CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER TWOThey caught the fish in the net and dumped it in the live box by the dock, hooked the bateau’s chain on the nail, and went up the hill. It was twilight by this time and they were hungry; they were both thinking of Mr. Ben again, but didn’t mention him to one another. They had had a good afternoon and were looking forward to the warmth of the house and food, and somehow the old man didn’t seem quite so dubious any more.
When they got to the clearing at the top of the hill there was the smell of woodsmoke in the air and they could see a light in the kitchen. They reached the back porch, closed ranks, climbed the back steps, and went in. The kitchen was warm; there was a roaring wood fire in the stove, a kerosene lamp was burning on the table, and Mr. Ben was just dumping an armload of wood into the woodbox. He heard them come in and straightened up and turned around. He was in his late sixties, lean, of medium height, and a little bent and lantern-jawed; his hands were gnarled and slightly misshapen by “the rheumatism”; he trapped muskrats in the winter and this kept his hands in cold water a good deal, but he had a good, friendly face and was still lively enough. He had about three days’ growth of beard, upon which the lamplight cast a silvery sheen.
They spoke together. “Hi, Mr. Ben.”
He made what once might have been a courtly bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, “good evening. When I saw the car and you weren’t here, I thought the alligators might have made off with you.”
The boys looked at one another. “Alligators?” Bud said. “There aren’t really alligators, are there, Mr. Ben?”
“Well, I didn’t see any today, but it was a little cool.”
“I never saw an alligator when I was here with my father,” Joey said, looking at Bud. “When it was warmer.”
“They’re shy,” Mr. Ben said, “with grown people. It’s different with boys. Yes, sir, Chickahominy River alligators are mighty careful.”
The boys looked at one another again, and Bud said, “We better bring the things in.”
“I reckon we better,” Joey said. “Excuse us, Mr. Ben.”
When they got to the Model T, Bud hissed, “We better be careful. Anybody talks about alligators … What’s he trying to give us? You think he’s making fun of us, or what?”
“He never tried to make fun of me before.”
“Maybe he was always too busy talking to your father … or something. You smell anything?”
“Smell anything? Smell what?”
“Whisky or anything.”
Joey stared at him. A fair amount of the time Joey was a dreamy boy; he was a great reader, and some of the phrases he encountered conjured up pictures in his mind that dulled his ears to the exterior world and turned his eyes inward for a while. He would get out of this world and into one of his own, but except when this fit was on him he had surprisingly practical moments. He had a better sense of reality than Bud, who was inclined to embroider a situation and then be caught in the embroidery, letting his imagination run away with him. “Shucks,” Joey said. “I think you’re making too much of it. He’s not going to do anything silly. He’s not going to do anything. He likes it here. He hasn’t anyplace else to go, anyhow.”
“You reckon?” Bud asked. “What’s he talking about alligators for, then?”
“I think he’s trying to kid us,” Joey said. “You thought so yourself a minute ago.”
“I … okay. Maybe he’s trying to kid us, but I’m going to watch him just the same.”
“Okay,” Joey said, and picked up as much as he could carry and took it into the house.
Bud followed him in with another load. Besides the things they had bought at the store, they had brought two cakes baked by their mothers, two cooked chickens, four loaves of home-baked bread, half a dozen cans of soup, and three jars of homemade raspberry jam. All of these things were piled on the kitchen table and then stowed in the kitchen cabinet. Mr. Ben’s eyes lighted up at the sight of all this plunder; living alone, he seldom cooked very much except eggs and cornbread, side meat and a fish once in a while.
The boys then brought in their clothes and gear. Joey lit another lamp, and as the guns always went into the living room and stood in corners, they took their guns in there and stood them up. The living room was rectangular; it had a sheet-iron wood stove with a fire in it against one wall and a table covered with blue-figured oilcloth that was used to eat upon on the other wall. The room had been plastered and painted a long time ago and it was hard to say what color it was any more; there was a window in each short wall, one of them giving out on the back porch and the other looking out over the fields in the front. The front window had a somewhat sagging couch in front of it; most of the furniture had been left by the farmer owner and had been supplemented by old, worn-out things that Joey’s father had sent down.
Joey left the lamp on the table until they got their clothes, and then carried it into the bedroom. There was no stove in there, and the room with a big brass double bed and an old bureau and several chairs in it had a graveyard chill. They didn’t stay there long. They went back to the kitchen, leaving the lamp in the living room again, and stood watching Mr. Ben put more wood into the stove.
“What will we eat?” Bud asked. “Chicken?”
“Chicken and beans,” Joey said. “Would you like chicken and beans, Mr. Ben?”
“I would indeed,” Mr. Ben said. “Perhaps a little soup first? You have soup, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You both got a little chilled, and soup warms the cockles of the heart.”
“The cockles of the heart?” Joey repeated. He liked the phrase; he could see in his mind’s eye the cockles of the heart, whatever they were, expanding and gently waving to and fro in the soup’s savory steam.
“Joey,” Bud said, after a moment.
“Huh? The cockles of the heart.”
“Oh, come on. Open the soup while I open the beans.”
“Open them and give them to me,” Mr. Ben said, setting two saucepans on the stove. “Then you can set the table while I get them ready.”
They opened the cans and gave them to Mr. Ben, then set the table and put the chicken out. Bud sliced some bread, opened a jar of jam, and they stood in the kitchen door watching Mr. Ben at the stove. He shook one saucepan and then the other; he had removed the lids from the top of the stove to hurry things along, and every time he raised one of the pans, a little of the firelight glowed on him. In the dim kitchen, lit by the single lamp, he looked somewhat like an old stooped alchemist trying to transmute some unimaginable mixture into gold. “Soup’s hot,” he said. “Get the plates.”
Joey got the plates and put them on the table, and Mr. Ben poured the soup into them. He put the lids on the stove again and set the beans back to keep warm, and they all picked up their plates and took them into the living room. Mr. Ben brought the other lamp and put it on the table and they all sat down and Bud picked up his spoon.
“Just a minute,” Mr. Ben said, and bowed his head. “O Lord, we thank Thee for what we are about to receive,” he said, and attacked his soup. He sucked in a spoonful with a sound that could only have been equaled by a powerful suction pump. “Ah,” he said. “Splendid! Splendid!”
The two boys looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes, and had a difficult time not to laugh aloud; it had been dinned into them that one ate soup silently. Mr. Ben was completely concentrated on his soup. They all finished it, the boys took out the plates and brought in the beans, and Mr. Ben cut up the chicken. No one said anything until the beans and chicken were gone, for the boys were still a little wary and Mr. Ben was enjoying himself too much to be distracted; then Joey brought in one of the cakes and they each had a quarter of it.
Mr. Ben pushed back his chair. “Gentlemen, sir,” he said, “that was real fine.” He belched. “Yes, sir, real fine. I’ll wash the dishes. My hands get chapped and the dirt gets into them, and the hot dishwater takes it out.” He got up and took his plate into the kitchen, and they could hear him pouring water into a kettle. They took their own plates into the kitchen; neither of them was concerned with his hand-cleaning procedure. It would have horrified their mothers, but the boys rejoiced because they had no dishes to wash. He gave them dish towels and they dried the plates and knives and forks as he got through with them and put them away. He concentrated on his work; the kitchen was quiet except for a subdued rattle of dishes. An after-dinner peace descended upon them all, and the boys, having watched Mr. Ben with the soup and the rest of the meal, felt better about him. He began to seem almost like other people, and by the time they went back into the living room Joey was relaxed enough to remember the chewing tobacco. He went into the bedroom and brought it back.
“We brought you this from Chickahominy Forge,” he said, and handed Mr. Ben three packages.
“Well, that was real neighborly. Thank you both. I was just about out.” He went out to the kitchen, brought in a few sticks of wood, and put them into the sheet-iron stove, which began to roar almost at once, and turned the draft down. They pulled up chairs in a semicircle around it.
“Mr. Ben,” Bud said, “you reckon we could shoot some squirrels tomorrow?”
“Squirrel? Why not? If you want, you could borrow White’s dog.”
They both looked at him, trying to decide whether he was making fun of them again or not. They knew of the Whites, who lived five or six hundred yards up the road; the water came from there, carried over in buckets, for there was no well at the house. It had fallen in, and hadn’t been fixed yet. Both their fathers were quail hunters and they knew about bird dogs and beagles, but neither of them ever had heard of a squirrel dog. Squirrels lived in trees, and what could a dog do about that? A sudden constraint fell upon both of them.
“A squirrel dog?” Bud asked, carefully.
“His name’s Charley.”
“Yes, sir,” Bud said, and his eyes slid toward Joey. Nobody named a dog Charley. He, Bud, knew a man who had a horse he called Polka Dot, but the man was often away in a “home”; he wasn’t quite right in the head. There was a silence.
“He’s a right good squirrel dog, if you can keep up with him,” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir,” Bud said again, and moved in his chair.
Joey thought it time to take a hand. “What does he do, Mr. Ben?” he asked. “Does he point up trees?”
“Why would he point up trees? He runs around until he finds one on the ground and trees him, and then he stands there and barks.”
The air cleared; both boys smiled. It sounded like a wonderful way to hunt squirrels. They had gone with their fathers and watched them shoot quail, but had never tried it themselves. The two or three times that they had tried to hunt squirrels before they had still-hunted them, sitting in one place without moving in the hope that sooner or later a squirrel would appear. No squirrel had ever done it, at least within range; they hadn’t been able to sit still long enough.
“You reckon Mr. White would lend him to us? Doesn’t he want to hunt squirrels himself?”
“No,” Mr. Ben said. “When I was over there today for water he said he wasn’t going to. The boys won’t, either. They have to go to school, to make up some work.”
“Maybe he would loan us Charley, then,” Joey said. The more he thought about a squirrel dog the better it sounded; excitement began to take hold of him. “How would we get him, Mr. Ben?”
“I’ll go get him for you in the morning, or I’ll go over there with you. That would be best. After that you can go yourselves.”
The boys looked at one another, pleased and reassured; Mr. Ben seemed to be turning out pretty well after all.
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. “Thank you, Mr. Ben.”
“Or, better than that, when we get him over here we might feed him. They don’t feed him much over there. If we feed him once, he’ll come back himself as long as you’re here.”
He grinned at them, and they grinned back; suddenly there was a warm, conspiratorial feeling among them. Bud visibly relaxed in his chair and then sat up. “What will we feed him?” he asked. “We haven’t got any dog food or anything like that.”
“I’ve still got the dishwater,” Mr. Ben said. “I’ll stir up a pan of cornbread with it before the stove cools off.” He got up and went into the kitchen, then stuck his head back into the living room. “That dishwater will be real nourishing,” he said. “It’ll fill him up good.”
His head vanished and the boys grinned at one another again. They felt fine now, for with the cornbread under way all their doubts began to recede; Mr. Ben was no longer an object of apprehension and doubt; he was doing something for them and they accepted him completely. All at once they both began to feel drowsy, a healthy, relaxed weariness from the drive from Richmond, the afternoon on the Pond, and the relief they felt about Mr. Ben. A vast desire for sleep suddenly came over them, a little confused with their anticipations for the morning and its adventures with the squirrel dog, and they both stood up. They looked into the kitchen where the old man was putting the pan of cornbread into the oven.
“Good night, Mr. Ben,” Joey said. “We sure appreciate your trouble.”
“We sure do. Good night, Mr. Ben.”
“Good night,” he said, and shut the oven door.
They took off most of their clothes in the warmth of the living room, ran into the freezing dark of the bedroom, put on their flannel pajamas, and jumped into the bed. It took them into its dank, chilling embrace; but they got their backs together, presently their teeth ceased chattering, and they began to get warm. They each thought drowsily of the day, of conquering the mudholes and being on the Pond, of being free and on their own, and of the surprising friendliness of Mr. Ben.
“He likes us,” Bud said. “Mr. Ben, I mean. He’s not at all like I thought.”
“You see?”
“See what? You weren’t sure about him yourself.”
“He’s even better than being home. He didn’t tell us to wash our faces or anything. And he’s going to get us the dog.”
Bud began to laugh and then he made a sucking sound, imitating Mr. Ben’s enthusiasm with the soup. Joey began to laugh too. They snuggled closer together, still laughing, and almost at once were asleep.
They were awakened by Mr. Ben throwing wood into the living room stove and lay for a few minutes whispering together until they thought the stove was going well and the night’s chill would be off the living room. Through the window beside the bed they could see that there was a light frost on the ground, and when they blew out their breath it produced a little vapor in the room. They waited a little longer, warm and wide awake now with anticipation, and then jumped up and ran into the living room and dressed in there. They decided to have pancakes for breakfast. They got out a box of prepared pancake flour, stirred it up with water, and greased up the skillet. The pancake-mixing was a serious enterprise for a while, and then they began to experiment. They flipped them into the air, as cowboys were supposed to do; some of them landed on the edge of the skillet, several landed on the floor, and before they were through they greased the top of the stove and cooked the pancakes on that. They would have been run out of the kitchen at home if they’d tried such maneuvers, and at first they weren’t sure that the same thing wasn’t going to happen to them here; but Mr. Ben just watched them for a moment or two, grinned to himself, and let them alone. He merely said that he never had much appetite. In spite of this declaration he got away with a surprising number of pancakes, but the boys left him far behind. When they couldn’t hold any more they surveyed the kitchen. It was a mess, but by silent mutual consent, because of the unusual freedom Mr. Ben had allowed them, they set to work and cleaned it all up. Then they all set out for White’s, each carrying an empty bucket to bring water back in.
“There’s something I ought to tell you,” Mr. Ben said as they walked up the road. “They got a boy named Horace. They don’t talk about him much, because he’s got a head so big one of these buckets won’t go over it. He’s afflicted.”
They both stopped and stared at him, feeling all of the distaste, which was almost a horror, of the healthy young for an abnormality. They didn’t want to see the boy; their own mental pictures of him gave them each a crawling feeling in the stomach; but they didn’t want to turn back and leave Mr. Ben. They were beginning to feel a sense of loyalty and good will toward him.
“He won’t be up yet,” Mr. Ben said. “It’s too early and too cold. His feet aren’t on right, he sort of has to walk on his ankles, and so he goes around the yard in a little cart when the weather’s good. I wanted to tell you, in case you see him you won’t be surprised.”
“Is he …” Joey began, “is he … crazy?”
“No, he’s a right nice boy, but he’s different. If he saw you today he could tell you five years from now what the date and the weather was and what you said to him. Word for word.” He realized they were all standing still. “He won’t make any fuss, if that’s what bothers you. But like I said, he won’t be out of bed yet.”
Joey swallowed; it sounded safe to go. “Okay,” he said, and they started to walk again. Bud, who hadn’t said anything, stood still for a second or two longer and then caught up with them. They reached White’s gate without saying any more, and turned into the sandy, rutted lane.
The house was on the left side of the lane, a hundred yards back from the gate. It was a wooden house, like most of them in that country, and the paint had mostly disappeared from it; the barn was on the right. The well was a little in front of the house, boxed in with lumber and having a wheel above it for the rope which held the bucket to run through. There were three big oaks around the house; the whole group of buildings, weathered and gray, looked rather desolate and bleak against the dark pine woods that grew behind them.
They had nearly reached the well when a man came out of the barn and waved at Mr. Ben. He met them at the well. He was thin, of medium height, dressed in dirty overalls and hip boots manured to the knees; his thin face, like Mr. Ben’s, had three days’ beard on it, and his eyes were too close together and strangely remote.
“Morning, Sam,” Mr. Ben said. “This is Joey and this is Bud.”
“Good morning, sir,” Joey said, and Bud echoed him.
“Hi, boys,” he said. “Nice to meet y’all.” He smiled at them, somehow managing to give them the impression that he saw them not as boys but as inanimate portions of the landscape. There was nothing hostile in this; it was even vaguely friendly; but it was evident that his mind was on something else, and they both felt that it usually was. He turned to Mr. Ben. “New schoolteacher’s here,” he said. “Crenshaw helped move her in.”
“That’s fine,” Mr. Ben said. “Crenshaw, he’s too young to be lonely all the time.”
An odd, secretive expression flitted across White’s face. Both boys saw it and wondered at it. “Reckon you’re right,” he said. “Well, I better get back.”
“If you’re not going to use Charley,” Mr. Ben said, “we’d like to borrow him.”
“You go ahead.” He turned, put two fingers in his mouth, and gave a piercing whistle.
They all stood there for a moment, and a big black dog trotted around from behind the house and came up to them. He was thin and his ribs stood out. His lines were mostly those of a foxhound; he had the long hound ears and the foxhound bone and head and carriage, but only his ancestors knew what varieties were in him. He stood there quietly looking from one of them to the other, self-contained and undemonstrative. He had never learned to be demonstrative. He was a back-country farmer’s dog, and the farmer had four children and played-out land and little money and wasn’t a demonstrative man. No one had ever made much of Charley, and he had accepted that; he was a working dog, in the same class as a mule, and a good deal of the time he had to shift for himself. No one had ever got very close to him or tried to. Joey leaned over and patted his head. He accepted the gesture, looked at Joey with an expression of faint surprise, and moved off a step.
White turned to him. “You go with them, you hear?” he said to the dog, and turned back. “I hope you get some,” he said, and went off again toward the barn.
They filled their buckets and started back again. The dog went with them, walking several steps to the rear of Mr. Ben.
“He sure is a quiet dog,” Joey said, after a moment. He was a little puzzled by Charley; all of the dogs he knew made much of people, wagging their tails and thrusting their heads into a hand to be patted. “You think he likes us, Mr. Ben?”
“You think he’ll mind us?” Bud asked.
“He’ll tree squirrels,” Mr. Ben said. “When you knock one out of a tree he’ll grab it and kill it and maybe run around with it, but you catch him and take it from him.”
“He won’t bite if we do that, will he?” Bud asked. “He’s a pretty big dog and he don’t seem very friendly to me.”
“Don’t worry about that. You do what I say. If he’d ever tried to bite anybody Sam White would have taken a shotgun to him and he knows it.”
“But he doesn’t wag his tail or anything.”
“He don’t tree squirrels by wagging his tail. Nobody in that house ever wasted time making him wag his tail.”
They got to the house; the boys went in, put on their high-top shoes, and got their guns and shells and hunting coats. Mr. Ben took the pan of cornbread out of the cold oven and gave Charley half of it while they stood and watched him eat. “You stay somewhere near the Pond, if you can,” he told them, “and then you won’t get lost. If you do get away from it and can’t figure where you are, find a creek bottom and follow it back to the Pond. You don’t know the country very well yet.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You go up this side of the Pond first.”
“Yes, sir.”
They started out. So long as they were in the big field that surrounded the house, Charley stayed near them; when they got to the edge of the woods, he disappeared. They didn’t know whether to call him or not; he was somewhat of a mystery to them, too self-contained, and they didn’t feel any assurance with him. Behind the cypresses that bordered the Pond the country was full of old oaks, maples, and hickories mixed with beech and holly and a little underbrush; there was not much pine in this vicinity. The boys walked along scuffling the fallen leaves, wondering whether they were doing the right thing.
“You reckon that Charley’s gone home?” Bud asked presently.
Joey was just about to reply when they saw the dog, a hundred yards or so ahead of them through the trees; he was running, and as they watched he jumped high in the air. He did this to listen, to see if he could hear a squirrel running about in the leaves on the ground, but the boys didn’t know this and were puzzled. When he came down he turned to the west and put on speed; shortly they heard his long hound’s bay.
“He’s got one!” Bud yelled. “Come on.”
They started to run, dodging trees and brier tangles, stumbling and panting. They found him presently; he was standing beneath a huge oak, looking up into the top of it. They were scratched and blown, and when they looked up the tree could see nothing. A vast disappointment took hold of them.
“Shucks!” Bud said. “There’s nothing up there. Come on, dog.”
Disappointed and feeling that they had done something wrong, they turned away. As the dog saw them start off he ran around the tree and bayed again; his voice, urgent and deep, vibrated about them and echoed back, rounded and diminished, from across the Pond.
“He thinks it’s still there,” Joey said. “We better go back. Maybe it hid up there when it heard us coming.”
They returned; one of them got on one side of the oak and one on the other. They stared up until their necks grew stiff, carefully looking along all the branches. They were ready to leave again when a little breeze came up, and high in the oak, near the top, Joey saw a flicker of movement. The squirrel had flattened itself against a limb and its gray color, so much like that of the bark, had made it almost invisible; the flicker had been its bushy tail, blown a little by the breeze.
“I see him, I see him!” Joey shouted. He raised his gun and shot.
He apparently dusted the squirrel, for it jumped from its hiding place and began to leap swiftly from limb to limb and run about the tree. It was a difficult target, small and quick and never still. Joey fired his second barrel; Bud fired both of his. They were too anxious and excited to be cool about it; seven shots were fired before the squirrel came tumbling down. Charley had watched it moving, and was right beneath it when it fell; he grabbed it and ran about. The boys yelled at him, dropped their guns, and chased him around the woods until they caught him.
“Give it to me!”
“Drop it!”
“You, Charley!”
It was their first squirrel and they wanted it so badly that they forgot to feel a little apprehensive about the dog. Bud got his arms around him, and Joey pulled his jaws apart and took the dead squirrel out. He allowed it. As soon as the squirrel was taken away from him he accepted the situation and started off to find another one.
The two boys sat down, still shaking from excitement and the chase to catch Charley, and admired their prey. They smoothed its rumpled fur, patted it, and finally put it into Joey’s game pocket. They looked triumphantly at one another; a new and enthralling world had been opened up.
“Boy!” Bud said.
“Great day! That’s sure more fun than still-hunting.”
“Whew!” Bud said and wiped his sweaty face. “It was sure hard to see, though.”
“He’s a good dog. He’s sure a good dog. He knew it was up there all the time.”
“Yeah, and we were going to leave him.”
“I’m sure glad Mr. Ben thought of him. He wants us to have a good time, and he doesn’t holler at us to dry the dishes or wash our faces or anything.”
“Listen!” Bud said.
They sat listening, opening their mouths a little, concentrating. Far off, mellowed by distance, there was a long, rolling bay. Both boys jumped up as though an electric current had gone through them. They ran about and found their guns and took off in a wild and heedless scramble through the woods.