I had nothing particular in mind. At the bottom edge of Mr. Blankhard’s corn field I seen one of his little old orange cats creeping through the weeds and I was tempted to try a shot—those cats is starving anyhow—but much as Mr. Blankhard wants them gone I knew he didn’t want them shot either, so I didn’t.
Actually, I am sorry for those cats of his; they are altogether starved and unwanted and that they stay there and live at all is a miracle to me. The pigs died and the chickens died, but those little old runted stray-looking orange-colored cats keep not only hanging on but increasing. Mr. Blankhard says they are not his at all. But they come about the same time he did, the mama cat did, and had kittens, and stayed, and it’s clear they claim him whether he claims them or not. Cousin Nat has tried to convince him they are a rare and special breed of cats. He says they are East Indian Boomerang cats that need only to be recognized as such, but Mr. Blankhard is not much of a one for jokes. As much as I have ever seen him angry, it was at them cats.
They is bad bred all the way and what he calls an abomination before the Lord, but somehow they have took to him, like to a friend. In the beginning he caught them up himself and took them off in the woods and left them, but they was back at the farm before he was. Then Pa took them off to the Springdale dump in his pickup, and this time only the mama come back, but soon there was kittens again. And since then them kittens has had kittens, and you got to be quick for they are wild but at Mr. Blankhard’s place you can see an orange-colored cat or two any time you care to watch.
So I watched this cat creeping along after grasshoppers or whatever she could find to eat, and I spared her, though I am not saying it was a kindness. I probably would have missed her anyhow, though. Or shot a blank.
I went on along at the foot of Mr. Blankhard’s corn field, which was doing good despite that he had done his best to have it fail again, plowing straight up and down the slope where one good rain could have washed half his seed out had it come at the right time instead of plowing across, a thing which anybody knows, and then planting corn again where it had failed the last two years in a row due to the ground being unlimed, underfertilized and planted to nothing else but corn for so long. Corn and cotton can wear land out no matter what you’re putting back in it, and Mr. Blankhard, where he would pay high for pedigree stock, would not lay out for his land any more than he had to, believing that a good crop or not was mostly up to God, and not really having no interest in it anyhow. He was no real farmer at all. Actually, he had this one side of a hill with a big gully down the middle of it that he really farmed, about six acres. The rest of his hundred and eighty acres was in run-down pasture and second-growth woods and the branch, which he never done nothing about at all and hardly seemed to know he owned, except he had fenced it. Which was more than any of the Millses had been able to do, at that.
By the time I had reached the branch it had got real hot. It was one of those mornings when there is no wind and no clouds and so hot by ten o’clock that the sky don’t seem blue even, but white. All that sun. And everything still. Things don’t even seem to have no smell. Not the way they do in the morning. You walk by a growing corn field on a day like that, like I just done, and you might just as well have walked by a wall or an empty field. You brush through weeds and you don’t hardly feel them. The ground don’t feel right, hard or soft. You don’t come down on it right and when you do, all its life is gone. It is a strange feeling to be walking out in that light and that heat. I would say it is like the sky has gone from round to flat and has come down low, so you walk out under it remembering all the time it is up there, which you usually would not think about; and if you stop and look up for a minute, which you are not apt to do very often, what you see is whiteness, pure heat, and when you look down again things will not look the same. Everything looks like it is fixed where it is and the way it is forever. It seems crazy that you are walking in it. You see a bird fly, and you don’t believe it. It is like it was not a bird but only a mark you had noticed in the air. So you look down when you walk and a clump of dirt gets busted by your foot or you bend down some weeds and it is almost like these things are big things, that you are pounding around like an elephant busting up things where you aren’t supposed to be for some reason. And yet in a way you feel that you have got nothing to do with it at all, being actually standing back somewhere as quiet and fixed there forever as a tree. It is always a big surprise to me on such a day to get where I am going.
When I stepped down into the shade of the branch it was like being woke up. I sat down on a log and rested. It was not cool in the branch either, but at least there was a wet smell to things and up in the leaves I could hear things moving now and then, birds or squirrels, I didn’t bother to look to see which. I sat there for a while, just looking around at the big spread roots of the cypresses and all the smaller trees and vines and bushes that try to grow in a branch but don’t never seem to get out of their own tangle, and then finally I got up and started working my way down the branch, past Mr. Blankhard’s place and then ours and then on south a ways with it, not having anywhere special in mind to go, but not hunting exactly either. In fact I was sorry I had brung the gun. It was just trouble to carry, and about the only living thing I seen to shoot at anyhow was a couple of songbirds too small to be worth the try.
Then I doubled back and started toward home, still in the branch, and this way I come to a path I knew, and it still seemed a while till noon so I took it and came up out of the branch and into the pine woods where the pines was thick enough to give some shade or at least scatter the light some, and I went on in the light, not feeling the heat so much, going up hill and down some, but easy, and finally coming out at the top of a little hill which is at the northwest corner of Mr. Holmes’s main pasture.
I sat down in some tall grass and just sat there. Mr. Holmes is a man who knows how to keep up a pasture right. The scrub oak and briars had all been grubbed out and the rest was smooth and neat enough that if he had wanted to he could have cut it any time for hay. He grazed it though, year round. His is a dairy farm only.
Then I saw Jenny come out on their back steps. I saw her hand reach up behind as she let the door go, but as far away as I was there weren’t no sound when it closed. She had on a white blouse and a dark skirt and for a while she just stood on the steps with one foot on one step and one on another and her hand still up behind her where she had let the door go, and in the stillness and the heat and the bright light she stood out like a picture. She has dark hair. Then she come on down the steps and walked out toward the sheds in back. Then she stopped. I guess she called, because in a minute Les come out of one of the buildings and come toward her. She didn’t wait for him, though, but went on back to the house and up the steps and in the door by herself. Watching her it was like nothing, not the house nor the sun nor the heat and certainly not Les, could really ever touch on her at all. She was just herself. Perfect. I had never noticed it quite so clear before. When Les come on up and went in the house it was altogether different. There was nothing even special about him.
Then I sat there a while longer, noticing how green the pasture was and thinking I could even smell it and seeing how the sunlight came down through the pines and slipped right into the spread grass and on down through it to the dirt and stones; so that for a while I more or less lost track of where I was, laying out on my back finally and just looking up at the pines and the sky, the grass scratching my neck some and little rocks rubbing in my back and not even bothering me, thinking what a thing it must be to be Jenny and what a thing it was to be me and not Les, her brother, and the grass and the sun and stones was a kind of hurt after a while, but good, as there was a kind of hurt in the whole thing anyway. I mean I did not even know how to think about Jenny, let alone know what to do, if there was to ever be a time.
But finally my neck begun to itch too much and I sat up and seen that some little red sugar ants had found me and bit me some, so I got up and took my gun and started
home. By this time I was hungry.
I went home without hunting for anything at all, the way I usually come home from the Holmeses’. Going through the branch I seen a rabbit but it went off into some tall tangled stuff where even a dog could not have followed, so I let it go. To be honest, I have never liked the taste of wild game anyhow, squirrels and rabbits, I mean. It is too strong, like they have not been fed right, and Ma says game is not to be killed for sport alone but for the table if we must. Game is no good in the summertime anyhow, even if you like it.
When I finally got home I was as hot and tired as if I had worked all morning. And after dinner I would not have moved off the front porch for anything except that then, when it was hottest, Rodney decided to come out and look around.
So I went out and looked around with him.
4
I had seen it all before, of course. I just went and looked with Rodney to be friendly. He had need of a friend, I figured. He had let the Stetson and Western boots go, but for some reason not clear to me he still clung to that lasso of his. He had it coiled and tucked neat through a belt loop and I never made no mention of it and he didn’t either, but he carried it with him the rest of the day. The big bump on his forehead had turned blue and went down and there was all kinds of scratches and blue spots on his face and arms, and he was limping a little, but aside from this he seemed okay. He nodded friendly when I come up and asked how I was and I said fine and asked how he was feeling and he said fine, and then we just stood in his uncle’s yard in the heat and blinked and looked around at things. Finally I said let’s go see if there is any grapes come ripe yet on the Millses’ old grape arbor, though I knew there wasn’t, but it would at least get us in the shade, so we went.
We bent and crawled in under the grapevine where the posts has rotted and let it down, and back in under it it was almost dark, and cool, and I come near to stepping on a big blacksnake, which is harmless, but even so I would not have liked to step on it, and it went out past Rodney and give him quite a scare. I could tell because he didn’t say nothing but just kept looking around at the ground for the rest of the time we was under there, looking for more snakes and hardly noticing the grapes at all. They was green and still so far from ripe that they had that frosted look about them, big bunches of them hanging all around, growing there so cool in the shade that they looked like they would be cold if you touched them. I picked a few so Rodney could finally see them. They was hard as marbles.
“How do you know when they are ripe?” he said.
What could I say? For one thing they are purple when they are ripe and swoll-up-looking and soft and just altogether different, and I could not think of how to begin explaining something to someone who could not even tell a ripe grape from a green one. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “when they are ripe I will come and tell you.”
Then we sat on the ground, Rodney watching all the time for snakes, and talked for a while. I asked him, and Rodney said the place where he had lived was called White Plains and was near to New York City but no city itself and that it was all right except that there was never nothing much to do there. I told him I knew nothing about it but that I supposed he was right. I asked him had he ever had a girl and he said not a real girl and I said me neither, and it was friendly enough, though I had to ask him things or he would not have talked none at all. He had had some fights, he said, but it seemed he could not remember them too well, so I told him about the last fight I had had with Les, and he said I was right, one warning was enough. Then he asked me what was there to do around the Hill. I told him the truth.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Well,” Rodney said, “let’s go look around some more then.” So we went back out into the heat. I took him all over Mr. Blankhard’s place again, this time telling him which was a pecan tree and which was a pear, and that a scrub oak was a scrub oak and would not get no bigger and things like that, trying not to leave nothing out at all so as to be on the safe side. We seen one of Mr. Blankhard’s orange cats and Rodney said it looked wild and I said it was, and then I had to explain that to him. Down in the branch, he said it looked like a jungle. I told him there weren’t no monkeys there but there was wildcat and raccoon and possum and skunk and moccasins and things I had never even seen myself but just knew was there. And Rodney looked around and said, “There could be most anything here all right,” and then we got out of the branch and walked all over Mr. Blankhard’s pasture and woods and when finally Rodney asked what was it good for and I said nothing, he seemed to believe that, too. Rodney wasn’t dumb, I could tell.
We went by Mr. Blankhard’s six acres of corn, but by this time Rodney was sweating hard from the heat and did not seem to have much interest in it when I told him what was wrong with it. The gully bothered him some, though. “Why has he put the fields where there is a big ditch like that?” he said.
“There was no such ditch, not to begin with,” I said. “The rain made it.”
“Rain?” Rodney said. “That would take a lot. That is deep.”
“We get a lot,” I said. “When we do.”
Rodney studied it some, but the sweat was pouring off him, and he give up on it. “I would like to see it sometime,” he said, “when the rain is doing that.”
“I’ll bring you and show you,” I said, and then I took him with me over to our place and got us some water. Ma said I should not keep him out in the sun too much until he had got used to it, and I did not bother to explain that it was his idea in the first place, not mine. He had not burned none that I could see but had just got red from the heat. Underneath it, he still looked white as the day he had come, the day before yesterday. So I took him down to our barn and sheds and showed him the different machines and things and kept him in the shade until on toward evening.
Then I got lines and took him fishing down to the little creek below his uncle’s place. We had to catch grasshoppers for bait and he had never seen it done before. We catch them in some crab grass near the bridge where it is clear and you can see them. They got to be still kicking when you put them on the hook, and when finally Rodney did catch one he mashed it half to pieces. “I killed it,” he said.
“You sure did,” I said. Then I laughed. “You are a regular butcher bird, all right,” I said, but of course Rodney did not know what a butcher bird was either, which is a bird with the habit of killing anything it can, like grasshoppers, and sticking them on a holly thorn or a point of wire in a barbed-wire fence and just leaving them there. I have never knowed why they do this except I guess they like to kill. “Anyhow it is no good to fish with,” I said, “but you killed it and it’s yours,” and I laughed again that I had thought of that, but Rodney just flung the grasshopper away and got down on his knees and went after some more. It looked like he had no more sense of humor than his uncle did.
We fished from the bridge with drop lines and I did not really expect that we would catch nothing and we didn’t. It was just something to do. Rodney did not seem much interested in it, anyhow. For a good while he just stood there holding on to his line and looking down into the water at his own reflection and not even talking. I noticed again how skinny he was. He did not so much lean up against the bridge rail as he hung on it, bending out over the creek in a regular curve, his long curly hair hanging down from the end of his head like what he was was a weed of some kind, with him hanging there so still he seemed just about lifeless. I could not think of a thing he could really be good at at all.
Finally he started to talk some. “In New York,” he said, “you can pay a dime and ride all day in the subway, changing trains, of course, and never see daylight at all.”
It was nothing to me as I have never even seen a subway, though I have been through the Bankhead Tunnel many times. “Have you ever done it?” I said.
“No,” he said. “But it can be done.”
“I can’t think of no reason why anyone would want to do that myself,” I said.
I guess he couldn’t
either because he let go that part of the subject and took up another. “My father is an engineer,” he said.
“On the subway?” I said.
“No,” Rodney said. “I am not talking about subways any more. He is a building engineer. He builds buildings. He has an office in New York.”
“I guess that is different, all right,” I said. “But I thought you was talking about subways.”
Rodney just shook his head at the water. He hardly looked at me the whole time we was talking. Like he really didn’t care. Well, I was just trying to be polite myself. “No,” he said.
“I suppose there are engineers on subways at that though,” I said. I am not ashamed to admit there are things I don’t know.
“I don’t think they are called that,” Rodney said. “I have never thought about it much.”
“Sure,” I said. After all you could hardly expect him to know all about subways just because he has rode them sometimes.
So we was quiet for a while and then Rodney tried again. “In White Plains we had a gang called The Wreckers. It was just a name give us by some of our folks, and we took it and made up a gang from it. I was kind of a boss.”
I looked at him surprised. “You was?” I said.
“Yes,” Rodney said. “I was.”
“Oh,” I said. Not only did he not look like no boss to me, I could not even get a good picture of him being in a gang. “What kind of things was it you wrecked?”
“That was just our name,” Rodney said. “The Wreckers. It was a gang. We just hung out together.”
“Where?” I said. I have never been in no gang in my life and know nothing about such things. Only what I have seen in the movies.
The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God Page 3
