by Hal Borland
“Would it be too far out of the way to go past it?” Mother asked.
“Not at all.” And Mr. Smith took the road north. Two miles and we came to an unfenced weed patch that had been plowed ground a few years before but had been neglected. Just beyond was an unpainted house that didn’t look big enough for more than two rooms. Just beyond the house was a well with a hand pump, and near the well was an open shed that apparently served for a stable.
“Let’s stop,” Mother said.
Mr. Smith was surprised. “Uh—” he said. “All right.” And he turned in at the wagon track to the house, drew up in the dooryard. We waited a few minutes, and a woman came to the door. She looked frayed and worn. “You want something?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mother called to her. “We want to talk to your—I guess your husband. Edward Paxton.”
“That’s him,” the woman said with a giggle. “I’ll git him up.”
Another wait, and Ed Paxton came outside. He looked at us and he rubbed his neck, and he said, “Howdy do, folks. I’m sorry to be laid up this way, but—”
“Where are the beans?” Mother asked.
“The what?” He looked at her, startled. Then he saw me. “Oh,” he said, “the beans. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s this way. Back in May, when it was time to get them planted, my woman took sick, and—”
“Where,” Mother repeated, “are the beans you contracted to plant on the shares?”
“I was trying to tell you, ma’am, that back in May the woman she took sick and was laid up for most of a month, and time to plant beans come and went—”
“You didn’t plant them?”
“Well, now—No, matter of fact, I didn’t get out to plant a blessed thing, the woman sick and all. I just didn’t, and that’s God’s truth, I swear it.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Well, there’s some left. Maybe half of ’em. You see, after she got better, then I took sick myself, and she dipped into them beans, not knowing they was seed beans, just thinking they was beans for eating like, and we lived on beans quite a spell there before I knowed what was happening. So—”
“Bring out what are left,” Mother ordered.
“Yes’m.” And he went back into the house.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Mother asked Mr. Smith. “We’ll make room for them here in the back.”
Then Ed Paxton returned with the bean sack and less than half the hundred pounds that had been in it originally. “Put it in here,” Mother ordered, and he put it in the car. He started to turn away, but Mother said, “You can be sued, you know.”
“Yes’m, I know. I know, and I’ll pay for them beans just as soon as I get a nickel ahead, I sure will, and don’t you worry your head about it one bit.”
“Let’s go,” Mother said, and Mr. Smith drove out of the yard and back onto the road and toward town.
Not another word was said about the beans all the way home. Father and Mr. Smith talked wheat, and Mother and I just didn’t talk. Finally we were at our house, and Mother got out, and I took the bag of beans and carried it around to the back porch. Father and Mr. Smith talked for another five minutes. Then Father came in the house. “Well,” he said, with an air of forced casualness, “that certainly was a nice trip. And we saw some of the finest wheat I ever saw in my life. Didn’t you enjoy it, Sarah?”
“Some of the best wheat, and two of the worst people,” Mother said. Then she turned to me. “Well, son, I hope you learned a lesson. Maybe next time you won’t be so quick to run after easy money. I always say experience is a hard teacher, but maybe the cheapest one in the long run. What are you going to do with the beans you’ve got left?”
“I don’t know. See if Mr. Hall will buy them back, I guess.”
“Not for seed beans, he won’t. And for regular beans he won’t pay more than about seven or eight cents a pound. That’s three and a half or four dollars.”
“Couldn’t we eat them, maybe?”
“Not that many beans, not in five years. By then the weevils would be in them.”
I felt miserable and ashamed. I didn’t care what happened to those beans. All I wanted to do was write them off, try to forget the fifteen dollars I had paid for them, and never do so stupid a thing again.
By Monday afternoon, though, I mustered my nerve and went to see Mr. Hall. I told him I had about fifty pounds of seed beans left over and asked if he would buy them. He didn’t ask any questions. He said yes, he would take them off my hands, but he could pay only six cents a pound because new beans would soon be coming in. There were forty-two pounds of them left. Mr. Hall paid me $2.52 for them.
The wheat crop was one of the best Flagler had yet had. There were piles of wheat on the ground, like tremendous golden ant hills, overflow from the grain elevators which couldn’t get freight cars fast enough to ship it out as it came in. Flagler was going to have money in its pockets, at last.
Beans were harvested in late August. There weren’t many beans, really; most of the farmers who grew them grew them as a side crop and nobody planted more than forty or fifty acres of them. Besides, there had been a bean blight that year and the bean beetle had appeared in some fields. Jimmy Wallace made only about $250 from his $75 investment in seed. He had expected to make twice that much. But I couldn’t work up any tears for Jimmy. At least, he made a profit, a good profit. I lost $12.48.
Mr. Hall gave me a raise the first of July, to $1.75. And at the end of August he offered me $2 a Saturday if I would stay on that fall and winter. But I said no, I didn’t really want to be a storekeeper. Besides, I had other things to do on Saturdays after school started.
15
THAT WAS THE SUMMER of Nell Bainbridge’s trouble, and it closed, for me, with the kit foxes. At the time I didn’t think there was any link at all between Nell and the foxes, but I have wondered since.
Nell’s name really was Cornelia, and though she was a rather plain-looking girl she was one of those you think of as beautiful because they are so full of life and vitality. She was slim, blue-eyed, with reddish-brown hair and a laugh always hovering. Everyone said Nell was fun. She dated various boys but never seemed serious about any of them. She was going on to college, Teacher’s College at Greeley. She finished high school in a flurry of parties and then just dropped out of things. The Bainbridges lived a few miles out of town—her father was one of the better farmers, but a stubborn, headstrong man—and Nell simply stayed at home. Then word got around that Nell was “in trouble.” I heard it first from the high school crowd. Nell had “got caught,” the girls said. The boys said she “got knocked up.” Then the talk began among the grownups. Nell always was “a little fast,” as the women put it, and now she’d have to pay for it.
People began to wonder when Nell would go away for “a visit with relatives” at a distance. That was the way such matters usually were handled. The girl went away for a visit, had her baby, put it out for adoption, and came home as though nothing had happened. In time she was taken back into the community’s social life, though usually with reservations.
But Nell didn’t go away, and word got around that she wasn’t going. She intended to stay right there and have her baby at home. And her father was going to start a paternity suit. That put a brand new angle on the story. Who was the boy—or the man? And now there was gossip about several married men in town being involved. One underground joke had it that three different husbands had bought one-way tickets to California and were just waiting to see who Jim Bainbridge was going to name when he filed the suit.
Mother thought it was a disgrace to the whole community, everything about the case. “You aren’t going to print a word about it, are you?” she said to Father.
“Not unless Jim Bainbridge actually starts suit and it comes to trial. If it comes to court, I don’t see how I can avoid at least mentioning it. You can’t pretend that a court trial isn’t going on. You can’t hide it.”
I knew what probably would happen, not at
the trial but to Nell and her baby, especially to the baby. There had been a similar situation in one town where we lived, though it had happened before we moved there. A schoolgirl became pregnant and her parents brought the man responsible, a married man, to trial and he was sent to prison for a nominal term. The girl had her baby at home and her parents adopted it, gave it a legal name and status. The girl then went away to finish school, became a professional woman, and eventually married. The baby was a boy my age, and when we moved there he and I became close friends. He was a brilliant boy and the grandparents—the legal parents—had money and standing in the community. They carried the whole situation off with decency and dignity. But every now and then some vindictive grownup or angry playmate would brand the boy with that searing word, bastard, and I would see him flinch, turn florid with anger, then walk away. He never fought back, even with words. He had to take it. He took it, right through school. Then he went away to college and changed his given name; and after college he took a job in a distant state, cut virtually all his ties to the past.
Something like that probably awaited Nell’s unborn child. But nobody in town seemed to be thinking about that child as a child. The talk was about Nell’s disgrace and, of course, the disgrace she was bringing on the town. There was even talk that Jim Bainbridge shouldn’t bring a paternity suit, that he should let the matter drop and let people forget it. But Jim couldn’t see it that way.
Then, the last week in August, I got involved with the kit foxes. George Sebastian came down to the News office on Friday afternoon and asked Father, “You know a kit fox when you see one?”
“Of course I do. We had kit foxes out south of Brush when we were on the homestead there.”
“Ever shoot one?”
“No. Hardest thing in the world to shoot. And they can drive a dog crazy, trying to run one down.”
“Right.” George Sebastian was tall, sinewy, red-faced, with dark eyes and reddish hair and a small mustache. He was something of a dandy, in a rough way. He lived out southeast of Flagler. “But,” he said, “I’m going to get me one. Maybe three or four. There’s a bitch denned on the hill off east of my house and she had kits there last spring. She’s still there, with the kits, and they’ve been stealing my chickens.”
“Never heard of a kit fox taking chickens,” Father said. “Sure it’s not coyotes, or maybe a weasel?”
“It’s them damn foxes,” Sebastian insisted. “I’m going to dig them out, and I heard you like animals, maybe you or the boy might want to have one of them kits for a pet. I hear they tame all right, you get them young.”
Father turned to me. I said yes, I thought I’d like to have a kit fox for a pet. At least I’d like to be there and decide if I wanted one when they were dug out. Sebastian said to come out to his place the next day, but it was a Saturday and I had to work in the store, so we agreed on Sunday, when I would ride out to his place on my bicycle and help with the digging.
We didn’t know George Sebastian except to speak to on the street. He came originally from Oklahoma or the Texas panhandle, took a homestead out on the flats, built up a herd of forty or fifty head of cattle, and called himself a ranchman. His wife was a rather pretty woman, a tall, bosomy blonde whom Mother called “stand-offish.” They had two little girls maybe six and eight years old. George was what used to be called “a ladies’ man,” a term that could be either a compliment or a sneer, depending on the way it was said.
Mother didn’t think much of having a kit fox for a pet, but she didn’t lay down a flat no. She never had much time or much liking for pets, though I was allowed to have dogs and, now and then, a cat when I was younger. But she didn’t like cats. And Fritz was the only dog that ever really made himself a place in her heart. He was practically a member of the family. On the whole, I had no need for wild pets, not even any particular interest in them. I thought that rabbits, ground squirrels, coyotes, snakes, and all the other native fauna were better off, and more interesting, wild and free.
But a kit fox was something else again. Maybe if I had one, even for a little while, I could learn more about its kind. All the way out to the Sebastian place the next morning I kept thinking about those I had known on the homestead. We sometimes called them swifts, or swift foxes. I don’t know where we got those names, but they are accepted common names, too. The animal is a true fox, Vulpes velox, the smallest fox there is, smaller than most jack rabbits. This is hard to believe because a kit fox has that beautiful full fox tail and long fluffy hair and looks at least twice as big as it really is. It looks like a miniature red fox with unusually big ears and a gray coat, almost silvery but with a golden tinge. It has the same slim, dainty legs as a red fox, the long plumelike tail, and the sharply pointed nose. And it lives on smaller fare, chiefly mice and ground squirrels and small snakes and grasshoppers. Maybe with an occasional nestling bird or a baby rabbit. It can’t run fast enough and isn’t really big enough to catch and kill a grown jack rabbit. I doubt that a kit fox would weigh more than half as much as a big white-tailed jack rabbit.
And despite the name “swift,” the kit isn’t a fast runner. A good rabbit dog could easily outrun a kit fox, but it probably would never catch one. The kit fox runs zigzag, which is the reason it is so difficult to shoot one. It will take off, running low to the ground, and run straight ahead maybe five jumps, then dart off at an angle another five or six jumps, then veer again, and again, keeping it up till it drives a dog crazy. And a man with a gun can’t get a bead on anything that runs that way. So there the kit fox goes, zigzagging across the flats until it suddenly vanishes. It goes to ground, and it can get into a hole that seems no bigger than a man’s fist. You stand and look at the hole, and you know that’s where the kit fox went, and still you can’t believe it. The animal looks so much bigger than it really is.
Jake Farley, our homestead neighbor, shot one once, largely by accident. He was hunting jack rabbits and this kit fox jumped out of a gully not twenty feet in front of him. Jake shot before he saw that it wasn’t a jack rabbit, one of those reflex shots from the hip with a 12-gauge shotgun. He hit it with a load of number 4 shot before it made its first sidewise jump. Jake skinned it out and tacked the skin on his barn, and it was unbelievably small. The carcass, Jake said, when he skinned it wasn’t as big as his little gray cat, which was the runt of a litter. “It’s them big ears,” Jake said, “that make them look so big.” We measured the ears and found they were as long as the kit fox’s face from forehead to nose tip. If I hadn’t known how much smaller a coyote is than it looks, I wouldn’t have believed that kit fox was fully grown.
It was a bright sunny morning and the road wasn’t rutted, so I made good time out to the Sebastian place. I got there soon after ten o’clock. There was a white frame house with a fence around it to keep the livestock out, and there was an un-painted barn and a big open shed with a corral and a stack yard and three big haystacks. It all looked neat and well kept up. There weren’t even any loose chickens, as there were on most farms. There was a flock of Plymouth Rocks, but they were penned, with their own coop, out beside the barn. At the house, there were white curtains at the windows and they all seemed exactly alike, even tied back just so, and the green window shades were all at exactly the same level, one-third down from the top.
There was a friendly dog, one of those woolly black-and-tan shepherds, as we used to call them. He was outside the fenced dooryard and he came to bark at me and wag his tail. He followed me up to the dooryard gate. I waited there a moment or so, and then the door of the house opened. Mrs. Sebastian appeared, tall and starchy looking, her blonde hair drawn back so tight it seemed to stretch her forehead. She had a dress that buttoned all the way up to her chin. She looked at me a moment and asked, “Yes?” then said, “Oh, you came to help dig out the fox, I guess. Mr. Sebastian is out at the barn.” And she closed the door. I saw the two little girls, blonde as their mother, peeking out one of the windows, but when she closed the door they drew back and pushed th
e white curtains into place again.
I went on out to the barn. Mr. Sebastian was cleaning the stalls where he kept his two saddle horses. The horses were out in the corral, and Sebastian was using the pitchfork almost viciously. He saw me and stood for a moment, his square jaws knotted, his knuckles white as he gripped the fork handle. Then he said, “Hello,” in a slightly hoarse voice and picked up half a forkful of bedding with the fork and threw it through the open door behind him onto the manure pile. He hung the fork on its pegs on the barn wall, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly before he smiled at me and said, “Nice day out. If it wasn’t for women it would be a good world.” Then he laughed, a kind of dry chuckle, and said, “Let’s go get that old bitch fox.”
We went to the tool shed and got two long-handled, round-pointed spades and a couple of gunny sacks. The tool shed, like the barn, was neat and orderly, as neat as the house and the dooryard. Almost fanatically neat.
Sebastian called the dog and we started out across the flat to the east, toward the top of the rise half a mile away. About half way there was a shallow swale, and as we approached it Sebastian said to the dog, “Go chase that bitch out of there, Tuffy. Go get her!” Tuffy perked his ears and headed for the swale, at a lope. Sure enough, he put up a kit fox, probably mousing in the tall grass. The fox took off, the dog yelped, and the chase was on. I had seen it happen many times, the dog’s initial rush, the fox’s sharp dodge just as the dog was about to close in, the zig and zag, the dog’s bewilderment and frustration. But Tuffy kept on, and the fox dodged to safety, time after time, working toward the top of the rise all the while.
We stopped and watched, and Sebastian shook his head and muttered, “That bitch! Just like them all. Let you get all ready to take them and then duck right out of your hands. You think you’ve got her, and then—there she goes!—then she slams the door in your face.”
