by Annie Proulx
After a while he did. It was that she wouldn’t let him quit. She would go out into the yard at the earliest light of hunting days—Santee had come to think of them as work days—walking in the wet grass and squinting at the sky to interpret the character of the new day. She got back into bed and put her cold feet on Santee’s calves.
“It’s cloudy,” she would say. “Rain by noon.” Santee would groan, because Earl did not like to get his gun wet.
“Won’t it hurt it?” Earl always asked, as though he knew it would.
“Don’t be no summer soldier,” said Santee. “Wipe it down when you get back home and put some WD-40 to it, all good as new.” It took him a while to understand that it wasn’t the gun. Earl didn’t like to get rain down his neck or onto his shooting glasses with the yellow lenses, didn’t care to feel the cold drops trace narrow trails down his back and forearms, nor to taste the salty stuff that trickled from his hatband to the corners of his mouth.
They were walking through the deep wet grass, the rain drumming hard enough to make the curved blades bounce up and down. Earl’s wet twill pants were plastered to him like blistered skin. Something in the way he pulled at the sodden cloth with an arched finger and thumb told Santee he was angry at the rain, at Santee, maybe mad enough to quit shelling out three hundred dollars a week for no birds and a wet nature walk. Good, thought Santee.
But the rain stopped and a watery sun warmed their backs. Noah found tendrils of rich hot grouse scent lying on the moist air as solidly as cucumber vines on the garden earth. He locked into his catatonic point again and again, and they sent the birds flying in arcs of shaken raindrops. Earl didn’t connect, but he said he knew it took years before shooters got the hang of it.
The only thing he shot that season was the clay pigeon, and the year ended with no birds for Earl, money in Santee’s bank account and a row of white stones under the drifting snow. Santee thought it was all over, a bad year to be buried with the memory of other bad years.
Through the next spring and summer he never thought of Earl without a shudder. The droughty grouse summer held into September. Santee bored the replacement stock for the Jorken. He bought a new checkering File and sat on the porch after dinner making a good job of it and waiting for the heat to break, thinking about going out by himself in the chill October days as the woods and fields faded and clods of earth froze hard. He hunched toward the west on the steps, catching the last of the good light; the days were getting shorter in spite of the lingering heat from the baked earth. Verna fanned her damp neck with a sale flier that had come in the mail.
“Car’s comin’,” she said. Santee stopped rasping and listened.
“It’s that Earl again,” said Verna, recognizing the Saab before it was in sight.
He was a little slicker in his talk, and wore an expensive game vest with a rubber pocket in the back where the birds would lie, their dark blood seeping into the seams.
“My wife gave me this,” he said, and he showed them the new leather case for his shotgun, stamped with his initials and a design of three flying grouse.
“No’ Santee tried to say, “I’ve taught you all I can. I don’t want to take your money no more.” But Earl wasn’t going to let him go. Now he wanted a companion with a dog and Santee was it, with no pay.
“After all, we got to know each other very well last year. We’re a good team—friends,” Earl said, looking at the fresh paint on the clapboards. “Nice job,” he said.
Santee went because he had taken Earl’s money. Until the fool shot a bird on his own or gave up, Santee was obliged to keep going out with him. The idea that Earl might ruin every fall for the rest of his life made Santee sick.
“I’ve come to hate partridge huntin’,” he told Verna in the sultry night. “I hate those white stones, too.” She knew what he was talking about.
Derwin heard Earl bragging down at the store, some clam dip and a box of Triscuits in front of him on the counter. Earl’s new game vest hung open casually, his yellow shooting glasses dangled outside the breast pocket, one earpiece tucked in through the buttonhole.
“Yes,” he said, “we did quite well today. Limited out. I hunt with Santee, you know—grand old fellow.”
“He didn’t know who I was,” raged Derwin, who had wanted to say something deadly but hadn’t found any words until he drove up home and sat on the edge of the porch. “Whyn’t you tell him where to head in, Pa? At least quit givin’ him birds he makes like he shot hisself.”
“I wish I could,” groaned Santee. “If he would just get one bird I could cut loose, or if he decided to go in for somethin’ else and quit comin’ around. But I feel like I owe him part of a bargain. I took a lot of his money and all he got out of it was a clay pigeon.”
“You don’t owe him nothin’,” said Derwin.
Earl came up again the next morning. He parked his Saab in the shade and beeped the horn in Santee’s truck until he came out on the porch.
“Where you want to hit today?” called Earl. It wasn’t a question. In some way he’d gotten ahead of Santee. “Might as well take your truck, it’s already scratched up. Maybe go to the Africa covert and then hit White Birch Heaven.”
Earl had given fanciful names to the different places they hunted, “Africa” because there was long yellow grass on the edge of a field Earl said looked like the veldt. “White Birch Heaven” because Noah had pointed six birds in twenty minutes. Santee had taken two, leaving the rest for seed after Earl shot the tops out of the birches. They were grey birches, but Santee had not cared enough to say so, any more than he pointed out that the place had been called “Ayer’s high pasture” for generations.
It was breathlessly close as they climbed toward the upper fields of the old farm. The sky was a slick white color. Noah lagged, the dust filling his nose. Santee’s shirt was wet and he could hear thunder in the ground, the storm that had been building for weeks of drumming heat. Deerflies and gnats bit furiously at their ears and necks.
“Gonna be a hell of a storm,” said Santee.
Nothing moved. They might have been in a painted field, walking slowly across the fixed landscape where no bird could ever fly, nor tree fall. The leaves hung limp, soil crumbled under their feet.
“You won’t put no birds up in this weather.” said Santee.
“What?” asked Earl, the yellow glasses shining like insect eyes.
“I said, it’s gonna be a corker of a storm. See there?” Santee dropped his arm toward the west where a dark humped line illuminated by veins of lightning lay across the horizon. “Comin’ right for us like a house on fire. Time to go home and try again another day.”
He started back down, paying no attention to Earl’s remarks that the storm was a long way off and there were birds up there. He was dogged enough, thought Santee sourly.
As they went down the hill, slipping on the drought-polished grass, the light thickened to a dirty ocher. Little puffs of wind raised dust and started the poplars vibrating.
“You might be right,” said Earl, passing Santee. “It’s coming along pretty fast. I just felt a drop.”
Santee looked back over his shoulder and saw the black wall of cloud swelling into the sky. Bursts of wind ripped across the slope and the rolling grind of thunder shook the earth. Noah scampered fearfully, his tail clamped between his legs, his eyes seeking Santee’s again and again.
“We’re goin’, boy,” said Santee encouragingly.
The first raindrops hit like bird shot, rattling down on them and striking the trees with flat smacks. White hail pellets bounced and stung where they hit flesh. They ran into a belt of spruce where there was a narrow opening in the trees like a bowling alley. Halfway down its length a panicky grouse flew straight away from them. It was at least eighty yards out, an impossible distance, when Earl heaved his shotgun onto his hip and fired. As he pulled the trigger, lightning struck behind them. The grouse dropped low and skimmed away, but Earl believed he had hit it. Buried in the soun
d of his crashing gun he had not even heard the lightning strike.
“Get it!” he shouted at Noah, who had pasted himself to Santee’s legs when the lightning cracked the spruce. “Make your dog get it!” yelled Earl, pointing in the direction the grouse had flown. The rain roared down on them. Earl ran for evergreen shelter in the direction his bird had vanished, still pointing through the bursting rain. “Fetch! Fetch! Oh, you damn thing, fetch my bird!”
Santee, trusting the principle that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, went under the smoking spruce. The bolt had entered the pith and exploded the heartwood in a column of live steam. White wood welled out of the riven bark. Almost at his feet, lying where they had fallen from the needled canopy of the top branches, were three dead grouse. They steamed gently in the cold rain. The hard drops struck the breast feathers like irregular heartbeats. Santee picked them up and looked at them. He turned them around and upside down. As soon as the rain slackened he pulled his shirt up over his head and made a run for Earl’s tree.
“You don’t need to yell at my dog. Here’s your birds. Three in one shot, mister man, is somethin’ I never seen before. You sure have learned how to shoot.” He shook his head.
Earl’s eyes were hidden behind the rain-streaked yellow shooting glasses. His thick cheeks were wet and his lips flapped silently. “Something felt right,” he gabbled, seizing the birds. “I knew something was going to happen today. I guess I was ready for the big breakthrough.”
He talked all the way back to Santee’s truck, and as they drove through the woods, the windshield wipers beating, the damp air in the cab of wet dog, explained how he’d felt the birds were there, how he’d felt the gun fall into line on them, how he saw the feathers fountain up.
“I saw right where they went down,” he said. Santee thought he probably believed he had. “But that dog of yours …”
Santee pulled up in his yard beside Earl’s Saab and set the hand brake. The rain flowed over the windshield in sheets. Santee cleared his throat.
“This is the parting of our ways,” he said. “I can take a good deal, but I won’t have my dog called down.”
Earl smirked; he knew Santee was jealous, “That’s okay with me,” he said, and ran through the hammering rain to his car, squeezing the grouse in his arms.
Santee woke before dawn, jammed up against Verna. He could see the mist of breath floating from her nostrils. Icy air flowed through an inch of open window. He slipped out of bed to close it, saw the storm had cleared the weather. Stars glinted like chips of mica in the paling sky, hoarfrost coated the fields and the row of stones along the drive. The puddles in the road were frozen solid. It was going to be a cold, unclouded day. He laughed to himself as he got back into the warm bed, wondering what Earl had said when he plucked three partridges that were already cooked.
In the Pit
“BLUE,” said his mother, looking like Charles Laughton in a flowered wrapper, “won’t you do this one little thing for me?” She tapped her cigarette ash into a ceramic sombrero on the dinette table. Papers, magazines, letters, bills, offers to develop her film in twenty-four hours or insure her credit cards against loss, fliers and folders spilled around her. Her white hair was rumpled like a cloud torn by wind, her eyes the common pastel of greeting-card rabbits. Blue looked away from the heavy sleeves of flesh that hung from her upper arms, from the smoke curling out of her nose.
“Now. It’s in here somewhere, and full of spelling mistakes.” She shuffled a deck of envelopes. “Here, sheriff writes blah, blah, vandals broke in. Threw chairs and furniture over the ledge, smashed dishes, broke windows, and they don’t know who did it.” The letter grated across spilled sugar as she slid it under her coffee cup.
“You could drive up in a couple of hours, Blue, see how bad it is, put on a lock or whatever. Revisit the scenes of your childhood,” she said, puffing her mocking voice out with the smoke, “those happy hours you spent in the loft while your father and I shouted at each other.”
He remembered the neatness of the camp, the moon-blonde kitchen with its silvery pots and pans on hooks, the blue shutters, the narrow clenched spirals of the braided rug, so different from this apartment where his mother’s carnival-tent clothes hung on the chairs and shoes sprawled like dead fish. She saw his look. “I don’t know how I did it in those days, keeping everything cleansy-weansy, always bent over that damn little sink the size of a sardine tin. Honey, I don’t know how I did it.” She threw a few envelopes into the air and let them fall in disorder.
“You’re a wild woman, mother.” he said.
Blue was visiting to show photographs of his wife, Grace, and their adopted daughter, Bonnie. The pool, little Bonnie and her pony, even Grace’s richly colored hair and nails demonstrated his success after years of failed starts at one thing and another. Blue had made his life over, had repaired himself through a class in Assertiveness Training, had learned how to look into others’ eyes, to clasp their hands firmly, to bend them to his will. He had dieted eighteen pounds away through willpower and dressed his new shape with style. A dark, wavy hairpiece gave his fleshy face with its long sheep’s mouth a kind of springing vigor.
He had two weeks for everything, the travel, the photographs, the overhaul of memories. This was the first time he had seen his mother since the funeral in Las Cruces seven years earlier. She had arrived late from the airport in a mocha-colored limousine, accompanied by an unknown man wearing saddle oxfords. After the service she had come up to Blue, embraced him and said. “Thank god that’s over, but your father would have loved it.” She had climbed hack into the limousine and waved goodbye. Grace stood beside him, stiff as a curtain rod, insulted because she had not been introduced.
Besides the photographs Blue brought his mother an armful of gentians, the deep emotional color of ocean beyond the sight of land. She put them in jar of water with an aspirin to revive them, but they had traveled too far; the stems bent weakly, the rich petals furled and closed. At least he had brought them.
That night he tried to sleep on the sofa, but the reek of an ashtray gave him a headache. His body was still thrumming with the vibrations of flight. There were things about the apartment he didn’t like: a pair of long black rubbers on the floor of the hall closet, the copies of Boxing Roundup on top of the toilet tank, the coffee mug stenciled “Lover Man” in the cupboard. He carried the ashtray to the kitchen to empty it. Not quietly enough; she came padding in, as big as a rolled mattress.
“Well, look at that,” she said, and the color of her voice was one she used to reserve for his father.
In the morning mirror he looked purposeful again, and proved it by making the breakfast. He cleaned the stove, wiped the counters while she was in the bathroom. They ate together at the formica table, honey-thick sunlight flowing across the surface, the toast crumbs casting shadows as long as pencils. “I could go up to the camp,” he said. He smiled without showing his teeth. The idea of the camp, of getting away from the dead gentians and the mug in the cupboard was a good one.
“I hope I never have to go up there again. Blue.” She looked at him as if he were a fortune-teller who had already pocketed the fee. “Blue, look the place over and see what you think it’d bring on the market. There’s three acres goes with it.”
He rented a sleeping bag and snowshoes, bought toilet paper and kerosene, matches and cans of Dinty Moore beef stew.
“For the Lord’s sake,” she said in her biting voice, “they have stores up there, you know. It’s not Darkest Africa.” But he showed her how he did things in a careful way, packed the car with the heavy objects at the bottom.
He pulled onto the track to the camp in late afternoon, shadows pouring out of the spruce like dark water, and as he knelt on the snow to buckle the snowshoe straps, his eye caught a flickering, circular motion out on the main road. A tall shape canted at an angle, a black figure that seemed to balance on a thin rod, bent into the curve and became a man on a bicycle, knees doggedly ri
sing and falling like the oars of a solitary rowing.
The bicycle drew near, and Blue saw fallen cheeks stubbled with white, the ears red and twisted as if they had been boiled. The rider mounted the hill and came up against the sky like a weathervane whose ingenious wheels turned in the wind. One slow, bare hand raised a paper bag to the mouth, then the rider disappeared over the hill as if he were sinking into tar.
One of those old boys. Blue knew that kind, pumping along on a kid’s bike with its fat tires and faded handlebar streamers, face blazing with drink and the abrasive wind thrown off by passing cars.
He was astonished to come on the camp in a quarter of an hour. When he was a child it had seemed deep in the woods, a remote place that could be reached only after a difficult journey through dark tunnels of trees. Now, in the light reflected off the snow, the place had a bruised look as though it had been dragged through hard times on the end of a dirty rope. The trees were scrubby spruce and fir. Everything seemed smaller, less exalted.
Inside the camp he smelled the mournful odor of trodden cloves. There was the brown sofa that folded out into a bed, the fireplace with a little pile of soot and a dead bird in it. There had always been a dead bird in the fireplace when they opened the camp. He threw it out into the soundless snow.
He climbed the stair to the loft that was his old room. The husks of dead flies, their legs as rigid as waxed threads, strewed the windowsills; a bright, buffy dusk bloomed in the dusty panes. His old cot stood under the west window as it always had. This raw place had been his first solitude, and the unfinishedness of the room had matched his child’s belief that he could become anything. Now clouds of frosty breath poured from his mouth like the wraiths of unspoken declarations, and he went back down the stairs.
