeliffe laughed. “Those silly superstitions. Don’t tell me two intelligent boys like you won’t pass under a ladder and are scared of black cats.”
As a matter of fact we weren’t a bit superstitious and we used to tease Billy because he’d turn around whenever he saw a black cat. But all of a sudden we were awfully superstitious about Snowy. We knew it was bad luck to kill Snowy. Anybody deserved bad luck if he even thought of killing anything as handsome and proud and beautiful as Snowy was when he ventured into the meadow that first evening and pointed his antlers at the moon.
So our hearts kept twisting up as we walked along with Mr. Jeliffe searching for Snowy’s body on the piny floor of the woods. His dogs kept sniffing, stopping and then running forward and any second we were afraid they would lead us to the fallen body of poor Snowy. But he wasn’t to be found. He had disappeared somewhere into the woods. Mr. Jeliffe got angry and said some bad words. “I’m going to get that S.O.B. of a buck yet,” he said. It made Davy and me feel pretty bad to hear Snowy, our beautiful white deer Snowy, called a name like that.
We worried about him all that night. We slipped out to the pasture but he wasn’t there. It was snowing a little bit, and mighty cold, but we waited as long as we could, until Davy’s teeth got to chattering so loud we had to go in.
That night I dreamt about Snowy. There was a terrible wound from a bullet in his sleek white chest and then he was gone and Davy and I were following a trail of blood across the white fields beyond the woods. I woke up half bawling and I heard Davy say, “What’s the matter, Steve?” He wasn’t in his bed. He was sitting on the window ledge staring out at the snow. I told him about my dream and he said he had woke himself up with a dream too. He dreamt that the two of us had gone hunting for Mr. Jeliffe and we had shot him right between the eyes and his head was mounted over the mantel of our fireplace with the bullet holes in his forehead making him look like a man with four eyes.
Some Faces in the Crowd Page 28
