“You take it after a rain,” said Henry …
Henry and I were sunning on the steps of the store. I was waiting for my wife to come along in the car and pick me up; Henry, being without attachments, was waiting for the end of time. For a brief spell we were as sensible as two cats, on the warm boards.
“You take it after a rain,” said Henry, “a fox hasn’t fed all night, because it’s been rainin’, and he’ll be lookin’ to feed in the morning. That’s the time you got to be there with your gun.”
I nodded wisely, wondering what the Meadow Brook Hunt would make of this kind of goings-on.
“I killed five foxes one fall, just half a mile from here, still-huntin’. No dog nor nuthin’. I outwitted ‘em. You know where McKee’s shop is, well right there, where the woods comes clean to the road in a point. I knew that’s where he’d have to cross the road, to git to where the rabbits were thick. I just set there behind the wall and waited. Only you got to be mighty quiet and nice. A fox has awful good eyes.”
It was the first chance Henry had ever had to tell me confidentially about himself, and it seemed significant that he had plunged without preliminaries into his triumphant chapter. From his dull galaxy of days he had picked out these five bright mornings. Every man has his memory of achievement. It is something to have known where a fox was going to cross the road.
The burning question around here now is what I am going to do about my deer. They always speak of it as “my” deer, and it has come to seem just that. I often think of this not impossible animal, walking statelily through the forest paths and wearing a studded collar with “E. B. White, phone Waterlot 40 Ring 3” engraved on it.
“You goin’ to get your deer?” I am asked by every man I meet—and they all wait for an answer. My deer-slaying program is a matter of considerable local concern, much to my surprise. It is plain that I now reside in a friendly community of killers, and that until I open fire myself they cannot call me brother.
The truth is I have never given serious thought to the question of gunning. My exploits have been few. Once I shot a woodchuck my dog had already begun to take apart; and once, in the interests of science, I erased a domestic turkey—crouching silently on a log six feet from the bird’s head, as cool as though I were aiming at my own grandmother. But by and large my hunting has been with a .22 rifle and a mechanical duck, with dusk falling in gold and purple splendor in the penny arcades along Sixth Avenue. I imagine I would feel mighty awkward discharging a gun that wasn’t fastened to a counter by a small chain.
This business of going after some deer meat is a solemn matter hereabouts. My noncommittal attitude has marked me as a person of doubtful character, who will bear watching. There seems to be some question of masculinity involved: until I slay my dragon I am still in short pants, as far as my fellow-countrymen are concerned. As for my own feelings in the matter, it’s not that I fear buck fever, it’s more that I can’t seem to work up a decent feeling of enmity toward a deer. Toward my deer, I mean. I think I’d rather catch it alive and break it to harness.
Besides, I don’t really trust myself alone in the woods with a gun. The woods are changing. I see by the papers that our Eastern forests this season are full of artists engaged in making pencil sketches of suitable backgrounds for Walt Disney’s proposed picture “Bambi”—which is about a deer. My eyesight isn’t anything exceptional; it is quite within the bounds of probability that I would march into the woods after my deer and come home with a free-hand artist draped across my running board, a tiny crimson drop trickling from one nostril.
Long before the coming of the cold I was on the barn roof, laying clear cedar shingles, five inches to the weather. My neighbors’ roofs all showed signs of activity, so I built some staging and mounted my own beanstalk to see what I could see. It seems a long while ago that I was up there, hanging on by the seat of my pants: those clear days at the edge of frost, with a view of pasture, woods, sea, hills, and my pumpkin patch stretched out below in serene abundance. I stayed on the barn, steadily laying shingles, all during the days when Mr. Chamberlain, M. Daladier, the Duce, and the Führer were arranging their horse trade. It seemed a queer place to be during a world crisis, an odd thing to be doing—there was no particular reason for making my roof tight, as the barn contained nothing but a croquet set, some swallows’ nests, and a stuffed moosehead. In my trance-like condition, waiting for the negotiations to end, I added a cupola to the roof, to hold a vane that would show which way the wind blew.
In some respects, though, a barn is the best place anybody could pick for sitting out a dance with a prime minister and a demigod. There is a certain clarity on a high roof, a singleness of design in the orderly work of laying shingles: snapping the chalk line, laying the butts to the line, picking the proper width shingle to give an adequate lap. One’s perspective, at that altitude, is unusually good. Who has the longer view of things, anyway, a prime minister in a closet or a man on a barn roof?
I’m down now; the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved. It is the ugliest peace the earth has ever received for a Christmas present. Old England eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper is a sight I had as lief not lived to see. And though I’m no warrior, I would gladly fight for the things Nazism seeks to destroy. (Living in a sanitary age, we are getting so we place too high a value on human life—which rightfully must always come second to human ideas.)
The sacrifice Mr. Chamberlain made to preserve the Ideal of Peace reminded me of the strange case of Ada Leonard, the strip artist of superb proportion. Miss Leonard, if you remember, took sick of a ruptured appendix; but rather than have it out she risked her life in order to preserve, in unbroken loveliness, the smooth white groin the men of Chicago loved so well. Her suffering was great, and her courage admirable. But there comes a point beyond which you can’t push Beauty, on account of the lines it leaves in the face. Peace is the same. The peace we have with us today is as precarious and unsatisfactory as the form of a strip artist with peritonitis.
It is not likely that a person who changes his pursuits will ever succeed in taking on the character or the appearance of the new man, however much he would like to. I am farming, to a small degree and for my own amusement, but it is a cheap imitation of the real thing. I have fitted myself out with standard equipment, dungarees and a cap; but I would think twice before I dared stand still in a field of new corn. In the minds of my friends and neighbors who really know what they are about and whose clothes really fit them, much of my activity has the quality of a little girl playing house. My routine is that of a husbandman, but my demeanor is that of a high school boy in a soft-drink parlor. This morning, carrying grain to my birds, I noticed that I was unconsciously imitating the young roosters—making a noise in my throat like a cock learning to crow. No farmer has the time or the temperament for vaudeville of this sort. He feeds his flock silently, sometimes attentively, sometimes absentmindedly, but never banteringly. He doesn’t go round his place making noises in his throat.
Another time I caught myself carrying a paper napkin in my hand, as I wandered here and there. I have never seen a farmer carrying a paper napkin around his barnyard.
For all its implausibility, however, my farming has the excitement, the calamities, and sometimes the nobility of the real thing. For sheer surprise there is nothing to beat this life. For example, I had read widely on the subject of lice and mites, had treated my flock diligently. The specter of infestation was with me constantly. Yet when trouble finally came to my farm, it was not my hens that developed lice, but my Victrola. The old machine, I discovered the other day, is fairly alive with parasites—in the seams where the old needles lodge, and running in and out of the little cup where old and new needles mingle in democratic equality. I use Black Leaf 40 (nicotine sulphate) for my hens, smearing it on the roosts according to directions on the bottle. But I’m damned if I know how to apply nicotine sulphate to a Victrola, and there is nothing in my agricultural bulletins that covers the subject. I suppose I could rub the stuff on a Benny Goodman record and let him swing it, but it sounds like a mess. It is this sort of thing that makes the land so richly exciting: you never know where the enemy is going to strike.