Home from the Hill (9 page)

Then the second humiliation: after five minutes of sitting, after giving him five minutes to think of it himself, his father turned and silently took the rifle from him and with a twig reamed out the muzzle and shook into his palm enough dirt to have blown the barrel off in his face the next time he pulled the trigger.

They sat through five minutes more of silence. Suddenly his father broke forth with the most outlandish and inimitable sound he had ever heard come from a person's mouth. It was, to the life, the chatter of that treeful of squirrels, only with the difference, noticeable even to his green ear, that now it was an all-clear signal instead of an alarm. And in no time at all the canebrake began to twitch with life. Soon the stalks were clacking and swishing together as though a wind was in them.

A big fox squirrel darted out, making for a hickory tree, saw them, wheeled, and sped up too fast for a shot. His father gave a sharp, shrill whistle. The squirrel stopped in his tracks and lifted his head. He was left where he lay. In this way they killed ten in an hour, five of them Theron's.

Later in the day when their feeding time was over and you had to stir yourself and go after the squirrels, he marveled at the way his father, who weighed almost as much again as he, could step on that dry and littered ground so completely without sound that you could not say at what moment his weight came to rest on his foot, or if it ever did; cheating the earth of the sound it exacted of his, Theron's, foot. He marveled at his ear. He not only heard every sound the forest made, but knew what had made it and why and exactly where it came from, and how to imitate it or its natural enemy or friend. But most of all he marveled at his eye. Within the range of a rifle he could spot a squirrel among the leaves, and it seemed that just as he could call them up by imitating their chatter, he could conjure squirrels into a spot just by looking at it.

They took a roundabout way in leaving, so Theron could see something of the Bottom, though as his father said, this was only the margin. His father showed him the tracks of a deer, said he believed they were a doe's and had been made that day. They followed the trail until his father stopped. In the next fifteen minutes he took just ten steps. Then he motioned Theron to come up. He did, conscious of sounding like a herd of mules, and looking through the leaves that his father held parted for him, saw, standing so delicately upon the edge of a little pool that it seemed her feet rested upon the surface of the water, his first deer. She scented something and looked up. He saw her delicate nostrils and soft eyes, and thought she was as pretty as a girl.

On their way out Theron followed behind and watched his father lead them through the trees until at a certain one, indistinguishable from all the rest to anyone but him, he would turn as purposefully and as casually as at the corner of his block in town. They were not hunting now, both having got their legal limits (which his father, it being too warm to wear the big hunting coat, carried in a game belt around his waist, twenty-four squirrels, fox and cat, with their heads looped into dangling thongs, so that it looked as if he was wearing a squirrel kilt)—they were merely strolling, so that there was no call for stealth; yet his father could walk in the woods in no other way except as noiselessly as ever, seeming to glide across the clearings like the shadow of a bird overhead and to melt into the shadow of the trees.

He finished telling her and fell silent for a moment, thinking of it all again, reliving it, wondering with a mixture of pride and despair how he would ever be worthy of such a father, when his mother said, “Well now, it'll be no time at all before you're every bit as good as he is yourself.”

10

She had said it unthinkingly. She began to think about it when in reply he gave her a look which said that though this was excusable because she was a woman, it was a disappointment coming from her, wife of the man she was.

She was both proud and impatient of her success in concealing from him the estrangement between his father and her. Doubtless he saw that they were somewhat formal with each other, but equally doubtless, it seemed natural enough to him. Formal by what standards, anyway? Not by the only ones with which he could compare. Possibly he thought they were comparatively intimate. At least she called his father by his given name. His grandmother had always referred to his grandfather as Mr. Griffin. Perhaps he had observed in the homes of friends that their parents, unlike his, shared a bedroom; if so, he would have thought it a mark of economic caste, and he would have thought it was considerate of his father to wish not to disturb his mother when he got up early to go to work or go hunting. What to others might have seemed to indicate coolness between her and Wade, Theron, she knew, took for mutual respect, and gave them both praise for it.

His adoration of his father irritated her, but she said it was her own dutifulness coming home to roost. She could tolerate sharing his love with Wade only by believing that she herself had protected them both from Theron's acquiring the knowledge that would have destroyed it. Now when he praised his father she acquiesced by silence, or else joined in. She was able to take a sad pride in her self-sacrifice, yet she was half in hopes that her ironical tone might penetrate to him. It did not, needless to say.

It was after Theron's fight with Dale Latham two years later that his adulation of his father began to gall her unbearably.

That fight had not ended with Theron's knocking Dale down. Dale came up, and when he did it was so fast he dropped the knife he had been fumbling after in his pocket. For a moment it lay on the pavement between them, and everybody saw it. It was five inches long, closed—a nigger knife, the kind they call a Saturday Night Special, one of those in the shape of a woman's leg in a high-heeled shoe, with a push-button to spring the blade. The crowd sucked in its breath and shrank back a step. Dale snatched it up and in the silence everybody heard the blade snap open. He could see he had Theron scared and he smiled exultantly. He took a step forward holding the knife at his belt line, and a flash of sunlight ricocheted off the blade. “He's got a knife,” somebody whispered loudly, and another voice farther back passed the word along. “A knife. He's got a knife.” Then a woman's voice from somewhere up close broke the hush: “Ain't you already as big as he is, but you got to have a knife to boot?”

Dale caught himself and flashed a look around. Actually he was as frightened of the knife as Theron was; he only carried it for show, and was not sorry now to close it and drop it to the ground and kick it towards his pals. He spun then, throwing a blow at Theron, hoping to catch him off guard. He got a fist in his face and sat down again. After that he stayed on his feet until the end. The only sound was their panting and grunting and the scraping of their shoes on the pavement, for though people had rushed over from all points on the square, it was not thought polite to choose sides and cheer.

When it was over, or when we finally decided it had gone long enough and separated them, Dale fell back against the wall of the drugstore, panting, the bow of his tie under his ear, and the crowd separated to let Theron pass. Aside from the merchants standing out in front of their stores and a group of old ladies knotted together on the south side, in all the square only one man had not come over to watch. He stood at the corner at the end of the same block, in the center of the ring of cedar shavings, in khakis and blue-denim shirt and cream-colored hat. Now, seeing it was over, he strode down.

“Did you hit him first?” the Captain asked, nodding towards Dale.

“Yes, sir.”

The Captain stood waiting to hear more.

“First, second, third, fourth and fifth,” said Theron, grinning a little with a lip that was beginning to swell.

The Captain could not keep himself from smiling. “You had good cause then, I hope,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I think I did. I believe you'd agree.”

We standing there realized then that this could get awkward for the Captain. There came a low but perceptible snicker from somewhere in the rear of the crowd.

“Well?” said the Captain.

“He said something he shouldn't have said. You know the sort of thing I mean.”

“Yeah, Cap. You know the sort of thing he means,” someone drawled, just innocently enough to pass challenge.

He had been in the right, if either of them had, he told his mother as she daubed on the witch-hazel. She would think so if she knew the details, but she would just have to take his word for that.

Thus she knew instantly what the matter touched upon. She knew too what it signified. He had reached the age of the kind of knowledge that would come between them.

If he had been drawn into a sidewalk brawl it could only have been for some high and disinterested cause. She believed no personal taunt could have touched him. He would have scorned to allow it. Besides, she could imagine no slur upon him conceivable even to the lowest mind. Nor was there, she knew, anything in her life that could have been held up to him for shame or ridicule. In the armor of his ideals there was just one flaw; she knew: she had built, of necessity, around that flaw. She concluded that he had fought because some slur had been cast upon his father. Even she would admit that that could be a slur of only one kind.

It both did and did not help matters to realize that she herself had been the smith of that armor of ideals. But she had done her best as wife and mother with what she had to work with. She had hidden the family skeleton from him. It was inevitable that such a world as this with such people in it would sooner or later give him the key to the cupboard. He had won this fight, which would prove to him that the charge had been a lie; but he would be older the next time he heard it made.

The thing that touched her deepest and angered her most was the terrible irony of the boy's misplaced adoration. It reminded her of her own case. But she had at least had the spiritual elevation of knowing that her generosity was the very opposite of what its unconscious and undeserving object had coming to him. Now, for herself she was willing still to go on pretending to an illusion, suffering in silence; but when she heard from Melba, who had it from Chauncey, that there had been a knife in the fracas, and said to herself in horror that he might have been killed, and when the next morning she saw the swollen lip, the bruised cheek and the black and swollen eye which his blind reverence had earned him, forgetting that he owed much of that reverence to her, something revolted in her.

There was one other person in whose mind no doubt existed that Theron Hunnicutt was going to be a better man than his father; that was the Captain himself. He was grateful to his wife, though it was no more than he knew to expect of her, for the job she had done in raising his boy. He believed she had had unusually good material to work with, but he did not subtract that from the credit he gave her. He had seen good material misused. Indeed, the boy was such a very fine boy that the Captain stood in some awe of him. For this he gave his wife the credit; nonetheless, his share in his son made him rise in his own esteem. The Captain's business in life was, in the final analysis, getting the most out of men. He felt he had a pretty broad conception of the possible human combinations. He had seen clever men without courage and courageous men without cleverness and strong men without loyalty to anything, and he had seen enough men without any saving quality to appreciate those who had even, if only, one. And sometimes in a despairing moment he wondered how little he might not have contented himself with, and sometimes in a contrite moment how much he had a right to expect in a son.

The only thing that worried the Captain sometimes was that the boy seemed a little too trusting, inclined to think too well of people in general. He did not want to see him taken advantage of, but more important than that, he did not want his disappointment to be too keen when, as was inevitable, he was suddenly disillusioned about one. But it was a delicate thing to tamper with, for certainly it was an attractive, if impractical, quality. But very likely the thing that kept the Captain, a practical man, from tampering with it just yet, was his observation that this very trustfulness certainly got some amazing practical results. He had seen at least one mighty shiftless specimen on one of the farms respond as though determined not to betray this sudden and unexpected confidence, and hold his head up and look people in the eye for the first time in years, all on the strength of Theron's friendship.

At first he had been a little mistrustful of the liking everybody showed for the growing boy. He himself knew of course that Theron deserved it all on his own account. But the Captain could hardly have helped being aware of the power of his position in the world, and he had—perhaps neither more nor less than the ordinary human amount, but enough cynicism to suspect any attention paid his son of just an element of craft. The boy's own odd mixture of modesty and pride, both parts of which, in fact, sometimes struck his father as being a little too much of a good thing, helped ease him on this score.
He
knew himself just what he was worth, and was not likely to be taken in by flattery. Anyhow, as he watched him come along, the Captain began to feel perhaps a little more than the ordinary human amount of paternal pride, and so he had little trouble convincing himself that Theron was accepted on his own merits, that his qualities would have been recognized had he been the ditch-edge child of some share-cropping sandhill tacky.

11

That fall, his last in school, Theron began right away to get poor marks. The Principal was surprised and spoke to him about it. He promised to do better—in a tone that gave the Principal to feel that he would do it as a personal favor to him, as one might give in to the rather irrational demands of a child. Clearly school marks had become a very unimportant matter to him, for despite his promise they got worse, until some while before mid-term and time for report cards, moved by dread of Mrs. Hannah's reaction when she saw the final grades his teachers feared they would have to give her son, the Principal went to call on the Captain beforehand about it. Not that he expected much sympathy from
him
. For without doubt it was the very passion for hunting which he got from his father that was keeping the boy from his work. But you could talk to a man, and it would at least soften the blow for Mrs. Hannah, and thus, hoped Mr. Statler, soften her blows in retaliation. To his surprise the Captain took it seriously, and promised to speak to Theron at once.