Real banker talk. And it pretty well put a stop to Cousin Nat’s newspaper career right there. And from then on Nat and him have been feuding. What they do is argue, and there is not much to it, but sometimes it makes Ma nervous. Why it should I don’t know, as they is neither one of them great fighters that I know of. But then Ma is always thinking things is going to happen on the Hill, and why she should ever think this, is really a question.
Then Rodney went and got his self a guitar. He writ off and ask his pa if he would send him one and it come right away. It come in a big box, too, but this time Rodney knowed what it was before he opened it.
The afternoon it come, me and Jimmy went over onto his back porch and sat there and watched him get the box open and then take the guitar out of the case, and then he stuck it under his arm and tried to strum it. It made a sound like a busted drum. Rodney told us it weren’t tuned. Finally Jimmy asked him could he play it.
“No,” Rodney said.
I already knowed this. “He reads music, though,” I said.
Jimmy thought awhile. “That ain’t the same,” he said.
There was a book come with it, though, and finally Rodney put down the guitar and started looking at the book. “See,” I said to Jimmy, “that’s what he’s doing. Reading music. Rodney, tell him what it says.”
Rodney went on reading and I went and looked over his shoulder and it was a book explaining how to play a guitar, with pictures and everything. “Jack,” Rodney said, “I wish you would not read music over my shoulder like that. It makes me lose the tune every time.”
“I was probably reading it too slow for you,” I said. “I am out of practice at it. Turn the page and let’s try another one.”
Rodney turned the page and Jimmy sat there and watched us, and I read a bit about the proper position for the thumb, and then I said, “Well, that’s a pretty one, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” Rodney said.
“How can Jack read music,” Jimmy said, “when he can’t even sing?”
I went over and sat down next to Jimmy again. “It ain’t the same thing,” I said. I could see that Rodney was proud of his new guitar, for it was the first time him and me had ever been able to joke about anything together.
“Jack,” Rodney said, “now that we have read all this music, would you happen to know anybody who can play one of these things enough to tune it?”
“Pa can,” I said, so we took the guitar over to our shed where Pa was fooling with the tractor. He stopped and cleaned up his hands and after taking a long time at it give the guitar back to Rodney and said it was tuned. Then we went back and Rodney got his book and studied it and put his fingers on the strings and hit them once and it sounded nice. “Does that sound like the chord of C,” he said.
“It sure does,” I said.
So we sat there and he played the chord of C for a while and then switched to the chord of G and then the chord of G minor, which was about the same, and then he worked at the chord of F but it give him trouble and never come clear. So finally I said, “Well, when you get that F chord whipped I will come back and listen to some melodies, but for now I think I will go outside and just listen to the quiet.” So me and Jimmy left.
We went up to his place. There was nothing to do there either, and around suppertime I come back home. Coming up toward Mr. Blankhard’s house I heard Rodney still working away at his guitar. Sounded like the chord of F had still not give in.
Rodney come over that night after supper and showed the guitar to Ellen and Ma and they both admired it, and then he took it back home and went to practicing again. He really stuck with it day after day. First thing in the morning I’d hear it until I come over after him, if I did. And then again in the afternoon right after dinner when the rest of us was doing nothing. And then we would hear him evenings, sitting on his own back steps by his self, working away at it until after dark. Then finally it would stop and he would come over and sit with us awhile, which had come to be a habit of his.
I guess he kept at it like that for better than a week. Then he quit. I noticed he hadn’t played it for a day or so but I thought nothing of it, but one night he come over and Ellen asked him why had he stopped practicing and at first he wouldn’t say.
“I hope you have not become discouraged,” Ellen said.
Rodney didn’t say nothing for a minute. Then he got up from where he was sitting and walked over to Ellen and stuck out his hand and said, “It’s no excuse, but I just can’t practice no more on account of these fingers.”
Sister looked, but it was dark, and then she got up and pulled his hand over to the light and I come and looked, too, and the ends of his fingers was as red and raw and swoll as if he had touched the four of them up against a red-hot stove and left the skin there. They was the fingers he pressed down on the strings with. “You have practiced too much,” Ellen said, and she stood there looking at his fingers and shaking her head like she had practically done it herself, and then she looked up at him and said it again, “You have practiced too much.” Then she looked down at his hand again, and started into the house with it and he come along behind, and I could hear her inside talking to him about not practicing so much. Then they come back on the porch again and later I noticed the four white bandages on the ends of his fingers moving around in the dark like big slow moths.
When he left I went with him down to the bridge, which was where he went to smoke sometimes. It was probably that chord of F, I said, and Rodney said no, it was them all. The book had said nothing about it one way or another; just to practice.
Then the next thing I knowed we was on into August, and the work picked up some. Rodney helped where he could.
One evening we come into our lot and Rodney was standing up in the back of our pickup leaning back against the cab and looking back the way we had come, and Pa cut the corner short the way he does sometimes and I watched to see Rodney duck when the leaves from the oak limb hit him. It has give me many a scare myself, and so I guess I was kind of grinning when I seen it coming up because Rodney looked at me real funny just before we got to it. Then not just the leaves but the limb hit him. Knocked him down. I had forgot how much taller than me Rodney was.
He got up before we stopped, and we was just about stopped when it happened. He sat up on the floor of the pickup and put both hands behind him on his head and just looked at me, and when Pa stopped at the barn Rodney let himself down easy over the tailgate and then put one hand up on his head again and walked on home.
I had to help Pa or I would have gone and explained it right then. Then I had to have supper. So I figured I would explain it when he come over later. I heard him practicing his guitar some—he had went back to it—so I knowed he was all right. Then I heard him quit. But he didn’t come over, and I waited and then finally I went to bed.
I went over first thing in the morning. I heard him practicing up on his uncle’s back porch so I went and sat on the steps where he could see me and waited for him to quit. But I sat there and he practiced for over an hour and then it got hot. So I interrupted and said I was going home because of the heat and he didn’t answer me so I went home.
By this time I figured he was making too much of it and I got stubborn. I stayed out on our porch again that night but he didn’t come over and I figured he wouldn’t so I went to bed without waiting.
The next day I never even seen him. I went up and saw Jimmy Bay. But in the afternoon Jimmy went to sleep on the hammock right while I was talking to him, and I got up and booted him once through the bottom of the hammock and he grunted but never even woke up, so I come back home.
That night after Rodney quit practicing and didn’t come over, Sis said, “All right, Jack, what have you went and done to Rodney?” We was all sitting on the porch.
“Not a thing,” I said. It was the truth.
“Jack,” Ellen said, “you must have done something.”
“I suppose you are calling me a liar,” I said.
“There will be none of that talk,” Ma said. “Jack, what has gone on between you and that boy?” According to Ma everybody is a boy but me if there is trouble between us. Then I’m some kind of six-foot monster.
“Rodney is taller than me by a foot,” I said.
“That is not what I asked,” Ma said.
“You said he was only a boy,” I said.
“Jack!” Pa said. He had been asleep and woke up. It was a warning.
“We was riding in the pickup,” I said, “and Rodney was not watching out for his self and got hit and knocked down by an oak limb.”
“When was that?” Pa said.
“Two days ago,” I said. “I would have mentioned it to you only I seen he wasn’t hurt.”
“I suppose you was looking the other way when that limb come up and hit him,” Ellen said.
If that was what Ellen wanted to suppose, I figured I would let her, so I said nothing.
“Well?” Ma said. “Was you?”
“I guess it were my fault at that,” I said. “I seen the whole thing.”
“I thought so,” Ellen said.
She and Ma and Pa just sat there looking at me in the dark. “You was right all the time,” I said. “Everybody is right and I am wrong. I should have took care of him like he was a baby. I should have jumped up and jerked that limb back with my two bare hands. I should have give a scream and warned him. But what I did was sit and just watch. I figured it would miss. So now I got no friends at all, not even my own sister, Ellen, so I think I will go to bed and cry some about it.” I got up and started toward my room.
“Jack,” Ma said, “you should have used better judgment is all. And please do not speak sarcastic to your sister.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then I went in and went to bed. It was early and I could hear Ma and Ellen talking on the porch but I didn’t even try to listen. There was a loud mosquito in the room, buzzing around in the dark, and I followed the sound with my ears and several times swatted at it. But it always come back. Finally I forgot about it and let it buzz. I thought about things and it looked like I didn’t have too many friends at that. But I couldn’t see where it was all my fault, and when the regular time finally come, I went to sleep.
11
It was clear to see that with Jenny against me and Rodney still holding his poor bumped head and with Ellen and Ma teamed up with the rest, there was nothing left for me but to make the best of things by myself. I have always done this more or less, anyhow. Still, no one likes being pushed to it.
So in the morning I took my rifle and nothing else and went off into the woods. I went west so as not to get nowhere near the Holmeses’ place. To the west it is second-growth piny woods for miles in all directions and one part of it very much like another. As woods go, it don’t amount to much. It’s one of those woods where it always looks like there is shade up ahead but there never is, and you might as well be walking all day in an open field. There is not much shade from yellow pines unless they is thick.
I figured if nothing else I would get far back and shoot up the rest of them bargain shells I had got for last Christmas. I had brung all there was. Walking along in that heat carrying all them shells in both my pockets I got the feeling that I was doing a foolish kind of thing. I mean the gun was heavy and so was the shells and there was nothing moving around in the woods but me, not even birds, and I was going nowhere. There weren’t much sense to it at that.
So I figured I would shoot away these shells and then go home. I waited until I had went some distance away from the Hill and then started banging away. I blasted down pine cones and blowed the heads off of weeds and knocked knots off of fallen-down trees and shot up a number of stumps without bothering to even go over and look for the damage. The blanks and the duds was not so many as I expected, maybe from the heat. In that heat it would not have surprised me if the shells had finally went off in my pockets. But I kept walking and banging away and either my gun got extra hot from the sun or I finally done it firing, but when them shells was finally gone that gun had got so hot I could hardly hold it. First time I ever had it happen.
Then finally I got so far back I come out onto the old Larson place. I have been there before. There’s stories about it of all kinds, but all you can tell for sure is that once it was a house and good-sized farm and now it is left and gone to weeds and is nothing. The way you know you have came to their place is you come on cleared ground. At least you can tell that once some time ago it was cleared. The fences and even the posts is gone but the space that was fields still shows, even though briars and weeds and seedling pines have pretty well covered it up. And then up near the house when you come to it there are shade trees, so when you first get a look at it what you see is the trees and some of the house showing through, and you half expect to see a dog come running out from somewhere, barking, or else somebody moving out from under the shade of the trees and into the light where you can see them. But then when you get up close you can see there has no one been there for years.
I went up and looked, and since the last time I seen it most of the roof had come down. It had just fell in. It laid there busted up and gone to pieces inside the rooms, and the sun come down all over it, inside and out, and I seen the whole thing was just about done for. Actually, the house looked less sad to me like this than when it still had its roof on. I walked around it and through it and then I went back and tried the old pump, just in case the last rain had left a prime in it. I could have used a drink about then.
Then I went and sat down under one of the shade trees in front. Once I seen a big jay come and sit on the roof and look down inside. He just sat on a rafter in the sun and studied the insides of the house for a time. The first he probably ever seen. Then he tipped forward and dropped like a stone, the way a jay will do, hardly spreading out his wings, and I heard him land on the boards inside. He had probably seen a bug. Then he flew up out of the top of the house and left. I sat and rested a while longer and nothing else come, so I got up and started back through the woods. It is not often you will see a sight like that. I mean a bluejay, sitting there looking down inside a house.
So I headed back through the woods pretty much the way I come. Once I come across a stump I had shot full of bullet holes. I had fired at a pitchy spot the size of a cat’s head but I had never once come close.
By the time I got home it was past noon. The house was quiet and I went back to the kitchen and seen from the dishes in the sink that everybody else had had their dinner and gone. It looked like I had not been missed at all. Which was more or less what I expected.
There had been nothing happening as it was all summer, but now with this cloud I had come under—not only with Ma, where it happens often, but with practically everybody I knew—things seemed to stop altogether. For me it was having everything about as near to nothing as it can get without you stop breathing even. Sometimes that was about all I done. Breathe, I mean.
But then Nat and Mr. Blankhard got into a thing which even if it wasn’t much at least was the kind of thing you had not expected. Nat and him got together on a way of getting rid of Mr. Blankhard’s cats. First time I had ever knowed them to get together on anything.
It started as a joke, I suppose, because one night Nat was sitting around on our porch and Ma made some mention of the pitiful condition of Mr. Blankhard’s cats, saying she seen one all the way up to his yard that day, and Nat took it up. Them cats will not come up close and be out in the open like that except they is practically starving. Although why they will try it even then is a mystery, for as far as I know, it has never got them fed nothing yet. Anyhow, Ma talked some about it and said even if they weren’t really Mr. Blankhard’s cats but just cats something had ought to be done. Nat give it some thought and said he would take it up with Mr. Blankhard himself. I could see Ma wished she had never brung the subject up, but it was already too late.
The next evening Nat went and called Mr. Blankhard out to the gate and they st
ood there and had some discussion about it. I come up and listened.
“I have been thinking about them cats of yours,” Nat said.
“Those was never my cats,” Mr. Blankhard said.
“That is neither here nor there,” Nat said. “There is something must be done about them, in the name of humanity.”
“Nathan,” Mr. Blankhard said, “I believe you are wasting your time. I have never looked on cats as humanity.”
“Now that is more to the point,” Nat said. “For neither have I. But there are those who does.”
“Let those who does take care of it then,” Mr. Blankhard said.
“Mr. Blankhard,” Nat said, “I am glad we have agreed.”
“I have agreed to nothing, Nathan, and you know it,” Mr. Blankhard said.
Nat shook his head. “Well, I am sorry to hear that,” he said, “because I thought if we was agreed on it, between us we might get them cats off the Hill for good.”
“That is easier said than done,” Mr. Blankhard said. “I have both tried it and had it tried.”
“They is clever, all right,” Nat said.
“It is instinct,” Mr. Blankhard said. “Blind instinct.”
“Them cats of yours,” Nat said, “seem to have more of it than most.”
“They may at that. However, they is not my cats,” Mr. Blankhard said.
“Well,” Nat said, “I guess we have come back to where we started.” He shook his head and looked at the ground and swung away from the fence like he had about give up.
“Nathan,” Mr. Blankhard said, “just what is it you have on your mind?”
Nat come back again. I was standing up the fence a ways, though you could have heard it just as well on our porch, I suppose.
“Getting rid of those cats,” Nat said.
“I will not allow them shot,” Mr. Blankhard said, “nor poisoned. Not on my property, anyhow.”
“Such things would not even have occurred to me,” Nat said.
“Well,” Mr. Blankhard said, “has there something occurred to you?”
The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God Page 10
