Still sucking his fingers, the boy looked once more at the men whitewashing the stones. They were almost at the gate. He didn’t need to wait and ask. His father was not crawling among them.
Later that day, passing along a street in a strange and lonely town, he saw a man dump a box of trash into a barrel. He noticed that a large brown-backed book went in with the trash. He waited until the man went back into the building and then took the book from the barrel. It was a book of stories about what people think. There were titles such as Cruelty, Excellent Men, Education, Cripples, Justice, and many others. The boy sat down, leaned back against the barrel, and began to read from the story called Cruelty.
I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty, and I have found by experience that malicious and inhuman animosity and fierceness are usually accompanied by weakness. Wolves and filthy bears, and all the baser beasts, fall upon the dying.
The boy was trying to read aloud, for he could understand better if he heard the words. But now he stopped. He did not understand what it said; the words were too new and strange. He was sad. He thought books would have words like the ones he had learned to read in the store signs, words like his mother used when she told him stories of the Lord and Joseph and David. All his life he had wanted a book. Now he held one in his hands, and it was only making his bruised fingers hurt more. He would carry it with him anyway.
He passed a large brick schoolhouse with big windows and children climbing on little ladders and swinging on swings. No one jeered at him or noticed him because he had crossed the street and was walking close up against the hedge on the other side. Soon the painted houses ran out, and he was walking past unpainted cabins. He always felt better on his travels when he came to the part of town where the unpainted cabins were. Sometimes people came out on the porch when he passed and talked to him. Sometimes they gave him a piece to eat on the way. Now he thought they might laugh and say “What you carryin’, child? A book?” So he held it close up against him.
“That’s a school too,” the boy said to himself as he stood facing a small unpainted building with its door at the end instead of the side, the way cabin doors were. Besides, he could always tell a school because it had more windows than a cabin.
At the side of the building two children were sloshing water out of a tin pail near a hand pump. One threw a dipper of water on a dog that came from underneath to bark at the boy. The school was built on posts, and a stovepipe came through the wall and stuck up above the rafters. A rusty tin pipe ran from the corner of the roof down to the cistern where the children were playing.
The dog had gone back under the building, so the boy entered the yard and moved toward the children. If one of them would work the pump handle, he could wash the dried blood off his hand. Just when he reached the cistern, a wild commotion of barking burst from under the floor of the school. Half a dozen dogs, which followed children to school and waited patiently for lunchtime scraps and for school to be over, burst from under the building in pursuit of a pig that had wandered onto the lot. In the wild chase around the building the biggest dog struck the tin drainpipe, and it clattered down the wall and bounced on the cement top of the cistern. With a pig under the building and the dogs barking and racing in and out, the school day ended.
Two dozen or more children raced out the door, few of them touching the three steps that led from the stoop to the ground. Some were calling the names of dogs and looking under the building. The boy found himself surrounded by strange inquiring eyes. Questions came too fast to answer. “You new here?” “Where you moved to?” “That your book?” “You comin’ here to school?” “Kin you read that big a book?” The boy had put his bruised hand into his pocket so no one could see it. Some of the children carried books too, but none were as big as the one he held close against his side.
Just when the commotion was quieting down, a man appeared at the schoolhouse door. The children scattered across the lot in four directions. “Tell your pa that he must keep his pig in the pen,” he called to one child.
Then it was quiet. The boy looked at the man in the doorway. They were alone now. The dogs had followed the children. And the pig, hearing a familiar call from the corner of the lot, had come grunting from his sanctuary and gone in the direction of the call.
In his many journeyings among strangers the boy had learned to sniff out danger and spot orneriness quickly. Now, for the first time in his life away from home, he wasn’t feared. The lean elderly man with snow-white hair, wearing Sunday clothes, came down the steps. “This pipe is always falling,” he said as he picked it up and put it back in place. “I need to wire it up.”
“I just wanted to wash my hand. It’s got dried blood on it where I hurt my fingers.”
“You should have run home.”
“I don’t live in these parts.”
“Here, I’ll hold your book, and I’ll pump for you.” And the mellow eyes of the man began to search the boy for answers, answers that could be found without asking questions.
“We need warm soapy water,” the teacher said. “I live right close. Wait ’til I get my papers and lock the door, and I’ll take you home and fix it.”
The boy wanted to follow the man into the schoolhouse and see what it was like inside, but by the time he got to the steps the man was back again, locking the door. “I usually put the school in order after the children leave,” he said, “but I’ll do it in the morning before they get here.”
At the edge of the school lot the man took the road that led away from the town. They walked without much talk, and the boy began to wish the man would ask him a lot of questions. When they had passed several cabins, each farther from the other as they went, the man turned off the road and said, “We’re home. I live here alone. Have lived alone for a long time.” Fingering the small wire hook on the neatly whitewashed gate which led into a yard that was green, the teacher stopped talking.
A cabin with a gate and green grass in the yard is almost a big house, the boy thought as he followed the man.
Inside the gate the man went along the fence, studying some plants tied up to stakes. He began to talk again, not to the boy, but to a plant that was smaller than the others. “You’ll make it, little one, but it’ll take time to get your roots set again.”
The boy looked at the white-haired old man leaning over like he was listening for the plant to answer him. “He’s conjured,” the boy whispered to himself. “Lots of old folks is conjured or addled.” He moved backward to the gate, thinking he’d better run away. “Conjured folks can conjure you,” the boy’s mother always said, “if you get yourself plain carried off by their soft spell-talk.”
But before the boy could trouble his mind anymore, the man straightened up and began talking to him. “Some animal dug under the roots and tore them loose from the earth. It was wilted badly and might have died. But I reset it, and I water it every day. It’s hard to reset a plant if it’s wilted too much; the life has gone out of it. But this one will be all right. I see new leaves startin’.”
“What grows on it?” the boy asked, thinking it must be something good to eat if somebody cared that much about a plant.
“It’s only a flower,” the man said. “I’ll water it when the earth has cooled a little. If you water a plant when the earth is too warm, it shocks the roots.”
Inside the cabin the man started a fire in the cookstove and heated water. As he washed the boy’s hand with a soft white rag he said, “You musta slammed these fingers in a awful heavy door or gate.” Before the boy could answer, the teacher began to talk about the plant he must remember to water.
He don’t wanta know nothin’ about me, the boy thought.
“When I saw your book, I thought you were coming to enroll for school. But you don’t live in these parts, you say.”
“I found the book in a trash barrel. It has words like I ain’t used to readin’. I can read store-sign words and some newspaper words.”
�
�This is a wonderful book,” said the teacher. “It was written by a man named Montaigne, who was a soldier. But he grew tired of being a soldier and spent his time studying and writing. He also liked to walk on country roads.”
The teacher lit two lamps. The boy had never seen two lamps burning in the same room. They made the room as bright as daylight.
“People should read his writings,” the man continued. “But few do. He is all but forgotten.” But the boy did not hear. He was thinking of a cabin that had two lamps, both lit at the same time, and two stoves, one to cook on and one to warm by.
The man sat in a chair between two tables that held the lamps. There were books on the tables too, and there were shelves filled not with pans and dishes, but with books. The mellow eyes of the man followed the boy’s puzzled glances as they studied the strange warm world in which he had suddenly found himself.
“I will read you a little story from your book.” The boy watched as the fingers of the man turned the pages one way and then the other until he found what he wanted to read.
“This is a very short story about a king named Cyrus, who wanted to buy the prize horse that belonged to one of his soldiers. Cyrus asked him how much he would sell the horse for, or whether he would exchange him for a kingdom. The soldier said he would not sell his prize horse and he would not exchange him for a kingdom, but that he would willingly give up his horse to gain a friend…. But now I have told you the whole story so there’s no use for me to read it. ”
“You’ve been a powerful good friend to take me in like this,” the boy said at last. “My fingers don’t hurt no more.”
“I am your friend,” said the man. “So while I heat some water to soak your hand and make your cot for the night, you tell me all about yourself.”
“I had a father and a dog named Sounder,” the boy began. …
VIII
“WHO’S BEEN KINDLY to your hurts?” the boy’s mother asked as she looked down at the clean white rags that bandaged the boy’s fingers. Rocking on the porch, she had seen the white dot swinging back and forth in the sun when the boy wasn’t much more than a moving spot far down the road. “For a while I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “Why you walkin’ fast? You done found him? Is your hand hurt bad? Is that a Bible somebody’s done mistreated?” The woman’s eyes had come to rest on the book the boy held in his good hand.
“No. It’s a book. I found it in a trash can.”
“Be careful what you carry off, child,” his mother said. “It can cause a heap o’ trouble.”
“I got somethin’ to tell,” the boy said as he sat down on the edge of the porch and ran his bandaged fingers over the head of the great coon dog who had stopped his jumping and whining and lay at the boy’s feet with his head cocked to the side, looking up with his one eye. The younger children sat in a line beside the boy, waiting to hear.
“Is he poorly?” the woman asked slowly. “Is he far?”
“It’s about somethin’ else,” the boy said after a long spell of quiet. “I ain’t found him yet.”
The boy told his mother and the children about his night in the teacher’s cabin. The teacher wanted him to come back and go to school. He had been asked to live in the teacher’s cabin and do his chores. The children’s eyes widened when they heard the cabin had two lamps, two stoves, and grass growing in a yard with a fence and a gate. He told how the teacher could read and that there were lots of books on shelves in the cabin. “Maybe he will write letters to the road camps for you,” the mother said, “ ’cause you’ll be so busy with schoolin’ and cleanin’ the schoolhouse for him that you can’t go searchin’ no more.”
“Maybe I’d have time,” the boy said. “But he says like you, ‘Better not to go. Just be patient and time will pass.’ ”
“It’s all powerful puzzlin’ and aggravatin’, but it’s the Lord’s will.” The boy noticed that his mother had stopped rocking; the loose boards did not rattle as the chair moved on them.
“The teacher said he’d walk all the way and reason about it if you didn’t want me to come to him. You don’t want me to go, but I’ll come home often as I can. And sometime I might bring word.”
“It’s a sign; I believes in signs.” The rocker began to move back and forth, rattling the loose boards in the porch floor. “Go child. The Lord has come to you.”
When he returned to the cabin with books on the shelves and the kind man with the white hair and the gentle voice, all the boy carried was his book with one cover missing—the book that he couldn’t understand. In the summers he came home to take his father’s place in the fields, for cabin rent had to be paid with field work. In the winter he seldom came because it took “more’n a day’s walkin’ and sleepin’ on the ground.”
“Ain’t worth it” his mother would say.
Each year, after he had been gone for a whole winter and returned, the faithful Sounder would come hobbling on three legs far down the road to meet him. The great dog would wag his tail and whine. He never barked. The boy sang at his work in the fields, and his mother rocked in her chair and sang on the porch of the cabin. Sometimes when Sounder scratched fleas under the porch, she would look at the hunting lantern and the empty possum sack hanging against the wall. Six crops of persimmons and wild grapes had ripened. The possums and raccoons had gathered them unmolested. The lantern and possum sack hung untouched. “No use to nobody no more,” the woman said.
The boy read to his brother and sisters when he had finished his day in the fields. He read the story of Joseph over and over and never wearied of it. “In all the books in the teacher’s cabin, there’s no story as good as Joseph’s story” he would say to them.
The woman, listening and rocking, would say “The Lord has come to you, child. The Lord has certainly come to you.”
Late one August afternoon the boy and his mother sat on the shaded corner of the porch. The heat and drought of dog days had parched the earth, and the crops had been laid by. The boy had come home early because there was nothing to do in the fields.
“Dog days is a terrible time,” the woman said. “It’s when the heat is so bad the dogs go mad.” The boy would not tell her that the teacher had told him that dog days got their name from the Dog Star because it rose and set with the sun during that period. She had her own feeling for the earth, he thought, and he would not confuse it.
“It sure is hot,” he said instead. “Lucky to come from the fields early.” He watched the heat waves as they made the earth look like it was moving in little ripples.
Sounder came around the corner of the cabin from somewhere, hobbled back and forth as far as the road several times, and then went to his cool spot under the porch. “That’s what I say about dog days,” the woman said. “Poor creature’s been addled with the heat for three days. Can’t find no place to quiet down. Been down the road nearly out o’ sight a second time today, and now he musta come from the fencerows. Whines all the time. A mad dog is a fearful sight. Slobberin’ at the mouth and runnin’ every which way ’cause they’re blind. Have to shoot ’em ’fore they bite some child. It’s awful hard.”
“Sounder won’t go mad,” the boy said. “He’s lookin’ for a cooler spot, I reckon.”
A lone figure came on the landscape as a speck and slowly grew into a ripply form through the heat waves. “Scorchin’ to be walkin’ and totin’ far today,” she said as she pointed to the figure on the road.
A catbird fussed in the wilted lilac at the corner of the cabin. “Why’s that bird fussin’ when no cat’s prowlin? Old folks has a sayin’ that if a catbird fusses ’bout nothin’, somethin’ bad is comin’. It’s a bad sign.”
“Sounder, I reckon,” the boy said. “He just passed her bush when he came around the cabin.”
In the tall locust at the edge of the fence, its top leaves yellowed from lack of water, a mockingbird mimicked the catbird with half a dozen notes, decided it was too hot to sing, and disappeared. The great coon dog, whose rhythmic panting
came through the porch floor, came from under the house and began to whine.
As the figure on the road drew near, it took shape and grew indistinct again in the wavering heat. Sometimes it seemed to be a person dragging something, for little puffs of red dust rose in sulfurous clouds at every other step. Once or twice they thought it might be a brown cow or mule, dragging its hooves in the sand and raising and lowering its weary head.
Sounder panted faster, wagged his tail, whined, moved from the dooryard to the porch and back to the dooryard.
The figure came closer. Now it appeared to be a child carrying something on its back and limping.
“The children still at the creek?” she asked.
“Yes, but it’s about dry.”
Suddenly the voice of the great coon hound broke the sultry August deadness. The dog dashed along the road, leaving three-pointed clouds of red dust to settle back to earth behind him. The mighty voice rolled out upon the valley, each flutelike bark echoing from slope to slope.
“Lord’s mercy! Dog days done made him mad.” And the rocker was still.
Sounder was a young dog again. His voice was the same mellow sound that had ridden the November breeze from the lowlands to the hills. The boy and his mother looked at each other. The catbird stopped her fussing in the wilted lilac bush. On three legs, the dog moved with the same lightning speed that had carried him to the throat of a grounded raccoon.
Sounder’s master had come home. Taking what might have been measured as a halting half step and then pulling a stiff, dead leg forward, dragging a foot turned sideways in the dust, the man limped into the yard. Sounder seemed to understand that to jump up and put his paw against his master’s breast would topple him into the dust, so the great dog smelled and whined and wagged his tail and licked the limp hand dangling at his master’s side. He hopped wildly around his master in a circle that almost brought head and tail together.
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