The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  “Do sit down, child,” she said. “I can lift a cat.”

  When it happened that a cat could not escape punishment, Sister tried always to be the first to reach him. If it must be done, she would rather do it herself. There was never a person who could congratulate a cat while apparently scolding it, as Sister could.

  A silence fell on the table. To break it, Aunt Nancy said, “What have you been doing with yourself since we saw you last, Edmond?”

  “Oh,” said Edmond casually, “just running true to form.” He loved to spring phrases on them like that. There was a large family stock of the funny things he had said, and he was always hoping to add to it.

  “Poor Mrs. Hansen had not quite collected herself, it seems, by the time she got to the pudding,” said Martha.

  Roast for dinner was in the oven, and in the quiet, clean kitchen where the clock on the wall ticked contentedly, Mrs. Hansen sat at the table sucking her teeth. Before her was spread her tabloid. Her eyes were wide and her lips indignant as she read; she held her breath while fumbling for the page in the back section where her story was continued. When she finished it she had to sit back, breathing heavily, and pat her chest to soothe the outrage in her heart. She saw herself coming home from working late to support her three fatherless children on a cold night down a dark deserted street. Suddenly, out of the shadows a figure loomed, reeling drunkenly. It made a guttural sound. It was …

  Queenie—prowling in from the sunroom.

  Mrs. Hansen yelped. Little did those three children Mr. Hansen left her with appreciate all that she went through for their sakes.

  Sister, coming down the hall, heard Mrs. Hansen’s gasp, and having some idea what might have caused it, turned and stole off to the library. She curled up on the sofa and found her place in a book. But the windows were open; there was a breeze in the maple tree and the steady rasping of Leonard raking the gravel walks. Soon she was asleep.

  “Sister,” said Martha, “bring me a pincushion.”

  Evaline’s party dress was almost finished. She stood with one arm raised for Martha to let out a seam.

  “Can’t you find one, Sister?” Martha called.

  “Here’s one, Aunt Martha,” said Enid.

  “Thank you, dear. Never mind, Sister.”

  “She isn’t here, anyway,” said Enid. “She went downstairs long ago.”

  Martha smiled. “Worried over her cats, I suppose.”

  “Nineteen,” said Nancy Taylor.

  Martha gave the dress a final tug, and settled back in her chair. The studio had been filling with gentle, late-afternoon light, and Martha was moved to think of her own gentleness, her patience. She let Sister keep nineteen disgusting cats, with never a thought for her lovely home.

  “It is a lot, isn’t it,” she said. She was filled with wonder at herself. “But you wouldn’t want me to make her give them up?” She sighed. “I suppose it’s what any other woman would do.”

  “But, Aunt Martha,” said Evaline, “don’t they make you—” She broke off with a shudder.

  Martha said, “Yes—I forget, don’t I, that they are disgusting to many people. That’s selfish of me, isn’t it? I mean, to allow my child to offend others.” She sighed and said, “Perhaps, my dear, you will understand better when you are a mother yourself. You know what they say about a mother’s love.”

  “There is more than one kind of blindness,” said Nancy, her voice grown suddenly hard.

  Martha did not like her tone. She found herself getting excited. She said, “Well, I’d like to know of another woman with a house as fine as mine who let nineteen cats simply ruin it to please a child.”

  “Or to please her conscience,” said Nancy. But she had not been able to say it as loud as she had meant to. The whine of a cat, beginning low and growing to a howl, had hushed them all. Nancy gave a shudder. Enid came to her and sat on the arm of her chair. Nancy hugged her reassuringly. Evaline came, too, a little jealous perhaps.

  “Why,” said Martha with a little laugh, “it’s hard to imagine Sister without her cats.”

  They all sat trying to do it.

  Dusk was turning to darkness. In the garden, under the balconies, among the plants in the rocks, cats were waking, yawning, and stretching. They prowled in from the woods, from the drive, from the stables. One cat licked the table in the grape arbor, growling at all comers, while another searched beneath the table, sniffing for scraps.

  They gathered in the courtyard. They perched themselves on benches, on tables, in the dirt of potted plants. One old cat found a vase in his way, knocked it off the table, and settled himself comfortably. They all sat waiting intently, each securely in possession of his spot.

  Sister yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes and raised herself to her feet with a mighty stretch.

  She made her way down the dark hall, stepping over a pail someone had left in the way. Passing the windows, she could see the cats listening to her approach and gathering in the moonlight near the door, purring all together.

  Sister held the door open. Huckleberry was the first one in, and Sister, with a smile and a nod, watched him make straight for his spot under the Swedish fireplace.

  The Shell

  THIS WOULD be the season, the year, when he would have the reach of arm to snap the big gun easily to his shoulder. This fall his shoulder would not be bruised black from the recoil. The hunting coat would fit him this season. This would be the season—the season when he would have to shoot the shell.

  It was a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. The brass was green with verdigris, the cardboard, once red, was faded to a pale and mottled brown, the color of old dried blood. He knew it intimately. On top, the firing cap was circled by the loop of a letter P. Around the rim, circling the P, were the two words of the trade name, Peters Victor; the gauge number, 12; and the words, Made in USA. The wad inside the crimp of the firing end read, Smokeless; 3¼; 1⅛-8. This meant 3¼ drams of smokeless powder, 1⅛ ounces of number 8 shot—birdshot, the size for quail. It was the one shell he had found afterwards that had belonged to his father, one that his father had not lived to shoot. So he had thought at first to keep the shell unfired. But he knew his father would have said that a shotgun shell was meant to be fired, and he, Joe, had added that any shotgun shell which had belonged to him was meant to hit what it was fired at. For four years now it had been out of Joe’s pocket, and out of his hand fingering it inside his pocket, only to stand upon the table by his bed at night. For four years now he had been going to shoot it when he was good enough, but the better he became the further away that seemed to get, because good enough meant, though he did not dare put it to himself in quite that way, as good as his father had been.

  He had been in no great rush about it during those first two seasons afterwards, then there had been time—though now it seemed that even then there had been less time than he admitted. But on opening day of the third, last year’s season, he had suddenly found himself sixteen years old—for though his birthday came in May, it was in November, on opening day of quail season, that he really began another year—time was suddenly short, and then overnight gone completely, after that day when he returned with the best bag he had ever taken and, in his cockiness, had told his mother about the shell, what he had saved it for and what he meant to do with it.

  He had not allowed himself to forget that at that moment he could hear his father saying, “Do it and then talk about it.” He had argued weakly in reply that he was telling only his mother, and then it was not his father but the voice of his own conscience which had cried, “Only!” Because whom alone did he want to tell, to boast to, and because already he knew that that was not what his father would have said, but rather, “Do it and don’t talk about it afterwards either.”

  She had seemed hardly surprised to learn about the shell. She seemed almost to have known about it, expected it. But she handled it reverently because she could see that he did.

  “Aren’t you good enough now?” she
said.

  “Hah!” he said.

  She was turning the shell in her fingers. “I always knew nothing would ever happen to him while hunting,” she said. “I never worried when he was out with a gun … Well,” she brought herself up, “but I worry about you. Oh, I know you’re good with a gun. I’m not afraid you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Not with the training I’ve had,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “What I worry about is the amount of time and thought you give it. Are you keeping up in school? The way you go at it, Joe! It hardly even seems to be a pleasure to you.”

  Pleasure? No, it was not a pleasure, he thought. That was the name he had always given it, but he was older now and no longer had to give the name pleasure to it. Sometimes—often times when he enjoyed it most—it was the opposite of pleasure. What was the proper name for it? He did not know. It was just what he did, the thing he would have been unable to stop doing if he had wanted to; it was what he was.

  “I see other boys and girls your age going out to picnics and parties, Joe. I’m sure it’s not that you’re never invited.”

  “You know that kind of thing don’t interest me,” he said impatiently.

  She was serious for a moment and said, “You’re so old for your age, Joe. Losing your father so young.” Then she altered, forced her tone. “Well, of course, you probably know exactly what you’re up to,” she said. “It’s the hunters the girls really go for, isn’t it? Us girls—us Southern girls—like a hunting man! I did. I’ll bet all the little girls just—”

  He hated it when she talked like that. She knew that girls meant nothing to him. He liked it when she let him know that she was glad they didn’t. He liked to think that when she teased him this way it was to get him to reaffirm how little he cared for girls; and yet she should know that his feeling for her was, like the feeling he had for hunting, too deep a thing for him to be teased into declaring.

  He took the shell away from her.

  “You’re good enough now,” she said.

  “No,” he said sullenly. “I’m not.”

  “He would think so.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think he would.”

  “I think so. You’re good enough for me,” she said.

  “No. No, I’m not. Don’t say that,” he said.

  He was in the field at daybreak on opening day with Mac, the speckled setter, the only one of his father’s dogs left now, the one who in the three seasons he had hunted him had grown to be his father’s favorite, whom he had broken that season that he had trained, broken, him, Joe, too, so that between him and the dog, since, a bond had existed less like that of master to beast, more like that of brother to brother, and consequently, he knew, he had never had the dog’s final respect and did not have it now, though the coat did fit now.

  He had not unleashed the dog yet, but stood with him among the bare alders at the edge of the broom grass meadow that had the blackened pile of sawdust in the middle—the color of fresh cornmeal the first time he ever saw it—to which he, and the big covey of quail, went first each season, the covey which he had certainly not depleted much but which instead had grown since his father’s death.

  The coat fit now, all right, but he wore it still without presumption, if anything with greater dread and with even less sense of possession than when it came halfway down to his knees and the sleeves hung down to the mid-joints of his fingers and the armpits looped nearly to his waist and made it absolutely impossible to get the gun stock to his shoulder, even if he could have lifted the big gun there in that split second when the feathered balls exploded at his feet and streaked into the air. He had not worn the coat then because he believed he was ready to wear it nor hunted with the big gun because he believed he was the man to. He had not been ready for a lot of things, had had to learn to drive, and drive those first two years seated on a cushion to see over the hood; he had not been ready to sit at the head of the table, to carve the meat, to be the comforter and protector, the man of the house. He had had to wear the coat and shoot the gun and rock on his heels and just grit his teeth at the kick, the recoil.

  Maybe there had been moments later—the day he threw away the car cushion was one—when he was pleased to think that he was growing into the coat, but now, as he stood with Mac, hunching and dropping his shoulders and expanding his chest inside it, it seemed to have come to fit him before he was at all prepared for it to. He heard the loose shells rattle in the shell pockets and he smelled the smell of his father, which now, four years later, still clung to it, or else what he smelled was the never-fading, peppery smell of game blood and the clinging smell of gunpowder, the smell of gun oil and the smell of the dog, all mixed on the base of damp, heavy, chill November air, the air of a quail-shooting day, the smells which had gone to make up the smell his father had had for him. Reaching his hand into the shell pocket he felt something clinging in the seam. It was a faded, tangled and blood-stiffened pinfeather of a quail. It was from a bird his father had shot. He himself had never killed so many that the game pockets would not hold them all and he had had to put them in the shell pockets.

  He took from among the bright other ones the shell and slipped it into the magazine and pumped it into the breech. He would have to make good his boast to his mother, though he knew now that it was a boast made no more out of cockiness than cowardice and the determination born of that cowardice to fix something he could not go back on. He would have to fire the shell today. He had known so all the days as opening day approached. He had known it at breakfast in the lighted kitchen with his mother, remembering the times when she and himself had sat in the lighted kitchen over breakfast on opening day with his father, both in the years when he himself had stayed behind and watched his father drive away into the just-breaking dawn, not even daring yet to yearn for his own time to come, and later when he began to be taken; he had seen it in the dog, Mac’s eyes as he put him into the cage, the dog cage his father had had built into the car trunk though it was the family car, the only one they had to go visiting in as well, that he would have to fire the shell today, and he had known it most as he backed out of the drive and waved good-by to his mother, remembering the times when his father had been in the driver’s seat and she had stood waving to the two of them.

  Now he felt the leash strain against his belt loop and heard the dog whimpering, and out in the field, rising liquid and clear into the liquid air, he heard the first bobwhite and immediately heard a second call in answer from across the field and the first answer back, and then, as though they had tuned up to each other, the two of them fell into a beat, set up a round-song of alternate call and response: bob bob white white, bob bob white white, and then others tuned in until there were five, eight separate and distinctly timed voices, and Joe shivered, not ashamed of his emotion and not trying to tell himself it was the cold, but owning that it was the thrill which nothing else, not even other kinds of hunting, could ever give him and which not even his dread that it was the day when he would have to shoot the shell could take away from him, and knowing for just that one moment that this was the real, the right feeling to have, that it was the coming and trying that mattered, the beginning, not the end of the day, the empty, not the full game pockets, feeling for just that moment in deep accord with his father’s spirit, feeling him there with him, beside him, listening, loading up, unleashing the dog.

  As soon as the dog was unleashed his whimpering ceased. Joe filled the magazine of the gun with the two ordinary shells and stood rubbing the breech of the gun, watching the dog enter the field. He veered instantly and began systematically quartering the field, his nose high and loose, on no fresh scent yet, but quickening, ranging faster already. They claimed—and of most dogs it was true—that setters forgot their training between seasons, but not Mac, not the dog his father had trained, not even after three seasons, even with no better master than him to keep him in training. He watched him now in the field lower his muzzle slightly as the scent freshened
and marveled at the style the dog had, yet remembered paradoxically that first day, his and Mac’s, when each of them, the raw, noisy, unpromising-looking pup and the raw, unpromising-looking but anything but noisy boy, had flushed birds, the pup a single but he a whole covey—two of which his father had bagged nonetheless—for which the pup had received a beating and he only a look, not even a scolding look, but a disappointed look worse than any beating he had ever had.

  The dog set: broke stride, lowered his muzzle, then planted all four feet as though on the last half-inch of a sudden and unexpected cliff-edge, raised his muzzle and leaned forward into the scent streaming hot and fresh into his nostrils, leaned his whole body so far forward that the raised, rigid, feathered tail seemed necessary as a ballast to keep him from falling on his face. You could tell from his manner that it was the whole big covey.

  He called as he set out down the field. “Steady, boy. Toho,” he called, and on the dead misty air his voice did not seem his voice at all but his father’s voice, calling as he had heard him call, and he was struck afresh and more powerfully than ever before with the sense of his own unworthiness, his unpreparedness, which seemed now all the more glaringly shown forth by the very nearness he had attained to being prepared; he felt himself a pretender, a callow and clownish usurper.

  Now the birds were moving, running in the cover, still banded together, and Mac moved up his stand, so cautiously that he seemed jointless with rigidity. Stock-still, trembling with controlled excitement, his eyes glazed and the hair along his spine bristling—you could have fired an artillery piece an inch above his head and still he would have stood unflinching for an hour, until told to break his stand, and so Joe let him stand, to enjoy the sight, as well as to give his pounding heart a moment’s calm, before going in to kick them up. He held the gun half-raised, and the shell in the barrel seemed to have increased its weight tenfold. Alongside the dog he said again, “Steady, boy,” knowing that this time he spoke not to the dog but to himself.