Mar. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a
kind of Puritan.
And. O, if I thought that, I’d beat
him like a dog!
THERE was an old man, too. He lived beside the river in Parker County, and my Weatherford friend had told me to look out for him, that he knew things. I scudded down there one afternoon before a bleak, damp, cutting norther, past shores with a farming-country sameness in their look. Willows and sand and cottonwoods, and at a fence line before a field, dead limb tangles shrouded in grapevines … Lost fishlines were looped around branches above the water; old refrigerators and washtubs and barbed-wire reels cluttered the bars.
At about the place where I guessed from my friend’s description that the old man ought to live, I parked the canoe and tied it, and with the pup climbed up through bright-leaved hardwoods to a pasture. Across its fence and a dirt road stood a neat, white, new cottage with no grass or shrubs, square-surrounded by a tight hog-wire fence. Fifty yards behind it was a double hewn-log cabin, boarded on the ends, in what looked to be good condition, with a galvanized roof and winter-bare rosebushes against its walls. White Leghorns scratched to leeward of a part-log barn, and a pair of milk cows stood waiting.
At the gate I stopped, and under the wind’s cut yelled: “Hello, the house!”—formula in that country, where you don’t barge into yards or bang on doors until you’ve used up remoter salutations and seen if there are any big dogs.
Nobody answered. I tried again, and someone shouted from behind me. I turned to see a man a couple of hundred yards away at a crossroads by the pasture’s corner, driving a calf toward me. I walked to meet him, the pup swaggering feistily ahead and then gradually falling back before the strangeness of the calf, a six- or eight-month-old bull, black and scrub in shape, that stopped and shook its head and pawed the earth a time or two as the gap between us narrowed.
The man, tiny and wizened and old in bib overalls, whanged him with a stick and said to me as though in greeting: “No-good piss ant!”
I guessed he meant the calf, and asked if he were Mr. Willett.
Thick gold-rimmed glasses beaded down his little blue eyes; he wore a blue chambray work shirt under the overalls, and over both an old brown suit coat, and had on a big dirty Stetson pulled to a drooping point in front, with no creases or dents in its ballooning crown.
He said: “I’m half of it.”
I said that my Weatherford friend had told me to look him up and talk to him about that part of the river. He grunted, hit the calf again, and drove him on toward an open fence gap. Emboldened, the pup began to shrill at the calf’s heels, and I called him back.
“Half Angus, half Jersey,” the old man said. “Took my cow to one of my boy’s bulls. Don’t know why.”
“You never cut him,” I said.
“Ain’t caught the moon right,” he said. “Besides, I like him bull.…” He spat brown juice. “Said I knowed the river, did he?”
“Said so,” I affirmed, that laconicism being easy to drop into.…
He said, wiring the gap shut behind the calf, that even living on her for fifty-six years he didn’t know a damn thing about her and, further, that he didn’t feel like saying what he did know in no sore-throat wind like that; why didn’t we go to the house? We headed for it. As we mounted the porch steps, a jet cracked sound above the low scuttling cloud cover; the house shook and its windows rattled. The old man swiveled his little eyes upward for a moment in token attention, said: “Them son of a bitches!” and held the door open.
“Bring him in,” he said, seeing me glance backward at the passenger. “Don’t reckon he’ll tangle none with a tomcat.”
The tomcat himself would have tangled with anybody or anything, except that he didn’t want to move. Heat-stupefied, he lay before a fierce butane stove and raised his head and made a noise like far-distant summer thunder, and the pup backed timidly into a corner. After two weeks on the river the room’s temperature was dizzying; the old man dropped into a rocking chair beside the stove and waved me to another. Tugging at zippers and neck buttons, I sat down. In a corner of the room was a single bed, and beyond its foot on a rugless floor stood a silent television set. To conserve that oven heat, the doors to other rooms were closed.…
“Looks like you’d have more brains,” Old Man Willett said. “Horsin’ around a river this damn time of year.”
“What you think you’re gonna find?”
I told him, or tried to.
He grinned and said I wouldn’t know what the crap to do with it if I found it.… A coffee can sat between his feet; rolling forward on the rockers, he spat darkly and perpendicularly down into it, threw the unheroic Stetson into a corner, and said he wasn’t nothing but a damned old farmer. However, if my Weatherford friend was willing to pay me money to run up and down a river in wintertime …
“Pay me?” I said.
“Pay you, hell yes,” he said, eye-drilling me. “Think I don’t know how cracked he is on old junk?”
I laughed. He took it for confirmation, and started a kind of lecture on the local background. Many of the old ones had still been around when he’d come into that country, and he had talked to them. He had known old Sam Savage, and had heard him tell of the time when he and his brother Jim had been violently orphaned over on Sanchez Creek and carried away by The People into the wild country for so long that by the time someone at Fort Sill swapped a pony for them, their English was forgotten. He knew where Margaret Barton had died, and had positive opinions about Andrew Berry and the two little redheaded boys.
But the butane fumes had me drowsy and out of the humor for lectures, and for that matter it was mainly second- or third-hand variant versions of matters I’d mostly heard about already. We butted heads over whether or not the Indians had killed Roe Littlefield (“Reckon I heared right,” he said. “Got a arrow in his crouch. Hoop-arn tip. FIoop arn hit might near always infected bad …”), and I steered him onto himself as a subject.
It was one he had thought about, and with some bitter humor. He’d wandered into that country in 1901 as a young man from Georgia, via work in the pine timberlands of Arkansas and East Texas, part of a continuing drift from South to Southwest that was then, with all its fits and starts, eighty or ninety years old. A year or so later he’d married the daughter of a man who had married the daughter of another man who had built, in the Comanche time, the hewn-log cabin behind the cottage. With his wife, Old Man Willett had lived in the cabin for nearly half a century, planting peanuts and cotton and corn and sometimes, when the drouths and the floods permitted, harvesting them. He had always had a beef steer or two around for meat, but distrusted ranching, and ranchers too.
“Take my boy,” he said. “Made him some money in Dallas. Bought him a little stock ranch south of Ward Mountain, old sorry land that wouldn’t sprout a cuckleburr. Ought to see him dressed up like Gunsmoke, Sundays.…”
They’d raised a family, and four years before had built the white cottage to finish life in—though he said he’d preferred the cabin. An oak fire, now, it put out a nicer kind of a heat than ara gas stove. Sweating, I agreed.… Then his wife had fallen into a long sickness which coincided with the latter part of the big drouth and ate up $12,300 in hospital and doctor bills (he knew the sum with exactitude because they’d had $7,300 in the bank when she came down, and later he’d borrowed $5,000 on his place), and had died. He’d burned her bedclothes, and lived alone now, his children scattered to the cities. His manner in telling it all was wry and factual. Life’s shape as he saw it held those things; he had a dry narrow dignity that did not ask for sympathy.
Later, not in comment on himself, he said: “A man needs it hard. I don’t give a crap. He’d ought to have it hard a-growin’ up, and hard a-learnin’ his work, and hard a-gittin’ a wife and feedin’ his kids and gittin’ rich, if he’s gonna git rich. All of it.”
“Appreciates it better, maybe.”
“Does it better,” he said, and spat.
He said he had to go and milk. We went out into the wind, the pup and the gray-and-white tomcat with us. It was blowing wet and steadily hard and colder than before. At the little barn Old Man Willett elbowed past the nuzzling cows and pulled down hay into the feeders and let them in. Sitting on an upturned nail keg, he gently and perfectly pulled the first cow’s unwashed teats and squirted milk into a cracked china bowl, which when full he set down for the pup to slop at. Then he aimed a couple of squirts at the face of the old tomcat and milked the rest into a dirty pail, which he carried just outside the barn door and emptied into a long chicken trough. The chickens gathered, vocal, and the torn and a friend joined them.
“Figure besides them cats and pullets, I’m feedin’ three coons and a skunk,” he said. “Separate some cream maybe oncet a week for me.”
I said it looked like a good bit of trouble, keeping two cows for a bowl of cream a week.
He looked at me. “Hit ain’t the cream,” he said. “Crap, I wouldn’t have no notion what to do. Always milked.”
While he was milking the second cow, I walked over to examine the log house. It was a good one, the great flat-hewn post-oak trunks that showed on the sheltered porch joined into a single surface by chinking and smoothed mortar, no rot in them even at the corners, which were held together with miter-dovetail corners, the hardest of all to make and the best, since water that might fester the joint or freeze and burst it drains always out and down. Each of the separate halves of the house had a sandstone chimney on its outward side, and behind them were two good-sized lean-to rooms of gray planks. In front and back, roofed and floored galleries ran the structure’s width, making an H with the shady open-ended dog run. I’ve seen others with the dog run enclosed and made a room, and with additional rooms tacked somehow onto the lean-tos or the rear gallery. Most of them began as a single square cabin with a door and a fireplace and maybe a loft for shirt-tail kids to sleep in, and grew with families. The log house was an infinitely expansible dwelling.
Stacked bales of hay showed through its windows, and in the dog run bags of feed were stowed. A good many cabins remain in that part of the Brazos country, though few compared to that time when they were the only houses. The great south-hooking finger of the Western Cross Timbers traverses the region. Largely scrub brush now, in the beginning it was thick with straight-boled post oaks that the men from timbered regions to the east and north knew uses for.… They left the marks of their origins in the way they built, mainly in their notches. Deep Southerners from the big-pine states cut simple, vulnerable half-notches and quarter-notches of the kind they’d used with the long, straight, expendable timber of home. Those flat notches rot out fast, and the examples that are left are mostly on houses that were boarded over a few years after building. Hill Southerners—Tennesseans and Kentuckians and Carolinians—had the tradition of the peaked saddle-notch, a tight joint suited to quick-tapering mountain hardwoods and good with post oaks, too, since a number of such cabins are still around. Pennsylvania Germans, apparently, shoved the use of the dovetail and the miter dovetail on into the Midwest, and when you find a house with those corners in Texas, you know that an ancient Ohioan or Illinoisan had his hand in it, or someone who learned from him.
Impermanent types, the wearers out and movers on, slapped up cabins like corncribs with round unhewn logs and haphazard plain saddle-notch corners, none of which have survived.…
A dull treatise? I daresay, though the field has its interest, and a properly obsessed student can get off into odd corners of it: the alternative use of rived boards or froe-split shakes for roofs, and how floor puncheons were hewn, and the effect that minutely local geology had on fireplaces.… And how we used to dig Comanche bullets out of the logs of the old Rippy place before it burned (somebody got mad at somebody else and set a pasture afire, and lots of things went that time), though oldsters said the bullets we got dated only from last season’s disgruntled deer hunters, and maybe they were right.
The easy skill with edged hand tools, with ax and adze and froe and knife, which went into the construction of those houses for a scant dozen or so years of the last century, before the big post oaks played out and the planks came in, is nearly inconceivable now. If you doubt it, take a look at a good set of corners. I never knew anyone who could do that kind of work on uneven logs of varying size without saws or elaborate measuring gear. Like all good handwork, it was a matter of feel, and that kind of feel is short among us these days. Once in a foreign country I sat at the window of a little hotel by a trout river and watched a man in the courtyard below chop out a pair of stilt-soled chestnutwood shoes in fifteen minutes with an ax, all but the hollows inside, every blow counting and his hand sliding up and down the helve in control of the angle and force of his strokes. Some such art as that must have gone into a set of miter-dovetail cabin corners.
But I guess it may not matter greatly. For the most part the countrymen who live among the few surviving cabins seem to think not, and burn and batter them according to the dictates of pragmatism, and sometimes of whim. The logs make good fence posts still. My Weatherford friend, a scholar of log houses and a resister of their destruction, ordered some cordwood from a farmer one fall and got a truck-load of sawed-up timbers hand-hewn 100 years before.
“Solid, ain’t it?” the old man said, coming up behind me.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
“Trouble was, she got to thinkin’ it was too old-timey,” he said reflectively. “Daughter-in-law stuck that in her head.” He thought. “Hell,” he said. “Her old maw she recollected when they had to squnch down all night long in there without no lights or fire, and the men layin’ outside a-waitin’ for Indians. They kilt one oncet down behint the barn.” He snorted, and spat. “Too old-timey!” he said.
It appeared to be the tail of a losing argument that he was unwilling to have let end even at her death. He pointed out a place where a few rotten shakes still showed beneath the galvanized roofing and a layer of shingles, and said that under the plank floor of the right-hand log room the old puncheons were still firm. Swapping cabin lore, we wandered back to the house’s butane fervor; I managed to prop back a swinging door that led into the kitchen, and it helped a little.… We spoke of the river, and he asked me if I’d run into any quicksand. I said no, not the real kind I remembered.
“They ain’t no more,” he said nostalgically. “Hell, I lost a team of mules in twenty-five. Somethin’ happened since.”
I mentioned the thought of a friend of mine, who’d theorized that Possum Kingdom Lake was settling out all the finer particles that quicksand needed, leaving only the coarse firm stuff in the river below it. He considered that, and said maybe so, unwilling that an outlander should tell him anything about the river.… Of my sand island where the geese roosted, he said: “Hit ain’t no island up there.”
I said he’d better tell me what river it was I’d been floating down, then.
“Ha!” Old Man Willett said. “You must of found it on that-air map.”
My books and maps, when I’d shown them to him, had curled his crusty lip. Holy Scripture, he said, was all the books that anybody needed. Now, reminded, he went to the windowsill by his bed and brought back a crack-spined Bible to the fire. He thumped it.
He said: “If they’s any salvation, she’s in this book.”
I said it was a fine book.
He said: “Crap! Hit’s the only book they is.”
His eye shone, and I didn’t argue. He started damning commentators and interpreters, water-muddiers. You could drink the truth in its purity if you went to the source.…
Calvinistic fundamentalism and its joined opposite, violent wallowing sin, settled that part of the world and have flourished there since like bacteria in the yolk of an egg. They streamed in with the gaunt unaristocratic Southerners who predominated in that settlement, and you may like them or not, but there they are. You may consider that, given the region’s temperamental tone, only a punitive God can keep its people from slavering animality, and a trip to the illegal beer halls of Glen Rose on a Saturday night will back your stand. Or you may wish that the whole schizophrenic mess could be tossed out and replaced with some sort of Mediterranean moderation.… But it hasn’t been, nor does such a solution seem likely.
Most of my own people came from South Texas, from the cattle-and-cotton regions along the Guadalupe, a piece of country with four or five different breeds of men and a consequent easygoing messiness of tone. There is nothing like having a few Mexican Catholics around to dull the spines of the Baptist prickly pear, and as a kid I liked it down there, and looked forward to summers with my grandfather in a gingerbread frame house among big live oaks. But I did most of my growing up in the Baptist country. There you breathed in the Old Testament, like pollen, from the air, and it produced its own kind of hay fever.
Not only Baptists, of course … There were a dozen or more sects, and several splinters off of each, and they all squabbled like cats on a midnight roof about such matters as total immersion and the scope of predestination. But they all saw sin in pretty much the same light, and they all went to the Bible for the word about it.
Old Man Willett said: “Listen. Can you show me any place in the Book where hit says anything about a nigger?”
Reflecting, I mentioned the un-Caucasic reputations of the Queen of Sheba, and Balthasar the wise man, and Ham.
But my fundamentalism wasn’t fundamental, and I knew it, as did he. He grinned. “Yes,” he said. “But do hit say they was niggers?”
I couldn’t remember that it did.
“Crap no, you can’t,” he said. “Because hit don’t. Nor nothin’ about no whisky, neither.”
Despite an uncertainty about what all this proved, I didn’t ask, for fear of finding out at too great length. It proved something, for he chortled as he bore the Bible back to its place by the bed, and was in a grinning good humor when he sat down again astraddle his spit can. “You damn right,” he said.…
His load of evangelism thus queerly discharged, we began again to talk about the river, and about those times when, the Indians gone, the sharp-edged saints and sinners had carried their inherent squabblingness up the cattle trails or, staying home, had grated violently upon one another. Somehow, the old man knew quite a bit about the savage Reconstruction-time lynching of Dusky Hill and her five daughters in the northern part of the county, but he wouldn’t talk much about it. Someone he’d known had been involved.
“They was Yankees,” he said obscurely when I dug for details. “Liked Yankees, anyhow. And the gals was you know what.…”
It was late afternoon. The weather looked no better. I said I’d best get down to the river and make my camp.
“Crap, stay here,” the old man said. “I got room.”
Remembering the wind’s damp bite, I didn’t feel like arguing about it. He had a telephone. I called my Weatherford friend and asked him to come out and eat with me at some café on the highway. At dark he came; since he and Old Man Willett hadn’t seen each other in a long time, they spent a half-hour or so catching up on country talk while I went down and made the boat secure. The old man refused to come along with us to dinner, saying that restaurant food made his belly burn.…
“Proud,” my friend said when we were on the road. “Snake-bit, too. They hit a gas field west of him there, but not a smell of it showed up on his place. One daughter takes a little care of him, but the other kids don’t worry much.”
As we ate and talked in a steak-and-catfish place by a bridge, I could tell that he was disappointed in my historical digging on the trip. I’d found nothing new. I’d known he would be, though, because there wasn’t too much new to be found, and besides, it was a goodbye trip, with a main part of its pleasure in the rehearsal of old things.… But there was enough to talk about. By the time we’d finished eating, the wind was harder and colder than ever and held a spit of rain. My friend left me off in the red mud before the old man’s house and drove home, and going in I crawled under heaped quilts into the bed made for me.
Having slept heavily, I woke early and lay there unwilling to slide out into the cold air beyond the quilts. At six thirty Old Man Willett came in and switched on the light. He was wearing flap-backed long underwear and slippers and seemed to be dancing a little with contained emotion.
He said: “You’re a blowed Jew!”
The pup started barking without showing himself from under the blanket I’d folded over him on the floor. “Why?” I said.
“Hit’s a-snowin’!” the old man cackled, and gave a caper, and disappeared.
Rolling up, I looked at the window and sure enough, hit was. Big wet white globs were whirling out of the half-darkness and flattening themselves against the glass and sliding down to stack up against the partition moldings. I got up and dressed and went out to the kitchen, where the old man was patting out biscuit dough and the radio, full-blast loud, was gloating over the fact that the weather was in a hell of a shape and likely to stay that way. I sipped coffee and listened and looked out the window at the snow-dimmed bulk of the log house, and the old man laughed every time he glanced in my direction.
“November ain’t so bad,” he said, misquoting words of mine from the afternoon before. “November’s the nicest month they is, in Texiss.”
Nevertheless, he fixed a noble breakfast—oatmeal and eggs and good smoked bacon and fat light biscuits and white gravy and strawberry preserves and cream so thick that you had to spoon it out of its Mason jar into cereal and coffee.
He was so set up that he refused to be much concerned over the fact that his unharvested peanuts would now almost certainly rot in the ground, having been more or less continuously wet since early October. I was unsure whether he most enjoyed my company or my discomfiture. He got plenty of both, for it snowed all the long morning and into the afternoon. We pondered the state of man (parlous, the Scriptural mores going rotten in aircraft factories—though once with surprising liberality he said that Convair had saved Parker County during the big drouth), and the intricate lore of the upper-middle Brazos.
At around two o’clock the thick melting snow stopped, and though the outdoors was mainly sodden red mud and a sullen sky, I decided the worst was over. I called Hale and caught him loose, and argued him past his wife’s objections by promising to get him to Dennis bridge by the following night. They drove out followed by a friend in another car so that Hale’s wife could leave his at Dennis, and when I heard the peremptory chord of his horn outside, I picked up my bundle of gear and told the old man, with a little embarrassment, that I’d like to leave him something for his trouble.
He eyed me with his button glare, and I wondered if I’d stepped over the thin line of offense, never precisely know-able with country strangers.
He said: “I didn’t ast you for no money.”
Relieved, I took out three dollars. He said it was too much and backed away when I proffered it, so I put it on his bed, where it stayed. I said I’d be around again some time, to visit.
“If you don’t git drownded,” he said.
“I’m not counting on it.”
“All right,” he said indifferently. “Don’t wait no ten years, though. I ain’t figurin’ to be here for the Second Comin’.”
OF THE ISLAND GEESE Hale said: “I’d have filled the damn boat. You can have five in possession.”
“Four would have rotted,” I said. “I can think of stuff I’d rather possess.”
“They were meat,” he insisted. “You could have given what you didn’t want to that skinny little old booger.”
“If they’d kept that long. And then he’d have loaded them off on a bunch of other people that never even noticed a flock of geese when they flew across the sky.”
“Maybe,” Hale said, probing at the fire with a green willow stick. “Just the same …”
He was a hunter and a fisherman clear through and always would be; for a long time he’d been impatient with my tendency just to snoop around instead of giving the business of killing wild meat the taut attention it needed. He worked hard and for good money and spent a lot of it every year on tight-scheduled expeditions after antelope in the Big Bend or mule deer and elk in New Mexico or bass in Florida, and the flesh of all of them was jammed usefully, labeled and dated, into freezers at his home. It fretted him that maybe African safaris would have ended before he had the money and time to make one.
He was also a good friend and an old one and the best kind of company. It was night. We were camped sloppily on a loose-sand shore a mile or so below Old Man Willett’s, with willows furnishing a leaky break against the continuing cold northeast wind. The river was high and wide and thickly brown, and made angry noises in the dark against snags and the roughnesses of its banks. Hale had brought steaks and some good whisky, which we were drinking out of enamel cups with honey and lemon and water while we waited for the fire to make coals.
He’d put out a trotline, a quarter-inch nylon cord from shore to shore with maybe twenty hooks, baited variously. The big cats bite most willingly in a rising muddy stream. I’d helped him set it, fighting the brown shove of the river and watching for the drifting logs that can toss a boat end over end, but had told him that if he wanted to run it during the night not to wake me. Now, restless, he emptied his cup and took the lantern, loud and functional again with white gas he’d brought, and went down to check it alone, absorbed in the bow of the canoe, pulling himself across hand over hand and examining the stagings as he went. Against the night the lantern made a clear bright circular picture of Hale and the canoe’s curving bow and the hard-rushing brown water. I wrapped potatoes and stuck them in the fire and got the grill ready to use. Hale came back grinning, the lantern in one hand and his chain stringer in the other, with a six-pound channel cat and a couple of others that looked to be maybe three pounds each.
“My breakfast,” he said. “Them as works, eats.”
The steaks were plump; garlicked and seared over glowing oak, they came out fine, and when we’d eaten we had coffee and smoked and talked about the days when we’d gone out to the mouth of Falls Creek in Hood County with big black Bill Briggs, Hale’s family’s chauffeur and yardman and occasional cook. Hale agreed that they had been the size of telephone poles, the tree trunks that Bill had lifted and carried over to drop across the fire. Red, the river had been then most of the year, high or low, Possum Kingdom not yet up above to catch the silt and hide the fact that West Texas was washing away, down toward the Gulf. But the creek had been clear, with bass and good bream. A girls’ camp stood there now.
The wind, quite naturally, as though it had intended all along to do so, started bringing horizontal thin rain, so cold that it seemed it should be snow; and in fact, I knew when a fleck hit my cheekbone and slid down to where beard stubble stopped it, it partly was snow. We tarped things and tumbled into the little tent. Hale had unrolled a fancy down bag on the windward side, which was sagging, its stakes unfirm in the sand. After I’d lain there for a while and was nearly asleep, I heard him cursing under his breath.
“What?”
“Leak,” he said.
The flashlight showed a drip from the down-curving sag of a seam, and a dark stain on his sleeping bag. We rolled out into the night, all wet snow now, and pulled the stakes tight and pounded them deep into the sand, trampling it down on top of them and finding stones to put on the trampled spots. It was tight then, but the snow was piling up against it, and I knew that having started it would probably keep on leaking. I offered to flip a coin to see who slept on that side. We did. I won, and lay down again on the good side and slept well except when, from time to time, I woke to hear him thrashing and blaspheming in his bag. Once when I did I said: “Hale?”
“Yeah?”
“Hale,” I said, “how come you don’t go run that line? …”
In the morning it was worse, still snowing, the ground a mass of melting slush and patches of dirty golden sand showing through. I stayed in the sack, as was my policy with weather. So did Hale, and slept a little finally; it had not been so much wetness as the first-night-out insomnia that had bothered him, most of the water having run off onto the tent floor beneath his air mattress.
Finally at about eleven he woke up and reminded me that I’d promised to get him to Dennis by night. It wasn’t far, but on the other hand we were bound to move slowly.… Outside, the thick wet snow plastered itself to us, and having lost my raincoat somewhere upstream I soon got soaked through a “water-repellent” jacket. While I gathered wood, fishing for it with numbed, hurting hands beneath mounds of snow, stumbling on numbed, hurting, wet feet, Hale built a fire. It took him thirty minutes to get it going even with gasoline, and when he did, a willow branch bowed down with slow grace and deposited a load of snow in its exact middle, and put it out. Later, when we had it burning again and a pot of sugared fruit bubbling on it, nearly ready, I raised my foot too high as I passed and dropped a thick glob of wet sand from my boot sole into the pot.
I looked at it, aware that seldom in my life had I wanted food as I had wanted that hot sugared fruit. Not even those beans on the island …
Hale started laughing. So did I, and remembered with a clarity that I hadn’t felt till then exactly why it was that he was good company, out. It was an awful day. The tent pulled together into a collapsed double-pointed lump finally from the weight of the snow on it. My old shotgun, left in the canoe, gushed water out both barrels when I picked it up. A drifting snag had carried away Hale’s trotline, entire. We got coffee and fruit at last, and stood by the fire steaming ourselves for a couple of hours, and then, the snow thicker than ever, hit the big brown river miserably, the pup a shivering sullen protuberance under the tarp.
The current was fast and shot us down. I remember a big buzzard roost somewhere, the birds hanging like sad black husks in leafless trees, with nowhere to go on a day like that. I remember Hale shooting at three ducks 150 yards away with his magnum twelve, and thousands of the little sad-high-whistling birds in the brush, never showing themselves, and a heron or so, and a place where we stopped and built another big fire and boiled eggs and ate chocolate with them and hung over the fire with sharp animal relish until we knew we had to leave. There was a volunteer watermelon patch at that place of the kind that sprouts where people have had picnics and spat out seeds, but the frosts had touched all the big melons and left only green mush inside them. Hale walked among them smashing them angrily with his gun butt.… I remember most clearly of all the feel of melted snow crawling down the hollow of my back and between my buttocks, and I told him, to put it on record, that if it hadn’t started clearing by the time we reached Dennis I was going to pull out too, for the year.
But the snow stopped not long before we came in sight of the 1892, plank-and-iron, one-way bridge, and blue sky showed behind us in the west, and at last the yellow setting sun. Soggy, we went into the old ser sta gro there and braved the stares of another set of philosophers while I bought some things I needed.
Outside again, Hale grinned. “When you think up another good joke, you be sure and call me,” he said.
“You picked the worst of it,” I told him.
“Picked, hell. Was picked.”
But it was a measure of how much like me he was in certain childishnesses that he looked wistful as he stood by his car beside the rusty cotton gin, the stringer with its catfish in his hand, and watched us move off downriver. Wistful was the only word for how he looked. The pup stuck his nose out from under the tarp and looked back at Hale until willows intersected the line of sight between us.…
I camped alongside the mouth of Patrick’s Creek in a grove of big elms and oaks where in frontier days and after they used to hold revivals, baptizing by total immersion in the Brazos, horses and guns nearby, and would still if an un-fundamentalistic owner hadn’t fenced them out. I was on the river side of his fence. The hills stand far back from the river there and the bottom is flat rich sandy loam, Southern-looking, the ground stoneless, just sand and mud and the rotting twig-and-leaf carpet of the grove’s floor.
At dusk the brush was full of whitethroats. It was also full of the sad-whistling song that had puzzled me. Ergo, the sad whistler was a … Certainly. Old Sam Peabody, they claimed the song said, and so it did if you pronounced Pea-body in the Yankee way. I supposed the big numbers of them had come in from the north with the cold. The thing was, it was a winter sound in that part of the country, and one tends falsely to associate bird song with spring, and to learn what little he knows about it then.…
I felt relieved, and again like an amateur naturalist, kinsman to Port Smythe, M. D. At Patrick’s Creek, whither our Red-Skinned Vergil conducted us at Night Fall, there fell upon our Ear the lugubrious Note of the White-Throated Sparrow, (Zonotrichia albicollis)….
But not much like one. I had no red-skinned Vergil, and all I wanted really, scratch-eyed and chilled, was fire and a drink and bread and bacon. I had them, and went to bed. Owls called, and far off someone was running hounds; scent would be good in the cold fresh-dampened bottom. A wet log on the fire was squirting steam out a tiny sap vein at one end and saying: Old, Sa-a-am, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. Beside me the pup wallowed and made groaning sounds in his regular expression of belly-full contentment. The night before had chipped at his routine—Hale in the tent, and the miserable snow.
Now it was all right, he seemed to be saying. Now it was the way it was supposed to be.
MITER DOVETAIL