All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

by John Farris

  Evvy shook his head politely. "I wouldn't know, Miss Nhora," he said, his politeness thereby made insulting but perhaps playfully so, as he invoked an image of old-fashioned darkie servitude. She was, after all, Boss's widow, an inheritor, although ownership of Dasharoons and other businesses had passed on to me.

  Nhora drank from her wineglass and turned somberly to me. "I went to visit the boy's parents this morning, to tell them how sorry I was. Jimmy. His name was Jimmy. And do you remember the other boy, the older brother? That's Custis. We took a long walk together, up along the ridge where it happened—the back side of Railroad Ridge. Saturday, Custis was doing some plowing in the field that lies below the ridge on the other side of a little creek. He saw Jimmy before he heard him. When he got to Jimmy, he said, Jimmy was nearly hysterical, but not yet in such terrible pain that he couldn't speak. Jimmy tried to explain. He'd been up there picking wildflowers for his mother, who is bedfast, when something on top of the ridge came out of the woods at him."

  "An animal?'

  "No. Nothing animal or human. Just light, a brilliant ball of green light, and a wind. The wind was so powerful that it tore off all his clothes and blew him a dozen feet from. where he'd been standing. Custis found a few pieces of overall, some brass snaps. Nothing but rags."

  "Probably he sampled some mushrooms that gave him such a burning bellyache he thought—"

  "No, Sshamp, listen! Custis showed me the place where Jimmy liked to pick flowers for his mother. Everything is dead there, in an area nearly fifty feet across. Dead, ashen, leaves stripped from the trees, bushes withered and shrunken, the grass brown—not spring there but autumn, after cold comes, the killing frost."

  "Not unusual to find a small area like that inside a healthy stand of trees," Evvy pointed out. "Lightning does it."

  "But lightning causes burns, it blackens where it hits, even the skin of someone struck by lightning will turn black. Jimmy wasn't marked. I believe he was telling the truth about what happened to him. And it was nearly the same time as the wedding—"

  Nhora shifted her gaze and bared her teeth, dropping the wineglass. She uttered a yowl that unnerved me. Evvy and I looked at the French doors that opened onto a small terrace. A tall man stood just outside the doors staring boldly in at us. He was wearing a slicker and a dark slouch hat that dripped rain. There was enough light from the glow of candles within to illuminate his deep eyes, cruel but intelligent. He looked at Nhora and looked at me with a crooked smile that ran up one side of his face like an emblem of self-torture.

  When Evvy Wilkes's chair crashed backward to the floor, the intruder faded away. I got up more slowly. Evvy reached the doors in a couple of bounds and threw them open as General Bucknam came running from another part of the house. Both men went out into the rain. We heard voices and saw flashlights. Nhora sat very still, white in the face. I put a comforting hand on her arm.

  "Just a yokel, I think. A curiosity seeker. Don't worry."

  "But he looked as if—"

  "What?"

  "Sshamp. I know I've seen him before."

  "Where?"

  "Home. At Dasharoons. Yes. That's where. Just a glimpse."

  "Then how can you be so sure?"

  "How could I forget that smile?" she said dispiritedly. She looked at the mess on the tablecloth, which a maid was sponging up. "What a disgrace. My nerves—"

  "Anyone would have been frightened."

  Evvy came back inside with the general. "Damn," he said. "Nothing. I thought maybe it was one of the reporters, but—"

  "How could any man have slipped past the sentries?" I asked the general. Cadets from the institute had been posted outside to prevent just this sort of intrusion.

  Erie Jack didn't know. He apologized to Nhora. We all chatted for a few minutes longer about the indignities that thoughtless and ghoulish persons seemed intent on visiting upon us, then Nhora excused herself and went upstairs. I followed not long after with a stack of messages, for the most part telegrams of sympathy from some of our venerable national treasures, all of whom had known Boss well. There was an especially poignant note from FDR, hand-delivered. Boss had had a grudging admiration for the president, though in the early days of the New Deal he was fond of describing Roosevelt as "an enema of the people."

  I soon found myself unable to concentrate and drifted into a reverie of home that hurt like puppy love. Quail hunting in rimed pastures at dawn, the three of us, gun-bearers, a dog handler or two, setters like barking silk, a weeping density of woods along the St. Francis River: the throat-catching spell of guns.

  Boss, not much of a shooter anymore because of his eyesight, was an extraordinary companion—wise man, litterateur, cutup and rogue. He was superstitious rather than religious, revering all saints, ancestors of proven worth and gods of the past. He respected shrines, graven images and the power of the crystal ball. Why take chances? Boss said. He was a visionary; a pragmatist; a skeptic ("There are no great men. There are sometimes good men who play over their heads."). He liked loving, and loved war. Through no fault of his own he had missed the Great War, which only intensified his desire to be a hero to himself. He was forced to settle for much less, investing his hopes in his three sons, two of whom had betrayed him. One son had withdrawn his love; another, twenty years later, had killed Boss with a swifter stroke. And I—

  Nhora startled me by appearing in my doorway, and sudden moves made my head throb unmercifully.

  "I'm sorry; I knocked twice. I had to see you tonight."

  I said she was welcome. Nhora was barefoot again, but she wore an elegant long robe of green Chinese silk with a tunic collar. There were spots of feverish color on her high cheekbones, but the green next to her face gave her a rather poor complexion. Nhora had brought a pot of coffee with her, and I was grateful for that if not entirely delighted by her presence.

  As I sipped the coffee which she poured for me I was surprised to hear the pendulum clock in my sitting room strike ten; more than two hours had slipped by me unnoticed. The house was very quiet. Outside, the rain had set in for the night, a blessing: It would bring an end to the forest fires along the Blue Ridge.

  "We don't know each other very well," Nhora said, standing by the balcony windows, tracing an interior pattern of raindrops with one fingertip.

  "No."

  "I can see you look at me—one moment approving, the next comme ci, comme ça. All right. Did you think like all the rest, that I had no business marrying Boss?"

  "No, because I was happy for him. You made him happy."

  "And he made me happy. If you can believe that."

  "It isn't hard to believe. Whatever men thought of him, women were—"

  "Mesmerized?" Nhora smiled. She had a slightly prognathous appearance transformed by good humor, and heavier, brows than I care for in a woman, but she was never without sensuous appeal. Her cat's eyes, the exact leaf-green shade of the robe she was wearing, had very large pupils; her eyes softened all the strong planes of her face. No, I wasn't starry-eyed as all that. The day after we met, we butted heads. Oh, he liked me in a rage! I was always on my toes anticipating what must come next, and wrong so often, fooled but not made a fool of. Do you know what I mean?"

  "I was raised that way. You had a crash course."

  "But I was never just a daughter to him. There was that part of it, for both of us. Why not? There was everything else besides."

  She blurted those words and hid her face briefly. "I don't know where to go now," she groaned. "I don't know what to do."

  I heard real terror in her voice. "You're one of us now," I said, and meant it. "Boss's death hasn't changed that."

  Nhora looked around at me. "We were only married a year. I don't feel that I belong. Not at Dasharoons."

  "A part of Dasharoons is yours. A one-eighth share, I think. If you remarry there'll be a reasonable cash settlement, around three hundred thousand dollars—"

  Nhora shrugged, hands dropping to her sides. "But that's meaningless
. Thanks to Boss I have money already. Dasharoons is yours now, and Nancy's. As it should be. I'm only trying to tell you—do you know what sort of life I've had? My father was a French civil servant with high ideals who ate his heart out in Equatorial Africa. My mother came from Boston; she was one of your high-flown romantic souls, a little bit beautiful despite her bones but bloodless as a moth, and never an ounce of purpose in her life. We drifted through exotic places, playing to each other, reading poetry aloud on lizard-infested terraces. Oh, God, can you imagine? Mother married again and again until we were cheated of everything except the small legacy my grandparents put away for me. I came of age just in time to save my sanity. I settled in Paris to study architecture; six months later the Nazis arrived. One gloomy, miserable night I stepped ashore in New York from a little tramp steamer, everything. I owned packed into one suitcase. Boss all but carried me off that pier—I was too terrified to take a step on my own. Bless the man! Dasharoons is the only real home I've known."

  "And I need you there," I insisted. "With Nancy."

  "Yes—but—what about you, Champ?"

  "I'm a soldier, Nhora. All my life I've been prepared to fight a war."

  "A war for Boss's sake!" she said, too shrewdly for my liking. "You don't need his approval anymore. Who's going to look after Dasharoons?"

  "Our foremen have always run the plantation. We'll suffer from a loss of manpower, but Boss saw the war coming three years ago and began changing over from mules to machines . . ."

  Well, I'd made Nhora's point for her. It was foolish to deny there would be difficulties without Boss, and I knew if I requested it I could be reassigned from cavalry to a post closer to home, such as Camp Joseph T. Robinson, for the duration of the war. No one would think any the less of me, but my career as a military officer would proceed in low gear—no battlefield promotions, no quick rise to the star I coveted. I had always taken comfort in the knowledge that Dasharoons would be there when I wanted it, after I'd had the opportunity to prove myself. I was not ready, as Boss had not been ready when tuberculosis ended his career, to settle down to the life of a gentleman farmer. Boss had applied his restless nature to a considerable literary engine and a capacity for political machination, eventually doing himself proud. I was less inspired to write, not his equal at gamesmanship and disinterested in forums.

  Nhora was both right and wrong about my motivations. I needed war because without it I faced a predictable course: reward without struggle, a sameness of days. and events to dull the heart, and—much worse—should I allow myself to concede even a part of my ambitions at this time, the slow but consuming rot that would surely proceed from a blemish of self-indulgence. And I needed war because I was convinced that in the fulfillment of battle I would understand at last what part of Boss I really was. I had to prove to myself that I was superior to the brother who had run away in shame—and the brother who, unable to sustain belief in himself and his high promise, had gone berserk on his wedding day.

  I tried to explain to Nhora. She proved to be a good listener, an absorbed companion. As the clock ticked and the hour wore down to midnight she encouraged me to reminisce about life at Dasharoons, perhaps taking comfort in the fact that for 121 years, through deaths and all manner of disasters, Dasharoons had grown and prospered. It was literally a sovereign state within a state.

  "Boss even fought his own war," Nhora said. "The colored uprising. What do they call it—?"

  "Outside the family they call it the Chisca County War. But we've tried to put all that behind us."

  "Do you remember anything about—Boss's War?"

  "I was only six at the time. I remember the guns firing, the burning, the screams—it went on all night. The tragedy is that so few of our nigras were actually involved. Boss had sixty men armed and riding. Next day he took me to the field where the bodies had been laid out in rows under canvas. Forty-eight dead. Their women were everywhere, weeping, trailing behind cotton wagons loaded with bodies and creaking along the road from Chisca Ridge. It was a pitiful sight, the sore remains of a pointless rebellion"

  "Not a rebellion—they weren't slaves."

  "Whatever you want to call it."

  "And that was the day Beau left Dasharoons."

  "After smashing Boss full in the mouth with a rifle butt. You've seen the scars."

  "Yes," she said, looking faint. She went to the bathroom for a glass of water. Rain hit the window glass in salvos. Nhora came back and sat on the carpet near my chair, legs tucked beneath her. There was a side slit in the robe through which a good part of her left leg was revealed. Nhora casually masked this openness by the positioning of her arm.

  "Would you like some water?" she asked.

  I was still dehydrated from the whiskey of the night before. I took the glass from her. The rim tasted faintly of her lips, a natural sort of sweetness. The clock ticked. Tired but unwilling to separate, we stared at each other, gravely curious.

  "Do you think Beau's dead?" Nhora asked me.

  "Most likely. It's been almost twenty-two years without a word or a sign."

  "But Boss believed he was still alive. He said that his flesh and blood couldn't die anywhere in the world without his being aware of it."

  "Beau was the firstborn. The favorite. After he left, no one in the family was allowed to mention his name, much less talk about him, in or out of Boss's hearing. I'm surprised Boss told you—"

  "He trusted me," Nhora said, a bit harshly. "He would have told me everything about Beau, when the time was right."

  We sat a while longer, ignoring time, which collected us regardless, mote by mote. The dead were all collected. Only the meaning of their deaths was missing.

  "What was Clipper like when you saw him last?" I asked Nhora.

  "At the rehearsal dinner? He was—tense, rather tired, I'd say, overextending himself to be hearty. He seemed to wish he were somewhere else. I think he and Corrie had a cloakroom spat, but it didn't amount to much."

  "Less than twenty-four hours later he killed her."

  "Champ, it was obvious how much he loved Corrie!"

  "It's how he did it that troubles me most. All along I've believed that Clipper just ran amok. But he was much too deliberate in murdering Corrie. With his saber he might have dismembered half a dozen of his attendants. He did cripple one boy who was interfering, but another he struck with the flat of his saber to get him out of the way. Yes, because he intended to kill only certain people. Mad as he was, there was a plan behind it—"

  "Dear God, you can't be serious!"

  "Nhora, he went directly for Boss, and Nancy. Nancy surely would have died if I hadn't pushed her aside. Here's something else I don't understand: Twice Clipper had the advantage, either time he could have killed me with a stroke. But he acted as if he didn't recognize me. And of course everyone, including Clipper, believed I wouldn't be there in time for the wedding."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "The second time I was flat on my back on the altar, half-blind from the dust of the plaster that had fallen. The point of his saber was against my collarbone. 'Not you,' Clipper said. 'Not here.' I took him literally, thinking there was some lunatic reason why he didn't want to spill my blood on the altar. The truth is, as far as Clipper was concerned I wasn't there at all. I wasn't an entry in his bloody cotillion program."

  "But—then—it sounds almost as if he were drugged."

  "Or in a psychotic seizure similar to hypnotism. Obviously Clipper intended to destroy every member of the family within his ken. If you'd been in your place beside Boss and Nancy—Sheer luck we weren't all lined up in that pew waiting for him to come down on us like an angel of death."

  "Why?"

  "There's no way we'll ever learn the answer to that."

  "I'm not so sure. Did he keep a diary?"

  "I don't know. Boss encouraged him to."

  "All of Clipper's things are in a bedroom on the third floor," Nhora said.

  The small guest room under the e
aves was chilly. There was firewood in a brass chest on the hearth. Nhora helped to get a fire going. The sound of rain was loud on the roof. We searched Clipper's belongings for the diary we presumed would be there. I felt sickened by this violation of my brother's privacy, though it couldn't matter anymore. But it was late and I was more frightened than I could say of emanations, the unexplained. I was obscurely, conscious of Clipper's haunting displeasure in the room. Despite the fire, Nhora's teeth chattered intermittently, and her hands when I touched them in the course of our search seemed clammy. She tried to smile and hunched her shoulders. I put an arm around her and we paused, not speaking, to catch our breath and take heart.

  And we found a diary, under lock and key in a strongbox.

  Nhora sat beside me on the bed as I turned pages, each beautifully calligraphic. Clipper's diary was detailed and intensely personal, but in a totally unexpected, shocking way. There was little in these pages of his achievements at school, no thoughts that revealed how he felt about the direction his life was taking. He seldom mentioned Boss, or Dasharoons. Hunting, riding, football were ignored. What he had chosen to write about were his sexual adventures. It was difficult to believe he could have been so active in the two years the diary covered, with such a variety of young girls—ranging from one whom I knew to be just fourteen years old, to mature, for the most part married, women.

  As soon as I realized what I would be reading over and over, I tried to close the diary. But Nhora stopped me. "No," she said. "Keep reading. All of it. Don't you see how important it is?"

  I didn't see, but we continued to read together. He spelled the Latin words badly, but most of it was couched in readily understandable English. I couldn't keep track of all his conquests. The girls Clipper's age or younger were named and described with scatological relish. They were from all parts of the country: poor black girls from Dasharoons, socialites from Sweetbriar. From some of his accounts it was plain that girls who had resisted him were raped. The compliant ones, those who appeared many times in his feverish chronicle, had been subjected to gross indignities which Clipper apparently believed they enjoyed.