Home from the Hill (2 page)

“Yawl want to make a little easy money this morning?” asked the big stranger.

They both grinned. One said, “It's digging a grave, ain't it, boss?”

“It's digging a hole,” he said with an attempt at rough friendliness. “What do you care what goes into it?”

“Ain't it peculiar,” said Ed Dinwoodie innocently, “body coming home and no word sent ahead to the family so they could even get the grave dug?”

Ed had raised his voice. The silence that fell afterwards was such that the stranger saw he would have to say something. “In this case,” he said to nobody in particular and without turning on his stool, “they ain't no family.”

“No friends neither?” said Ed, emboldened now.

“No friends, neither. Besides, death came sudden.”

“Shooting?” said Ed, smiling. “Or electrocution?”

Seeing his two Negroes make a move to shy away, the stranger said, “Nothing like that. No, she just—”

Everybody looked up.

“She?” said Otis Wheeler from across the room.

“A lady!” said Ben Williams.

“Now, who could it be, I wonder,” said Ben Ramsay.

“Well, I bet you one thing,” old Ross Holloway piped. “I bet you if her folks buries here then I know of her—poor soul.”

“I was going to say a dollar, but maybe we better make it a dollar and a half on a warm day like this,” said the stranger to the Negroes, while, lifting his hat, he mopped his forehead.

They glanced nervously around at their white townsmen.

“If it's a lady—a white woman—and her folks always buried with us and the poor soul hasn't got no family now,” said Ben, “why we would all be glad—”

One of the Negro men plucked his buddy's sleeve and took a backward step. “What do you say, Doc?” said the stranger to his young companion. “Hell, she'll never know.”

The young man gave his companion a scornful look, then to Ben he said, “Thank you,” then to all the rest, “thank you, but this was how Mrs. Hunnicutt wanted it.”

“Miz Hannah?” cried the waitress.

The two startled strangers wheeled on their stools. When they turned back, the two Negroes were stealing away.

“Here! Come back here!” said the big fellow. They stopped. He turned to his companion. “Jesus! You want us to have to dig the damn hole ourselves?” he said.

“You wouldn't,” said Marshall Bradley. “You wouldn't have to dig.” He said no more, and of course they did not know what to make of that.

“Her death didn't come sudden,” said Ben Ramsay, as if just thinking aloud. “Not to her.”

“Pick up those tools,” said the driver to the two Negroes. They did, and they and the young stranger went outside. The big man paid the check while the young one opened the rear of the hearse and pushed the two reluctant hired hands up inside, then locked the door. When the driver came out he said to one of the boys, one of Peyton's, who had taken a dare to climb on the running-board and see what he could see through the little barred window behind the front seat, and who had got caught there when the others broke and ran, “She still there, son? Thanks for keeping an eye on her.” The stranger reached into his pocket and Peyton's boy's eyes rounded in fear. The stranger took his hand out and flipped and a coin spun brightly through the air, which Peyton's boy caught and at once popped into his mouth. Then the stranger climbed in and the hearse pulled away and swung about, cut across the square, and shot out the north corner.

The men split up and covered the square, going from store to store spreading the word. What few shoppers there were at that hour hurried to their cars and streaked out of town. The storekeepers phoned home, then came out onto the sidewalks pulling on their coats and locking their doors and went upstairs to the second-floor lawyers' and doctors' and dentists' offices with the news that Mrs. Hannah had come home to stay. The only other one of those three crazy tombstones that
ever
would was now to get its body laid beneath it, and the Hunnicutts (or rather, all the Hunnicutts who could be publicly acknowledged) had passed into story.

2

The Captain, Captain Wade (he had been commissioned in the A.E.F. and, the men in his company being mostly local men, county men, who brought it back with them after the Armistice, had kept his title of rank) was our biggest landowner, and even gave his name to a day in the calendar, the first Saturday in October, still called Hunnicutt Day, when his tenants from all over the county came into town for their shares in the year's cash-crop money. And though men have grown rich and men have died memorable deaths since him, none has been remembered as he is. You would have to go back to an earlier, more spacious time, say to something like the days of the opening of Kentucky, when a landowner took personal care of his vast plantation and took the lead in its defence against whatever threatened it, man or beast, or to Tudor England and the times before the gentry grew exquisite, to find another man like Captain Wade.

But then, maybe it takes one of us to appreciate his kind of man. We—at least we small-town Texans (for the cities are getting to have as many Northerners as Texans in them) have a name abroad for violence: grown men still playing guns and cars. Well, and it must certainly be owned that even those of us who have gone away to college, lived in the East, and ought perhaps to know better, never quite get over admiring a man who is a mighty hunter—and who, for the two things go together, takes many trophies poaching in the preserves of love. One who can hold his liquor, zoom down our flat straight roads at a hundred and more miles an hour, who is fast on the getaway, as the expression goes. It cannot be denied, we are all born machine-crazy, gun-crazy, and car-crazy, and never grow out of it. Is there a Texas boy (if there is one who can't then he does not grow into any man) who at the age of six cannot, at a distance of half a mile or as it goes past at whatever speed it is capable of, name you the make, the model and the year of not just Chevvies and Plymouths and Fords, but of ancient Reos and Cords and Dusenburgs, and Hudson Terraplanes, a Star, a Whippett, an Auburn Beauty Six? For a Texan the names of guns and caliber numbers are magic: Winchester and Colt and Remington and Smith & Wesson; .30–30 and .22, .44 and .45 and .32 and .38-Special. You could speak of a Texas boy's growth and manhood as his .410, his 20 and 12 gauge years. Certainly you could have of Theron Hunnicutt, who lived for hunting and who, more than a boy and not quite a man, died at about the 16 gauge. We love machines, and the kind of man we admire is one who handles them well, who masters them to the point of recklessness—such a man as Captain Wade Hunnicutt was, whose duck gun and worn old .30–30, whose car (though he wore one out a year) each took on a personality and might, any one of them, have stood proxy for the man, as the sword of a king off fighting a war in olden times could stand proxy for him to be married back home.

He would be sixty if he were alive today. More; for Theron was nineteen at the time and that was fifteen years ago, and the Captain and Miss Hannah Griffin were married when he had been back from the war less than a year. But if ever there was a man not meant to reach sixty it was the Captain. Hard enough to believe he was in his forties when he died, with that hair black and smooth as the breast of a crow and those sharp black eyes and that skin too weather-lined ever to show a wrinkle of age.

He had a regularity about him, as if free from the indecision that troubled other men; it was reflected in the very clothes he wore. Winter and summer he wore the same felt hat, cream colored, of stockman pattern, and it never seemed to age, just as it had never seemed to be new. He had paid a hundred dollars for that hat, it was said—the sort of extravagant small gesture of which legends are made in Texas. Every day of his life he wore a fresh, faded blue denim workshirt with, from May to October, the cuffs rolled two turns above his black wrists, and fresh khaki trousers with creases that even at the end of a wiltering August day still seemed honed to an edge. Summer and winter he wore white socks, and at all times he kept on hand four pairs of shoes of the same pattern, or lack of pattern, plain, of very soft and minutely wrinkled brown kangaroo skin, always freshly polished, which a Ft. Worth cobbler made on his last at fifty dollars a pair. By May already there would be a heavy line across the bridge of his nose and under his eyes like a domino, where the shadow of his hat brim fell, where the lighter, though not light, skin met the sunburned skin. Even when he was fresh from the barber's chair early in the morning his neck would be bluish with beard right down to the tuft of black hair in the cup of his collarbone that showed above a patch of dazzling white undershirt. He was a very comfortable looking man, without looking as if he strove for comfort. He was always very trim and sleek. His pockets never bulged. They were empty. He carried nothing on him. He put no lock on anything he owned and so did not carry keys. He could go anywhere he wanted to go without need of money. He did not carry a watch. Time would wait on him. He was punctual to appointments, however; his years in the woods and work fields, watching the sun and sky, having given him a fine sense of time, and he knew when you were as much as five minutes late to an appointment—though probably that came less from his fine time-sense than from the likelihood that anyone arriving late for an appointment with him would wear a shamefaced and apologetic look. But whether or not you had an appointment, meeting him you always felt late, behindhand. Even in town he kept, not farmer's hours, for though a farmer would be up that early in the morning, he was asleep long before that at night: he kept hunter's hours.

The Captain had the center place in that circle of men where you will find us all on any Saturday afternoon, on one of the corners of the square, squatting in a ring, watching the girls stroll by, swapping the same but never old tales of famous shots and cunning animals, of dogs better remembered than the men who owned them, of game stands so rich that men were killed disputing the rights to them. There you will find town men and country men and, on the fringes, town boys and country boys, and in the innermost ring you may find one or two of those special few who come to town not every Saturday, but often not for six months at a time: the year-round hunters, not farmers, the men from Sulphur Bottom, silent-footed and quick-eyed as the game they hunt and trap, gaunt, sallow men, skin dyed sulphur yellow from malaria and from that water where no fish but mudcat, and nothing else but mosquitoes can live. These are the men for whom the rest of us make place, and who—and not just because he was rich—moved over to make place for just one man—“the Cap'n.” For they lived upon the edge of and spent their lives fighting against that vast tract which by common consent belonged as a private preserve to him (who owned the rest of the county anyway), the only man known to have gone in one side of it and out the other, and who brought out of there game of kinds otherwise extinct in this hunted-out land: deer and wild turkey and once a wild boar.

The Captain was also the deadliest hunter of another kind of game—in town; and divided his spare time about equally between the two sports. And, as he took the right to cross any man's fences in pursuit of furred or feathered game, and as he would often return with as many as forty or fifty quail or ducks (which he would have his man Chauncey distribute with his compliments to all the pretty young housewives in town, a mess or a brace to each impartially), so in his other sport he was equally unmindful of property lines, bag limits, and no-trespassing signs.

He made neither a secret nor a spectacle of his escapades, supposing, no doubt—if he thought about it at all—that people would sooner be out having adventures of their own than talking about somebody else's. Only once, and we were all young then, did one of us try to joke with him about his latest conquest. Not that Wade was gallantly avenging the lady in question. It was himself he was avenging. He had not kept pigs with any man.

Yet he seemed to have no eyes for women at all. It was like his still-hunting: he let the game come to him. He seemed to know without looking that a squirrel sat in the second fork of the third slippery-elm; so it was with women. He could look them up and down so quick they hardly could be sure they had been noticed, much less appraised.

Others might come home empty-handed, but for him the woods were full. As his man Chauncey put it, he had to fight the women off with a wet towsack. But his taste ran to married ones. Maybe they knew better how to appreciate him. Certainly they were safer from certain complications and entanglements. Quicker to come to the point than young girls too, no doubt, young town girls at any rate, who, even when they know very well exactly what is on a man's mind, and even when they have no intention of denying it to him, still like to have a face put on the matter. And, too, they make a man feel beholden, unlike a married woman, who is more liable to realize that she has given no more than she has gotten. So he was very friendly. Friendly with husbands of pretty wives and polite to the husbands of the plain ones, and very democratic about it, often having to supper some town lawyer or doctor and his wife, along with one of his herdsmen or crop clerks who had a pretty wife. And he would take the husband hunting and would assist him to an intimacy with women of whom he himself had tired—for he had the rare ability of parting friends with a mistress.

All of which, by the late years, was enough to make a man a little suspicious of his friendship. For I take it that most men, for a time anyhow, like to think their wives attractive to others. But the Captain, though no man could claim intimacy with him, did not want for friends. For fortunately there was a sure way of enjoying his friendship without suspicions. That was so long as Mrs. Hannah was
not
friendly with your wife.

But there were plenty with whose wives she had been friendly, and so there were men who were not too sorry when, to raise a posse, the Captain was brought downtown, lying, for all to see, in the bed of that pickup truck, unrecognizable except by his clothes, that mild spring afternoon fifteen years ago. There were some, though they never dared show it of course, who were not too shocked at the manner of his death. And there are others who have learned in the years since that they too had just as much reason to wish him dead. Then, there are others with just as much reason who to this day do not suspect it.