The two years of school on which Lantry insisted, passed for the boy Lant in a dull torment. By the spring in which he was ten years old, he had learned to read and write and to figure enough to make change in money. He had learned as well to pass the brief winter sessions in the unresisting aloofness of a caged animal that has found there is no escape.
The second year was over and done with. On an afternoon in April he followed Kezzy and his cousins out of the schoolhouse and down the road through the piney-woods to the river landing, where his mother waited for them with the rowboat. The girl of twelve hummed under her breath. Cleve was hilarious and chased the smaller children around the pine trees. Lant was preoccupied.
He was thinking about squirrels. He had thought about them a great deal. He could tell young squirrels from old ones and females from males. There were squirrels in between that were neither male nor female. Old man Paine the hunter said it was to keep off too much fighting. The male squirrels were fighting now, for they were mating. That morning, coming through the hammock, he had seen one big grey male attacked by three. They had baited him one at a time, while the female watched bright-eyed from a crotch.
He had long wondered whether squirrels could swim; whether they could swim across the fierce sweep of the river current. Now, as the children settled themselves in the rowboat and Piety picked up the oars to swing out into the river, he saw that a grey cat-squirrel was rocking back and forth on the trunk of a palm, poising to jump into the water. The palmetto was fifty feet high and curved in almost as sharp an arc as a sapling trap. The bent top leaned part-way across the river. The woman settled to her rowing. The squirrel leaped. His jump, with his tail spread behind him, carried him more than half-way across the stream. He paddled madly the rest of the way to the east shore and was out of sight with a whisk. The boy grunted to himself.
"Kin swim like Hell," he said under his breath with satisfaction.
Kezzy asked, "What you see now?"
He frowned and dabbled his fingers indifferently over the side of the boat.
"Jest a ol' squirrel."
Piety said, "You young uns has got all your books and sich. I best to carry you thu the creek."
Kezzy said, "'Tis a sight closer, Aunt Py-tee, but I hates to see you polin' thu sich a thick place. Leave Cleve take the boat thu the swamp." She added, looking at him, "You big ol' lazy, you."
He grinned at her but did not repeat her offer.
At the entrance to the creek the woman laid down her oars and stood up in the stern to pole. The channel narrowed in the swamp. It doubled back on itself, winding about obstructions of rotted stumps and fallen logs. It was gloomy; almost without light. The boat slipped under the arching growth like a water-bug. The boy Lant drew a deep breath. He reached for a leaf of flea-myrtle and crushed its spiced sweetness against his nose. He leaned his cheek against the board seat so that he might peer into the ends of hollow logs for a sight of hidden alligator or coiled moccasin.
The creek spread flat and shallow in the overhanging swamp. Piety poled the boat between cypress knees. The children jumped out on hummocks of dark muck. Piety tied the boat to a cypress and laid the oars behind a clump of bushes. Lant gathered a handful of twigs and crouched a step at a time along the swamp edge. He drew in his breath and let it out again with a puff, hurling his sticks in the water. A gurgle sounded above the ripples he had made, and a wider ring spread across the brown water. Cleve called after him.
"What you chunkin' sticks at?"
"Leetle ol' 'gator."
"More'n likely a catfish," the older boy said.
Lant shook his head.
"I seed his big ol' eyes."
He cut up the steep ledge at an angle from the others, following a narrow trail among the live-oaks and hickories and magnolias. The April sunlight, so fiercely strident in the open, was defeated by the dark hammock and filtered in thin patches to the ground. The earth here was cool. Ferns were moist and sweet-scented and fungus sprouted, sometimes in alabaster sprays like unearthly flowers. He broke one off; smelled of its loamy must; touched his tongue to the stem, splintered like crystal; remembered old man Paine's warning against poisonous herbs and threw it down.
From the north the sound of the timbering came faintly. The crews had passed the Lantry land and were working beyond Zeke Lantry's homestead. Thad Lantry and Willy and Sylvester Jacklin still worked with them. There sounded the dull clang of wedges being driven. Then the boy heard the muffled crash of a tree. From the thickness of the sound he judged it to have been a dead-fall, taking the top of another tree with it. He reached the top of the ridge, where the hammock broke abruptly into the Lantry clearing. Piety and Cleve and Kezzy and the small children were entering the field below him. Ahead, he saw Lantry's tall form moving about the yard.
He was suddenly conscious that instead of the renewed activity that usually followed a felling, there had been a silence. Now he heard one man "Halloo-o-o-o," and another take up the cry. The steam whistle on the pull-boat burst into a long-drawn scream. Piety cupped her mouth with her small hands and called shrilly across the field.
"Lant! You go see what's the matter."
He dropped his books on the sand and loped down through the hammock towards the timbering. He had run half a mile when he heard the voices of men come close. On the trail he met his uncles, Thaddeus and Sylvester, and two of the piney-woods Jacklins. They were carrying among them a large bundle wrapped in their clothing. Thad was naked to his waist, white-skinned and thin. His blue work shirt with one sleeve dangling held the bundle under the middle. Blood soaked through it as from fresh venison in a sack. The men looked at one another.
Thad said, "Son, you jest as good to know now, hit's your daddy."
The boy blinked. He remembered the heavy crash of cypress.
"Was it him caught in the dead-fall?"
"It were him."
The men laid the bundle on the ground. Thad wiped the sweat from his throat; passed his hand down the hollow between his ribs, leaving a streak of grime; shook his hand, so that small drops spattered on a palmetto frond by the trail.
One of the Jacklins said, "I never figgered Willy no big kind of a man, but the pore feller's as heavy totin' as a buck in the scrub."
Another said, "It'll pussle us to git him home."
The boy stared at the bundle. Syl Jacklin looked at him.
"He were slow, son," he said solemnly. "Cousin Willy were always slow. Hit don't do to be slow too clost to no dead-fall."
Lant asked slowly, "Is he done dead?"
Thad said, "If we hadn't of knowed 'twas Willy was there, nobody wouldn't never of knowed who 'twas, after." He spat to the side of the trail. "Son, I don't know what Py-tee kin do about a fitten buryin'. They jest ain't enough o' Willy to fix nice in the coffin. Le's go, boys."
They lifted the bundle by its four corners. The boy followed behind. His stomach hurt him. He remembered his father, slow and quiet, with his black forelock between his eyes. He tried to imagine a man smashed by a dead-fall; he would be flat, like smoked mullet. He could make the two pictures of his father but he could not fit them together.
He ran ahead of the men to open gates for them into the clearing. They passed through the garden into the yard. His mother walked slowly towards them, twisting her apron between her hands. Lantry stood by a chair on the breezeway, holding to its back.
"Willy?" she asked.
Thad nodded.
"Take him in to the bed," she said.
Lantry watched after them, trembling as they passed him. In the bedroom the men hesitated.
Sylvester said, "Better git a ol' quilt to lay under—"
The woman said, "The mattress don't matter. Hit's jest corn-shucks."
Lantry came to the doorway, leaning heavily against the frame.
"How come it to happen?" he asked.
"The pore feller were slow, Pa," Thaddeus said. "He someway wa'n't payin' no mind when the tree were throwed."
The blood in Lantry's face grew purple. His temples pulsed.
"God damn his sorry hide," he said hoarsely.
The men raised from their disposing of the lacerated mass on the bed. They gaped at him.
"Hit's jest like the fool to make a pore widder-woman o' Py-tee before her time. He's a no-account white man, dead or alive—"
His breath grew short. He choked. He put one hand to his throat and clawed at his windpipe. Piety left the side of the bed and came to him.
"Pa—you're gittin' yourself in a tumble fix."
Lant, by the window, saw that she was more concerned for the living man than for the dead. She led him to his bed and loosened his shirt. The three Jacklins talked together in the bedroom. Sylvester came alone to the woman.
"Py-tee," he said, "we'll jest go on and take Willy acrost the river for the buryin'." He flushed. "A Jacklin ain't beholden to nobody."
Lantry was fighting for breath. The woman began to pour whiskey a drop at a time down his throat. His mouth was open, like a fish on a line. When his throat was full, the whiskey began to trickle out again. She called to her brother.
"Thad! You do what's right about Willy. I can't leave Pa. He won't never come out of this un."
He nodded to the other men. They passed through the room with the wet bundle. Lant heard their voices in the yard; then the movement of a mule and the sound of the wagon rattling down the road. He moved across the room to Lantry's bed. The man was black with agony. A few minutes before the end he drew a comfortable breath or two. He knew that he was done for. He clenched Piety's wrist until it swelled in his grip. He jerked his head towards the boy, big-eyed and white of face at the foot of the bed.
He said hoarsely, "He'll look out for you, Py-tee." He gasped. "This place—suit him. He kin make a livin' here—somehow."
He closed his eyes. His chin sagged, spreading his beard on his chest. Suddenly he reared bolt upright in the bed. Terror wiped out his pain. His red eyes rolled. He fell back on his pillow. A crafty expression came over the glazing face. He had, after everything, gotten safely away. He plunged panting into the cool dark retreat of death. He whispered over his shoulder to old pursuing phantoms.
"Run, you bastards, run!"