She would drop no matter how urgent a piece of work to correct his drawing, cut out something for him, answer his endless questions, whittle or glue something or hold her finger on a knot. Even so, she enjoyed accusing herself of neglecting him for her own pleasure so she might atone by reading to him an extra half hour in bed at night without suspecting she was spoiling him. Her own pleasure! Those of us whose relations with her husband did not include our wives, and who were thus a matter of indifference to her, those of us, I say, who were not worth her hysterical gaiety, remembered that at twenty-five, having no one for whom to care to make herself as attractive as possible, she had looked over forty. The pastimes and the talk of women had seemed to her frivolous; books, moving-pictures, and songs all lies designed to blind girls to the realities of life. Busy with her work and occupied with the child, teaching him to talk and then to read and write, a process that inspired her with the feeling of aiding at a miracle, she lived in a world enclosed by her house and garden. She had discouraged her few and always rather distant schoolgirl friends, and her mother’s visits became infrequent. She did the formal entertaining that was necessary to her husband’s place in the world, and felt, as she listened to her guests, that they spoke of things happening in another world, to another race.
We were burying a woman of rare attainments. She had studied to keep up with the boy’s interests, which were intense, passionate, and short-lived. When he took up nature-lore, plant-and insect-collecting, she memorized long lists of Latin names, helped mount and label the specimen ferns and moths and butterflies. When he dropped that for kites in the spring she helped make his big box kites that were the envy of all the other boys, who had only flat kites. Then it was stamp-collecting and she learned odd bits of history and exotic geography, learned of the insurrection of Bela Kun, the invention of Esperanto, the outlandish names, such as Tanganyika and Bechuanaland, of all the British Protectorates, and knew how many annas make a rupee and about watermarks and perforations, commemorative issues and first-day covers, and knew stamps by their Scott numbers. Then it was model airplanes and she suffered with him at first at the difficulty and was disappointed when one after another they failed to fly. Together they studied how to better them and she helped cut out the tiny stamped balsa wood parts, got callouses on her fingertips from pushing the pins into the drawing board to hold the delicate parts and the flimsy strips of wood in place on the outspread plans. When he got expert at putting together the ones that came in kits, she studied with him the mathematics of aerodynamics and together they designed planes of their own. One they worked on for almost a year had, when finished, a wingspread of seven feet, and on the test flight her heart beat with his in pride, anticipation, dread. She held the long, graceful fuselage, a triumph of weightlessness, while with a hand drill fitted with a hook he wound the rubber motor. They watched it climb, soar, catch an airpocket, and lift its transparent skeletal redness high and free into the April sky. To follow it they had to get the car. It stayed aloft an hour and six minutes and came to a perfect three-point landing in a field five miles from where they had launched it.
She learned to tie Boy Scout knots, memorized the Morse code, learned to make crystal set radios, learned the Periodic Table when it was a chemistry set that absorbed him.
She had disapproved of none of his friends, believing him proof against any bad influence, and had been rewarded by his choices and pleased that though he had many friends, he depended on none.
6
He ought to know she had been crazy, we finally persuaded the “Doc,” and not be too surprised at what he found here. Even Hot-shot had now lost some of his big-town weariness-with-it-all, and came over to watch the proceedings more closely, and taking note we all had our hats in our hands, even removed his sailor straw.
It did not take long for the casket to reach bottom. There was a settling sound, something like a sigh, and the ropes went slack in our hands. We stood up, drew the ropes out and coiled them slowly, and though there was really nothing more to be done, everybody stood for a while, looking at the open hole, thoughtful and still, so that you heard a locust chirring somewhere nearby and the flat scream of a jay.
Habit, it must have been, just the feeling that you could not leave it at this, more than any particular regard for Mrs. Hannah herself, after all these years, that caused what happened then. We seemed all to have moved gradually nearer the brink of the grave. Roy Merritt, one of those who had helped with the coffin, suddenly bent down and picked up a clod of the fresh earth and held it over the hole and slowly crumbled it in his fist and let it sift through his fingers. You could hear it pattering hollowly on the lid of the coffin like a light rain on a roof. When Roy had done that, another of the pallbearers did it too. And then, one by one, a number of those up close did the same. Hot-shot remarked that he had thought she did not leave any kin.
“She didn’t,” said somebody, in a tone that would have told anyone else to mind his own business.
“Oh,” he said. “Kinfolks of his, huh?”
Of course he did not know what he had said. But tell that to one of those men with some reason to be touchy on the subject, one of those we have come to call “one of the Captain’s Company.” Or, for that matter, to any of the rest of us. For it was all so much a part of us that it did not seem in the least far-fetched for him, a total stranger, who had never seen the Captain alive or ever heard the rumors which instead of dying down have multiplied in the years since his death, to have noticed a strong family resemblance among a number of young mourners there, in their late teens and twenties now, ostensibly the children of all assorted kinds of looking fathers, yet all with that same sharp and slightly hooked nose, same hard jaw with the muscles always nervously at work in it, the same brown skin and stiff black hair and black eyes—dominant characteristics, as the biologists call them, especially remarkable among a homogeneously sandy, freckled lot of Scotch-English like us. As somebody said there, after the stranger’s blunder, repeating the old quip somebody in town made years ago, “It’s a wise child who knows his own father was not Captain Wade Hunnicutt.” While another, looking around him as the dirt was being dropped into the grave, his eyes picking out especially one boy the spitting image of the Captain—the very ghost of Theron himself—said, there was never a man of whom such a live memory had been kept as Captain Wade.
Some left after that, but as many stayed and watched the Negroes shovel the old dirt into the hole. The strangers might have gone, and the Doc was for it. Their job was done, and they had miles to make in that hearse. But they were on the expense account and could stay over if they wanted to, and Hot-shot seemed to have had his eye out and found a couple of cute little reasons why a smart fellow from Big D ought to treat himself to a night in our town. Besides, for the moment his curiosity was aroused—lot of good it did him.
“Say, men,” he said in a familiar tone, taking in the three stones of the Hunnicutts with an inclination of his big head, “what is all this anyhow?”
Nobody answered him.
“What did she mean by that—only child of just her?”
Nobody spoke. He seemed to suspect he was being cold-shouldered, and this determined him to show us he could figure out a thing or two on his own. “Wasn’t he”—pointing towards the black stone—“the kid’s father?” Still nobody spoke. He must have taken this for resentment at his getting warm. “So that was it,” he said. “Christ! That’s one hell of a thing for a woman to want cut on a stone for people to see, ain’t it? Even a crazy woman.”
He got no rise, nothing but cold looks. Then we thought we would give him just one little piece of information to take home with him, and told him that underneath that white stone in the middle no body lay, that indeed to this day schoolboys on their way home who dare one another to walk across his “grave” are of half a mind that Theron Hunnicutt is still alive.
He whistled softly and waited for us to go on. We did not. So he reverted to his other topic. “I get
it,” he said, again nodding towards the stones. “That black stone. Black! She musta hated him, boy! She didn’t care if it meant she had to give herself away into the bargain, so long as it meant people would know he wasn’t the father of his own child. Christ! She was something! She was crazy, wasn’t she? Say!”
He was so pleased with his explanation, we let him keep it.
7
We had had a somewhat similar thought once ourselves. He was awfully close to his mother when he was growing up, and we worried sometimes that he might be turning out a mama’s boy. It was just the kind of trick and the Captain just the kind of man you would expect fate not to overlook—to make the only son who bore his name turn out to seem the one in whom he had not been concerned.
And certainly in one respect he was not forward in taking after his father. That was the difference Mrs. Hannah had in mind in choosing their respective monuments. Gray, at least, rather than black, might have been better suited for the Captain’s; but white, signifying innocence, was no doubt right, even then, for Theron. For wasn’t that just Theron’s trouble, just what led to everything, his innocence?
He could do this, for instance, when he was seventeen:
One Saturday afternoon that summer he rounded the northeast corner into the square, when a boy his age named Dale Latham, whose hatred he had unconsciously earned by his odd combination of innocence and manliness—innocence which the manliness had already given him so many fine opportunities to lose (Dale had seen them; Theron himself had not)—was suddenly provoked by the sight of him to violate the respect which even he and his gang, the smart ones, the ones with their own notion of manhood, who loitered outside the drugstore on Saturday afternoons, affecting to despise the boys who hung on the edge of the circle of hunting men, had so far kept towards Theron Hunnicutt. Dale Latham sauntered out and confronted him and said—but with a huskiness that robbed it of some of the sarcasm and most of the swagger he had meant it to have, “Why, hello there, Theron. How’s the old cocksman? Getting much lately?”
The sound of this and the look on Theron’s face were as much as was needed to assemble the beginning of a crowd, for a fist-fight somewhere on the square was the main event of every Saturday afternoon, and everybody was always on the alert for the first sign. So Dale Latham bolstered up the smile that had begun to droop somewhat faced by Theron’s stare, and because he had not heard quite the volume of snickers he had counted on from his gang at his back, and repeated (he had no shadings in his sarcasm, and even for an audience could not embellish his simple text, he could only italicize) “Been getting much? I said.”
He found himself stepped around carefuly, like some community cur, and looked upon with an expressionlessness that drove him wild.
“I guess you don’t know what I mean,” said Dale, thinking this to be about the worst taunt he could offer. Dale was suffering from half a suspicion that the little girl who had failed for so long to be very much impressed with him was secretly longing for Theron Hunnicutt. This alone would have been bad enough, but the thing Dale could not forgive was that Theron did not even know, much less care, that he had been preferred to him. Theron was moving away, and Dale, suspecting now that he actually disdained to fight him, called out, “You’re yellow.” This did not stop Theron, so Dale added, “And so’s your old man.”
Somebody in the crowd laughed loudly. Theron stopped, laughing himself, and turned to see who had done it.
It brought an approving chuckle from the crowd, which made Dale glower and turn red. His effort to find something clever to retort was visible on his face. The only quarter in which he seemed to find any support was his gang, so to them he said, nodding towards Theron, “He still thinks it’s for peeing through.”
And the next thing Dale knew he was sitting on the sidewalk with his legs straight out before him and his back against the wall of the drugstore which had suddenly been bared for his backward passage, and he was sucking a gap from which two teeth had smiled out at him in the mirror as he snapped on his ready-tied bow tie before stepping out downtown that noon.
Was it any wonder then that it had changed our tone considerably when, a couple of years before that incident, the Captain first brought Theron in to sit with us on the corner of the square? It was rather as if he had brought Mrs. Hannah. Other boys had moved in from the fringes and taken their places among the men, and most of them, in the beginning, had seemed disappointed and embarrassed and would look down, look away and pretend not to have heard, when the passing of some girl would put a stop to the hunting talk and bring out a coarse remark. But from the start, with Theron Hunnicutt there, such things were seldom said. It was not merely that we sensed the Captain would not like it, or more obscurely, that Mrs. Hannah would not have. It was also because the boy himself made us feel ashamed to do it, and this he did not so much by making us feel that he was too good, as that we ourselves were. Shyly, delicately—since praise to the face is open disgrace—he let us know what we had meant in his life, and it came out bit by bit that we, a more mortal lot than whom you would have to go far to find, had all figured to him as a kind of assembly of lesser gods surrounding that god of a father of his. He told us stories about ourselves, stories in which we were heroes, most often things we ourselves had long ago forgotten and never had seen much heroic in; but listening to him tell it over, with his dark, humorless, intense young face, you got the feeling that you had looked pretty good on that occasion, and that it was something memorable. It was a little like reading about yourself in a book, an old book, in old-fashioned and formal language full of words that amused and yet pleased and at the same time embarrassed you a little just because they both amused and pleased, words like courageous, valiant, even fortitude, even steadfast, words he got from his reading in Scott, Marryat, Cooper, and Southern historians of The Lost Cause. When he told you of a time when you had been more courageous, more loyal, more valiant than you knew perfectly well you ever had been, it shamed you into resolving to live up to his notion of you in future. In that boy’s stories you always came off well somehow, bigger than lifesize, even when it was a story on you; if you were a fool, you were an epic fool. He made you feel you had taken it too much for granted, being a member of this fine body of men like yourself. You did not want to say or do anything that would hurt his regard for you or the fresh regard he had given you for yourself.
You could not help liking him—even if he was conceited. And he was conceited. He was not brash or smart-alecky, not show-off. He did not have to impress his self-assurance on others to know he had it. He just took things for granted, as he took for granted right away that his rightful place was among the hunting men. He felt he still had to prove that right, but to prove it only to them. Of other men, and of all boys his own age, he was unconscious. He was not disdainful of boys his age—just unconscious of them. And he did behave very grown-up. At twelve he had all the certainty of a crown prince as to precisely what his role in life was to be, and he judged from the example of his father, down to the smallest detail, exactly how he would fill it. It gave him a kind of miniature pomposity, but you could not help liking him. For one thing there was that earnestness of his. Even for a boy, he took things seriously. Because of his strong sense of the high expectations held of him, he had a time forgiving himself for any mistake he made. And though not so hard on others as on himself, he made high demands on others too. What made this appealing, as well as just a little touching, was that so far as he could see as yet, nobody fell short of his high demands. Narrow and intolerant, as boys will be, he could feel pity, but he could not separate it from contempt. He could not feel very much pity for someone and go on thinking of him as a friend. Oh, he was conceited, but not so conceited that he could pardon in others what he could not pardon in himself.
And he was humorless. He could be sold the most useless things told the most outlandish lies; then, too trusting to believe it or too proud to admit it, had to be told he’d been had. He was subjected to all the
old as well as hundreds of spur-of-the-moment pranks, sent after a pint of pigeon’s milk, a left-handed monkey wrench, etc.—that sly leg-pulling, that mountain-style April-foolery that seems all the more delicious the hoarier the device by which the victim is taken in. He could take it and come back for more, had a bottomless fund of trust, and did not harbor any resentment. But instead of being let off because of his spirit, being such an unwearying sucker—irresistible, with those big credulous black eyes and solemn face—he was put through the whole bag of tricks, the entire accumulated tradition. And so one day on the square we began to talk about snipe hunting. God help us now, him dead at nineteen and not even at rest in his grave, but when he rose to the bait that day we looked at each other in unbelieving delight: Lord God, he hadn’t even heard of that one!
Dick began it. “Been snipe hunting any time lately, Bob?”
“Snipe hunting! I golly!” exclaimed Bob. “Naw, Dick, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say. You?”
“I been thinking of going. Just haven’t got around to it somehow or other.”
“My, I haven’t been on a good snipe hunt in I don’t know how long!” said Bob, while his eyes clouded over with fond memories.
Then Dick, with a squint at the weather, said, “Good snipe day today if you ast me.”
“Why, yeah. This is snipe weather.”
Said Dick, “You ’member the time we—”
“Haw! Do I! That was a time!”
Then after a little silence, Dick said, “Well, what do you say to it?”
Bob looked around at the men, not seeming to see the eager, hopeful boy near him, and said, “Any you fellows be interested in going on a snipe hunt?”
“Why,” said Joe, “I was hoping you wouldn’t leave me out.” And George, “Count me in!” And Ben, “I’m game.” And Hank, “Can I come, fellows? I ain’t been snipe hunting in years.”
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