by John Yount
She’d got so sick of it that sometimes she really didn’t mind so much when he’d quit one job for another and leave her and James for months in one strange city while he went off to the next. They’d fought until, at last, they didn’t fight anymore, or make love anymore, or even talk, so that when he said he was going to Pittsburgh, she’d said that was fine, because she and James were going home to North Carolina. With an icy calm she could feel reaching for her heart, they had discussed mechanical things like money and the trailer and the car and had left the other ninety-nine percent of what was between them go unspoken.
Oh God, she thought, let me start all over again with a clean slate, clean and blank with nothing written on it, I pray you, Jesus God Lord Almighty Christ. Please just let me sleep. But her stomach didn’t feel so good, and she slid her legs to the edge of the bed and sat up very slowly, hoping she wasn’t going to be sick all over everything with no water to clean it up. She’d left him, she told herself sternly. It was done. Why on earth did she have to leave him again every single night? Why did she have to list her grievances over and over, try him again and again like a judge in court?
She got up and quietly slid back the thin plywood partition that separated the bedroom from the rest of the trailer. Dimly she could make out the boy sleeping on the couch, wrapped in a sheet and a blanket. She’d given up trying to get him to let the couch down and make it up properly as a bed. When it was time to sleep, he’d snatch his pillow, sheet, and blanket from the storage compartment under the couch, fold the sheet and blanket together lengthwise, and climb inside. In the morning he’d grab them up and stow them under the couch again. It was an uncomfortable couch, even for sitting, since it was covered in stiff, green Naugahyde, with huge buttons to hold the batting in place, but when he didn’t let down the back, there was scarcely room for him to lie there. She hated having him sleep on it like that, absolutely hated it, as though what they had left of dignity and self-respect might somehow be put at risk by permitting such small compromises. Other folks, it seemed to her, had a much larger margin of safety in such matters.
Quietly she opened the small gas refrigerator and poured herself a glass of milk, and, as if watching him had disturbed his sleep, he began to turn over, making small, careful adjustments even as he slept in order to keep from falling to the floor. She drank her milk, her hand shaking, the rim of the glass rattling against her teeth. “Damn you, Edward Tally,” she said, not loud, but loud enough to rouse her son, who sat up on the couch and blinked at her through the dim moonlight.
“Momma?”
“Hush and go to sleep,” she said. “I’m just having a little milk to settle my stomach.”
JAMES TALLY
He followed Piney Creek, sometimes wading the deep meadow grass along its cut banks watching for grasshoppers to use for bait, sometimes wading the stream. It was a pretty creek, but not a big one, usually no more than twenty feet across and nowhere over his head, but it was clear and clean and full of fish. Hog suckers lay motionless in the shallows until they were spooked. Then they’d dart away, swift as bullets, to lie absolutely motionless somewhere else. And there were hornyheads and perch and schools of minnows and, in some of the deeper pools, even a few smallmouth bass. Sometimes he’d see the bass gliding like shadows to disappear under a rock or under an overhanging bank.
He would have liked to catch some of those, but he had little chance. They preferred minnows or crayfish, and he needed to let them take the bait and run until they got ready to swallow it and he could set the hook. But that called for being able to give them line, and he only had a cane pole he’d bought for a quarter at the country store down the road. He’d tied a length of braided green line to the middle of the pole and finally to the tip, so that if some monster fish broke the tip, it would have to break the pole a second time to be free. The line, a snelled hook, and the split-shot sinkers he’d taken from his father’s canvass musette bag of fishing equipment. He’d asked his mother if he could use the equipment in the bag, and she’d pawed it out of the closet in her bedroom. He didn’t ask to use his father’s fly rod and reel, although he might have caught a bass with that. It was a split-bamboo trout rod, and Piney Creek was too warm for trout, and anyway, his father was particular about the fly rod. Once, when his father had been away, James had borrowed it without permission, and sure enough, he’d managed to step on the tiptop and break the rubylike center of the final eye. The rod had an extra tip, but it was the principle of the thing, and his father had taken a belt to him, which James expected and figured he deserved. When Edward Tally had come home after six weeks away, the first thing James said to him was that he’d broken the fly rod. He liked to get certain things over with and behind him, but his father waited until after supper before he inspected the damage, took off his belt, and gave him the deliberate and inevitable punishment.
His father had two possessions that seemed almost magically elegant and powerful. One was a Lefever double-barreled shotgun, which smelled of gun oil and was kept in a leather leg-o’-mutton gun case; and the other was the glowing, honey-colored rod, the sections all fitting snugly around an inlet wooden spindle kept inside a canvas bag. But even under the best of circumstances, James wouldn’t have pretended that his mother had authority over these possessions, and to do so just then, when she might have granted permission, would have seemed low and venal. As it was, even having his mother search through his father’s clothes, shoes, and other stuff seemed to stun them both for a little while, as if Edward Tally had reached across a great distance to box their ears.
Still, his mother had gotten over it and gone off to Cedar Hill with his aunt Lily and his cousins. And barefoot and shirtless, he’d gone fishing. There was bright sunshine and the warm, green smell of grass, and the varnished odor of the stream all around him, and after an hour or so the hollow feeling in his stomach left.
He’d spent the better part of two days digging a ditch from the farmhouse to the trailer, laying the sod carefully aside and digging the water hose down deep, sure that when he filled in the ditch and replaced the grass, the waterline to the trailer would be invisible. But it wasn’t so. There was a long, dirty depression across the yard and part of the pasture. But rain might wash away the loose dirt in time, and if he straddled the sunken part with the lawn mower, then the grass in it would get longer, and the yard might look okay even if it wasn’t. He thought he’d try the same thing with the tire tracks. Digging in the hose for the drain was a much simpler proposition, a matter of twenty feet or so before the slope of the land would carry the sink water away toward the scrub growth and highway. His grandfather had said that would be all right. Also an electrician had come and run a line out to the trailer from the house, so they had lights and water, even if it was only cold water, which tasted strongly of the new hose.
He was disappointed in the way the yard looked, but his aunt Lily and mother and grandmother had praised him, and he figured he had the silent approval of his grandfather as well. Three nights before, when Harley Marshall had learned at the supper table that James had got the stile out to the fence by himself, he’d stopped eating to study him for a few seconds. “Bertha,” he’d said to James’s grandmother, “you’ll want to call Irey in the morning and tell him not to come by then, for he was to help me tote it.” After that, he’d given his head one nearly invisible shake and gone back to eating. But toward the end of James’s first day of ditch digging when his hands had begun to creak with blisters, his grandfather had suddenly appeared with a pair of work gloves, new ones that nearly fit, which James figured he’d bought at the country store half a mile down the road. Stooped, silent, the old man had pondered the ditch, nodded his head, and tucked the pair of gloves inside the waistband of James’s britches. One quick, sure movement and he was already making his unhurried way back across the yard, disappearing around the broken quince bushes by the front porch before James could even thank him.
So, everything considered, he figured he w
as doing pretty well, and he planned to take home enough fish to feed everyone, even his cousins, although an hour and a half had got him only five keepable hornyheads, and not one of them ten inches long. Still, each bend in the creek had a deep side where the current undercut a bank and possibilities lurked.
He kept his hornyheads strung through the gills on a forked willow branch, and when he saw a good spot ahead, he’d jab the long end of the branch in the bank to keep his fish in the water; and after swatting around in the deep grass until he had a fresh grasshopper kicking against his palm, he’d sneak to the edge of the bank, careful not even to let his shadow fall on the water, and swing the grasshopper—legs kicking and wings askew—into the current. Waiting for the telegraphed thump, thump, thump of a bite to travel the line and pole into his hands, he was free to think expansive and, it seemed to him, profound thoughts.
First he figured out his cousins, deciding that a good deal of their stiff and unfriendly behavior came from years before when each of them, in turn, had taught him what little he knew—and what little they knew too—about sex. They were embarrassed about that, he decided, and probably hoped never to see him again, or at least not until they were truly as grown-up and sophisticated as they were trying to be. He hadn’t committed the actual act with either of them, although it had all been very exciting, and he would have done so if he’d known how and if they would have allowed it. He had been not quite eight and on a visit when each girl began to desire his company alone in the barn or the smokehouse or hidden away in the laurel thicket at the end of the pasture where they wanted to play husband and wife. They couldn’t absolutely do it, they explained, because they were first cousins and weren’t, and could never be, really married. Trying to seem just as grown-up and earnest as they were, he had pretended to understand, although he had no notion what it was. Still, each of them had wanted him to see and touch that soft cleft—delicate as a seashell—at the crux of them. And they wanted to see and touch him too. Likely they feared he might remember all that just a little too vividly. And he did. He didn’t have much of anything else to remember along those lines. Not, anyway, if he didn’t count a great many fantasies. Yet, somehow, he felt worldly and wise.
In fact, fishing down Piney Creek in the bright sun, he felt on the threshold of great things. His character, despite past disappointments, seemed perfectly redeemable and even capable of being invented out of raw material, hammered out and tempered like a new blade, just to suit him. Why not? Very little in his spirit felt inescapable except maybe a constant melancholy. He’d worked hard the past few days. Honorable blisters had broken and stiffened in his hands, and with that sort of work on his character, he didn’t see why he couldn’t become a fellow of such strength and integrity that no circumstance would be able to provoke cowardice, weakness, self-pity, or dishonor in him. He knew such strength of character to be possible because he had the example of Osceola, chief of the Seminole. He’d read a book about him only a few months before. Osceola was three-quarters Indian and one-quarter Scot, and that seemed an important coincidence since he, himself, had some Indian blood from his father and a lot of Scottish blood from his mother. There was no doubt that Osceola was the perfect man, the ideal blueprint to follow. He was as brave and just as anybody could want. He would not surrender or be moved about and told where he could live. He was fair with his own people and gave runaway slaves refuge in his tribe. And he never would have been captured, James was certain, if a general he’d defeated many times hadn’t tricked him under a flag of truce and taken him prisoner. Even so, deceived and locked in prison, he’d shamed his jailors absolutely by sitting in one spot without speaking or eating or sleeping or attending to any bodily function until he simply dropped dead. You couldn’t beat that, James thought. Nobody could beat that.
He didn’t figure to be put to quite such a test any time soon, but he did have to start in at a new school in a little more than three weeks. He’d had a lot of experience changing schools, three times during the fourth grade alone, but he didn’t like it. Yet this time things could be different. He could teach himself not to be so anxious and fearful, and maybe if others saw this calm, sober strength in him, they wouldn’t tamper with it, and he could get by without fighting. It was possible.
He had just caught a hornyhead nearly as colorful as a rainbow and was stringing him up through the gills when he caught sight of something moving below the next bend down the creek. Elderberry bushes leaning out over the water partially hid whatever it was, but James could see it was some sort of animal. Careful to make no noise and no quick movements, he eased his stringer back in the water, set his pole aside, and began to creep on all fours through the deep grass until he could see that the animal was a raccoon, busily feeling around stones in the bottom of the creek. It looked about half-grown, but he couldn’t be sure since he’d only seen a few, and none in broad daylight. He didn’t know what it was after; but, its beady black eyes glittering with concentration and its elbows pumping like a woman scrubbing out clothes over a washboard, it seemed totally unaware of him.
Finally the young raccoon caught a crawfish in his finicky fingers, although he lost it and caught it again half a dozen times before, mysteriously, he began to scrub the crawfish against the top of a flat rock, which was a few inches out of the water. Maybe he’s trying to kill it, James thought, but the crawfish looked at least vaguely alive when the coon began to eat it with the greedy intensity of a squirrel hulling a hickory nut.
The moment he was finished with the first, he began looking for another, his elbows pumping and that fanatical gleam back in his eyes. He caught one almost immediately, but it managed to get away from him; still, it wasn’t long before he had a third to worry against a stone and eat. The next thing he pulled out from under a rock, however, wasn’t a crawfish, but a snake about sixteen inches long. Even James gave a start where he lay hidden, but the young raccoon merely puzzled at it, turning it thoughtfully this way and that in his black hand, watching it writhe as though he were speculating about what it might be and how it might taste. At last, apparently unable to solve the riddle, he picked up the rock, put the angry creature back where he’d found it, and set the rock gently down again. It was an action so unexpectedly orderly, serious, and somehow droll that James held his nose and buried his face in his arms to try to keep from laughing; but he only managed to muffle it. Still, when he looked up again, the raccoon was searching the bottom of the stream as if nothing whatever had happened and had moved even closer to him than before. He lay on his belly and watched and had begun to wonder if there was any way in the world to catch the animal, when a skinny, redheaded boy came ambling up on the other side of the creek and looked casually down at it.
“I thought so,” the boy said. “If you weren’t in Momma’s henhouse stealin eggs or up to some other meanness …” He sucked his badly discolored teeth and didn’t bother to finish. “You’re somethin, ain’t you?” he said and collapsed to sit on the bank as if all his joints had suddenly come unstrung.
The raccoon seemed to acknowledge him only by frisking the bottom of the creek a little more frantically, as though he feared he might be hauled away, but James felt suddenly transformed from a skillful stalker into something much more like prey. It was a familiar feeling. For years he had been the stranger, the trespasser on unfamiliar land. No doubt this redheaded boy’s father owned the spot where he lay hidden, and it was possible that no fishing was allowed, and everybody, by God, knew it except James. He wanted to stand up and take his chances, but it was hard not to stay hidden. Being hidden seemed fundamentally sneaky and ridiculous in the first place, and the longer he waited, the worse it got. Anyway it would probably scare hell out of this boy to appear right across the creek from him when he thought he was alone. You might as well leap into the most private part of someone’s brain as do that, because when a fellow was alone, that part expanded to include the world. It would be a piss-poor way to introduce himself, and he kept his belly fla
t to the ground and his nose among the grass roots.
Many minutes later, rigid with funk and fear, he heard the boy cluck to the raccoon, and he heard splashing and other sounds, but it was a while longer before he dared raise up enough to see the soaking wet animal riding the boy’s retreating shoulders and looking back directly into his, James’s, eyes. “Damn!” he said, flopped down on his belly again, closed his eyes, and lay there while his jitters, like cold chills, diminished and his tension drained away into the ground. A pretty poor start on his new life, all in all, he thought, to let his emotions run off with him just as he usually did. Discipline, sadly, seemed a long way off. But after a while he got up again, collected his pole and his fish, and stood wondering if it wouldn’t be safer to go back the way he had come. He decided it would, and so he went the other way instead, trying hard to own the day and the stream the way he had before.
He fished for another hour, but the sun didn’t seem so warm or the odors of the grass and creek quite so satisfying. When Piney Creek joined another larger stream, the deep confluence where they met stirred an excitement in him that was strangely touched with fear, and he had to make himself stay. Almost every time he threw his line in, he took a good-sized hornyhead or a nice perch, but even his success was somehow unsettling.
When he realized he had more than enough fish to feed seven people, he was suddenly in a panic to gather his things and leave. It felt very late in the day. The sun was perhaps an hour from slipping behind the western rim of the mountains, and he knew the haunting and oblique twilight would last almost an hour after that, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was long overdue.
Some reasonable part of him knew the feeling was ridiculous, but he could walk no more than a few yards before he had to run, and in less than a mile his knees were burning and his breath was coming in sobs. Still he kept on until his legs found a numb, stubborn strength, and his breathing, though raw, grew deeper and freer. When at last he came in sight of his grandfather’s house, his chest was streaming with sweat, and he had become the very heart and soul of motion.
