Lantry and his grandson Lant sat on a fallen log beside the timber trail that wound through the upper swamp. At their backs the ledge of hammock sheered steeply against the sky. Piety was hunting squirrels in the hickories. Below them in the swamp and on the river sounded the racket of timbering. It was incredibly noisy after the years of silence. The Murkley Cypress Company had come up the Ochlawaha eight years ago, in the year young Lant was born. Their presence still irked Lantry. The blows of axe on cypress struck on his ears with a sharpness keener than sound. He shook his bearded head impatiently. Young Lant looked at him curiously.
At eight years of age the boy had his father's heavy forelock that dropped between his eyes, but it was dark red, like Lantry's. His neck was long and thin and the thick hair made him top-heavy. His head, with its red-brown eyes staring like those of a deer, might have gone on a twelve-year body. He was all head and eyes and neck. The spindling frame might some day equal Lantry's in height, but the massive bulk would not be there. Something about the country to which the grandfather had brought his blood to breed, pared down progeny to a square-jointed leanness. Lant edged closer to the old man.
"Le's go yonder to the timberin' and see kin we ketch Pa workin' on a jog-board."
"You set still. Your Ma won't know where to look for us, time she's done huntin'."
"I got no mind to set still," the boy said belligerently.
He glared at Lantry and for an instant the man glared back at him. They were much alike and the two minds met in mid-air, like gamecocks, and clashed. But Lantry was gentler, with his age upon him.
After a moment his red lips parted through his beard in a smile, and he said quietly, "Set right still and Grand-daddy'll tell you about the up-country. And about the world."
"What's the world?"
The man ruminated. His eyes twinkled.
"Well, son," he said, "I ain't never travelled no direction but south. But if so hit's the same in 'tother directions, why, all I got to say, the world's a big place and a lot o' people in it."
The boy frowned blackly.
"That ain't no tale. Tell me about niggers."
The subject fascinated the child, for there was only one Negro in the scrub, an ex-slave to whom his master had given land in Florida. The Negro kept to himself in an old house.
"Niggers," Lantry said, "is borned male and female, like squirrels and dogs and white folks. Niggers is all shades o' black and brown and yaller." He closed his eyes, as though recalling a picture. He sang softly:
"Massa had a yaller gal,
Brought her from the South.
She combed her hair so very tight
She could not close her mouth.
Her head was like a coffee pot,
Her nose was like the spout.
Her mouth was like the fireplace
With the ashes taken out."
The child shouted with laughter.
"That's 'Git along down,' ain't it?"
"You got it right, son. That's the song."
Lantry leaned his back against a palmetto trunk, scratching his shoulder blades.
"I mind me of a big buck nigger in North Caroliny, had one glass eye—"
He smiled to himself. The boy, watching him raptly, saw the lids droop, the big head nod. The old man had fallen asleep. Lant jumped angrily on a dry palmetto frond, hoping it would rouse him. His grandfather infuriated him. Lantry went to sleep with a story half-told. He was ignorant, too, of most of the things the boy wanted to know. He had wanted to ask him if squirrels could swim. He decided that his grandfather would only have said, "Blest if I know." He would ask his Uncle Zeke. Better, he would remember to ask old man Paine, the mighty hunter who lived across the scrub and brought them presents of bear-meat and venison.
He walked a few cautious feet away from the sleeping man. His movement went unheard. He wheeled like a yearling deer and ran down the trail towards the swamp. He picked a vantage point high on a cable trail. He could see the pull-boat anchored with iron stakes on the opposite side of the river. He could see the company house boat above Otter Landing. The boat lay quiet now, but last Saturday, after dark, it had been bright with lights and the sound of men singing and playing. His father had lived on the boat before the timbering came close to the Lantry land.
Through the dense upper swamp Lant thought he could identify a man driving a wedge into a cypress as Willy Jacklin. His father's hanging black forelock shook like a horse's mane with the force of the blows. The noise of the timber outfit hummed in Lant's ears. He heard the shouts of men above distant axes and cross-cut saws. The drum on the pull-boat chattered, the gears ground and creaked. A steam whistle blew, the engine puffed and chugged. The great cypress began to fall. Three hundred feet away he saw a trembling in the dark canopy that was the tree-tops over the swamp. There came a ripping, as woody cells, inseparable for a century, were torn violently one from another. The tree crashed, flattening everything in its path, and the roar of the fall went like a roll of thunder through swamp and hammock and scrub. The boy thought there was a hush after the last echo, as though the men waited before they began to trim and saw, watching the tree like a great prone animal that might not be entirely dead.
When he was a man, he decided, he would not timber. His father, his father's cousin Sylvester, and his Uncle Thaddeus had been timbering since the year he was born. They seemed stupid, puny creatures to him, to be felling and rafting the giants of the swamp. He would raise cattle, like his Uncle Abner; or become a hunter like old man Paine; or make whiskey as his Uncle Zeke was doing. The thought of hunting reminded him that he had not heard his mother's gun in some time. He scrambled to his feet and trotted back over the trail. Piety, coming down the hammock ledge towards her father, saw the boy moving in, with a curious air of rapt detachment, on a line converging with hers.
Lantry was still asleep. He looked old. His mind still ran pursued down dark roadways. This, she thought, and not the wear of time on the bulky body, had weakened him. She felt concerned about his frailty, as he had once concerned himself with hers. She was small and scrawny, as she had always been. But she felt within herself a rooted strength, like that of a small plant sucking at the earth with deep tentacles. Between her father and her son she was strong and comforted.
Lant's eyes shone as his mother fished out squirrels from the pockets of the man's jacket she wore. There were ten. The boy gathered the limp grey bodies together and tip-toed on bare feet to his grandfather. He piled them on the sleeping man's lap and against his breast. When he laid one on either side of Lantry's neck, the man wakened with a start and leaped to his feet, scattering dead squirrels like leaves. Piety chuckled and the child shouted.
"Dog take it," Lantry said, "I figgered I'd done woke up in a nest o' varmints."
The boy sobered.
"Squirrels is varmints, ain't they?"
"I reckon so. I had it right. A nest o' varmints is jest what 'twas."
They laughed together. The man and boy were friendliest when the woman was with them. A turbulent stream flowed into a quiet pond and another flowed out of it. One violence did not meet the other. The boy carried the squirrels against his chest. He went ahead of Piety and Lantry. Where the hammock met the clearing, he stopped short. He pointed with a stubby brown toe to fresh deer tracks.
"A doe and a fawn," he said excitedly. "Ma, le's track the boogers and you shoot 'em."
The fawn, in the early fall, must be past the spotted stage and at its best for eating. Piety turned to Lantry.
"Reckon hit's ary use to try and foller? I ain't much for trackin'."
"The boy's a fine tracker," he said indulgently. "Le's go a piece, anyways."
The trail led in plain sight along the edge of the clearing, across the road and into the scrub. Piety hung the squirrels in the crotch of a tree. They crept along in single file. Lant led the way, pointing out the tracks. They went a long way into the scrub. It was the farthest either Piety or Lantry had come on foot.
The trees grew thickly, like trees in a dream, and there were no shadows, because all the scrub was shadow. The scrub was unreal. They had left behind the road, the hammock and the river. Human life was left behind, and human safety. Nothing was here but thin pines and blackjacks, with scrub palmettos thick and hindering underneath. They could scarcely walk for the low growth. Piety could see no further track, but the boy insisted it was plain. Where the underbrush was thickest they heard once the faint whirr of a rattler. All three stood breathless for a long time. At last the boy, shaking himself free from his mother's hand on his shoulder, pointed a cautious foot ahead. There was no further sound. The snake had slipped away.
The trail led into the rough, a patch of ground that had been lately burned, and the fire put out by rains. The area here was as the scrub had been in front of Lantry's clearing when he first moved from across the river. The new growth was low and tangled, matted with stumps and burned trees. Because the strip was narrow, the three continued across it. It lead into old scrub; scrub whose tall pines were bent by the storm of '71. The pines grew openly, with stretches carpeted with coarse grass, dotted with the grey-green of sweet myrtle bushes, of rosemary and sea-myrtle.
The doe and fawn were here, bedding. The doe leaped up ahead of them. The fawn lurched to its feet and turned immense wondering eyes. Piety cocked her gun and levelled it; exerted her strength to pull the stiff trigger. She was slow. The fawn and doe were gone.
The child went into a rage. He stamped his foot on the ground like an infuriated bull yearling. He spat, as he had seen Lantry do. His red-brown eyes glared at his mother. He seized the heavy gun from her hands and tried to put it to his shoulder to fire in the direction of the deer's retreat. He could not lift it. He stared at it. His fury subsided as quickly as it had come.
Lantry said gently, "Never you mind, son. Grand-daddy'll git you a leetle gun you kin tote and shoot all by yourself."
The child nodded. "Then I kin trail alone."
They turned to go home. They walked silently for half a mile, each with his own thoughts. The child was in the rear, following without attention, his head poked forward on his long neck. Lantry halted.
"Py-tee," he said in a low voice, "this ain't right."
She looked at him, her hand half over her mouth.
"I cain't never find my way here, Pa," she said. "I figgered you knowed the way."
"I figgered so too. But I ain't never been much in these parts. I got no hankerin' to be in the scrub no time. Le's try up here a ways, see kin we hit us a trail back."
They went farther. The scrub deepened. They were lost. Lantry mopped his forehead with his bandana. Piety took out her snuff-box from her blouse and lipped a pinch for encouragement.
Lantry said, "No use, daughter, I got nary idee where we're at."
The child jerked himself out of his reveries.
"You-all fixin' to go home?" he asked abruptly.
"Soon's we kin find the way," Lantry answered.
Lant craned his neck.
He said, "Lift me up so's I kin see."
He pointed from Lantry's shoulder.
"Yonder's the river," he said.
He set out ahead of them. The man and woman looked at each other.
Piety asked, "Reckon he know?"
Lantry said, "How kin he know?"
But the eight-year-old back ahead of them had a surety that drew them. One way was as good now as another. In a brief time they came out on the road that marked scrub from hammock. They could hear faintly the sounds of the timbering. They had been near home all the time. The boy turned to the right, striding brusquely.
"Son," Lantry called, "how come you to know the way?"
The boy pointed to the ridge at his left.
"Why," he said impatiently, "I could see the tops o' them big trees yonder. Them's hickories. Ain't none o' them in the scrub. Ain't hickories nowhere excusin' right along above the river."
They retrieved their squirrels and approached the clearing. They saw three women and some children waiting for them on the stoop. Martha came down the fenced-in lane to meet them. Behind her were Thaddeus' wife and Zeke's wife, Lulu. Zeke had married Dan Wilson's widow. He was a gentle stepfather to her girl-child, Kezzy.
Lulu had not been friendly after she married Zeke. Piety and Lantry had not seen the girl in some months. Kezzy was ten years old, with a milk-white skin, great black eyes and smooth black hair that hung over her shoulders in stiff braids. She was square-built and quiet. Piety was struck at once with her resemblance to some one she had known and liked. Lantry studied the child, stroking his beard.
"Lemme see—Annie Wilson were aunt to this gal young un. That right, Lulu?"
Lulu said, primly belligerent, "Annie were Dan's sister, all right. Her and Dan's buried side by side right now. I were always proud Dan never had none of Annie's crazy ways."
"Annie Wilson were a fine woman," Lantry said quietly. He turned to his daughter Martha.
"What you women-folks studyin' about? Clustered on my stoop like hens with your biddies."
Martha smiled, smoothing back her sandy hair. She laid a hand on the shoulder of her oldest living child, the boy Cleve. He was ten, the age of Kezzy; a pasty-faced boy, sullen, inclined to a round puffiness. Four younger girls twisted their hands into the woman's full calico skirt.
"Well, Pa," she answered him, "we been wonderin' wasn't you goin' to start Lant in to the school this year. If you was, we figgered couldn't we git you-all to tote the hull mess o' young uns acrost the river in the rowboat."
Lantry said, "We been talkin' about it. I been learnin' him since he were six. He do pretty good now at the readin'. I reckon 'tain't the same as reg'lar schoolin', though."
Lant said, "I cain't go to school. I'm fixin' to hunt this winter." The man stroked the boy's head and studied him thoughtfully. Piety could not endure to have the boy all day across the river, sitting unwilling at desk and bench.
"He'll perfeckly hate it," she said. "You jest as good to put a wild cat to the books."
The boy Cleve grinned, exposing his gums.
"He'll be a varmint shore, if you don't learn him somethin' more'n runnin' in the scrub."
Lantry said, "We got it to do, Py-tee." He nodded at the women. "Leave us know the day school is due to commence. Have all the young uns is to go, at the Landin' soon of a mornin'. Py-tee and me between us kin tote 'em and fetch 'em back agin."
Relieved, they talked a while of the timbering, of fall crops and hogs, then took their leave. The girl Kezzy passed close to Lant.
She said in a low voice, "You won't hate it the least bit, time you git used to it."
Lantry watched after her, smiling.
He nodded to Piety, "She shore favours her Aunt Annie."
Suddenly Piety was watching again a big man and woman scuffling sand in the dance; fat-wood torches flickered and she was sitting close to Annie Wilson, hearing the rich laugh, smelling the sweet musk of the big sweating body. When the stoop under her took shape again, her eyes came to rest on the boy. His head was thrown back like a deer's at sound of the dogs. His nostrils quivered. He glared impartially at her, at Lantry, and in the direction of his kin plodding down the lane.
"I be dogged," he said, "if I aim to mess up with no school no longer'n I have to."