Home from the Hill (27 page)

The bottle slipped from his hand and clattered on the floor and he came to himself. He stretched and looked around and his eye fell on the gun cabinet. He got up and stretched again and crossed over to it through the heavy sunlight coming level through the windows. He took out his bird gun and rubbed the stock lovingly with his palm. The wood was Circassian walnut and the grain was intricate and rich as the grain in a polished agate or a fine briar pipe. He breeched the gun and raised it and looked down the barrels that gleamed in concentric rings. He closed the locks and threw the stock to his shoulder and swung on a rising bird. He lowered it, flexed his arms, then snapped it to his shoulder again and swung in the opposite direction. He had come in a little early this afternoon because he was just worn out, and now, damn it all, he ought to drop everything, just drop everything for a day and go hunting. His cotton-pickers took more time for hunting than he did.

It was time to get dressed for dinner. The Captain replaced the gun in the cabinet, left the den and went upstairs. At the head of the stairs he turned towards his room, but then he paused. A vision came into his mind of a certain pea patch which to the south ran uphill into a stand of loblolly pines, to the north sloped gently downhill into a little spring-fed swamp green with ferns, where one day last year, a day in early fall, one of those misty days the color of wood smoke, silent with dampness, heavy with smells, he and Theron had stood watching the dogs quarter the field as if they had drawn lots, then saw old Sal suddenly plunge to a stop as if she had been shot, saw her set with all four feet dug in, saw her feathered tail go up like a flag, her nose lift into the wind, saw her lean stiffly forward, then watched her move up hypnotically, in a kind of paralyzed trance, delicate-footed as if walking on eggs, as, meanwhile, the other dogs drew near, backing her up, respectful, honoring the point, the three of them rigid as a statuary group, only the long hair of their stiff, upraised tails fluttering faintly in the breeze. They had been in no hurry, he and Theron; they shared the knowledge that the real reason for going bird hunting was to watch the dogs at work. When at last they drew near and Theron walked around the dogs and strode a little ahead and kicked, it was as if he had set off an explosion. The roar seemed both close, yet muffled, as if too much for your ear drums. From the ground, like whizzing shell fragments, rose at least forty birds—blurs, streaks against the sky. Four—one for each barrel to both of them—had crumpled, and he remembered how, as feathers still fluttered to the ground around them, he and Theron had turned to each other, smiling.

He had earned a day off, he said to himself, and he turned about, in the direction of Theron's room. To his surprise, there was Theron standing in the hall, watching him.

“Son!” he exclaimed involuntarily. “Well, I was just coming to see you.”

Theron did not speak.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked the Captain. “Going hunting? If you are, maybe I'll take off and go with you.”

Still Theron did not speak, and for a moment still did not move. The Captain became aware of how very still, how almost unnaturally still he was. At last he moved, and it was to come suddenly at a dash down the hall. He did not stop, did not pause. He spoke only as he went past, and as he passed, to the Captain's astonishment he saw that the boy was crying. “I'm never going hunting again!” he sobbed, and he dashed down the stairs.

The Captain was shocked, stunned by the sight of such strong emotion. He stood staring down the steps. He heard the front door slam. What had happened? What did it mean? The words seemed to hang in the air:
I'm never going hunting again!
Somehow they seemed to accuse him.

Mechanically he turned back towards his room. He took a step or two, then stopped abruptly. He knew suddenly that Theron had been silently watching him for some time before he turned. He knew it; the feeling was so strong that he turned about now, as if he were watching him now. The hall was empty. Staring at the empty spot where Theron had stood, he felt a sudden, sharp, cold chill of loneliness. He felt lonely, yet not alone. He felt for a moment the strange and intolerable sensation of being alone with himself.

37

He had to get away from the noise and bustle that made of this sad occasion a kind of festivity, a time for starting courtships, of telling over and over again the tales of the dead while enjoying the edifying moral to their lives and deaths. It was Graveyard Cleaning Day, and already, working off to himself, Theron had flushed one pair of furtive lovers from behind a crypt. Now, too heartsick to go on, he had laid down his tools.

His wandering brought him to a corner of the graveyard far from any family plots, where off to itself was a grave enclosed with draped chains coated with a mould of pale orange rust and bordered with nasturtiums, a tangle of withered and twisted stalks now, but which had grown thick in this leached and rocky poor soil in season. The grave had a stone, but it was curiously out of place. It was a tiny stone, smaller than any you would find marking the grave of an infant, and instead of standing at the head, stood just about above where the knees of the occupant of the grave would have lain. It said:

HERE

AWAITING HIM
,

LIES

THE LEG

OF

Hugh Ramsay

LOST

JUNE, 1927

The story of Hugh Ramsay's leg was a familiar one, and, ten years after, a kind of gruesome anecdote in the town. He had been a housepainter. After his accident he had required a sitting-down job, and the same perverse flair for self-punishment that had made him erect the little stone had made him choose, with the money he was awarded in compensation, to set himself up in business as a shoe cobbler. Because of his odd part-grave, he was a special figure at Graveyard Cleaning Days. He cleaned the grave himself, feeling that it would have discomforted others to have to clean it for him.

He had worked for a building contractor in town—a steady young man, putting money away towards a house and planning to be married in the fall, when he fell off a scaffold while painting a church steeple and shattered both legs. When the left one was amputated at the knee, nothing could shake his despondency. His fiancée protested her readiness to go ahead with the wedding as planned, but Hugh broke off the engagement. He had the bitter satisfaction of seeing her married inside a year.

Meanwhile a lawyer had got hold of him. Hugh paid no attention, but in his torpor allowed him to file suit against his employer. The contractor would have been glad to settle something on Hugh out of court if the sum asked had been anything within reason, but the lawyer upped it to something you could not even bargain with. The trial came. Hugh hardly knew where he was or what doing. He took the stand listlessly. But then something happened to him; his mood changed. He hated the unfeeling pity he saw in the faces of the jury, the unction with which the defence lawyer handled him, the pathetic spectacle his own oleaginous lawyer made of him. The trial dragged on while his attorney piled up evidence in excess. The jury decided in Hugh's favor. The judge then pronounced the figure that the court thought just and appropriate. Then Hugh stood up on his crutches and shouted. He didn't want their damned money, he said.

“What do you want?” the astonished judge asked.

“I want—justice! Ain't this a court of justice? It's justice I want. Justice! Do you hear! I want justice!”

Theron Hunnicutt understood Hugh Ramsay now. The man had not wanted to see his employer's leg amputated at the knee, or the judge's. But that would have come as near compensating for his loss as money. He didn't know what he wanted. He wanted justice. Such a simple thing: just that: justice—nothing else would do. And so did he. No matter what you had done, the punishment was always too great. Now all day long and in his bed at night inside himself he heard it, that childish, silly, profound, anguished cry for the impossible thing, right for the wrong that can never be righted, reparation for loss that nothing could make up for. He wanted things not to be what they were: justice.

A slow rustle of leaves broke in upon his thoughts. Wishing not to be found, especially not here, he stole away and hid behind a tree until it would be safe to move further off. It was Hugh Ramsay who came into sight. He carried a leaf rake and a broom, hobbling along, dragging his peg in the dry leaves. Theron wished not to spy on him, but was afraid he might betray his presence if he stirred. So he watched. Hugh raked the grave and raked outside the chains for eight or ten feet, making piles of leaves at the four corners. Then he lighted them, hobbling from one to another. The thick smoke stood up like four gray columns on the windless air. Hugh dragged himself inside the temple they made and sat, his stiff leg flat out before him, on the grave; it was like some ritual observance, torches at the corners of a catafalque or a votive offering to some strange god. When the fires were burned down and the smoke gone, Theron saw what was left of Hugh Ramsay sitting on the grave of his lost part, pulling up the nasturtium stalks and cultivating the stony ground with a hand fork, and with the other hand, Theron saw, absently rubbing the stump of his knee, as amputees will do, to soothe a ghost of an itch or the memory of pain in the missing member. You were never reconciled to loss. Justice, he thought. Where could he find as much compensation as Hugh Ramsay? You could stump along on a wooden leg, but where could you get back your respect for yourself or for your father, once it was taken from you? He entertained himself bitterly with the fantasy of a grave that he might erect, with a stone just over the place for the heart, saying, Here, Awaiting Him, Lies the Happiness of Theron Hunnicutt.

He took advantage of Hugh Ramsay's absorbing grief to steal away. He drifted without direction, only guiding his steps to avoid the sounds of life, of people.

His steps brought him now to the back edge of the cemetery, where he sat down against a cedar tree overlooking a shallow valley overgrown with scrub and weeds, a neglected and desolate place in complete accord with his mood. Presently, however, their game of tag brought a troupe of children close enough to disturb him. He rose and went down the slope.

Not looking where he was going, he caught his foot, stumbled and fell. On his knees, he looked back and saw what he had tripped on. It was a man-made something driven into the ground. It was a flat piece of metal the size of a postcard on a short stem painted blue. He had twisted it and could see that the two sides were different. He examined it without interest. It had a front and a back, and the front was not metal, but a browned and clouded pane of isinglass. There were beads of moisture and spider egg sacks behind the pane and there appeared to be a piece of paper with writing on it. He wiped away the old rain-splattered dirt. It was a printed form, originally pink, but faded now and water-streaked and mouldy. He could read at the top of it the printed word NAME, followed by some script in runny ink, once black no doubt, now a pale reddish-brown. Stanley Tr-something, was as much of the name as he could make out. The next line began with the printed words DATE OF BIRTH, and of the writing that followed all that could be seen through the dew under the glass was -ber 26, 18—. The third line said –E OF DEATH, and of the writing following that he could make out nothing. At the bottom was a signature he could not read, and beneath it the printed words, much faded, COUNTY CORONER.

He stood up, and to his surprise, looking about he discovered more of them hidden in the tall brown poverty-grass. They were all identical, and those that were not all rust were painted a bluish gray. Then he saw that he was at that moment standing on a grave, in violation, however unintended, of one of the strongest taboos he knew, a childish superstition, but one which no one ever quite outgrew. He jumped aside, and found himself on another one, so close to the first that the occupants must lie like a couple in a double bed. He cast an automatic glance back up the hill to see if he had been observed.

He saw that there were graves of this same sort all around, the markers fallen over on many, tilted and leaning on others, running all the way to the woods and as far as he could discern the blue stems and pinkish faces in the grass on either side down the little valley. Who were these people? Why were they so forgotten, their graves so neglected, and what had consigned them to this desolate back-slums of the graveyard? There were no paths among the rank, dead ragweed and cockle-burr and milkweed; not one of them had been trodden down by any visiting foot. Could so many people each have left no kin at all to visit their graves? But kin, had they had any, would not have been the ones to tend the graves, for that was not polite; you cleaned other peoples' plots and they cleaned yours. Why did no one in town clean these?

He found himself at once deeply curious about these dead, and, getting down on his hands and knees, began to crawl from one marker to another, puzzling out as much as he could of them. There must be some sort of kinship among them, he thought. They could not be Negroes, for the Negroes had a cemetery of their own. Perhaps they were Indians, or Yankees, carpetbaggers who had died in the town in the old Reconstruction days. But no, he discovered some fairly recent dates among them, and in addition to men, he found the names of women among those that could still be read. All were on the same pink form: Name, date of birth, date of death, signature of the county coroner. He discovered that the dates got more and more recent as he worked his way in one certain direction, and then he came to where the graves gave out and where an unused patch of land of the same sort lay, as though to receive still more of them in time to come.

There reached him now on the far edge of the shallow valley only a low hum of the activities up in the graveyard. A hush hung over this deserted village of dead, who were remembered with no stones or epitaphs, nothing but that uniform and official notice that they had lived and had died. Such was his own mood, however, that he felt himself no unwelcome intruder upon their poor privacy.