CHAPTER ONE

The Virginia road was a morass, a continuing and apparently bottomless mudhole; anyone familiar only with modern turnpikes and good roads would have found it incredible. It ran between the pine woods and the sandy cornfields and occasionally passed a wooden house that had long since lost whatever paint had been on it and now stood weathered and gray between the road and a muddy barnyard where there was always a mule or two standing with hanging head, ears drooped forward, and an air of dejection and boredom. There were old Model-T Fords standing in some of the yards, so covered with mud and red clay that their original black paint was invisible, and the houses all had a bleak, utilitarian air because their owners had neither the money nor the energy to do more than just live in them. It was a poor country, between Richmond and Norfolk; the day of commercial fertilizers in any quantity hadn’t dawned yet, and the land had long since been farmed out. The farmers who hadn’t given up and moved somewhere else scratched a thin living out of it, and that was about all. A good deal of the land, between the fields where the corn was turning brown and the second-growth pine woods, had gone back to brush, greenbrier, scrub oak, holly, honeysuckle, and small struggling trees. There was a little autumn color but not much; most of the trees had lost their leaves except the oaks, which were brown or a somber deep red, and soon what color there was would be leached to a wintry gray against the dark pines.

There was another Model T with two boys in it zigzagging down the road, its high running boards awash. Two fans of mud and water curved up from beneath the wheels and descended like waterfalls on the sides of the road. The Model T bucked and pitched like a destroyer in a heavy sea, and the boy driving it, tall, blond, rather thin, and about fourteen years old, fought valiantly with the steering wheel to keep it on a straight course. He was accustomed to such driving; once out of town in Virginia in 1917, most of the roads were like this one; but this was a particularly bad stretch and he was completely concentrated on getting through it. He knew that if he didn’t keep enough momentum the roaring engine would stall and they would be bogged down, in which event one of them would have to wade ashore and find a farmer with a mule to pull them out.

The other boy, stocky, with red hair and freckles, of about the same age, was half standing in his seat, holding on to the windshield. His eyes were on the road too, but farther ahead. It was his job to pick out the least dangerous-looking parts of the road and direct the driver. It was a mutual enterprise; nobody could watch ahead, swiftly estimate the probabilities, and keep an eye immediately in front at the same time.

“Left, now, Joey,” the red-haired boy, Bud, said. “Left till you get to that rock, then quick right.”

Joey swung, the Model T yawed, slid a few yards sideways, and came back on course again. Joey swung right at the rock, and forty yards on the road rose a little and grew drier. Joey stopped, pulled on the emergency brake which also put the gearshift pedal into neutral, took his hands off the wheel, and stretched his arms.

“Great day!” Bud said. “You reckon any more of them will be worse than that?”

“I reckon not,” Joey said. “That was always the worst one. My father got stuck in it the last time we came down. He didn’t tell anybody, but he did. I told him to go left but he didn’t go and he had to take off his shoes and roll up his pants and go get a mule.”

“We’re better than he is.”

“Cost him a whole five dollars. He gave me an extra five dollars in case we got stuck too.”

“Can we spend it now?” Bud asked. “I got a idea.”

“We can’t spend it. We got to get back through it coming home, anyhow.”

“We’ll make it all right,” Bud said. “We made it this time, didn’t we?”

They grinned at one another, having accomplished something that a grownup had failed to do. They were exhilarated by this rare triumph, and by being on their own for the first time. Several months past, Joey’s father and three of his friends had bought the place where they were going as a hunting and fishing camp; it was an old farm, with a house and a lake on it, and this was the first time that Joey had been able to talk his way into going there alone. He had asked his friend and neighbor, Bud, to go with him. It had taken several family councils before their fathers, who were in favor of letting them go by themselves, had been able to convince their mothers that nothing lethal would come of it; the fact that there was a caretaker on the place helped.

“Let’s go,” Bud said, after they had sat there a little longer savoring their success. “Let’s go, so we’ll have time to get some fishing in.”

Joey started the Model T again. The road, although very muddy and badly rutted, was better now; there was a gravel bottom somewhere under it most of the way. They had two more dubious-looking stretches, but these had been improved by some local farmer who, tired of being stuck in them, had cut poles and laid them across the road. The poles had sunk into the mud, but they did furnish bottom. The Model T bounced across them, and presently they came to a village named Chickahominy Forge, which consisted of three houses and a store with a gasoline pump in front of it. This was the place where they turned off the main road to make their way eight miles back into the country, and they had been told to check in at the store. They stopped the Model T near the gas pump and got out of it and went in.

The store was dim, unswept, and in a state of monumental disarray. A back-country store, it carried everything, and carried it piled up and scattered in all directions. The counters and shelves looked like a cyclone had struck them; besides the things all over the floor, horse collars, boots, steel traps, and hams were hung from the ceiling; there were more variegated smells than in an Oriental bazaar. Two or three old black men were sitting around the stove in the middle of the floor, eating sardines from cans, and when the two boys came in, pausing a moment to accustom their eyes to the gloom, one of them got up, went over to the kerosene barrel in the corner, and pumped a little kerosene over his sardines. The boys looked at one another and made faces, then walked to the end of the room where the storekeeper, Ed Pitmire, was selling another man a bottle of liniment. Pitmire was a bear of a man with a barrel chest, a long nose, and four days’ growth of black beard. He looked as unswept as the store.

Pitmire turned his attention to the boys. “Your father wrote me y’all were comin’ down,” he said to Joey. “Y’all should have come in the train and let me take you over. There’s a bad place up the road a piece. You could have got stuck in it.”

“We came through it,” Joey said with pride. “We made it. You getting ready for wild turkey season?”

“Sure. Plenty of turkeys this year. Y’all need anything?”

“I reckon we do,” Joey said, and got out his list. His father usually bought some supplies from Pitmire, who was the only point of contact in the vicinity and therefore a man to be considered; Pitmire also would meet the single daily train and drive them to their destination in his Model T when the roads were too bad to drive from Richmond. “We need some beans and some corned beef hash and bacon and pancake flour and syrup and some eggs. You got some eggs this week?”

Pitmire nodded, and began to pick canned goods out of the confusion and stack them on the counter. “Two each?” he asked, and gave them two each at Joey’s nod. The eggs went into a paper bag and would have to be watched out for. “You ought to take Ben some eatin’ tobacco,” he said, and produced three packages of Beech Nut. “That all?”

“I reckon it is,” Joey said. “Can you charge it?” He had been told to charge the things and felt pretty grown-up when he said it, but, as usual, wasn’t convinced that it could be done. His own transactions were always in cash, for penny candy or milkshakes, and he didn’t understand how merchants got their money from charge accounts.

To his relief Pitmire nodded, scrawled some figures on a dirty sheet of wrapping paper, and stuck the paper in a drawer. “Y’all gonna do some fishin’?” he asked. “Fishin’ ought to be good, it ain’t rained too much. Ought to kill some squirrels, too. Season starts tomorrow. Y’all got licenses?”

The two boys looked at each other and their faces fell. They had forgotten about licenses; there had been too much else to think about. Their double-barreled twenty-gauge guns, which they had been carefully taught to manage over the last two years, were in the car; now they were useless. They were too disappointed to say anything; they glumly shook their heads.

“Y’all go ahead and shoot,” Pitmire said. “The warden comes around, I’ll tell him you’ll have ’em next time.”

The faces lighted up again.

“We’d sure appreciate it if you did that.”

“Yes, sir. We sure would. You reckon it will be all right?”

“Leave it to me,” Pitmire said. “Y’all can bring me a fish when you come back.”

“Yes, sir. Would you like two fish?”

“One’s enough. Liza and me, we can’t eat but one fish. I’ll get a mess of squirrels, anyhow.”

“We sure thank you,” Joey said, and picked up as many cans as he could carry and took them out to the Model T. Bud followed him with the rest, carrying the bag of eggs by holding the top of the bag in his teeth. He could always think of a precarious way to do something.

“Be careful,” Joey said. “We better put them in the front seat.”

“I’ll put them on the back seat,” Bud mumbled between his teeth, and the bag tore. He dropped the cans he was carrying and just managed to catch the eggs on the way down. None of them broke; he put them carefully on the back seat and picked up the cans. They finally had the provisions stowed, climbed into the Model T, and looked at one another. They were on the last lap, they were nearly there, and excitement began to take hold of them. In their minds’ eyes they could both see the lake on the place, always called “The Pond,” and themselves on it catching huge bass, unsupervised, free as birds, masters of their lives. It was a delectable vision; they grinned at one another and Bud cranked the engine.

Three hundred yards down the road they turned off onto the sandy track into the woods and settled back. The track got little traffic and was much better than the highway; hardly anyone ever went in the direction they were going now, and few people came out very often. The natives were self-sufficient in the main, butchering their own meat or shooting it, raising their own corn and vegetables, supplying their own needs except for such things as kerosene, matches, and a few canned goods and notions they could buy at Pitmire’s store or other articles they couldn’t buy from Pitmire and got from the “mail order.” The Chickahominy Swamp, which ran off into the Great Dismal Swamp, contained them to the south, and the poor land which had been largely deserted stretched around them in the other three directions. The land rolled a little, but not much. It was like an island, cut off from the world and forgotten by it. There were not over a dozen families on the eighteen miles of the road which wandered about and ended up in an abandoned pasture, and not half of them had cars; many of them were poor black people who were lucky if they owned a mule.

The boys passed the first cabin, set back a little in trees, within a mile; three ragged young children playing in front of it waved and gave them wide white smiles. There was one more such cabin four miles farther on with more smiling children. They knew when they passed it that there were only three more miles to go; the excitement built a little higher, and without realizing it they both sat forward on the seat.

They came over a hilltop and dropped down, turned a corner, and stopped on the little bridge that went over the spillway of the dam. Water roared softly beneath them, and a few feet off to the right the Pond, their future kingdom, lay quietly in the sun. It was roughly rectangular, and they were near the end of one of the long sides; it curved away from them, lined with old, tall cypresses with their feet in the water. The needles that were left on them were brown, so their color was reddish and rather somber; the road ahead was lined with them too, big trees three feet or so in diameter, reddish and feathery. They were surrounded by cypresses, which didn’t grow in Richmond or any place else that they knew. The feeling descended upon them, as it always did when they came to the big cypresses, that they had entered a different world. Joey turned off the engine and silence fell, a sort of waiting and mysterious quiet, and they looked at one another and grinned with delight.

“Boy!” Bud said.

They sat there for a little while, savoring the quietness and the thought that all this, and the Pond and the fish in it and the squirrels along the shore, were theirs for three days to run about in and explore, catch and shoot at.

Bud stirred on the seat finally and brought into the open a question they had both been secretly thinking about when they had the time. “You reckon,” he said, “that Mr. Ben will be all right?”

Mr. Ben was the caretaker. He had come from one of the best families in Richmond, but he had been a black sheep. In his younger days he had had grievous scuffles with the bottle; he had had the habit of getting himself into cheap rooming houses and staying there for a week or two completely out of touch with his family and too drunk to get out of bed, or if he could get out of bed he would wander around the Richmond streets and disgrace himself by falling down in the most public places. It had finally got so bad that they had made a sort of remittance man out of him; they paid him an allowance so long as he stayed a long way off, out of sight and out of mind. He had wandered for years all over the United States and finally, God knows how, had found this obscure place and come to rest with the farmer it had been bought from. He had stayed on as a caretaker, and although his passion for the bottle had long since burned out, the boys were in awe of him; they had heard their parents’ talk, about his misadventures, which their youthful imaginations had enlarged to monumental proportions and considerably overcolored.

“I mean,” Bud went on, “will he …?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Joey said, hoping that he would. “My father wrote him we were coming. He wouldn’t do anything my father wouldn’t like.”

“You reckon he wouldn’t? You sure?”

“Why, sure I’m sure,” Joey said stoutly, trying to convince himself. “You think he’s a wild man or something? What would he do, for gosh sakes?”

“How do I know what he’d do? We’ll be there all alone with him, won’t we? He might get drunk and chase us with a knife or something.”

“Good Christmas!” Joey said, with as much disgust as he could muster. “What for?”

“Because he’s found a bottle or something.”

“Shucks!” Joey said, but he wasn’t too vehement. His own imagination, which he had managed to keep fairly quiet, was warming up under Bud’s encouragement. A silence fell between them; they sat and stared out over the Pond. A few feet from shore four cypresses grew in a cluster in the water, and something fell out of one of them. As it hit the water a huge bass rose in a shower of spray, engulfed it, and fell back with a tremendous splash. The two boys forgot Mr. Ben and a possible bottle and being chased with a knife; they forgot everything except the bass, and were galvanized to instant life.

“I vench on him!” Bud shouted. “I vench on him! Let’s go!”

He jumped out to crank the Model T, while Joey sat there and turned the ignition key and felt cheated. Bud had shown more presence of mind than he; to vench on anything first was to have first go at it, as every boy knew. It was a law as unchanging and unbreakable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and there was no appeal. The Model T started, Bud jumped in, and they tore along the road, up the hill, through the gate, and around to the back of the house.

It was a sound wooden house with five rooms on the first floor and two on the second, standing between two great black walnut trees. There was a porch along the back of it, half of which was roofed and screened; the other half was unroofed and the kitchen door opened on it. It needed paint. There was a small old barn about fifty yards away that wasn’t used any more except to store junk in. The boys stopped the Model T between the house and the barn and looked around. Although the house looked as bleak as the rest that they had passed, it didn’t seem as bleak to them; it was their headquarters. There was no one in the yard. The boys grabbed their cased bait-casting rods out of the back of the Model T and ran through the house as they tried to put them together. There was no one in the house either; Mr. Ben was out somewhere. Outside again, they calmed down long enough to set up the rods and reels, assemble their gear, and grab a paddle and landing net from the back porch, and then took off on the wooded path that ran down the hill to the boat landing.

The small wharf faced out upon a little cove; a very large cypress grew in the water a few feet in front of it, framing a view over about a quarter of the Pond, the sunny water and the distant, close-growing rank of trees on the opposite shore. This small view was somehow a friendly one, an introduction to the rest of the Pond which opened up without a house or a sign of man’s handiwork when you got into a boat and left the cove. There was a large, half-sunken wooden box with wire sides on one side of the wharf to keep fish alive in until whoever caught them was ready to take them home, and two rowboats and a bateau, flat-bottomed and double-ended, were tied up on the other side.

Joey usually paused on the wharf and looked out from it for a moment or two, feeling that he was meeting the Pond again and getting ready for the pleasures of being upon it, but he didn’t do it this time. The big bass was in his mind, hurrying him. He unwrapped the old trap chain hooked to a nail that kept the bateau from drifting away and jumped into the stern. Bud got into the bow, and they shoved off and headed out to cross the Pond.

“Faster!” Bud said, in a fever of anxiety. “Faster! He’ll be gone.”

Neither of them even looked up the Pond.

“Faster!” Bud said again. “Go on.”

Joey didn’t reply; he didn’t have the breath for it. He dug the paddle into the water, and the bateau skimmed along until they got to within fifty yards of the group of cypresses where the bass had jumped. Joey stopped paddling and the bateau coasted along, losing way; then Joey began paddling again, very carefully, and they sneaked up on the spot. Bud raised his rod and brought it forward. He was too anxious; the reel ran over, and he had a backlash. The line snarled and the plug swung in a short wild arc and smacked the water beside the boat.

“Goddamn!” Bud said. He sat down and began frantically to strip off line in order to untangle the bird’s nest caused by the backlash, shaking with anxiety and frustration, tangling it more.

“Give it to me,” Joey said, beginning to shake himself. “You’re messing it up. Give it to me, damn it!”

He couldn’t sit still; he half rose and started for the bow, and the bateau began to rock. He sat down quickly again, almost frantic himself with the urge to get at the reel and fix everything; he’d never seen such a butter fingered performance as Bud was putting on. “Give it to me!” he shouted. “Let me have it, you clumsy ox!”

Bud looked up. “Back up!” he snarled. “Back up! You’ve let us get too far; we’ll scare him!”

Joey looked around and saw that Bud was right. He reached for the paddle, but it wasn’t there. In his excitement he had let it slide into the water, and it floated mockingly twenty yards away.

“Back up!” Bud snarled again, not looking up. Joey didn’t say anything. “Back up, will you?” Bud said, and raised his head. “What are you waiting there for? Back up!”

“Bud,” Joey said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“The paddle’s out there.”

Bud put the rod down and stared. Joey pointed.

“Oh, damn!” Bud said in complete disgust. “Now you have messed it up. How are we going to get it?”

“We’ll have to paddle with our hands.”

“Good Christmas! And you calling people clumsy oxes.”

“You started it,” Joey said, stung. “Getting a backlash when I put you in the exact place. The first cast.”

“I guess you got paralyzed and just dropped the paddle, huh? You sick or something? You got a temperature? You see a man get a perfectly natural backlash and can’t—”

“Oh, shut up!” Joey shouted.

They sat and glared at one another from opposite ends of the bateau and presently, seeing that they weren’t getting anywhere, made peace by silent mutual consent. They rolled up their sleeves and paddled with their hands. It was a long and tiresome process, and wouldn’t have worked if there had been any wind. They finally reached the paddle, and Joey picked it out of the water.

“You reckon you better tie it to you?” Bud asked.

“You reckon it’s my turn to fish? You sure messed that up. You better get that backlash fixed before we move from here. We’ll have to go somewhere else; we’ll never catch him now.”

“I’ll fix it,” Bud said. “But I get to fish until I catch one.”

Joey could hardly quarrel with that, after having lost the paddle. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go around the shore and try him again on the way back.”

Bud got the backlash fixed finally, and Joey rowed back across the pond and started to paddle slowly along fifteen or twenty yards offshore while Bud dropped the plug along the shoreline and reeled it in. They had both practiced their bait casting for long hours in their backyards and were surprisingly accurate; it was a pretty thing to see the plug drop into the center of the little three-foot openings between the cypress butts and start wiggling its way back toward the boat.

There was almost a dreamlike quality about this kind of fishing, gliding slowly and silently over the dark cedar water with only an occasional dip of the paddle. The paddler watched the fisherman and the shore, where an infrequent squirrel was surprised as it foraged on the ground or a bird flashed into view and out of it again; the woods were still, the cypresses brooded almost over their heads, and the fisherman cast and reeled in, concentrating on his work, with a slow and steady rhythm. Neither of them spoke. A series of water drops fell from the paddle as it was retrieved from a leisurely stroke, the plug splashed when it hit the water, and there was no other sound except the distant rattle of a kingfisher as it flew from tree to tree far ahead of the bateau.

Presently the quiet was broken when a bass darted out from shore, hit the plug, and jumped into the air when it felt the hook. The broken water flashed in the sun, the bass gleamed as it curved, shaking its head, back into the water again, and Bud played it until it gave up and was netted and put into the live box amidships. They both moved in to admire it as it sulked in the live box, a good dark fish of two pounds or so, and then they changed places.

Joey didn’t get a strike until they came to the first long cove where a great dead oak lay half submerged and partially blocked the cove’s entrance. The bass came out from under the sunken trunk; he was a big one, Joey had gone a little dreamy, and the strike was so hard that it took the handle of the reel out of Joey’s fingers. The reel spun backwards, and the fish ran down into the tree and tangled the line among the sunken branches and got away.

“Ah!” Joey said. He tried to reel in and couldn’t. “I’m tangled up,” he said in disgust.

“Why didn’t you hang on to him, for gosh sakes?” Bud demanded, and swung the bateau. They each took hold of a branch and Bud poked about with the paddle. They had to roll up their sleeves again and feel about under water until the line was free again. It took a long time, a deal of amateur profanity, and a soaking to the shoulders for both of them; by the time the plug was free the sun had sunk so low that they were in shadow and chilly. They looked up the cove, which was lined all around the shore with trees, and decided to go back and try the fish they had seen from the road again before they quit.

“I get to catch him,” Bud said, as they started across the Pond.

“You caught one. It’s my turn.”

“You’d had one if you hadn’t gone to sleep. Anyhow, I venched on him.”

It was a problem. He had venched on him, and even if he’d had a backlash Joey had lost the paddle. Joey realized that he didn’t have much of a case, but he tried anyhow. “If you hadn’t had the backlash—”

“I venched on him.”

“Okay, gosh hang it. Catch him, then. Only, I get to fish until we get there.”

“Okay,” Bud said, and they went across the lake. Joey worked the shore until they neared the cypresses without raising a fish, and they changed places in the bateau. They crept up to the place, scarcely breathing, and Bud cast his plug. They both stared in fascination as it returned through the water. Nothing happened. Bud tried several times more, bracketing the spot where the monster had appeared, but the monster refused to be drawn out. Finally they gave him up for that day, and headed for the wharf, sliding across the lengthening shadows on the water, shivering a little in the gathering evening chill, but at peace with one another now and content.