CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER THREEA little after noon they got back to the house and laid four squirrels on the edge of the porch floor. They were scratched and weary, famished and happy; they had never had such an exciting time. Charley had returned with them and lay down near the foot of the steps. Mr. Ben came out of the kitchen and grinned when he saw the squirrels.
“I was about to call out the militia,” he said. “It sounded from here like somebody started a war.”
“We shot up almost a whole box of shells,” Joey said. “They’re hard to hit, but we sure had a swell time. Mr. Ben, you reckon we could keep Charley here? You reckon my father could buy him?”
“Maybe my father would put in some money, too,” Bud said, “if they wanted too much for him. We could be partners.”
“Sam White wouldn’t sell him,” Mr. Ben said. “He’s too handy to have around. He’ll run a rabbit if he comes on one, and they hunt possums and coons with him at night. We’ll give him the rest of the cornbread after a while, and tonight I’ll make some more. That’ll keep him around. You better have some lunch.”
They all went into the house and began to get together a lunch of more soup and beans. Joey poured a little water into one of the agate basins on the table near the stove and started to carry it out onto the porch to wash his hands. When he reached the door he stopped and stared. Charley was on the porch and the four squirrels had disappeared; the tail of the last one was just vanishing down his throat. Joey’s exclamation of dismay was so tragic that Mr. Ben ambled over to the door beside him, and Bud came after him and looked over his shoulder.
“Mr. Ben!” Joey said in anguish. “Mr. Ben, he’s eaten them all!”
Mr. Ben grinned. “Dang if he hasn’t,” he said. “Hides, tails, and whiskers. It was my fault. I forgot how hungry they keep him, and I should have put them out of reach.”
“But they were our first ones,” Bud wailed.
“Plenty more where they came from. In another hour or two you can go out and get some more. Eat your lunch, now.”
With a last, reproachful look at Charley, Joey turned around. Bud had gone back to the stove and had already poured out the soup; he was putting the beans on the plates. They looked at one another, trying to be mad at Charley; suddenly they both began to laugh.
“Tails and everything!” Bud said. “You ever hear of a dog eating squirrel tails?”
“He looked like he was just swallowing his own whiskers,” Joey said. He laughed again, and then a disturbing thought occurred to him as they sat down at the table. “You reckon he’ll get a bellyache now and won’t go this afternoon?”
This thought sobered them; they wanted nothing so much as another wild scramble like the one of the morning. It had been the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.
They looked at one another apprehensively.
“You reckon he will?” Bud asked. He got up from the table and ran into the kitchen. “Mr. Ben, you reckon Charley will get sick and won’t go?”
“Get sick from what?”
“From eating squirrel tails and everything. We want to go again, and if he gets sick …”
“Take more than a little fur to make him sick,” Mr. Ben said. “That dog could digest two ax heads and an armful of wedges and holler for more. His stomach hasn’t had much practice, and it’s as good as new.”
Bud ran to the door and looked into the yard. Charley was back at the foot of the steps again; he bulged a little, but seemed otherwise unchanged and in good working order. Bud went back to the living room.
“He looks all right,” he said. “He looks like he could go.” He sat down and attacked his beans. “Hurry up, Joey.”
“I am hurrying up.”
“You both take your time,” Mr. Ben said, poking his head through the door. “Squirrels have more sense than people; they take a nap in the middle of the day. You have an hour or two yet.”
They slowed down obediently, finally finished their lunch, and went out and sat on the back steps. The time went by on leaden feet; within ten minutes they had both asked Mr. Ben if they shouldn’t start out.
“I’ll tell you when,” he said, and went into the house.
A few more minutes crawled by; Joey stared at the dog. He had dropped his head on his forelegs and seemed to sleep. Joey continued to stare at him, half hypnotized; a series of mental pictures, in which he and Charley roamed an endless forest, drifted through his mind. They became increasingly fond of one another; Charley grew more demonstrative all the time, looking at him soulfully, returning from his forays to be patted and made much of, sleeping beside him at night, going out of his way to please his master.
Joey had never had a dog; he had never really wanted one before, and now he longed for Charley’s affection. The experience of the morning, so new and exciting, had a good deal to do with it; in his well-sheltered life he had never got near his primeval hunting ancestors before, and now that he had, a change was beginning to take place within him. The other things that he liked would be less important. The new feeling was going to influence him for a time and shift and deepen, but at the moment it was focused on killing, the fierce joy of holding his gun on a living creature and pulling the trigger and seeing the creature fall. There was a feeling of guilt mixed up in this, for the evils of violence, killing, and destruction had often been impressed upon Joey, especially by his mother; but the guilt was unrecognized and therefore unadmitted, though it brought with it a sense of loneliness, vague and undefined, and made him turn to Charley, who had started it all, as a friend and support. He got up and walked over to the dog to pat him on the head, but Charley got up, moved out of reach, and sat down.
Joey, feeling rebuffed, looked toward the porch. Bud had fallen asleep sitting up; Mr. Ben had come out again and was standing there watching him.
“Doesn’t he want to make friends?” Joey asked.
“He might, in time,” Mr. Ben said. “He’s just got to get it into his head that somebody wants him for more than yelling at, taking a kick at, or shooting over. You keep working on him, boy.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and felt a grateful warmth toward the old man. “You reckon it’s time to go now?”
“I think you could start persecuting them again.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said, and went over and shook Bud.
Bud waked up, yawning and stretching. “I vench on him,” he said muzzily, and got his eyes open. “Joey? What …?”
“It’s time to go,” Joey said. “Come on.”
Bud looked around, collecting himself, and saw Charley. He stared at the dog. Something had happened within him while he slept; there had been the beginning of a sorting-out of preferences in his subconscious mind. He had been caught up in the excitement of the hunt, but now he wasn’t so sure that he wanted it again. Despite his interest in guns and shooting, he remembered with something like remorse the first dead squirrel and its small paws curled under its chin. “I’m still tired,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go and try the fish again.”
“The fish?” Joey asked, nonplussed. “Good Christmas, what do you want to go fool with the fish for? Squirrels are more fun than a fish.”
“Not that fish,” Bud said.
Joey didn’t know what to say. Bud’s change of heart confused him and seemed almost like a betrayal; they had always wanted to do the same things together before, and had been practically inseparable. Dissension had suddenly appeared between them, and Joey didn’t know what to make of it. “Aw, come on,” he said finally. “Come on, Bud.”
Bud shook his head. “I’d rather go fishing,” he said.
“Gosh hang it, you can fish all the rest of the year. You can’t hunt squirrels that long.”
“I don’t want to hunt squirrels,” Bud said, and because he didn’t want to be thought a sissy, added with a defiant air, “I don’t like them when they’re dead.”
“Oh,” Joey said. It was all he could think of to say. He understood, finally, as he hadn’t understood before, that he had lost his friend—or, at least, he had lost him except for fishing. This didn’t make him angry—he acknowledged Bud’s right to his preferences; it made him lonely and sad. “Okay,” he said.
In the face of this acceptance Bud’s defiance disappeared. “I’m sorry, Joey,” he said. They looked at one another unhappily, almost in grief. “I’m sorry,” Bud said.
“Okay,” Joey said. Then he brightened a little. “Look,” he said, “you can’t fish by yourself. You’ll have to paddle, and when you quit to cast the boat will turn around and everything. If you’ll go with me awhile, I’ll go fishing with you after that.”
“Okay,” Bud said, anxious to make amends. “I don’t have to take my gun, do I?”
“Not if you don’t want to.” He went into the house and got his gun and came out again. They called the dog and started out. Charley didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but he followed them. When they got to the edge of the woods he trotted off, but they walked for quite a distance and didn’t hear anything out of him. Joey saw him once, far ahead, but the enthusiasm that had informed Charley during the morning wasn’t in him now; he was just trotting around and didn’t jump high in the air to listen. They kept on for a while longer, but nothing happened; finally Joey stopped. “Heck,” he said, “he’s not hunting. Gosh hang it all, he ate too much.” Feeling deserted all around, he gave up. “Let’s go back.”
“Okay. You reckon we ought to call him?”
“No,” Joey said. “Let him go on and take his darn walk.”
They returned to the house, put Joey’s gun in a corner of the living room, got their casting rods and a paddle and net, and went down to the wharf. The small breeze of the morning had held; on the part of the Pond that they could see, the ripples glinted in the afternoon sun. There was a moment of constraint when they unhooked the old trap chain, for they both wanted to try for the fish and they each wanted to give way to the other, now that they had had their trouble.
“You catch him, Joey,” Bud said finally.
“Heck, no. He’s your fish.”
“I want you to catch him.”
“You venched on him.”
“Joey—”
“I don’t want the darn fish! You catch him, or I won’t go.”
“Okay,” Bud said, and climbed into the bow. “What you reckon we ought to try him on?”
“The wiggler that’s spotted like a frog, maybe.”
“I bet he would take that one,” Bud said. “Only thing is, I haven’t got it. We didn’t bring the tackle box. I got this red and white one; he wouldn’t look at it before.”
“You better go up to the house and get it then.”
“Okay,” Bud said, and climbed out on the wharf again and ran up the hill. He had the tackle box when he came back, and put on the spotted wiggler.
Joey paddled across the Pond; the small waves slapped under the bow of the bateau. He stopped paddling as they neared the group of cypresses, and the bateau coasted almost to a stop. Bud cast, very carefully; the spotted wiggler began to return through the water, and suddenly, right beside it, a monstrous bass materialized. He looked as long as the bateau was wide; he was a fearful and wonderful fish. Both boys stared at him, and their jaws dropped; Bud forgot to wind his reel. The wiggler stopped in the water, the bass turned and slapped it contemptuously with his tail, and vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Bud sat down as though his legs had been cut out from under him. “Oh!” he said. “Oh, Joey!”
Joey managed to speak. “Go on!” he hissed. “Don’t just sit there! Try him again.”
Bud stood up and tried him again. He tried a dozen times, but the monster had seen enough, and finally Bud gave him up. “He’s too smart,” he said. “He’s gone. Oh, Joey.”
“Gosh! You ever see such a fish? Great day, he was as long as the paddle.”
“Maybe in the morning. Maybe we could try him again in the morning. We don’t have to go until right after lunch. You try him then. If I hadn’t stopped reeling in …” Bud was very downcast; he looked as though he was almost ready to weep.
Joey had thought that Bud’s failure to keep the plug moving might have spoiled everything, but he wasn’t going to say so now. “Aw, he wasn’t going to take it,” he said. “If he was, he’d have smacked it right away. Maybe we’ll get him tomorrow,” he said. This fish had been so big that he’d forgotten the squirrels for the moment. “Well, let’s fish.”
Bud moved back to the stern. They crossed the Pond again so that the fisherman would be facing the shore correctly, and spent the rest of the afternoon fishing. Taking turns, they caught five fish by the time the sun had dropped to the tops of the trees, but none of them even approached the size of the one by the cypresses. They had had a good afternoon, however, moving silently along the wild shoreline that was unbroken except for half a mile on the eastern side that had been lumbered long ago and was open and covered with brush, stumps, and decaying treetops left by lumbermen. They had fallen into a half-hypnotic state which was only broken occasionally by the strike of a fish. The ranked and close-growing cypresses brooded above them; as the sky took on color they headed for the wharf in the encompassing silence, each thinking of frontiersmen paddling their lonely way far from civilization and looking for a place to camp for the night.
The big fish was the main topic of conversation during dinner.
“Maybe he was what I was thinking about when I asked you about alligators,” Mr. Ben said with a twinkle in his eye. “I remember now I was over there one day and that fish came up for a frog with his mouth open, and I thought he was going to swallow the boat. He scared me. Took me the rest of the afternoon to get over it.”
“You scared us with the alligators,” Joey said, sure enough of Mr. Ben now to tell it. “We thought you were … We didn’t know if you were trying to kid us or what.”
“I bet if we had a frog we could catch him,” Bud said. “You reckon we could find a frog, Mr. Ben?”
“Not now. They’re all down in the mud for the winter.”
“How could we catch him, then? I’d sure like to take him home. My father never caught a fish that big.”
“Mine either,” Joey said. “We got through the mudhole he got stuck in, and if we could catch the fish too I bet he’d sit up and take notice, and think we were really something.”
“I imagine he thinks so already,” Mr. Ben said.
“He doesn’t show it much. He’s always telling me to be careful of the car, and to study harder, and quit eating so much butter and everything. He doesn’t seem to think I’ve got much sense.”
“He let you come down here by yourselves,” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir, and we didn’t wreck the car and we got through the mudhole. How do you reckon we could catch that fish, Mr. Ben?”
“Just keep trying. It would be better early in the morning or late in the afternoon when there isn’t much light and he can’t see so well. Fish gets as big as he is, he’s smart. He’s not going to take hold of anything he doesn’t look over first. We better get the dishes done.” He stood up.
Bud stood up too. “Will you wake us up early, Mr. Ben?” he asked. “Real early, so we can get over there?”
“I will.” He picked up his plate and took it out into the kitchen, and Bud followed with his own plate. Joey started to do the same thing, but noticed a Sears, Roebuck catalogue on the shelf behind the stove and stopped to look at it. He put his plate down and picked up the catalogue. It opened to the fishing-tackle section, and there before his eyes was a wonderful thing: the Kalamazoo swimming frog, sixty-eight cents. “In pulling the frog through the water,” he read, “the legs kick backward with identically the same motion used by a live frog.”
Stout Cortes upon his peak in Darien was not filled with wilder surmise than Joey at that moment; he forgot to breathe. He read the paragraph about the frog again, more slowly this time, and a shiver went up his back; in his mind’s eye he saw himself casting the frog out and the explosion of water as the huge bass smashed at it. “Great day!” he whispered. “Great day in the morning.”
Bud put an end to his rapt contemplation by coming through the kitchen door. “Joey?”
Joey started, closed the catalogue, and turned guiltily around. He made his decision upon the instant; he was going to keep his discovery to himself.
“What are you looking that way for?” Bud demanded.
“Like what?”
“What’s that book?” Bud asked, and walked over and looked at it. “I bet you were looking at the ladies’ underwear, that’s what.” He picked up the catalogue and it was all Joey could do not to snatch it out of his hands.
“I was not! I was not!” Joey shouted, terrified that the catalogue would fall open again at the frog. “Give it to me, damn it!” Mr. Ben stuck his head in the doorway at the uproar and looked at them askance; Bud hastily put the catalogue down and they both busied themselves clearing the table.
The dishwashing began in an atmosphere of constraint. Bud was baffled by Joey’s performance, and Joey was even more baffled at himself. The vehemence and the variety of his emotions startled him, as well as the speed with which they had taken hold of him. He knew that he had done a mean thing when he decided to keep the frog for himself and tried to rationalize this meanness as a natural result of Bud’s decision not to kill any more squirrels with him. It wasn’t very successful, and left him with a lingering feeling of guilt, but despite this he was grimly determined to have the fish. Several hours ago he had been willing for Bud to catch it, but that time was suddenly past; he had to have it now.
Mr. Ben washed the dishes and said nothing; Joey saw Bud look at him several times out of the corner of his eye. Joey avoided the glance and wondered how to get the catalogue out of sight; all sorts of schemes went through his mind. The long and uncomfortable silence that threatened to hold the house until bedtime was suddenly broken by footfalls on the porch. The door opened, and a tall, muscular man, about twenty-five years old, came in.
He was carrying a lantern and was dressed in overalls and a ragged gray sweater; his head was bare and his thick dark hair looked as though it had been cut with hedge clippers. He was a powerful man, but there was an odd diffidence about him. “Evenin’ to y’all,” he said, in a mild voice.
“Hello, Crenshaw,” Mr. Ben said. “This is Joey and this is Bud.”
“Hi, Mr. Crenshaw.”
“Hi, Mr. Crenshaw.”
Crenshaw nodded, smiling shyly at them. They looked back at him with interest, for he was the man who had moved the new schoolteacher in.
“Blow your lantern out,” Mr. Ben said. “We’re about finished up in here.”
Crenshaw raised the glass globe of the lantern with the lever on the side, blew out the flame, and put the lantern on the kitchen table. They all went into the living room; Mr. Ben put more wood into the stove, and they sat down around the table.
“You get any squirrels today?” Mr. Ben asked.
“I got five,” Crenshaw said. “I went down to see if Sam wanted Charley, but y’all had him.” He smiled shyly again at the boys. “I had to still-hunt. Did y’all get some?”
“We got four,” Bud said, “but he ate them after we came home.”
Crenshaw shook his head. “Yes, sir, he’ll do that if he can. Seems like they could feed him.”
Although a part of Joey’s mind was still moving around the catalogue and what to do about it, the rest of it fixed upon Crenshaw.
“Schoolteacher all moved in?” Mr. Ben asked.
“Yes, sir. Her name’s Mandy. She came from up yonder around Blackstone, somewhere. I reckon she feels sort of lonely. It’s the first time she’s ever been away from home.”
“You’ll have to help her get over that,” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir, I reckon I’ll try.”
He smiled shyly again, and suddenly Joey began to like him. He was obviously poor and worked hard for what little he got; he seemed unaggressive and diffident compared to Joey’s father and his enterprising friends; but somehow there was a feeling of trustworthiness and decency about him.
“How did your crop turn out, finally?” Mr. Ben asked.
“Not very good, I reckon,” Crenshaw said, and several lines appeared on his forehead. “I worked hard at it, but seems like my land’s just gettin’ too poor for much.”
“My potatoes aren’t any better than they ought to be, either,” Mr. Ben said. “Nobody did any great shakes, the way I hear it.” He added, encouragingly, “Well, maybe next year will be better and we’ll get more rain.”
“I sure hope so,” Crenshaw said, and looked toward the kitchen. He had heard something, and then the others heard it. There were footsteps on the porch, the door opened and closed, and two boys appeared in the living room doorway. The oldest was a year or two younger than Joey, and the other a year younger than that. They were both small for their ages and not very clean; the eldest appeared to be wearing his father’s cast-off clothing to which the other had fallen heir in his turn. They stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting. They both bore a resemblance to Sam White: the eldest had his thin face and close-set eyes; the other’s face was rounder and softer.
“Come in, come in,” Mr. Ben said, a little impatiently. “Odie, Claude. This is Joey and Bud.”
The four boys looked at one another with careful appraisal, trying to be casual; only the eyes of Odie and Claude indicated a wistful envy as they noted the good clothes of the other two. They walked over to the sofa against the window and sat down, and became as immobile as two rabbits crouching in their nests. Only their eyes moved.
The two men took up their interrupted conversation, paying scant attention to the four boys. Their voices rose and fell; Crenshaw was so diffident that Mr. Ben had to keep asking questions to keep the conversation going. Most of it seemed to be agricultural, and Joey’s attention wandered from it after a while and moved to the White boys. He became aware that they were not quite so immobile as they seemed. They communicated with small twitchings and an almost imperceptible poking of elbows; Joey realized that they would stop even that if they caught him watching them, and pretended his interest was elsewhere. By their movements they seemed able to direct one another’s attention to the guns in the corner, the clothes hanging on hooks in the wall, or anything else that interested them. They would frequently turn their attention to Crenshaw, and when they did this the twitchings would increase; once or twice secret half-smiles crossed the face of Odie, the older one.
Crenshaw finally said something about turkeys, and Joey’s attention immediately fixed on him again. A turkey meant a wild turkey, a fabled bird, so shy, elusive, and clever that it was the ultimate goal of every hunter. Joey had heard a lot of turkey talk from his father and his father’s friends, and although he was sure they would be too smart for him for a long time to come, he had, deep within him, an intense secret longing to get one. The White boys heard the word too; they became completely immobile again, listening.
“You saw them, then?” Mr. Ben said.
“Yes, sir. It was a right big flock. They were—”
Mr. Ben, glancing at the White boys, interrupted him. “I’m glad there are some around,” he said. “You better see if you can get a shot at them before somebody else breaks the flock up or scares them out of the country.”
Crenshaw, a little belatedly, got the point. “I reckon that’s right,” he said. He looked ill at ease for a moment, and then stood up. “I better go along,” he said, and smiled at Joey and Bud. “It pleasured me to meet y’all.”
They stood up and smiled back at him. Mr. Ben got out of his chair and went into the kitchen with him; they heard him light the lantern and go out the door, and Mr. Ben came back into the room. “Well, now,” he said to the Whites, “what have you two been up to?”
Their eyes slid toward one another and the small one, Claude, said in a deep voice, “We reckoned they might want to go coon huntin’ tomorrow night.” By “they” he meant Joey and Bud, beings from a different world; the deep voice, coming from such a small boy, seemed incongruous and funny. Joey and Bud, caught unaware, almost laughed at it.
“Thank you,” Joey said, “but we won’t be here. We have to go home.” Not knowing what else to say, the four boys stood looking at one another; Joey suddenly remembered that they hadn’t eaten the other cake yet. “Do you want some cake?” he asked.
The eyes of Odie and Claude gleamed; Joey could almost see them licking their lips. They nodded, and Joey went out to the kitchen, cut the cake into fifths, put the pieces on plates, and brought the plates in on an old tin tray. Odie and Claude could hardly wait to get hold of it; their hands started to come up while Joey was still in the doorway, but they remembered their manners and let the hands drop again. Everyone sat down at the table and began to eat. The two country boys licked the rich chocolate icing first, and looked at one another; thereafter they ate with intense concentration, and didn’t look up until all their cake was gone. They both sighed, wiped their mouths with their sleeves, and reluctantly stood up.
“Reckon we better go,” Claude said. “Sure was good cake. Maybe you can go next time.”
“I’d like to,” Joey said. “Next time I’ll bring another cake.”
Odie and Claude exchanged a swift, hopeful glance, and Claude said, in his deep voice, “I hope it’s real soon.”
The other poked him with an elbow, he winced, and they both bobbed their heads, murmured what must have been a “good night,” and, turning quickly, went out. Mr. Ben and Bud went out after them; Joey stayed in the living room, for a plan had suddenly formed in his mind. When the other two came back in he said, “They sure seemed to like the cake, didn’t they?”
“It was nice of you to think of the cake,” Mr. Ben said. “I wonder how long it’s been since they had any.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s too bad, it’s just too bad.”
“Do you think they’ll tell their father about the turkeys?” Joey asked.
“Not them. He’d beat them for not finding out where they were, so they won’t mention it. They have to be pretty careful. Did you see them nudging one another? They’ve had to develop a language of their own. Now you’ve seen them, maybe you can see how lucky you are.”
“Yes, sir. If you’d let Mr. Crenshaw tell where he saw the turkeys, you reckon Mr. White would go after them?”
“Why, he’d have been out there before light.”
“But they were Mr. Crenshaw’s turkeys, weren’t they?”
“They’d be Sam White’s if he could find out where they are.”
“You reckon I’ll ever get a turkey?” Joey said.
“Maybe. If you ever run into a flock and break them up, you come right in here and get me. Turkeys call to one another when they get scattered. I’ve got a turkey call, and we’ll get where they were and see if we can call them to us. You better go to bed now. That’s where I’m going.” He took one of the lamps, waved at them, and went out of the room.
They undressed down to their underwear, took the other lamp, and went into the cold bedroom. They put their pajamas on, and Bud jumped into bed. Joey acted as though he was going to do the same thing.
“Oh, heck,” he said, taking up the lamp as though to blow it out. “I forgot to leak.”
He saw that Bud was not going to get up again, and taking the lamp he went into the dining room. Walking softly, he picked up the catalogue, took it into the kitchen, hurriedly found the page with the Kalamazoo swimming frog on it, and tore out the page. He crumpled the page and put it into the stove; there were a few embers left, and the page caught fire and burned. He stood there a moment, took the catalogue back into the living room, put it where it belonged, and went into the bedroom again. Bud didn’t stir; he was already asleep, hunched up on his side of the bed, and Joey raised the lamp a little and looked at his sleeping face. It didn’t look happy; there were lines across the forehead, as though Bud was worrying about something in his sleep. Looking at it, Joey suddenly felt unhappy too and confused. He didn’t want to feel that way; he blew out the lamp and crawled into the cold bed.