When he had recovered himself, he said, “Well, perhaps you know best, Miz Hannah. Perhaps the best way to cure him of this craze of his is to indulge him in it.”
She disliked having anyone presume to understand her motives, especially when he came near the mark, and she disliked having anyone discuss her son at all, except to praise him, especially to dare prescribe for him. And she resented his word craze. But she said, “I am glad you see it that way, because I have told him he needn’t go back at all this semester. Or in fact ever, if he doesn’t want to.”
“Not go back at all!”
“Not go back at all. If he doesn’t want to.”
“But he’s within a year of graduation! Why, there’s a compulsory education law in this state!”
“He is over the age. But if there is any unpleasantness I know I can count on you to take care of it for me.”
She rose.
“Melba,” she called.
He got to his feet.
“Thank you so much for dropping by,” she said.
The night before she had been sitting in the parlor with Theron when Wade came in. He was early and she wondered with long-accustomed bitterness what had brought him home, when, passing their door, he said, “Son, I’d like to have a talk with you,” and continued down the hall to his den.
Not only did her curiosity demand to know what this was about, but she was also instantly nettled that he should have anything to discuss with Theron that he wanted her not to hear—something, moreover, already existing between them, already excluding her. For Theron showed no surprise at this summons; a look of understanding passed over his face as he got up from the couch. Resentment mounted in her as she listened to his steps going down the hall and as she heard the den door close behind him.
She got up and went out into the hall and stood looking down it at the closed door. What was the meaning of it? She hesitated, ashamed of the impulse, only for a second; then slipping out of her shoes she tip-toed down the hall.
She knelt, and peering through the keyhole saw a scene that maddened her. Theron sat hunched up in the fireside armchair, looking abashed, ashamed, contrite—miserable; while his father stood on the hearthstone facing him with his hands behind his back and his legs spread, looking stern, disapproving, shocked—paternally disappointed. How dared he! He—with all he had to be ashamed of! She did not yet even know what it was over; perhaps something for which the boy deserved his part in this classic father-son scene. It did not matter; she could not abide it. For, though she herself could be firm with him, the idea of his father’s reprimanding him was intolerable to her. She rose and laid her hand on the doorknob. Then she saw her stockinged feet.
She went quickly back along the hall. Her fingers trembled so with anger at what she had witnessed that she could not get the second shoe on. While she fumbled she heard the door of the den open and heard Theron, in a small, humbled voice which swelled her heart with pity and indignation, say, “Yes, sir.” Then she heard him coming along the hall. She jammed her foot into the shoe and ran to her seat. He looked her way as he passed the door and gave her a sickly smile, then averted his eyes. She started up, but stifled her question. She would not ask him, not force him to confess whatever ignominy he had been put to. He passed on and she heard his foot on the stairs, a heavy humbled tread, then his feet and legs came into view and she watched them ascend out of sight.
Her disarming, hot befuddlement abated, and, tempered by determination, she reached the door in iron control of herself. “What has happened?” she demanded, shutting the door behind her.
He was squatting on the hearthstone, poking the low fire. He twisted about and looked up, trying to smile. “Happened? Nothing,” he said.
“If it’s nothing then it wasn’t worth keeping from me,” she said.
He stopped trying to smile. He turned back to the fire and give it a final jab, then stood up and returned the poker to its stand. He faced her. “Well,” he said, “it’s something that Theron would be happier if you didn’t know about until you have to.”
“He’s not in the habit of having things he would rather I didn’t know about,” she said.
The firelight leapt up, yet seemed actually to darken the room, withdrawing it still farther from the early dusk remaining out of doors. He did not answer at once, but stepped to the endtable beside the armchair and switched on the lamp. Still bent, his face close over the lampshade, he squinted at her and said, “This was something both of us thought you might as well be spared until you had to know.” He flushed. “Why will you put a man in the position of having to tell you he has tried to be thoughtful of you?”
By way of reply she sat down and folded her hands, waiting to be told all.
He leaned against the mantelpiece and said, “Well, Jim Statler came to see me this morning. He says Theron is failing in every course in school. He’s not doing the work, and he’s been playing hookey. To go hunting, of course. Jim has spoken to him about it, but it hasn’t done any good, and now he’s so far behind there’s no hope of catching up.”
Somehow it added to her irritation to see that he was genuinely distressed over it. She half admitted that this was sheer ill-will, and knew she would have been much more irritated had he seemed not to care. But as it was, it violated an exclusive right she felt she had earned. She had fretted over Theron’s hunting, the danger, the absences from her it meant, his single-minded absorption in it. It was rather late for him, Theron’s model in it, to commence to worry. But it was not mere perversity that caused her now to take the opposite side from her husband; for the boy’s sake she was capable even of agreeing with him. She said, “He shall be taken out of school tomorrow.”
“Now don’t get mad at the school because he’s failing,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” she repeated.
There was no heat in it. He saw she was cold sober. She meant it. “Well, this is funny,” he said. “Anybody would have expected it to be the other way around. I thought this would bother you even more than it does me.”
Bother her that her son was failing in public school? It was simply another proof of Theron’s superiority. She had always considered school a waste of his time—had indeed, as she later told the principal, looked with no great disapproval on his occasionally skipping for his sport. She was not exactly opposed to the cultivation of the mind, but she did think it was definitely middle-class. Education: the acquirement of useful knowledge. What use did a gentleman have for that? He could buy brains, could buy the industrious grubbers after knowledge. Oh, she had encountered people who were education-proud, and knew that snobbery for what it was: sour grapes for the lack of gentility and birth. A gentleman was idle, spent his time hunting. Why should he go to school along with every till-keeper’s son and learn arithmetic to count pennies?
There was just one thing that might have kept her from her present course. Unfortunately, as even she had to admit, the embodiment of her ideal, certainly Theron’s model in it, was his father. But finding him, as he himself had just said, on the opposite side of the matter from what anybody might have expected was suddenly exciting. Hunting was what Theron had shared with his father. Now his father had reneged on him. It was an opportunity to make hunting something Theron owed to her.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“I won’t try to deny my share of responsibility in it up to now, but this is your doing. I’m against it.”
“That surprises me,” she said, and he took her meaning.
He said quietly, “I’d like my son to be better than I am.”
“He is better than you,” she said. “In every way.”
“Do as you please,” he said. “But remember that I was against this.”
“My doing. Yes,” she said. “Don’t you forget it.”
It hurt her to think of Theron alone in his room, humbled, ashamed, miserable at the prospect of her finding out, of having to go back to the school he detested. To think that he had suffered in the be
lief that she would be disappointed in him, that he had suffered still more—as she knew he would—at having to conceal anything from her. Not to be able to come to her with it, when something had hurt him! She would go up at once and set his mind at ease.
Poor kid, he must be feeling pretty low, thought the Captain. How miserable he had looked, hunched up in that chair! Too miserable to see how unconvincing a job his father was doing with his part in the act. He had not lacked sincerity of conviction; but “do as I say, not as I do,” supported by no matter how much earnestness of belief, is a sermon not to be orated without some feeling of warmth around the collar. He wanted the boy to profit by the mistakes he had made, to unlock and pass through doors that had been closed to him. And he would see to it that he did. This interruption was temporary, and meanwhile it was impossible for him to be quite as unhappy about it as he might have been had Theron’s truancy been from any other cause. Hannah amazed him. Let him live to be a hundred, he would never understand Hannah. But understand her or not, he knew how to appreciate her. You would not find many women who would go so far in understanding what a thing like hunting could mean to a boy his age. It would be a load off Theron’s mind to know she knew, much less to know how she had taken it, and that he need not go back to school but could take a long holiday in the woods. However, it was going to puzzle him, the way his father had reversed himself—or been reversed by his mother. A child liked consistency in his parents, and according to the Captain’s views, liked to see the father the master in the house. He knew how much the boy looked up to him—so much so that sometimes it got to be rather a burden. Perhaps he had better go up there and break it to him himself. That would be better than hearing it from his mother. It would be a pleasure anyway. If he desired to save face, he could in all honesty say that in this case that was no selfish motive. Surely a son did not enjoy seeing his father lose face.
Hardly had she knocked when the door flew upon, and there, instead of the dejected boy she had imagined, stood one rapturously happy. He flung both arms around her, grabbed her up and swung her feet off the floor and spun around with her into the room, laughing and thanking her in between loud kisses he planted on her cheeks and neck. She had been anticipated. He had taken all the credit. Theron’s thanks were for allowing herself to be persuaded against her inclination. She forbade herself to say anything, but it was another drop in her already brimming bitter cup.
To Mr. Statler’s amazement, the affair presented no problem whatsoever to his school board; nor was their decision in doubt for a moment. Unanimously they agreed that Theron Hunnicutt was to be given an “Incomplete” rather than a “Failure” for his work of the year and to be given a legal excuse from school attendance for the rest of the term and until such time as he got ready to come back, and in reply to Mr. Statler’s plea for a reason to give the County Superintendent, one member said, “Simple. Excused on the grounds he wants to go hunting.”
“But how in the world,” said another, “are we ever going to keep the other boys—our own among them—in school after this?”
We all spoiled him, you see. Small wonder if he took to a fault what no one around him thought could be one, or that he grew narrow and proud and intolerant, in a place where even the womenfolks felt that no man was a man who was not a hunter.
12
So he stayed out of school and hunted that year, did nothing but hunt—ate, drank and slept hunting. He went with his father and without him, with other hunters and alone—more and more alone, for he was going deeper and deeper into Sulphur Bottom now, and the company of any other man than his father was a care and slowed him down.
She would watch him leave (he had his own car now, a new Ford, black like his father’s—and sometimes when he passed and a man plowing in a field straightened and shaded his eyes and waved, he suspected he was mistaken for his father) and, “Get the limit,” she would call out.
That was the winter when for weeks the Captain was telling everybody high and low about the boy’s hitting a quail he himself had shot at and missed. Mrs. Hannah came to resent that story. He told it too often to please her and seemed too amazed at both halves of it, at his missing the bird and at Theron’s hitting it. But once he stopped telling the story, that dead bird became hers.
“Get the limit,” she would say, especially if he was going alone, and often she would add, “We’re having the So-and-so’s over to supper Friday night and you know they never get much wild game and would just love some—” whatever it was he was going after: quail, squirrel, duck—venison, now. She would count on it, she would say.
He would advise her to have a few steaks in the icebox, or else would simply thank her drily, whereupon she would say, “For what, dear?”
“For speaking as if all you have to do is just place your order, like with the butcher. Papa is not going with me, remember.”
“I know that,” she would say.
“Well then, don’t count on it.”
“I could count on him.”
“Yes, Mama. That was my point.”
“Mine too.” And then, “Well, remember the time he missed that quail and you killed it.”
It was no use explaining to her that he had missed that bird trying to do something that few men could do and that he could do just about every time—that he had already brought down one bird on that flush, that the one he missed had been his second shot on the rise. It just happened to have flushed out his way. It irritated him, for as a matter of fact he had made much prettier shots than that.
She would stand in the driveway and wave and watch until he was out of sight, and her heart yearned after him. She was not demonstrative, though she would have liked to be, was by nature. The first time she saw him shrink from her goodbye kiss, she cried. She told herself it was a stage he was going through, the boyish embarrassment over sentiment, over being mothered; still she cried. But thereafter, though it caused her an ache of heart that no amount of usage ever remitted, she fell in with his ideal of mother-son relations—a kind of rough friendliness, good fellowship, without any “syrupy sentimentality.” First it had been a gradual ceasing ever to kiss goodbye, then good night; now he never kissed her, never put his arm around her. She never saw him now but what he was making hurried preparations to leave again. His rough life was coarsening him. She feared him and did not dare complain. Moreover, she had only to see Wade occasionally shake his head in disapproval when Theron came in late, wet, bramble-torn, only to set out afresh, to make her forget her own unspoken complaints. If she owed this to no one but herself, then she must believe she was happy with it.
And he did bring home the limit. When he handed them to her, she would smile knowingly and say nothing. And she did have the So-and-so’s over and fed them off his game.
It was yellow woodlands first, for squirrels. Then with the first silvering snaps of frost, the brown uplands for birds, woodcock and quail. Every farmer in the county came to know the rapid, nearly single, double bang of his little Parker 16, and his shrill whistle, blown through his forefinger and thumb, to the dogs. Most often it was land of his father’s, the farmers his tenants; but when it was not it never occurred to him to ask permission to hunt on it, any more than it occurred to the owner to think he should. With tenant or owner he always left a mess of game at the end of the day.
When the birds were gone, it was down into the flats and marshes after wildfowl, waterfowl—raw days of whistling winds black with rain, days spent huddled in a blind, a pit dug into a frozen sandbar covered with a dripping tarpaulin, or a hut above-ground wattled of cattails, his neck craned, stiff, aching, as he watched for ducks or, occasionally, a perfect V spanning the sky of great gray-brown Canada geese. You were allowed to use live decoys in those days, though he had reached the point where he probably would have if they had been outlawed, and he sat and listened all day to the whip of the wind and the splash of rain upon the tarp and, from time to time, like a chain of firecrackers going off, the traitorous quack of t
he decoys luring the wild birds to his gun.
When the duck flights petered out, he went back into the woods—bare now—after deer. He was a week without firing a shot, sitting dawn to dark perched in a tree, near saltlicks, near water, along trails, the rifle across his lap, rattling two sets of antlers together like two bucks fighting over a doe, and it was so cold the chattering of his teeth almost matched the racket of the horns.
He picked his buck, passing over half a dozen, as carefully as a housewife picks over all the butcher has on display for the tenderest young fryer. He had gone in for finesse. His squirrels were all shot clean through the head. His quail were hardly ruffled and had never more than three or four pellets in them to annoy the eater, for he took them upon the very edge of the shot pattern.
He hunted out of legal season now, unable to restrain himself, unable to quit when closing day was past, confident that no game warden would dare stop him, and moving too furiously, too fast, to hear the voice of his own conscience. And by degrees he had become a game hog. The crop was good that season: hunting of the kind we don’t get anymore. One day late that fall he wore out three brace of dogs and came in with sixty-one quail, upon which he had expended exactly three boxes—that’s three times twenty-five—of shells. Now it was his birds that Chauncey distributed through the town—only Theron, unlike his father, did not designate their recipients, didn’t care who got them, just told him to get shut of them before they went bad.
Then it was the dead of winter, when even the illegal, the natural season was over and there was no game. The squirrels denned up, the birds withdrew into the thickets, the ducks migrated on south. Yet the change of season brought him none of that hunter’s sense of identification with the year, of fulfillment, of rest after harvest, as it had in the past. Something drove him on, back into the barren fields, the sleeping woods, and it was not the pursuit of pleasure. It had ceased to be a pleasure to him. Formerly a day afield, the smells of the earth, the satisfaction of watching the dogs at work and the sense that he had taken part in their training, that he was now a part of the smooth, precise team they made, a good shot or two plus a few exciting, near misses, and then tired, happy, with a good bag at night, the quiet pride in his father’s look—the sum of these things had been pleasure, the one pleasure. Now a kind of urgency had come over him. He was more intolerant of errors in the dogs and in himself, was furious that a single bird escaped him. Yet the old thrill throbbed less intensely when over the barrels he saw the blurred streak crumple and drop.
Home from the Hill Page 8
