Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  “I was here,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Having a good time?”

  “You are, I can see. I mean smell,” she said.

  “Oh, now. On a day like this?” he said. “Besides, I only had—”

  “It must have been plenty to make you wonder where I I was,” she said.

  She could not have been more surprised at herself. That she should have uttered such words to him in any tone at all, sardonic or bitter, was incredible; her tone had been neither of these; it was hurt, there was a suggestion of a pout in it, even supplication. Was she entreating him for attention?

  If he had responded with any mawkishness she believed she might almost have hit him. Instead he said, “Maybe you ought to have a little for once.”

  “I just may,” she said.

  “This is the day for it,” he said.

  “Yes, this is the day for it,” she said. He was proud, she thought, pleased with himself and with the celebration. How different from her mood. She felt a premonition of loneliness like an ague coming on.

  “How does it feel,” he said, “to be the mother of a grown man?” But he ceased listening to himself as soon as he began to speak. What he was thinking was, why had this woman alone failed to love him?

  She said nothing. He moved closer and he put his arm around her shoulder in a gesture of awkward and ungentle friendliness, such as men show for men. It disinfected the embrace for her, and she permitted the arm to remain. His words had given her a need for close company—even his. She could not be choosy.

  He said, “Hannah, I was looking for you because I had something I wanted to tell you.”

  Whatever it was caused him some little difficulty. He hesitated, and to her chagrin she felt something faintly stir in her heart. Quick as always to suspect herself, she wondered was she, after all, merely another of his creatures, and the most abject, that when he clapped her on the back, as he might one of his cotton-pickers or hunting companions, after twenty years of neglect and abuse, she could feel anything at all. Had she no pride? No memory?

  “And that is: thanks. Thanks, Hannah. For everything. You have been all a man could ask for in a wife.”

  She ought to have resented it, and out of loyalty to herself, she tried. All that a man could ask for, and ask and ask, she thought, while he gave what in return? But though she despised herself for her weakness, the candles she had lighted upon the altar of her resentment had been blown out by a gust of loneliness. She knew what had brought him to this, and she ought to have resented that too. It was the day, not her. He was grateful in his shallow way for the comfortable home she had made for him, for bringing up his son and heir a credit to him. Probably he dared even be grateful to her for not making trouble about his pleasures. Probably he dared to think she ought to be grateful for his gratitude. But maybe his gratitude ought to content her now. There were women who did not have even that. Maybe what her mother had always said, that as he grew older he would change his ways, was coming true. It was not love he offered, but it was peace of a kind, and she thought of the prospect that faced her soon, of living in the house there alone with him after Theron was married and gone. And maybe she had expected the wrong things, had asked for too much, little as it was. Maybe what she had had was what a good marriage really was. Women envied her, knowing all. Maybe they were right, after all. Maybe the other things, the things she had missed, never came, came only in books. One thing she had had: her husband’s respect. And she had had this certainty: that he did not respect those other women. How long could she go on pining for things that over the years had grown vague and dim even to her? Young hopes and the pain, the bitterness that came when they went unfulfilled—wasn’t she old to nurse them still? She felt like a traitor to herself, but she was starved for a little affection.

  “You’ve been a good father to my son, Wade,” she said. It was an admission that cost her little. It was so. And she did not deny him credit for concealing his deplorable side from Theron. But then she felt a nagging suspicion that she had not been as generous with him as he had been with her. And then she saw again in her mind the gray, bristling head of the boar. Out of resentment of Wade she had driven Theron to expose himself to such danger, to possible calamity. No, she had not been as generous as he. With almost a shudder she pressed herself to him. “Our son,” she said.

  21

  Chauncey punctured the ham with the long skewer and slowly pushed it all the way in. He drew it out and a trickle of red juice followed it. He straightened, took off his apron and folded it up, took off his chef’s hat and yelled:

  “Come an git it!”

  A longer pipe of smaller diameter was slipped through the one on which the boar was spitted. Three men squatted at each end and got their shoulders under it and lifted.

  Theron was suddenly grabbed from behind. He felt many hands on him. He felt himself lifted off his feet. He was raised above the heads of the crowd, then lowered onto the shoulders of his father and Pritchard. His mother smiled up at him. They fell in behind the men carrying the boar, and the procession started up the hill.

  Jokes were shouted up at him; he could catch only occasional words amidst the yelling. Boys were cavorting alongside the marching men. Someone began singing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. All joined in, pausing in stride and raising their voices each time for the drawn-out note on fe-el-low, then marching quick-step to which nobody can deny. Once he felt a squeeze given his leg and looked down to see his father winking up at him.

  He was borne through the crowd of women and children on the lawn to the head of the table and seated on the only chair. The men carrying the boar stood waiting. When Theron was seated, they heaved all together and raised it above the table and lowered it in front of him. The table creaked and sagged. Pritchard reappeared, bringing a comic set of carving tools. The knife and fork were three feet long, made of lath and covered with tinfoil. Theron made a pass at carving with them. He bore down, frowned, felt the edge of the knife with his thumb. Pritchard said, “What’s the matter? Dull?” He took the knife and disappeared with it into the crowd. In a moment he was back with a genuine carving set. “Ground it down a little,” he said.

  Smoke arose, and the liberated juices welled up when the pink ham was sliced into. A hum of hungry approval went up. When Theron had placed slices of meat on the first two plates, Pritchard grabbed them. People yelled, “Here! Hey! Just a minute there! Where do you think you’re going? Women and children first!” But holding the plates above his head, he pushed through the crowd. They fell back, revealing Deuteronomy and the Plott bitch chained to a tree. Pritchard rested one plate on his forearm and shook out his pocket handkerchief and tucked it into Deuteronomy’s collar for a bib. Then he set down the plates for the two dogs—who, however, found the meat too hot and too spicy. He got a roaring laugh.

  There was a merry din. The Negroes were serving potato salad and beans and olives and cole slaw and pickles. Bottles were being opened, and children who had not yet learned to drink from the bottle were choking on sodapop. Beer, jostled, foamed over onto trousers, splashed shoes. There was a great deal of loud talk, jokes yelled over heads, much laughing and some crying.

  Manners remained good until after the women and children were served. Then the men and boys crowded and pushed against the table. Two Negro men had taken over the carving of the meat, but Theron insisted that every plate must pass through his hands. The flashing knives and forks of the two carvers worked as steadily as two pairs of knitting needles, and Theron had all he could do to serve the stuffing and hand out the plates and keep up with them. Naturally some were offended by the cut or the size of the portions they were served. These, however, were not so deeply offended as those who were kept standing while time after time Theron passed them over and gave the plate to someone else. And there was a consistency in it: he simply did not see any but the men he was accustomed to find in the circle of hunters on the square, and some fairly uncouth swampers among them wh
om he saw seldom enough there. So long as they were hunting men. Otherwise it might be the mayor himself or the president of the bank or the most respected Christian in town, but for Theron they were just not there; the only men who existed for him were the hunters. The poor Baptist minister, whose summer revival-meeting tabernacle chairs had been borrowed for the day, after standing right in front of Theron (where the other men, out of respect for his calling and guilt that they did not otherwise honor it much, had pushed him), timidly holding out his hand for every plate, finally got served at all only because Captain Wade saw his plight and came and served him.

  Polite little spoonfuls were left at the bottom of the tubs of potato salad and cole slaw, a few crumbs in the potato chip cartons, a few squashed deviled eggs on the platters. Coffee was brought out in steaming milk pails, served in paper cups. Everyone had ice cream. Then those with cows waiting past their time to be milked, and women with infants and some with husbands to be put to bed, took their leave and went home.

  Others probed the carcass further. They ate until dark, then lanterns were strung and still they ate, rested in talk, then ate some more. When the dance band arrived, the carcass was a skeleton.

  22

  Sometimes when the sight of his wife reminded Albert Halstead that time was not standing still, and his mind turned for comfort to thoughts of his posterity, he was cheered by his prospects in having such a daughter as Libby. How well a beauty like that might marry!

  She seemed especially attractive this evening; though no sooner had Mr. Halstead made that observation than his habitual apprehensions set upon his mind. Reclining in his armchair in the living room (which he was conscious he would soon have to vacate for Libby and her date), he observed his daughter as she observed herself in the hallway pierglass. She was looking especially attractive, and thought so herself, no matter how much she might pout at her reflection or how dissastisfied she might pretend to be with her mother’s efforts to do some last minute something, down on her knees, her mouth bristling with pins, to the hem of her gown. Mr. Halstead had not yet put to himself the question, why she was in a party gown, a new one, if he was not mistaken; nor yet the question, why she was taking such very especial pains with her appearance this evening. Both questions were present in his mind, awaiting his attention; but he was not going to acknowledge them before he just had to. He said to himself again, “How well she might marry!” and at once, despite all his practiced efforts, he thought “—if only she isn’t ruined first!”

  He had come near to escaping this apprehensive hopefulness, this tantalizing dread, almost had had no daughter and still could not comprehend how he could have had such a burdensomely beautiful one, considered it a mockery of fate masquerading as a boon. A man who never did anything, who had desired of life nothing but lack of notice, who had welcomed growing old because it was expected of the young that they make a show of passion, he had married late and sensibly a woman his own age, who for ten years blessed him with barrenness, a length of time sufficient to permit him the feeling that a hazardous corner had been safely rounded, whereupon, among other things he did, he bought a house with a mortgage the payments on which would otherwise have gone toward a college trust fund, only then, just then—the timing of the ironies of life was so tauntingly pat—to have his wife up and conceive. Not quite a Sarah, she must still have had the help of God.

  But, middle-aged and about to become a father, even Albert Halstead had felt foolishly happy. What man will not alter his ideas of himself for the sake of a son to gladden his declining years? Quite unconsciously, Mr. Halstead had slipped into thinking himself slated for some little reward for having asked so little of life, and the chance that it just might be a girl-child did not occur to him. He could not conceive himself as the father of a daughter. What place had an infant daughter in the life of a middle-aged man? What place had an old father, he asked himself now with undiminished wonderment, in the life of a near-grown one? It had been an agony of embarrassment to him to have to wheel the perambulator down the street; when the child began to grow, its beauty was an added embarrassment. Not that he suspected it was not his (for Albert Halstead was free of vanity, of illusions, about his wife), just that it drew still more amused attention to him. To the joke of his being a father at his age was added the joke of his being the father of such a little doll. Not, of course, that anybody ever said that to his face, and not that his vanity would have been wounded if someone had. He was not vain. He knew he was not young and that he never had been handsome. He did not mind not being young and handsome. He minded looking foolish.

  All that he had asked for had been a little peace and quiet for his last years. He had seen them attended upon by a wife sensible of the comforts he had provided and grateful for having been spared any demands upon her passions. He would not have minded a daughter, either—but one of those like some men had, who, if no source of dynastic daydreams, was no source of worry either, whose every thought was for the comfort of the author of her being, a mute wraith, always on tiptoe, his slippers or a hot water bottle in her hand. Instead, he had not even a room, not even a chair he could call his own, but must put himself out like the cat at night so some young blade could have his living room to spark his daughter in. He had been willing to give the threescore to the world, so he might have the ten for himself, and now in his old age (he was sixty-three) his house was infested with boys like drones swarming to a queen bee.

  Better that, however, than evenings when instead of a parlor date she went out on one, he said hastily to himself. For, a fatalist and superstitious, Mr. Halstead had a terror of being overheard complaining. And indeed he was punished now. For now the question of the gown his daughter was wearing and upon which his wife was expending herself demanded his notice. That was a party gown. You did not have parlor dates in gowns like that. She was going out. Where? To the dance at the Hunnicutt house. With whom? He named over some of her recent beaux, not knowing, as he never did, whether he hoped tonight’s was a new one, and thus one who could not have made much time, or one of the old ones, thus one who might be serious, which is to say, one with honorable intentions. For whom was she taking all this unusual trouble?

  Albert Halstead tried to be an honest man, above all honest with himself, and on one point he was even more successful than he wished to be: not from him, he knew, could his daughter have inherited the strength of character to resist all those boys. (And if not from him, certainly not from her mother!) It was not that he considered his daughter especially susceptible; he did not consider his suspicions to reflect on Libby herself. It was not a question of whether she was particularly susceptible, but that she was not as particularly unsusceptible as she would need to be with her looks, and men being what they were.

  He was thinking how the spreading of his daughter’s wings had made all men, especially those between 18 and 25—the non-marrying age—his enemies, made him fear them in proportion as they also raised his hopes, when the doorbell rang. He shuddered. He never had given his daughter the lectures he believed he owed her. He had always been ashamed to. His suspiciousness was vaguely a reproach to his manhood; moreover, he recognized, without being able to change, that he took it to absurd, to comical lengths. He had allowed himself to be uneasily comforted by the supposition that his wife would have given her the customary motherly talking-to about boys; but occasionally he put to himself the disturbing question, how much impression would any talk of his wife’s have made on him?

  For a moment his two women froze in their attitudes before the glass. Then Libby let out a shriek, heisted her skirts, and dashed up the steps two at a time. Her mother scrambled up from her knees and followed after, leaving him, who feared and mistrusted all boys, who always felt like the man in The Lady or the Tiger, to open the door and welcome this boy who might be the one to marry her … or the one to ruin her.

  Theron knew Mr. Halstead, as one knew most everyone in town; not well, since there was no particular connection between th
e Halsteads and his parents, and not otherwise, since Mr. Halstead, being the father of a daughter, was no hunter—but to speak to.

  But Mr. Halstead seemed not to know him, not even to speak to. At least, Mr. Halstead did not speak, but stood at the door gaping at him. He supposed he did look different from the way people were used to seeing him, in a dress suit, a new dark brown flannel one, white shirt and tie, dress shoes, new ones that shone, and carrying, like a flower preserved in a block of ice, an orchid in a cellophane box. “It’s Theron Hunnicutt,” he said.

  “I see it is,” said Mr. Halstead, who saw all too well. He was aghast. This boy of all boys Mr. Halstead had reason to fear, and on this day of all days to mistrust. There was not among Mr. Halstead’s social needs any longing for a local aristocrat to exempt from the daily claims made by the world upon himself; he feared guns and was morally shocked by anybody, no matter how little need he might have for getting on in the serious business of life, who allowed some hobby to become his whole existence. Mr. Halstead had a middle-class hatred of all the so-called quality—who took rights unto themselves, especially the right to their neighboring subjects’ women-folks. Oh, he knew him, all right, and it did not make Mr. Halstead feel more hospitable to observe the ease with which he had made the transition from gentleman-hunter to well-dressed young man, to see that he was good-looking, or rather, to see that women would think so. Especially today. For Mr. Halstead knew too what day it was. How could any girl resist him on this day, his day? That any girl would have to resist him Mr. Halstead did not even think to question; for he knew Theron Hunnicutt, all right—that is, he knew Wade “The Captain” Hunnicutt.

  “I’ve come to call for Libby,” said Theron.

  “Have you?” said Mr. Halstead.

  The tone of this was somewhat disconcerting. “Why, yes, sir. To take her to the dance.”