Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  The barbecue pit—eight feet long, three wide, and six feet deep, to judge by the mound of dirt alongside—had been dug the day before; the fire had been lighted and through the night fed half a cord of green hickory, so that now a close view gave you the sensation of looking into the crater of a live volcano. Two tall slingshot-shaped poles had been driven into the ground at the ends of the pit.

  At seven a.m. six men brought the boar down from the garage. He was spitted on a length of water pipe to which at one end was fitted a crank. The ends of the pipe were lowered into the crotches of the two posts. The carcass sagged over the fire. The skin at once puckered and shriveled in the heat, and in another moment the fat began to drip onto the coals, sending up little explosions of smoke.

  Then down from the house came two more assistants carrying a washtub between them. Behind them came Chauncey in a chef’s hat made from a grocery sack, carrying a floor mop over his shoulder. The tub seemed to be full of fresh blood; it was the barbecue sauce, Chauncey’s recipe, famous at every Juneteenth, as the Negroes call Emancipation Day, for thirty years. He dipped the new mop into the tub, and while a boy turned the crank, gave the boar his first basting. When he was turned belly-up he was seen to be stuffed and sewn with wire. Some said he was stuffed with the parts of a dozen chickens, some said with a barrelful of sausage meat and bread crumbs. Chauncey smiled knowingly; he wasn’t saying.

  The hunters were there, with their boys. They squatted on their hunkers around the pit. They wore the same farmer’s favorite single-breasted dark pepper and salt suit with a fresh ironed shirt, either blue denim or chamois cloth, collars buttoned but tieless. Their pants were heisted to preserve the crease, revealing one after another pair of shapeless gray cotton socks. Their shaven jowls looked like the hide of a fresh-scalded, fresh-scraped hog.

  There was a bottle there already, too; or rather, a good many bottles, two or three in circulation, and a lot more, said Hubb Lewis, where those came from: underneath the fabled false floorboard of his car, which had been driven down to the barbecue pit despite the presence of the Sheriff there. For our county was dry. But the neighboring one was wet, and the Sheriff would wait for Hubb at the county line on nights when there was no moon, and take out after him as he crossed over. Only, if the Sheriff had a new V-8 with an aluminum rear-end specially built-in for speed, Hubb had a standing order with the Ford dealer for the Sheriff’s old car when he traded it in on a new one every year. It would be around 3 a.m., and they had the road to themselves, so they would tear along at ninety-five and a hundred and across cotton fields and pea patches at not much less, as Hubb tried to shake him—the Deputy Sheriff handling the county car while Sheriff Tom took potshots with his .30-30 at the glow from Hubb’s exhaust pipe. He claimed he never really meant to hit, and it was no doubt true: he would have been sorry to see any harm come to Hubb; Hubb that he couldn’t have hit him if he had been sitting stock still. Sometimes the Sheriff caught him, confiscated his liquor, and threw Hubb in jail for a few days; then when the liquor was gone and he was bored and had got to miss chasing him and Hubb had won all his money at spit-in-the-ocean, he turned him loose. They admired each other and were not unconscious of together constituting a legend. Now the Sheriff claimed to have known Hubb was running this load last night and to have let him through, not wanting to spoil today’s fun and because he was getting dry as a rope himself. He lifted the bottle, and his Adam’s apple made two long hauls up and down. He lowered the bottle, became aware of the admiring and incredulous gape of a little boy standing near and said, “Boy. Never touch the stuff,” laying a broad emphasis on the word touch. He wiped the lip on his sleeve and passed the bottle on.

  Pritchard was talking:

  “He’d just about run the feet off of us, so we hit the hay early. I aimed to get up a little ahead and get a bite of breakfast and make us some dinner to take. Well, I turned over once, and the next thing I knew the rooster’s crowing for day. I jumped out of bed and run in and lit the stove and put the coffee up. Then I washed my face and combed my hair and put my clothes on while the oven was getting hot. Then I went out to Theron’s room, where he was sleeping, and tapped on the door and said, ‘Time to get up.’ He never answered me, but I never thought nothing about it at the time. I figured he’d turned over for a last wink. Well, I went back to the kitchen and laid the table. The coffee was perking by that time and the biscuits beginning to smell. I made us up a batch of sandwiches—still no Theron. I didn’t want to embarrass the boy by having to call him a second time. Besides, he was probably up all right, just taking his time, was all. Well …”

  This was about the fifth time he had told the story that day, and each time he spun it out in added detail, to the delight of his listeners.

  “Yes. Un-huh,” said Ed Dinwoodie. “You tell that story about twice more and you’re going to have yourself believing it, Robin. We know how you was aiming to get up a little ahead, don’t we, men? Truth is, you never slept a wink all night, now ain’t it so? I bet you you just about wet the bed when you heard Theron get up. What was you aiming to tell him when he came knocking at your door—that you had a bellyache, or what? Boy-oh-boy, it must have seemed too good to be true when you heard him leave the house. Did you get out of bed and look out the window to make sure he was gone, or did you just hide your head under the covers?”

  “Listen. Listen. I was there the first day, wasn’t I?”

  “You was, and so you had good reason for not wanting to go back again, I grant you. We’re all your friends here, Bob. We understand. You don’t have to be ashamed of yourself in front of none of us. Ain’t that right, men?”

  “Well, since he went to the trouble to make up his story, he might as well go ahead and tell it,” said Ned Tayloe.

  “Go ahead. Go ahead. But before you come to the part where you first laid eyes on that big ole hog old Theron had killed, here—” passing him the bottle—“fortify yourself a little,” said Ed.

  “Makes that un of yores look like a regular little shoat, Cap,” said a man standing beside him at the pit.

  “And the runt of the litter, what’s more,” said another.

  And in keeping with this, of course they both claimed to have known at once which was which of the two trophy heads now hanging in the den. This caused the Captain to share a smile with Theron, who stood at his side.

  The carcass had hung in cold storage minus its head all week, and everybody pretended indifference to the fate of that inedible portion. Theron thought he knew pretty well that it had not been thrown out with the leavings.

  Then at breakfast this morning his father had said, “Let’s all have coffee in my room,” and Theron knew what to expect.

  When the door of the den was thrown open, they saw the two boars’ heads glaring at each other down the length of the room. They entered, and after a moment, feeling his father’s eyes on him, Theron strode down to look at the new one. He sensed that he was alone and, looking around, saw his father still at the door, his mother standing undecided in the middle of the room.

  “It’s hard to tell one from the other,” she said. There was sufficient trace of disappointment in her voice to embarrass Theron for her.

  “Apparently,” his father replied. “That’s mine that Theron’s looking at.”

  He ascribed to Chauncey the decision that the place of honor over the mantel belonged to the new one—with a delicate emphasis on the new—not the bigger, not the smaller—not lost on Theron.

  And to Theron, it was neither bigger nor smaller. He joined his mother and father in the middle of the room, and from there, having both in view, equidistant, to him it was like looking at a stereograph.

  “Full-grown ones,” his father volunteered, again in that off-hand tone, for Theron so full of intention, of understanding and affection—in a word, of fatherliness, “must all run about the same size.” And there came to Theron that sense of identity with him that he had known first that memorable morning years before, on their
first hunt together, when he had tried to steal the jump and shot the first squirrel and then saw that his father had foreknown this impulse to be his own man, had known every impulse he would feel. In the vision that had come to him then in the vast silence of the woods in which they were alone together, he had seen his father as just such a boy, making the same mistake—if so universal an impulse could be called a mistake.

  “You’ll make us both proud,” was the Captain’s reply to his two guests at the barbecue pit, and in those words Theron felt again the deep affinity between them.

  He had felt it most keenly in the den that morning when his father showed his understanding of how little the big mounted head meant to him now, when, turning to the old bureau and reaching into the top drawer, his father had said, “And now here is a trophy for your room,” and pulled out a tiny plaque, shaped like the large two, on which was mounted the curly tail of the boar.

  They laughed together, and then turned together back to his mother, in time to see her put out an arm to steady herself, reel and stagger against the wall beneath the boar’s head.

  The boar had leapt for the last time.

  “I never knew,” she murmured to neither of them, and seemingly not to herself either, as, between them, they held her up. “I never knew.”

  The taxidermist had done a skillful job. She had seen those burning eyes level at her son and flash with murderous cunning, and then, as the beast hurled past her towards Theron, had seen them flash cunningly at her, as if in recognition. And then she saw those gleaming yellow tusks red with Theron’s blood.

  19

  Standing by the barbecue pit the Captain watched his son depart to circulate among the guests, and he thought, more than a little embarrassed at himself and laying the blame for such poetry to Hubb Lewis’ rye whiskey, that a boy had two births to go through: he was delivered from his mother, and then (for convenience the world had fixed the date at age 21) he had to deliver himself from his father. It was not easy to become your own man. It was a rivalry with your father in which you hoped with equal fervor to win and to lose.

  The Captain’s thoughts turned to himself. The day had brought him a realization and some mixed feelings of his own, and it did him almost as much good, he found, to tell himself that his was a problem all men had as it would have done Theron. What the Captain wished for just now was someone to talk to, though he did not know what he would have told the person. He had never been what is called an outgoing man, and ordinarily he felt no need to share his feelings. But then, ordinarily he was not so full of feeling as he was today. Just what he felt, he could not decide, and his confusion also he would have liked to account for by Hubb’s whiskey. He ought to have felt good, and he did, but he was impatient with himself for feeling anything more. He was proud of his son, proud of himself in his son, and he always enjoyed playing host, and not since his marriage, not even then, had he been host to so many as he would be today, and not even then had the occasion been more auspicious. He was pleased at his largesse and glad to think of all the people whom it would make gay. But he had no one with whom to share even his good feelings. And extending the metaphor over which he was already sufficiently embarrassed, he thought that that second delivery, like the first, was painful for the parent, too. He had mused proudly on being the father of a grown man; it had led him to feel old.

  The Captain knew that these rather selfish feelings somewhat accused the sincerity of his impulse to be with Hannah, and he suspected that this rare husbandly instinct of his was just a trifle boozy. Nonetheless he felt it—an urge to be with his wife, the one person whose emotions at this moment must be the same as his own. That her feelings might not be identical with his own hardly occurred to him. Hadn’t she and he the best reason in the world for being in identical moods just now? Thinking of Theron would have led her to think of him, as it had led him to think of her. Besides, the Captain had never learned that the world was not somehow telepathically in time with his moods. He needed cheering up so seldom that it seemed to him little enough to expect the world to be waiting when he did. He felt, as he set out to find her, in a forgiving and forgiven mood towards Hannah. From emotions more complicated than his usual, the Captain always took refuge in the wish simply to forgive and be forgiven. Forgiven what, it did not seem necessary to specify. He felt he made up for this by relinquishing his right to list particular trespasses against him.

  He tried to be honest with himself, not pretend that his wish to be with his wife was unselfish. Now as he searched without catching sight of her in the crowd, he found, somewhat to his consternation, that his desire for her company was sincere and urgent, and he found too that he was cold sober, could blame nothing more on Hubb’s liquor. He knew that Hannah had done nothing to make him change his feelings about her. He knew just what those feelings were. They were what a man ought to feel for his wife: respect. Nothing urgent about that. He wanted to be honest with himself about this, too, and not enlarge upon his feelings to make them grand.

  “Haven’t seen my wife, have you?” he asked a man.

  “Why, no. Not in the last little while.”

  He asked another, and that one replied, “Why, yes, I seen her a little while ago. She was with your boy, standing over yonder by the house.” And then the man said, “Is anything wrong?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing wrong. I was just looking for her, was all.”

  20

  “How was your girl?” said his mother to Theron.

  “She is not ‘my girl.’ She’s the girl I’m taking to the dance, that’s all.”

  “That’s all I meant to say.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is she a nice girl?”

  “For all I know.”

  “She’s a pretty girl.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You suppose.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want me to bring an ugly one?”

  “What color eyes does she have?”

  “Gray,” he said. “They’re the kind,” he added hastily, “that you can’t help noticing, that are paler than the face. You know the kind I mean.”

  She smiled at his little giveaway, but it was hard to smile. Yet she knew she was torturing herself unnecessarily. Libby Halstead was just the girl he was taking to the dance. He deserved a pretty one. But the occasion made this seem his first really serious date, and, said the words that had sounded in her heart all day, the first of many, the start of his final growing away from her.

  Though not religious, Mrs. Hannah, like all women of her place, had a mind stocked with scriptural tags, mostly of the bleak and grim sort, and the text that had occupied her thoughts all day was, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” Oh, she did not expect him to elope with this girl. But after this girl, another, others, and in time the one who would take him from her. She had seen how the girls all looked at him today. He was good-looking. He favored his father. She granted that. She could allow herself to, for she believed that there the resemblance ended.

  She said, “I didn’t know you knew how to dance.”

  He laughed. “I don’t,” he said.

  “Does she know that?”

  “No. I’ll have to get her to teach me. Do you think she’ll mind very much?”

  “Mind? Why, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Oh, now, cut it out.”

  “It’ll be worth it—having the hero of the ball, even if he can’t dance.” Then, “Why didn’t you ask me?” she said, no longer in a bantering tone. “I’d have taught you.” But she knew why he had not asked her. Two reasons: it had never occurred to him that she knew how—she was not sure she did anymore; and he had wished to spare her. It was ungrateful of her not to allow him to, but she did not wish to spare herself.

  She watched him go. Until now, she thought, he had seen himself only in the eyes of men. Today, and during this past week, when he had been the town hero, he had begun to catch reflections of himself in eyes into which
he had never bothered looking before. He had been slow about girls, backward for his age, and it had been a blessing to her. He had had a contempt for girls. She knew what it came from. Though certainly there was some of that in it, it was not altogether from boyish notions of manly seriousness and dedication. His pride had been affronted by girls. Their transparent little wiles and coy inferences had worked perversely on him. She had seen him being solemnly insensitive to the hints and come-ons of more than one. He resented their assumption that what worked on all other boys was bound to work equally well on him, that he was so little the master of himself that a sigh or a flutter of the eyelids was enough to melt him, make him forget everything for which he lived. But he was not her little boy anymore. She was not worried that he would do wrong. Her worry, if it was a worry, was that he would do right. Theron was the marrying kind. She could not wish it otherwise, but she could not help regretting that it was so.

  “Oh, Hannah! There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  It was Wade.

  She gave him her attention with difficulty. “Have you?” She had just remembered the old saying, My daughter’s my daughter all the days of her life, but my son is my son till he gets him a wife. “What was it?” she said.

  “What was what?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘What was it?’” he said.

  “Did I? Oh. Well, you said you were looking for me. What did you want me for?”

  “Oh. Oh, it wasn’t anything in particular. I just didn’t see you anywhere. Wondered where you were.”