Flags in the Dust (43 page)

“We let you sleep,” Rafe said, then he said: “Good Lord, boy, you look like a hant. Didn’t you sleep last night?”

“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth; in the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots Bayard said:

“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”

“New breed I’m tryin’,” Jackson answered, and Rafe returned with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.

“Them’s Ethel’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ’em after you eat. Here, drink this. You look all wore out. Buddy must a kept you awake, talkin’,” he added, with dry irony.

Bayard drank the whisky and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” Rafe said.

“Ethel?” Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night. Y’all raise her?”

“Yes. She growed up with last year’s batch of puppies. Buddy caught her. And now Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business, with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom, and a fox’s smartness and speed.”

Bayard approached the corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity. “I never saw many fox
pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw any that looked like them.”

“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered.

Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ’em, but they haint no more’n weaned, yit. You wait and see.”

“Dont know what you’ll do with ’em,” Rafe said brutally. “They wont be big enough fer work stock. Better git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”

“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands, in a gentle, protective gesture. “You cant tell nothin’ ’bout a dawg ’twell hit’s at least two month old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.

“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe insisted. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”

He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their corner, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald enjoyment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of hovering concern, like a hen.

“Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared. “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ’ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and hauled the puppies ungently
into the light, where they crouched abjectly—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like any other living creature—Neither fox nor hound; partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy, there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene. Here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears; there limp ears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; and limp brief tails brushed over with a faint, golden fuzz like the inside of a chestnut burr. As regards color, they ranged from reddish brown through an indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast; and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ’em, now,” the old man directed.

He got them all facing forward, then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one became aware of its presence; he swept it back and forth just above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any personal interest whatever and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.

“You cant tell nothin’ about a dawg——” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.

“Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained a sort of scrambling lope. Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without swerving the puppies blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and
from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson crossed the floor and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.

“Now, what do you think of them, fer a pack of huntin’ dawgs?” the old man demanded. “Cant smell, cant bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”

“You cant tell nothin’ about a dawg——” Jackson essayed patiently.

“Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral in hyer.”

Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry. “Come hyer,” Mr MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in midstride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror, then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.

“You cant tell about dawgs——” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and rose.

Mr MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I dont blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself Them’s my boys——” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with heavy enjoyment. “Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ’bout as proud as he does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”

All that day it rained, and the following day and the one after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning
to sprawl before the fire, drowsing and malodorous and steaming, until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ethel, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard. With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtimes they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry fetched the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.

Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in two hours or six or twelve or forty eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of desertion, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent, also. Hunting, they told him when Buddy had been missing since breakfast.

“Why didn’t he let me know?” he demanded.

“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keer to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.

“Buddy dont mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”

“Nothin’ aint anything to Buddy,” Lee said, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding in the fire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’d spend his whole life in that ’ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawn bread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.” He rose abruptly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and he was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount
Vernon, six miles away. He spent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.

Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after the departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”

“Him and Rafe was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.

Bayard said: “Well, I wont melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?”

They pondered for a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last. “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ’im next time ’fo’ he starts out.”

After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the skeletoned fields in the rain, in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; or, accompanied now and then by Rafe, hunted ’coon and wildcat in the bottom. At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “Ther goes Ethel,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well upon the wet earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.

All through the night the ringing, bell-like tones quavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill in anticipating the course of the race. Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparently anticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their mounts upon a hill and sat so in the frosty starlight until the
dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past not half a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the silence again.

“Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, upon his white horse. “Aint that music fer a man, now?”

“I hope they git ’im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much ever’ time he fools ’im.”

“They wont git ’im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”

“I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed, “unless they’ll refuse to run they own granddaddy. They done refused ever’ thing else excep’ vittles.”

“You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies gits old enough to——”

“Listen.”

The talking ceased, and again across the silence the dogs’ voices rang among the hills. Long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the dark hills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.

“Too bad Johnny aint here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”

“He was a feller fer huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”

“John was a fine boy,” the old man said.

“Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated, “a right warm-hearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”

“He never
sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how
cold and wet it was, even when he was a little chap, with that ’ere single bar’l he bought with his own money, that kicked ’im so hard ever’ time he shot it. And yit he’d tote it around, instead of that ’ere sixteen old Colonel give ’im, jest because he saved up his own money and bought hit hisself.”

“Yes,” Jackson agreed. “Ef a feller gits into somethin’ on his own accord, he ought to go through with hit cheerful.”

“He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,” Mr MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he up and headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and next we knowed, here him and the fox come a-floatin’ down river on that ’ere drift lawg, and him singin’ away loud as he could yell.”

“That ’uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’ thing that come up.”

“He was a fine boy,” Mr MacCallum said again.

“Listen.”

Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up upon the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself might have found voice, grave and sad and wild with all regret.

Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas eve and the wagon was going into town, and although, with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.

It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing
logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small embers that leaped out upon the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily, his tired muscles relaxed in cumulate waves of heat as in a warm bath, and his stubborn wakeful heart glozed over too, for the time being. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without even offering that explanation which would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.

Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother had been the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped close to his round head was a noticeable contrast to his brothers’ brown eyes and black hair. But the old man had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as ever a one of the other boys’, and despite its youth, it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.