Some Came Running (106 page)

Dave wondered how ’Bama was going to handle the matter, as regarded young Ted, about letting his older brother, Johnny, go along tomorrow. But he did not have to wonder long, because as soon as the three were inside the door ’Bama had taken it up.

“I’m lettin Johnny go out with us tomorrow,” he said to all three together. “He’s too young to go, but I told him he could take his wooden gun and practice. I told him he’ll be goin out with men and he’ll have to act like one, and if he don’t, I’ll send him right back home.”

“He’ll do jes fhahn,” Clint said, patting the towhead.

“Sure he will,” Murray said.

Ted said nothing, but walked over to where his older brother stood by the door and stood beside him. Dave had the same feeling of sympathy for, and pride in, him that he had had about Johnny a while before. Ted did not say—or show in his actions—anything that might be construed as envy or disappointment. And Johnny did not say or do anything that might be marked as triumphant over this slightly smaller edition of himself. The two of them stood in silence by the door, their faces closed, like two small soldiers.

After they had talked about the prospects, the males—all six of them—went down to the barn to look at the dogs; and here again Dave felt there was something of the played-out ritual. The two dogs, both good-looking pointers, were kept in a run beside the barn to keep them from taking up the chasing of rabbits and other game. The men leaned their elbows in the mesh wire of the tall fence and put one foot up on the bottom wire. The two towheaded little boys in accurate imitation also leaned their elbows in the fence—at about the height of the crotches of the men—and placed one foot up on the wire. And the dogs, as if they knew just exactly what was taking place, came whimpering to the fence and panted at the men pleadingly, while Ted and Johnny reached through the fence and rubbed their ears and the redbone coonhounds in their own run came to their fence and barked enviously. Clint had said before that he had seen three, and possibly four, coveys around the place. Murray had said that he had seen two others in the south end. Now Clint said he had had the dogs out several times to sharpen them up. After a while, they all went back to the house.

That night, they had a gala supper party. Clint’s wife and other four children—two young girls of nine and ten, a smaller boy, and a baby—came over from the other house, each of them but the baby carrying an armload of crocks or mason jars or boxes of food. Again there was that feeling of the played-out ritual. The men—whom Murray uncontestedly took his place among—sat out in the side yard on cane bottom chairs with the whiskey and got pleasantly half-drunk, while the women and two girls worked themselves red-faced in the kitchen. The three smaller boys, told off to mind the babies, sat quietly on the porch as close as they could get to the men without being ordered to move off. When over the whiskey the talk turned to sex, Dave noted that young Murray’s face got sharper, even cruel, though not in any very unpleasant way. And in the kitchen, where the women worked, the talk was all about the prayer meeting they had been to two nights before. Dave knew what the women were talking of, because once he had gone in and offered to help. He did not do it again. When he offered to help the women with their meal, it embarrassed everybody. Though, of course, everyone did not say anything. Only ’Bama laughed.

“You ain’t in the city now, old sock, where the women have the men to do the dishes for them.”

Once ’Bama had turned it into a joke the others were able to laugh, too. Ruefully, Dave laughed with them. He could not escape the feeling he had had once before in Florida that time: that he had been moved backward in time to another (would you say stronger?) America of a hundred years ago. And strangest of all was to see the cynical, sneering eminently sophisticated ’Bama sitting in the middle of it very much at home.

The meal itself was tremendous. There was fried chicken, and fried squirrel, and mashed potatoes and chicken gravy, skillet-fried cornbread, also biscuits, home-canned green beans, home-canned asparagus, and another dish of beans called “shucky” beans, which when Dave asked about it he was informed by Ruth were fixed by stringing green beans on needle and thread and hanging them up to dry. There was also a dish of home-canned Southern squash. Then for dessert, there was home-canned peaches, apple pie, and rhubarb served in a side dish with hot biscuits, and more pumpkin pie with home-whipped cream. As a fat man who was trying to lose weight, Dave was glad he did not eat down here very often. ’Bama himself ate nothing except some chicken, and presided at the head of the table with his never-empty glass of whiskey and water. “That’s just the way some men are,” Ruth said smiling; “they’d rather drink than eat.” But the rest of them, including the kids and women, put away amounts of food that were astonishing.

After the boys had been put to bed, ’Bama had shown Dave over the house with Clint and Murray trailing along, and when it came time to go to bed and all the rest were gone, Ruth went up and spent a half hour fixing Dave’s room up for him. She had not seen her husband for over three weeks, and yet she would take an extra half hour to appoint Dave’s room for him. There even was, he felt, an air almost of apology about her, as if she was pitying him because he was a bachelor. And so he had gone to bed, with that peculiarly painful, twisting loneliness of a man who sleeps alone in a guest bed while his host is ensconced with his lady. He had lain awake quite a while. And mostly he had thought about all he had observed today. Everything was apparently just exactly as ’Bama had described it to him beforehand. It seemed unbelievable. Christ, you’d think a man who had it would stay right here with it the rest of his whole life! And he could not help remembering all of this next morning, when he watched Ruth who stood at the big stove with her flushed bright excited face and cooked and ladled out the hunting breakfast for them. It was clear to him that Ruth had an instinctive understanding of what men were like; and if ’Bama drank whiskey and ran around, it did not upset her in the least. The whole damned thing was, as far as he was concerned anyway, just about phenomenal.

They took the farm pickup, ’Bama driving and Dave on the seat beside him, Clint and Murray and young Johnny in the back with the excited dogs. Not until they had reached the furthest limits of the farm to the south, did they stop and get out and in the chill first light begin to tramp the cornfields and the alfalfa fields and the edges of the woods, the happy dogs ranging closely out before them.

“We really made a mistake,” ’Bama said to Dave. “We should have gone up north after pheasant first, and saved our own farm back until we’d done all the huntin we wanted to do other places first. That’s the way to really do it.”

Dave had not shot a shotgun since before the war, but the Sunday previous and several other days before they came down to the farm he and ’Bama had gone out to the Parkman Gun Club and practiced up on both skeet and trap. That made it almost six years since he had fired one. He was in for a rude awakening at the Gun Club. Shot after shot, he would stare in painful disbelief as clay bird after clay bird would fly away from him untouched. The truly satisfying relief of seeing one explode into smoke was a great many more times in the minority. He was not doing anything wrong. He just could not shoot. Not having practiced, he could no longer shoot at all. It was mortifying. Here was a man who while he had never amounted to much as a rifleman—in the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company, had nevertheless accounted for eleven personal Germans in the Battle of the Bulge—and he couldn’t even hit a clay bird with a shot column as wide as your arm! He reminded himself that rifle shooting and shotgun shooting was totally different skills, but it did him little good. He felt totally ridiculous. ’Bama, who evidently did a
little
shooting every once in a while, was considerably better and that did not help Dave, either.

Out in the field after the quail, it was almost as bad. After they had flushed out the first covey, he fired shot after shot, hitting nothing. And all this time, of course, both Clint and Murray were knocking down bird after bird. Nonchalantly, indifferently, with his clean, new white eye patch and his enormous belly, Clint would walk up and pick up his bird or take it from the dog and stuff it behind him in his steadily thickening game bag. Murray was almost as bad, shooting quickly with the superb coordination of youth, and accurately with the eye of an old hunter. They both had kept an eye out for the birds all year long as they worked the fields, and knew exactly where to go to look for them. It was the kind of hunting quail-shooters like to reminisce about afterwards—except that Dave was never the one who hit any of them; and the fact that both Clint and Murray went about it in such a matter of fact inexcitable way as if it were an everyday commonplace. By noon when they quit to eat, they both had their limit of twelve and had—at ’Bama’s suggestion—started working on his and Dave’s. Consequently, Dave found himself carrying eight birds he had not shot in his new game bag, and hating both of them with such grinding murderous hatred that every tired step he took was a pleasure—just to imagine mashing both of their indifferent faces into the ground. He had never hated any of the Germans he had killed in the war one-twentieth so much, and he was so miserable that he could not even enjoy the really beautiful day or the truly magnificent scenery of the hills and hollows of the bottoms woods. In addition, his feet were sore and his legs weary.

They ate their lunch at a strange, little settlement in the bottoms which was known as Castle Finn. Three houses and two stores, Castle Finn crouched athwart a dusty gravel road, not a single tree around it anywhere within a quarter of a mile though there were woods visible on all sides. Of the two stores, one was a bar and a restaurant of sorts, and the other was a general store. Sitting in the dingy little bar, they gorged themselves on hot deliciously greasy-smelling hamburgers and drank beer interspersed with shots of whiskey and talked to the general store owner who had come over from next door to loaf. Murray, of course, was not of age; but this was Castle Finn down in the Dark Bend River bottoms, the backwoods, where the county law almost never came unless requested, and so Murray was served beer and whiskey right along with the others and nobody thought a damned thing about it.

Sitting there with them, hungry, weak, footsore, weary, and birdless, Dave suddenly envied all of them again, as he had last night. They were together, and they had a pattern, and a place, and they were—
living.
He wasn’t living, even when hunting with them. He was, at best, an outsider. He was a writer, and so he didn’t—couldn’t—live. He sat rootless, cut off, without foundation. Nowhere—but most especially in the great United States of America—was there any pattern or social framework for a writer to be a working part of. Even when they congregated together, like a covey of nervous peep-peeping birds, writers were only a collection of outsiders being outside each other right along with being outside everything else. But it went even deeper than that. By its very nature, being a writer meant being an outsider, meant not living. Like these people lived. To live meant to act, and the very act of writing was itself an un-act—a putting of it down on paper instead of doing it. Bob French had a saying for it, which Gwen was always quoting: “You can’t work and live, too.” Every other man in the world, even a painter, could at least live while he worked. But not a writer. You had to be every-body, and every-thing, and hence you were no-body, and no-thing.

Savagely, sitting there with them, he wished that goddamned bitch of a nymphomaniac Gwen French had never gotten him into this. But even that was no help; because what had gotten him into this wasn’t really Gwen. It was himself. His own nature, which had always been that of an outsider who could not live. Why else had he gotten into writing in the first place, out in California? She couldn’t be blamed for that. Christ! He wanted to live! To do! Loneliness and an odd objectless terror that reminded him of that time he had lain by Ginnie and listened to Dewey and Lois arguing, assailed him as, dead, he sat amongst the living as they drank their beer and talked.

Not until late in the day did he finally get a bird. After the meal at Castle Finn, they drove back up to the north end of the farm where they had started working on the four coveys Clint had spotted. Still terror-ridden and suffering that horrible aloneness in the midst of friends which is the worst kind, dejected, weary, totally hopeless, Dave had just without thinking flung up the gun and fired as they flushed out three leftovers from a split covey. There was no doubt that it was his bird because he had fired first and the bird had fallen. It was a moment of great triumph, and if he had stopped to think, he would never have been able to have done it. But then, when he—carefully nonchalant—walked up and picked up the little feather-bedraggled lump, he could not help wondering at the ridiculousness of it all. He could not help feeling a sharp pity for the bird, and felt like some kind of huge monstrous oaf blundering and destroying through the woods. Still nevertheless there had been that crashing moment of triumph, and of breathtaking poignant tragic beauty, as the shot column struck the whirring bit of feathers. Sadly and not a little guiltily, he thrust the quail back into the game bag with the others that he had not shot and after being congratulated, went on with the others looking for more birds, his terror not alleviated but actually stronger than before as he straggled along after the others, Clint and Murray happily knocking down more birds, and ’Bama, too, when he could, though he couldn’t compare in shooting with his cropper relatives. Home is the hunter, home from the hill. And the cow’s in the meadow and the sheep’s in the corn. And what earthly good to anybody any of it could be, Dave could only wonder dimly, wishing once again that he was like the others. And had their un-self-conscious manhood that allowed them to shoot birds without stewing about it, instead of what he was. Whatever it was he was.

He found out what earthly good it could be that night, when Ruth and Clint’s wife cooked the quail. Again they had a sort of communal gala supper. They had brought home a grand total of thirty-seven birds, all but six of them (two of which were Dave’s) shot by Clint and Murray. Ruth cooked them all. And not a single bird was left on the platters when they were done. Murray alone ate six. Clint ate five. Most of the kids ate three. And Dave, ravenous, stiff and tired and relaxed with several whiskeys under his belt, almost terror-stricken now at the thought of ever having to leave all this strange and wonderful security but still anxious to get back where he could have a woman for himself again, ate five himself with several generous helpings of delicious slaw and the wonderful mashed potatoes.