Home from the Hill (5 page)

The three stones, the black and the white and the red, were inscribed:

Wade Hunnicutt

DEPARTED THIS LIFE

MAY 28, 1939

AGED 48 YRS
.

Theron

ONLY CHILD OF HANNAH HUNNICUTT

DEPARTED THIS LIFE

MAY 28, 1939

AGED 19 YRS
.

Hannah

MOTHER OF THERON HUNNICUTT

DEPARTED THIS LIFE

MAY 28, 1939

AGED 39 YRS
.

So maybe if those two professionals, the psychiatric interne and his violent-ward attendant from Dallas, who had known her and no doubt worse cases than hers, could say it, looking at those three stones, we can be understood for having said, when we first laid eyes on them that morning, “Crazy!”—and for persuading her mother to commit her and sending at once for the people from the home to come and take her away.

5

But of course, like all craziness, it had its sense. Who could doubt that with Theron's death her life had come to an end? She had been selfless in her devotion to that boy. Who was to say she mightn't dictate the way in which she wished to be remembered—not as Wife of Wade, but as Mother of Theron? We remembered how, whenever he spoke, her lips moved slightly, forming the words after him, how when he was puzzled and arched his brow, she arched her brow; she shook her head, pursed her lips, bit the tip of her tongue in thought, following the expressions of his face. Sometimes she shuddered to think how easily he might have been a girl.

She would drop no matter how urgent a piece of work to correct his drawing, cut out something for him, answer his endless questions, whittle or glue something or hold her finger on a knot. Even so, she enjoyed accusing herself of neglecting him for her own pleasure so she might atone by reading to him an extra half hour in bed at night without suspecting she was spoiling him. Her own pleasure! Those of us whose relations with her husband did not include our wives, and who were thus a matter of indifference to her, those of us, I say, who were not worth her hysterical gaiety, remembered that at twenty-five, having no one for whom to care to make herself as attractive as possible, she had looked over forty. The pastimes and the talk of women had seemed to her frivolous; books, moving-pictures, and songs all lies designed to blind girls to the realities of life. Busy with her work and occupied with the child, teaching him to talk and then to read and write, a process that inspired her with the feeling of aiding at a miracle, she lived in a world enclosed by her house and garden. She had discouraged her few and always rather distant schoolgirl friends, and her mother's visits became infrequent. She did the formal entertaining that was necessary to her husband's place in the world, and felt, as she listened to her guests, that they spoke of things happening in another world, to another race.

We were burying a woman of rare attainments. She had studied to keep up with the boy's interests, which were intense, passionate, and short-lived. When he took up nature-lore, plant-and insect-collecting, she memorized long lists of Latin names, helped mount and label the specimen ferns and moths and butterflies. When he dropped that for kites in the spring she helped make his big box kites that were the envy of all the other boys, who had only flat kites. Then it was stamp-collecting and she learned odd bits of history and exotic geography, learned of the insurrection of Bela Kun, the invention of Esperanto, the outlandish names, such as Tanganyika and Bechuanaland, of all the British Protectorates, and knew how many annas make a rupee and about watermarks and perforations, commemorative issues and first-day covers, and knew stamps by their Scott numbers. Then it was model airplanes and she suffered with him at first at the difficulty and was disappointed when one after another they failed to fly. Together they studied how to better them and she helped cut out the tiny stamped balsa wood parts, got callouses on her fingertips from pushing the pins into the drawing board to hold the delicate parts and the flimsy strips of wood in place on the outspread plans. When he got expert at putting together the ones that came in kits, she studied with him the mathematics of aerodynamics and together they designed planes of their own. One they worked on for almost a year had, when finished, a wingspread of seven feet, and on the test flight her heart beat with his in pride, anticipation, dread. She held the long, graceful fuselage, a triumph of weightlessness, while with a hand drill fitted with a hook he wound the rubber motor. They watched it climb, soar, catch an airpocket, and lift its transparent skeletal redness high and free into the April sky. To follow it they had to get the car. It stayed aloft an hour and six minutes and came to a perfect three-point landing in a field five miles from where they had launched it.

She learned to tie Boy Scout knots, memorized the Morse code, learned to make crystal set radios, learned the Periodic Table when it was a chemistry set that absorbed him.

She had disapproved of none of his friends, believing him proof against any bad influence, and had been rewarded by his choices and pleased that though he had many friends, he depended on none.

6

He
ought to know she had been crazy, we finally persuaded the “Doc,” and not be too surprised at what he found here. Even Hot-shot had now lost some of his big-town weariness-with-it-all, and came over to watch the proceedings more closely, and taking note we all had our hats in our hands, even removed his sailor straw.

It did not take long for the casket to reach bottom. There was a settling sound, something like a sigh, and the ropes went slack in our hands. We stood up, drew the ropes out and coiled them slowly, and though there was really nothing more to be done, everybody stood for a while, looking at the open hole, thoughtful and still, so that you heard a locust chirring somewhere nearby and the flat scream of a jay.

Habit, it must have been, just the feeling that you could not leave it at this, more than any particular regard for Mrs. Hannah herself, after all these years, that caused what happened then. We seemed all to have moved gradually nearer the brink of the grave. Roy Merritt, one of those who had helped with the coffin, suddenly bent down and picked up a clod of the fresh earth and held it over the hole and slowly crumbled it in his fist and let it sift through his fingers. You could hear it pattering hollowly on the lid of the coffin like a light rain on a roof. When Roy had done that, another of the pallbearers did it too. And then, one by one, a number of those up close did the same. Hot-shot remarked that he had thought she did not leave any kin.

“She didn't,” said somebody, in a tone that would have told anyone else to mind his own business.

“Oh,” he said. “Kinfolks of his, huh?”

Of course he did not know what he had said. But tell that to one of those men with some reason to be touchy on the subject, one of those we have come to call “one of the Captain's Company.” Or, for that matter, to any of the rest of us. For it was all so much a part of us that it did not seem in the least far-fetched for him, a total stranger, who had never seen the Captain alive or ever heard the rumors which instead of dying down have multiplied in the years since his death, to have noticed a strong family resemblance among a number of young mourners there, in their late teens and twenties now, ostensibly the children of all assorted kinds of looking fathers, yet all with that same sharp and slightly hooked nose, same hard jaw with the muscles always nervously at work in it, the same brown skin and stiff black hair and black eyes—dominant characteristics, as the biologists call them, especially remarkable among a homogeneously sandy, freckled lot of Scotch-English like us. As somebody said there, after the stranger's blunder, repeating the old quip somebody in town made years ago, “It's a wise child who knows his own father was not Captain Wade Hunnicutt.” While another, looking around him as the dirt was being dropped into the grave, his eyes picking out especially one boy the spitting image of the Captain—the very ghost of Theron himself—said, there was never a man of whom such a
live
memory had been kept as Captain Wade.

Some left after that, but as many stayed and watched the Negroes shovel the old dirt into the hole. The strangers might have gone, and the Doc was for it. Their job was done, and they had miles to make in that hearse. But they were on the expense account and could stay over if they wanted to, and Hot-shot seemed to have had his eye out and found a couple of cute little reasons why a smart fellow from Big D ought to treat himself to a night in our town. Besides, for the moment his curiosity was aroused—lot of good it did him.

“Say, men,” he said in a familiar tone, taking in the three stones of the Hunnicutts with an inclination of his big head, “what is all this anyhow?”

Nobody answered him.

“What did she mean by that—only child of just her?”

Nobody spoke. He seemed to suspect he was being cold-shouldered, and this determined him to show us he could figure out a thing or two on his own. “Wasn't he”—pointing towards the black stone—“the kid's father?” Still nobody spoke. He must have taken this for resentment at his getting warm. “So that was it,” he said. “Christ! That's one hell of a thing for a woman to want cut on a stone for people to see, ain't it? Even a crazy woman.”

He got no rise, nothing but cold looks. Then we thought we would give him just one little piece of information to take home with him, and told him that underneath that white stone in the middle no body lay, that indeed to this day schoolboys on their way home who dare one another to walk across his “grave” are of half a mind that Theron Hunnicutt is still alive.

He whistled softly and waited for us to go on. We did not. So he reverted to his other topic. “I get it,” he said, again nodding towards the stones. “That black stone. Black! She musta hated him, boy! She didn't care if it meant she had to give herself away into the bargain, so long as it meant people would know he wasn't the father of his own child. Christ! She was something! She
was
crazy, wasn't she? Say!”

He was so pleased with his explanation, we let him keep it.

7

We had had a somewhat similar thought once ourselves. He was awfully close to his mother when he was growing up, and we worried sometimes that he might be turning out a mama's boy. It was just the kind of trick and the Captain just the kind of man you would expect fate not to overlook—to make the only son who bore his name turn out to seem the one in whom he had not been concerned.

And certainly in one respect he was not forward in taking after his father. That was the difference Mrs. Hannah had in mind in choosing their respective monuments. Gray, at least, rather than black, might have been better suited for the Captain's; but white, signifying innocence, was no doubt right, even then, for Theron. For wasn't that just Theron's trouble, just what led to everything, his innocence?

He could do this, for instance, when he was seventeen:

One Saturday afternoon that summer he rounded the northeast corner into the square, when a boy his age named Dale Latham, whose hatred he had unconsciously earned by his odd combination of innocence and manliness—innocence which the manliness had already given him so many fine opportunities to lose (Dale had seen them; Theron himself had not)—was suddenly provoked by the sight of him to violate the respect which even he and his gang, the smart ones, the ones with their own notion of manhood, who loitered outside the drugstore on Saturday afternoons, affecting to despise the boys who hung on the edge of the circle of hunting men, had so far kept towards Theron Hunnicutt. Dale Latham sauntered out and confronted him and said—but with a huskiness that robbed it of some of the sarcasm and most of the swagger he had meant it to have, “Why, hello there, Theron. How's the old cocksman? Getting much lately?”

The sound of this and the look on Theron's face were as much as was needed to assemble the beginning of a crowd, for a fist-fight somewhere on the square was the main event of every Saturday afternoon, and everybody was always on the alert for the first sign. So Dale Latham bolstered up the smile that had begun to droop somewhat faced by Theron's stare, and because he had not heard quite the volume of snickers he had counted on from his gang at his back, and repeated (he had no shadings in his sarcasm, and even for an audience could not embellish his simple text, he could only italicize) “Been
getting
much? I said.”

He found himself stepped around carefuly, like some community cur, and looked upon with an expressionlessness that drove him wild.

“I guess you don't know what I mean,” said Dale, thinking this to be about the worst taunt he could offer. Dale was suffering from half a suspicion that the little girl who had failed for so long to be very much impressed with him was secretly longing for Theron Hunnicutt. This alone would have been bad enough, but the thing Dale could not forgive was that Theron did not even know, much less care, that he had been preferred to him. Theron was moving away, and Dale, suspecting now that he actually disdained to fight him, called out, “You're yellow.” This did not stop Theron, so Dale added, “And so's your old man.”

Somebody in the crowd laughed loudly. Theron stopped, laughing himself, and turned to see who had done it.

It brought an approving chuckle from the crowd, which made Dale glower and turn red. His effort to find something clever to retort was visible on his face. The only quarter in which he seemed to find any support was his gang, so to them he said, nodding towards Theron, “He still thinks it's for peeing through.”

And the next thing Dale knew he was sitting on the sidewalk with his legs straight out before him and his back against the wall of the drugstore which had suddenly been bared for his backward passage, and he was sucking a gap from which two teeth had smiled out at him in the mirror as he snapped on his ready-tied bow tie before stepping out downtown that noon.