Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts, shaking the woman. She braced herself. She closed her eyes against the sight of the dead man. His set features were aquiline; the yellow of bee's-wax above the streaked red beard. Safe from his fear, he looked noble and at peace. Pain swept across her in a gale. The deep-lidded eyes blinked. She shook her small head to be rid of her torment.
Suddenly Piety remembered her son. He had gone away as Lantry fought for his last breath. She went across the breezeway into the kitchen. He sat on a low bench before the stove. He was trembling as a frightened puppy trembles. She had not seen him afraid before. Lantry's fear was tangible in the moment of his dying, and a cold breath had blown in on the boy from a distant land. She sat beside him. The wood-fire was almost out and she reached across him for a stick of pine. He handed her splinters to make a blaze and after they had sat together a while his trembling stopped.
A little after sunset the front gate clicked and steps sounded on the stoop. Zeke Lantry and his step-daughter Kezzy came into the room and Piety went to meet them. Zeke took his sister's hand gravely and walked with her to look down at his father. The drake's-tails fluttered on his neck. His pale blue eyes watered and he blew his nose. He had spilled fermented mash on his trousers and the odour rose about him in a sour wave.
"I ran off a charge this evenin'," he said. "I were jest crossin' the river from the outfit, jugs and all, when a raft o' logs passed me and the men hollers to me Willy were dead and Pa were dyin'. Hit takened me so I like to turned the boat over."
She asked, "Where's Marthy and Lulu and Nellie?"
"Marthy don't dast leave the house. She sent word you was havin' trouble enough without she should take to the child-bed on you." He blew his nose again. "Sis, my Lulu and Thad's Nellie, they right-out say they'll not put foot in your house again. They both got Jacklin blood and they're sayin' mighty hard things about you and Pa. I say, Pa wa'n't hisself, and you cain't hold a dyin' man's words agin him. I say, you done right lookin' after him, with Willy to where mortal hand couldn't raise to he'p him. The dead's dead, but the breath o' life is the breath o' life."
He cleared his throat, pulled out a plug of tobacco, looked at it and shoved it hastily back into his pocket.
Kezzy asked in a low voice, "Where's Lant, Aunt Py-tee?"
"To the kitchen. The young un's had a perfeck fright."
The girl walked away with her eyes averted from the sight of Lantry. She found Lant feeding the fire and stroking the head of Lantry's small mongrel dog.
"Hey, Lant."
"Hey, Kezzy."
She went to him and put her hand on his shoulder, leaning over him so that her long smooth braids hung against his flat chest. He shook away.
"Git them ol' black snakes outen my way," he said.
They laughed. He drew a deep breath. He realized that he was hungry.
"Kezzy," he whispered, "don't nobody eat no supper when folkses die?"
"You ain't had nothin'?"
She was not familiar with the kitchen. Her mother had discouraged intimacy between the two families, through jealousy that the Lantry land was plainly to pass to Piety instead of the sons. But she foraged in the kitchen safe and fried the boy cold biscuits and warmed squirrel-meat and rice together. He ate ravenously. She lit a kerosene lamp and sat beside him. Piety and Zeke talked in low tones in the front room.
Zeke called to Kezzy and they went away. Lant sat alone in the kitchen until he nodded. Through the doorway he could see his mother sitting motionless. A shaft of lamplight lay across her pointed face and on the small knotted hands. He did not want to see his grandfather again. He moved without sound into his bedroom off the breezeway, undressed as far as his underwear and got into his bed. After a time he heard his mother stir in the front room. Then she too went to bed.
The woman was dropping off to an unhappy sleep when she heard a sound as of a small animal scuffling across the floor. The boy was at the side of her bed, slipping in under the quilt beside her. It was like having a wooden box in the bed, she thought. The buttons on his underwear were hard against her arm and his knees and elbows filled the bed. He was all bones and buttons. He had not slept at her side since she had weaned him. She felt with her hand until she had found his hard young knuckles. She drowsed. Towards morning she wakened and found that he had slipped away.
In the afternoon Willy Jacklin was buried on the west side of the river and Lantry was buried on the east. Several Lantry and Jacklin infants lay under the blackjack oaks of Martha's clearing and her husband Sylvester had given a grudging permission that for Piety's sake the old man should rest there too. The preacher and most of the family buried Willy. Even Abner Lantry had chosen to follow him. Only Piety and Lant, Martha and her children, and Zeke and Thad saw the sand fall on Lantry's homemade pine coffin. Martha was big with child and left the burying nervously as soon as it was ended. There was no ceremony. Piety thought bitterly that her father had come without the word of his fellows into an alien country and was gone the same way. Zeke walked with her and Lant down the road as far as his place.
"Sis," he asked, "you got money sufficient to do with?"
"I got money to do with for a whiles. Willy were rale good that-a-way. He give me his loggin' wages, what didn't go for rations, and I got some hid out. I'm gittin' corn and sweet pertaters in the ground soon's I kin. I aim to fatten hogs, come fall."
"You always was a great un for corn and 'taters and hogs. If I remembers, you always had your hogs so rotten spoiled to where they'd lay up near the house all day, scairt to go to rootin' off a ways for fear they wouldn't hear a year o' corn to drap."
She smiled a little. "Well, Zeke, I makes mighty fine hogs when the 'gators'll leave 'em be."
Zeke said to Lant, "You been wild as a jay-bird, son, runnin' the woods. You belong to he'p your mammy now."
They went on. The boy's long arms dangled at his sides. His big head, poked forward on his neck, moved from side to side, like a turtle's. He frowned, his eyebrows meeting over the red-brown eyes.
"Ma," he burst out, "I been studyin'. Grandpa wa'n't no farmer. Nor he wa'n't no trapper nor no timberman. What did he do for a livin' in the up-country where he come from?"
"He never did love to say, but he told me oncet 'twere makin' moonshine whiskey."
The boy nodded.
"The revenooers gits after them fellers up in Caroliny," he said wisely. "Grandpa done tol' me they was raisin' sand all the time."
His eyes turned to her and held, steady as a good bead on a target.
"What were he skeert of, here in Florida?"
She hesitated.
"I don't rightly know," she faltered.
"You do too," he said. "You do too know."
"I reckon he'd had trouble."
"What kind o' trouble?"
"If you got to know," she said desperately, "he killed him a feller and had to take out."
"Who was after him for killin' the feller?"
"I reckon the gov'mint," she said. "Hit were a gov'mint feller."
"Didn't nobody never come up with him, did they?"
"Nobody never come up with him here. He had it always to figger on."
The boy nodded.
"That's what he was skeert of."
He spat zestfully into the gallberry bushes by the road.
"I'll jest bet he had good reason, killin' that feller. Nobody better never come messin' up with me, neither," he said.
His maturity startled her.
"No, nor you'd better not go to gittin' biggety nor lookin' for a fuss. Your Grandpa nicked nary fuss in his life."
She had never tried to rule the boy, but she felt a new and frightening responsibility. Her small voice rose shrilly.
"Don't you go to rarin' back on your dew-claws!"
He swung a moment on the gate before galloping after her up the lane to the house.
"Ma," he coaxed her, "say now I ain't got to go to school no more, come fall."
"You got to learn somethin'," she protested.
"I've done learned a-plenty. I got to make a livin'." He blocked her way, standing with his thin legs spraddled, his eyes owl-like on either side of the ruddy forelock. "Say it now, I ain't got to go no more," he insisted. "Don't look to me to take keer of you if I got to go to school."
In spite of her heaviness, she had to laugh at him.
"If you're he'pin' make the livin', come fall," she promised, "you don't have to go."
She made hot cakes for his supper. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and could not eat. The boy poured the syrup thickly. There was no one to complain. The dog whined at the door and went unheeded.
They were both worn out. Lant thought it would be easier to sleep without Lantry's sharp yellow features lifted to the rafters on his death-bed, with the lamplight flickering over them so that he seemed to breathe. The woman and the boy were in their beds before the sunset melted into the river. The redbirds were still singing when they fell asleep.
A light rain fell during the night.
In the morning Piety said to Lant, "Hit's always so. You take notice, son, hit'll always rain after a buryin'. Hit's planned so o' purpose. The rain washes out the tracks o' the dead along with the tracks o' the livin'. Hit wouldn't do to have the earth all yopped up with the tracks o' the dead."
A sharp pain struck through her because she would never come on Lantry's footprints again.
After breakfast she dug some roots of coral vine to plant on the grave. She helped Lant with his chores and they walked together down the scrub road. They turned into the open blackjack and stopped short at the fresh tawny mound. Something had been digging at the grave.
The boy said excitedly, "Hit's small sharp tracks! Hit must be 'possums. They's dirty scapers."
The woman was faint. It was an obscene thing that Lantry's bones should not go unmolested.
She said, "Don't say nothin' to nobody. We'll come tonight and lay for it."
They went home and waited nervously for dark. They ate no supper, the woman for nausea and the boy for his excitement. He got out his father's 12-gauge gun and polished the sight. Soon after the sun had set they walked the scrub road again and squatted among the blackjacks and waited. Nothing came. They went home at midnight. The next morning the creature bent on its scavenging had dug deeper.
Lant said, "Mought be that wolf been seen around Lake Kerr."
The tracks puzzled him.
Piety said, "We come too soon, that's what we done. The varmint done watched us and slipped up when we was gone agin."
The next night they did not go until two o'clock in the morning. As they crept up they heard the scratching of claws on the thin pine box. Lant waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the surroundings. In a few minutes the light colour of the fresh grave swung into focus. Then he made out a small dark form in movement. He fired. A thumping and a scrambling indicated that he had made a hit. When the motion ceased, they approached. The dead animal was Lantry's own dog.
Piety said weakly, "Mebbe he were lonesome for Pa and figgered he wa'n't dead."
"We ain't paid much attention to him the last two-three days," Lant said bitterly. "The low-down varmint were hongry."
He kicked the dog's body into the blackjacks. He was furious and frightened.
In the morning Piety caught Thaddeus before he went to his timbering and Zeke before he went to his still. Since the occasion was somehow extraordinary, Lant rowed across the river and brought back Abner. Abner was florid and pompous. He had cattle ranging on both sides of the river.
He said at once to his brothers, "You fellers buried the ol' man too shallow. Hit don't do to dig a grave too shallow."
Zeke said mildly, "We ain't had much practice, Ab."
They were digging a new grave for luck, throwing the red-gold sand against the sun. Thaddeus rested on his shovel.
"I don't know as a six-foot grave be needful," he said. "Four foot had orter do for ary man."
"Not for me, 'twouldn't," Abner said. "I aim to swell up when I die."
Zeke and Thad were doing the work. Abner strolled off to poke the body of the dead hound with his foot.
"On my side the river," he remarked, "some o' the folks was so foolishly fond o' Pa they'd say this were a case o' dog-eat-dog."
They guffawed.
Zeke said, "Pa were all right."
Piety sat near-by with her hand over her mouth. The boy watched with his hands in his overall pockets, scuffling the sand with his bare toes.
Abner said, "Why'n't you bury your dog?"
"He weren't mine. He were Grandpa's. I got nuthin' to do with him. Let the buzzards have him."
"Th'ow him out a ways then."
Lantry's board coffin was moved and the new grave filled in. Abner turned to the boy.
"You want you a rale good dog, son?"
"I wouldn't keer."
The man pondered. He never gave something for nothing.
"I tell you, son. I got nobody to look after my cattle this side the river. I got a pair o' young dogs has got no names, even. You come git them dogs and learn 'em to run cattle and you he'p round up and brand and butcher, and you're welcome to the dogs and a calf for your own."
Lant's face was eager. His eyes shone, as though sunlight moved swiftly across pools of cypress water. He had never had a dog of his own.
He said, "I'll come with you and git 'em."
His uncles laughed at his eagerness.
"You'd git there quicker to swim the river, Lant," Thaddeus said.
Piety watched him follow after Abner. She went back alone to the cabin. When dusk came, and the boy had not returned, and the hoot-owls cried, she hated the sound. She got out her accordion and played a hymn on it. Her throat swelled and she thought she might feel better if she played something lively. She began to play "Double Eagle" but she remembered Lantry playing it on the banjo with his head thrown back and she was obliged to put away the accordion. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, rocking in the buckskin rocker, lipping a little snuff. She thought of walking down the road to Martha.
"'Twon't be the last time I'll set alone," she decided, and did not go. She had no existence, she thought, outside these two males; the one living and the other dead.
The boy returned after dark. She heard him talking softly to the new dogs. He was bedding them under the kitchen, tying them so they could not run away. She heard him go into the kitchen and get cornbread to feed them. She heard them lapping water. She strained her ears for the words he was saying to them. The boy came in the house and she laid out a cold supper for him. She stuffed crumbs of biscuit in her mouth, watching his face.
"Them's fine leetle fellers," he said. "One's black as a nigger and one's kind o' red-like." He stirred sugar in his cold coffee.
"I've done named 'em Red and Black, Ma."
She was grateful to him for telling her what he had named the puppies.
"Them's fine names for dogs o' sich colors," she said with enthusiasm. "You couldn't git you no better names for a pair o' dogs."