HENRY PETTIGREW got a fearful coughing attack at five o’clock in the morning, and within another hour he was dead of the malady which had weakened him so long.
In a region such as ours, where people had been thoughtful of each other’s needs since the first trees were blazed, that made for busy calls upon the telephone. People were lifting their receivers and listening and talking all along the line.
Camden and Benjy prepared to leave home as early as they might, when their own morning tasks were hastily done up. Sad plans for the funeral must be made, and comfort offered. There must be the gathering of relations from distant points; five small Pettigrews needed to be looked after as well.
Camden it was who gave Little Lady her breakfast on that fateful morning; in Benjy’s estimation she took an uncommonly long time doing it. He had put on clean overalls and was ready with the car, backing it out of the corncrib driveway where they kept it, when Camden joined him.
He looked at her coldly. “You spent quite a while.”
“I fed her,” said Camden.
“Did you feed him again, too?”
She wanted to cry, “None of your business if I did!” but she was softened by distress, thinking of Amy Leah Pettigrew and how round-shouldered and straggle-haired she always looked.
Camden maintained politeness, merely nodding in answer to the question.
Benjy spoke low in his throat. “Thought I made it apparent that I didn’t want him fed.”
“Thought I made it apparent that I don’t allow any stray animal to die of starvation on my place,” and there was a jab in that, too: the Terry place was rightfully Camden’s own, and had belonged to her ancestors before her.
So they drove, stiff and unhappy. This was unpleasantly bad in Benjy’s case, for he was the sort whose rages built to high temperature when blanketed like red coals in the ashes of his silence.
“Blood is blood,” he said presently, fairly clipping the words by their tails. “I thought you appreciated Little Lady, and what she’s meant to us and the world, and what she might mean in future times if—I see now I must have been mistook.”
Camden turned one slim shoulder toward him, and soon he knew from the motion of her body that she was crying, and yet never making a sound. Somewhere inside himself (he said long afterward) there were the tiny voices of decency and affection, declaring how he had offended all truth.
Camden Terry had been a handmaiden to the Almighty, some years before: she it was who bred Bugle Ann to Proctor Pride, and watched over the litter. She fed and tended Little Lady and the common pups, when their mother was ailing, in solitary nights when Spring Davis was in the Pen, when Benjy was a good five counties distant. She treasured Little Lady before we ever knew that the voice of Bugle Ann—a famous echo in the soul and body of one saddle-backed puppy—would sound once more along the gullies of Heaven Creek.
Maybe it was the restrained quietness of her weeping which enraged Benjy Davis still further, and sent him on and on into an ugly forest of contention. Pretty soon he was piling mean words behind him like logs which he could never climb back over.
“Harboring a cur like that! Saying that maybe she loves him! Ah—”
For more reasons than one, Camden was nervous as a cat on this morning. She screamed to him to stop, to say no more.
“All right. Just this: I truly believe if you had your way, you’d put the two of them together.”
“I would,” she cried. “You’re right. I would!”
“I’ll make certain that you never get your way,” said Benjy. He locked his jaws shut until the car turned in at the Pettigrew yard and he was compelled to speak to folks who came trooping sadly.
The young Davises served their neighborly stint in that house of bereavement, maybe for an hour or so. Other men were already looking after things on the place which needed to be seen to; and there were perhaps too many well-intentioned women crowding the porch and kitchen for the widow’s peace of mind.
It was agreed that Benjy should take the Pettigrew car and drive over to Buttonball, a good forty miles, to fetch Amy Leah’s parents, who were elderly and unable to transport themselves but whose presence was earnestly desired.
So Camden drove for home by herself, with lips set tight. She was trying all the while to wipe from memory the awfulness of her conflict with her man. She sought to bandage every wound by consideration of Nature’s kindliness; she strove to remember it was a blessing that their poor sick neighbor had found rest at last, and would never more lie feeble and consumptive.
But it was impossible for her to do, remembering that her slight hands were holding now the wheel which Benjy had held when he spoke that bitterness aloud. Purple vervain in hillside pastures were the same fatal weeds they had gone past earlier, no matter how the sunlight came to dress them, no matter how golden the wild canaries flew.
Here was the bridge. Planks rattled deep beneath the car, and shaggy timbers of Lancey’s old mill were tumbled just beyond, with snags of black walnut sticking up to mark the ancient dam. Shiners might glint beneath the easy brownness of the stream; a dusty smell of roadside tangles might rise like musk; and Camden witnessed laughter of three boys who worked and talked, a-stripping sugar cane. But her heart lay unascending and cold.
And worse and worse, as she approached her farm, for there were hooks of trouble and tragedy reaching out to snatch her. It was a thing folks have described in books (and long before that, people whispered such remem-brances around the fires at night, and thus sent children quaking and bug-eyed to bed). It was the business of knowing a calamity before you’ve seen the facts—and still not knowing; of smelling a tribulation in the very wind of night or day—and yet having its scent dissolve in common smells of fresh-cut grain.
Therefore she drove wildly, all caution gone, the car jouncing furious over washboards in the road, and skidding its rear end in high white dust when she made the final turn.
Camden set foot at last within her yard, the house empty and shaded beyond, an old sow muttering comfortably to her young in a lot beside the barn. But Camden stood with hands clamped against her pretty head, and then she started to run. She must have run clumsily, as women do for all their grace, catching linen skirts above her knees, skating on the long bent grass which pressed all over the slope.
“Little Lady!” she called, eagerly trying to reassure herself as she scampered. “Hello, Honey! I’ve been—” But from afar she could see that wired gate a-drifting open, she could hear it whine as the light breeze took it idly shut and opened it again.
Camden Davis prayed as she had never prayed in years; but solely the faint jangle of a loose-swung hook came to touch her hearing. The pen was empty, sure enough. Only the Almighty, gazing down in whimsy against the small affairs of men and hounds, might be able to tell just how this thing had come about. One hook, one staple and one flange: ordinary contrivances, used every day and every hour. Yet in their silent presence there dwelt now the same riddle which had ruled the evening hours before, when Camden couldn’t even find a moon to reassure her.
No Little Lady, proud and slim behind the chicken wire. No rugged-haired old Bristles, snorting and wagging out of range of rocks, and streaking off when you threatened him. The gate turned lazy, open and loose. How and why had she done this thing?
Oh, she could have sworn upon a stack of Bibles that the fastening was made full well—the hook sunk deep within its proper staple. But all the upset in her soul, and thinking of the Pettigrews, and mad and worried by Benjy’s orneriness; and then she hastened with the pans in hand, the little breakfast for the gyp, the bigger bait for that old rascal with the stickery face—
Somehow she’d managed it, with no defiance or intent. And now the pen stood free of any occupant, with only one slow-moving velvet butterfly to drift above the wire, and wag its wings across a truant wind, and then lift high—take speed for uplands and the miles of brush beyond, where those lovelorn dogs had fled away.
She ran to the house to get her bugle. All the way she felt how dry and hot her eyes were burning, though wet tears stung her spirit underneath. A little boy? she thought. Could some neighbor have come and—? But in all that region dwelt no person, tall or little, who would have done this trick for devilment.
Still Camden hastened back to the empty pen once more, where there was barren ground before the gate—the sod turned over into mud or dust as rains or hardbaking sunlight might determine. There’d been a sprinkle in the night, and so all tracks were plain to see: the big toe-pads of Bristles mostly, and those few dancing marks Little Lady had left when she galloped to her freedom.
Camden’s own traces appeared, going and coming, and going and coming again—the small print of her heels typed into soil where some time previous the hogs had wallowed. No other feet had trod that ground upon that day, and Camden felt sweat frosting new across her forehead. It was she and she alone who’d done this thing.
Her bugle. She’d bought it years before in Kansas City: one of those army surplus places where she saw a heap of bugles in a window, and recalled at once how old Spring Davis had taught his famous Bugle Ann to respond forever. I trained her to the horn. Same as—She’d said those words at night, up near Heaven Hump, in the far-gone strange hour when Little Lady first was sniffing at the tall old man.
She raced to the house, now, and snatched the bugle from its hook. Out on the porch she made the first two notes, and more and more—the warm wind coming nigh to flutter at her dress, to take her auburn hair apart.
Down at the nearest fence, and pointing her bugle at the wooded hills out yonder, sending keen the notes to race past willows and up through harder timber on the higher slopes.
Yes, those were good music-calls to hear—at night especially, or in the dawn when some redsided gray was stubborn in his holing, and the dogs were tired because they’d driven some other foxes earlier. But in the stare of day they sounded limp and futile. The tones screamed brassy, rapping the gullies.
Such neighbors as were not up at the Pettigrews’ or gone to town—the nearest people working in their fields or kitchens—every ear could recognize those two round notes repeated often, and speculate upon them. Little Lady, shut up tight against the demands of circumstance: we all knew that. Here lived the summons, hard and constant. Only one gyp might be called by them—the same who had the marks and voice of Bugle Ann. Only she or the wraith of her mother would have answered and come in.
Over at the Davis place across two fields, old Spring creaked lamely from his chair upon the porch, and he could feel the cloud of misery come haunting.
“Adelaide,” he said. “It must be Camden. She’s trying to blow Little Lady in.”
“But they had her in a wire pen.” Mrs. Davis wrapped her apron around her hands.
“Fetch my bugle, too,” the old man ordered quietly.
He walked out across the rear yard, moving stiff and with a skinny majesty; and when he loomed like that you didn’t need to know he owned a little maltese cross to pin upon his chest and a gray slouch hat to wear on special days. He walked with the saddened kingliness of the few Confederates left to us, and you imagined you could hear drums a-rolling in the distance, a very long roll indeed.
He went past barn and cribs; and Mrs. Davis she went part way too, and then she stopped; and Gabe was seated on a keg beside the barn, riveting a tug-strap which had parted; and so he put his riveter down slowly, and came to stand beside Mrs. Davis, watching Springfield traipse ahead.
Neither of them might relate the whole story of that bugle stuck beneath the old man’s suspender, so brown and battered but with a shine about it. He didn’t know the tale himself, except the brief things I’d related; nor did I know it in entirety.
It happened in the fall of I9I8, when I was climbing along a ravine where I never expected to climb. Those ridges lay beside a river not as deep as our Indian River at home, and wider still than Heaven Creek; the name on maps was the Meuse, but we folks from America couldn’t many of us pronounce it properly, so we called it the Muse, just like that.
And I was twenty-one, lonely for Missouri and the taste of a clean new hickory nut pounded on a rock—lonely more so for fox-hounds giving voice on a blackdark night. And I saw something lying in brush and wire, and it had a kind of glint in the last sun of day.
I went over and stood looking down, not touching it at first, for we were warned of things like that. Mess tins were lying everywhere, and helmets too—plenty of Kraut helmets, some of our own. There was old junk which French or Germans had dropped long before; those same hills had been drubbed by shells and dug by hobnails in earlier seasons.
Rust and moldy leather in all the thickets, and chunks of metal that once had been white-hot, and playing cards sometimes, and always the wire. (One variety of bob-wire hadn’t even any rust on it: it was galvanized, kind of.) And what a place to discover a bugle.
This was nothing, a voice told me soft as silk, which it was unsafe to disturb. They had ordered us not to handle stuff—old grenades might explode—but the bugle had a golden lip and a little dark face in the hidden hollow which seemed to smile quaintly and say, “I’m good. You don’t need to be fearful of me.” So I picked it up.
There I stood, a nervous soldier all mud, and wondered where this thing had come from. Off behind the closest hill a battery of French .75’s was going to it, pound, pound, pound, but those were big Swedes and Nordskis from the Northern states handling those guns, and sometimes they laid the stuff on so hard that captured Krauts asked please could they see our .75 machine guns. But it wouldn’t have been some husky guy from Minnesota or elsewhere who dropped that bugle in the clay. They were all too busy with artillery to go a-bugling.
Holding the little horn in my hand, I stood awhile and dreamed over it, and the autumn sky filled rainier and grimmer; still I stood. It was not a military thing I was clutching so tight: it seemed rather as a hunting horn. I was what they called a runner, having just delivered a message, and on my way wearily back to my own outfit; but I lingered, studying and imagining what that trumpet could mean to me and to the world.
It was short and stumpy—I guess the type folks call a cavalry bugle—and it made you doubt that it was actually of modern make, there amid those fierce old ridges. For men had fought there from time long agone; great invasions once traveled those forests, a-horseback or on foot. I reckoned maybe they had come in chariots too, though I know better now; but I was confident they’d had swords and spears and bows-and-arrows, which indeed they owned.
So it seemed that possibly those long-dead warriors grew tired on occasion of all their stamping and swordplay, and they said to one another: “We’ve had enough of this. We got to get out in the timber with the dogs.” So they went, taking big packs of hounds along, and warranting that there would be deer-meat or boar-meat to toast above their fires when they returned.
Did the wild boars and tall horned stags—did the galloping bears know all the tricks of the foxes which we people used to run in Missouri? It could be believed—and maybe elderly, more ardent and ferocious tricks as well.
So you could see them swarming, if you let your imagination carry you along. First the wild beasts, dripping with lather and snorting as they fought to elude; and then the gaunt white-teethed hounds driving them; and finally men with helmets and lances and big knives in scabbards, waving their bows like a pack of Indians in a Western show, and shouting their battle cry and the hunting cry that went with it. Seemed like I could hear the deep rough voices bellowing, though all the French I knew was Vive la France and Merci, beaucoup and Ma’mselle, voulez vous—? and certain it was that the ancient hunters hollered none of those phrases.
But most of all I heard the horn or horns, the winding smooth cry they made—keen as a slim tenor in a church choir, deep bass as the bottom of a rain-barrel. And answering up the glens where now their skeletons must be mildewed, those dogs which spoke in the hunt made reply to the instruments that were blown.
And one hound more than all: it seemed that I could hear him or her, putting breath into a bugle all its own, and challenging the armed pursuers to do better if they could, but they never could.
So the guns went barking, and shells spoke like witches in the air above, and the First World War continued; it was my war and I had to go back to it, and leave those throngs of brawny men and long-legged beasts flocking across the little mountains as I had dreamed.
I took the bugle with care, and with a wadded rag I’d used for a handkerchief I wiped clay and some portion of corrosion from its cup, and carried it away. I pushed my gas mask aside where it dangled, and got the bugle fastened beneath a strap of my equipment; and thus Springfield Davis carried it in later years, tight under his suspender.
Later years indeed. It wasn’t until he had bred Bugle Ann, and first led her out through Chilly Branch Hollow, and discovered the wonderful sound that haunted inside her and could emerge when she was shoving a fox—it wasn’t until late in the 1920’s that I went into the loft above our summer kitchen and dug the bugle out.
Spring said, “Listen to that voice, Cal and Bake Royster. It’s not human for her to have a voice like that. Just as if she was playing cornets in a heavenly band. Cal, if I had a trumpet, I’d train her to it. Make her come when I’d blow her in. A little golden horn. Not one of them crazy blowing-horns made out of goat’s antlers, like the Armstrongs sent away for. Hell,” said Springfield Davis, “that little lady ain’t no goat.”
“Spring,” I said to the old man, “I’ve got a bugle.”
“Whereabouts?”
“It’s up in a barrel in the loft. It’s put away with war souvenirs and such.” I thought awhile; after all those years the recollection of my fancy came back to me: forgotten Europeans with beards and steel upon their heads, with stained shields and pennants hanging in firelight on the stony castle walls at home, all rampaging in a wilderness beside the Meuse River, and hounds crying ahead.
I said, never knowing quite why I spoke: “Come daylight, I’ll get up on the stepladder and poke around in that pile of relics, and find the bugle. You wouldn’t want a helmet to go with it, by any chance?”
“No,” said Spring, “just the horn.” And thus I gave it to him for a present, and thus he trained her well.
A good ten years it was, and here at last the horn came into play again. I heard them blowing now, far over at our place—Spring Davis and the daughter of the man he’d murdered over Bugle Ann (and still he hoped she’d nurture flesh of his descendants in her body). Both bugling—as if in wildest mockery and rivalry, and then somehow getting together in a warlike chorus, and then straying unhappily apart again.
They met down at the second fence, with Heaven Creek bubbling meagerly in shady trees beyond, as if it and its crawdads had no concern with the strange power that dogs could wield over humankind.
Camden was drenched and scratched, for she had waded and she had gone through blackberry vines.
“You were blowing for her,” the old man fal-tered. “I heard you. Thought I’d come to help.”
“Oh, Mr. Davis,” the girl cried, gripping him. “She’s gone! If Benjy—It’s Little Lady, Mr. Davis, like you guessed. She’s out and gone.”