Sounder (6 page)

The teacher lit two lamps. The boy had never seen two lamps burning in the same room. They made the room as bright as daylight.

“People should read his writings,” the man continued. “But few do. He is all but forgotten.” But the boy did not hear. He was thinking of a cabin that had two lamps, both lit at the same time, and
two stoves, one to cook on and one to warm by.

The man sat in a chair between two tables that held the lamps. There were books on the tables too, and there were shelves filled not with pans and dishes, but with books. The mellow eyes of the man followed the boy’s puzzled glances as they studied the strange warm world in which he had suddenly found himself.

“I will read you a little story from your book.” The boy watched as the fingers of the man turned the pages one way and then the other until he found what he wanted to read.

“This is a very short story about a king named Cyrus, who wanted to buy the prize horse that belonged to one of his soldiers. Cyrus asked him how much he would sell the horse for, or whether he would exchange him for a kingdom. The soldier said he would not sell his prize horse and he would not exchange him for a kingdom, but that he would willingly give up his horse to gain a friend…. But now I have told you the whole story so there’s no use for me to read it. ”

“You’ve been a powerful good friend to take me in like this,” the boy said at last. “My fingers don’t hurt no more.”

“I am your friend,” said the man. “So while I heat some water to soak your hand and make
your cot for the night, you tell me all about yourself.”

“I had a father and a dog named Sounder,” the boy began. …

“WHO’S BEEN KINDLY
to your hurts?” the boy’s mother asked as she looked down at the clean white rags that bandaged the boy’s fingers. Rocking on the porch, she had seen the white dot swinging back and forth in the sun when the boy wasn’t much more than a moving spot far down the road. “For a while I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “Why you walkin’ fast? You done found him? Is your hand hurt bad? Is that a Bible somebody’s
done mistreated?” The woman’s eyes had come to rest on the book the boy held in his good hand.

“No. It’s a book. I found it in a trash can.”

“Be careful what you carry off, child,” his mother said. “It can cause a heap o’ trouble.”

“I got somethin’ to tell,” the boy said as he sat down on the edge of the porch and ran his bandaged fingers over the head of the great coon dog who had stopped his jumping and whining and lay at the boy’s feet with his head cocked to the side, looking up with his one eye. The younger children sat in a line beside the boy, waiting to hear.

“Is he poorly?” the woman asked slowly. “Is he far?”

“It’s about somethin’ else,” the boy said after a long spell of quiet. “I ain’t found him yet.”

The boy told his mother and the children about his night in the teacher’s cabin. The teacher wanted him to come back and go to school. He had been asked to live in the teacher’s cabin and do his chores. The children’s eyes widened when they heard the cabin had two lamps, two stoves, and grass growing in a yard with a fence and a gate. He told how the teacher could read and that there were lots of books on shelves in the cabin.
“Maybe he will write letters to the road camps for you,” the mother said, “ ’cause you’ll be so busy with schoolin’ and cleanin’ the schoolhouse for him that you can’t go searchin’ no more.”

“Maybe I’d have time,” the boy said. “But he says like you, ‘Better not to go. Just be patient and time will pass.’ ”

“It’s all powerful puzzlin’ and aggravatin’, but it’s the Lord’s will.” The boy noticed that his mother had stopped rocking; the loose boards did not rattle as the chair moved on them.

“The teacher said he’d walk all the way and reason about it if you didn’t want me to come to him. You don’t want me to go, but I’ll come home often as I can. And sometime I might bring word.”

“It’s a sign; I believes in signs.” The rocker began to move back and forth, rattling the loose boards in the porch floor. “Go child. The Lord has come to you.”

When he returned to the cabin with books on the shelves and the kind man with the white hair and the gentle voice, all the boy carried was his book with one cover missing—the book that he
couldn’t understand. In the summers he came home to take his father’s place in the fields, for cabin rent had to be paid with field work. In the winter he seldom came because it took “more’n a day’s walkin’ and sleepin’ on the ground.”

“Ain’t worth it” his mother would say.

Each year, after he had been gone for a whole winter and returned, the faithful Sounder would come hobbling on three legs far down the road to meet him. The great dog would wag his tail and whine. He never barked. The boy sang at his work in the fields, and his mother rocked in her chair and sang on the porch of the cabin. Sometimes when Sounder scratched fleas under the porch, she would look at the hunting lantern and the empty possum sack hanging against the wall. Six crops of persimmons and wild grapes had ripened. The possums and raccoons had gathered them unmolested. The lantern and possum sack hung untouched. “No use to nobody no more,” the woman said.

The boy read to his brother and sisters when he had finished his day in the fields. He read the story of Joseph over and over and never wearied of it. “In all the books in the teacher’s cabin, there’s no story as good as Joseph’s story” he would say to them.

The woman, listening and rocking, would say “The Lord has come to you, child. The Lord has certainly come to you.”

Late one August afternoon the boy and his mother sat on the shaded corner of the porch. The heat and drought of dog days had parched the earth, and the crops had been laid by. The boy had come home early because there was nothing to do in the fields.

“Dog days is a terrible time,” the woman said. “It’s when the heat is so bad the dogs go mad.” The boy would not tell her that the teacher had told him that dog days got their name from the Dog Star because it rose and set with the sun during that period. She had her own feeling for the earth, he thought, and he would not confuse it.

“It sure is hot,” he said instead. “Lucky to come from the fields early.” He watched the heat waves as they made the earth look like it was moving in little ripples.

Sounder came around the corner of the cabin from somewhere, hobbled back and forth as far as the road several times, and then went to his cool spot under the porch. “That’s what I say about dog days,” the woman said. “Poor creature’s been addled with the heat for three days. Can’t find no place to quiet down. Been down the road
nearly out o’ sight a second time today, and now he musta come from the fencerows. Whines all the time. A mad dog is a fearful sight. Slobberin’ at the mouth and runnin’ every which way ’cause they’re blind. Have to shoot ’em ’fore they bite some child. It’s awful hard.”

“Sounder won’t go mad,” the boy said. “He’s lookin’ for a cooler spot, I reckon.”

A lone figure came on the landscape as a speck and slowly grew into a ripply form through the heat waves. “Scorchin’ to be walkin’ and totin’ far today,” she said as she pointed to the figure on the road.

A catbird fussed in the wilted lilac at the corner of the cabin. “Why’s that bird fussin’ when no cat’s prowlin? Old folks has a sayin’ that if a catbird fusses ’bout nothin’, somethin’ bad is comin’. It’s a bad sign.”

“Sounder, I reckon,” the boy said. “He just passed her bush when he came around the cabin.”

In the tall locust at the edge of the fence, its top leaves yellowed from lack of water, a mockingbird mimicked the catbird with half a dozen notes, decided it was too hot to sing, and disappeared. The great coon dog, whose rhythmic panting came through the porch floor, came from under the house and began to whine.

As the figure on the road drew near, it took shape and grew indistinct again in the wavering heat. Sometimes it seemed to be a person dragging something, for little puffs of red dust rose in sulfurous clouds at every other step. Once or twice they thought it might be a brown cow or mule, dragging its hooves in the sand and raising and lowering its weary head.

Sounder panted faster, wagged his tail, whined, moved from the dooryard to the porch and back to the dooryard.

The figure came closer. Now it appeared to be a child carrying something on its back and limping.

“The children still at the creek?” she asked.

“Yes, but it’s about dry.”

Suddenly the voice of the great coon hound broke the sultry August deadness. The dog dashed along the road, leaving three-pointed clouds of red dust to settle back to earth behind him. The mighty voice rolled out upon the valley, each flutelike bark echoing from slope to slope.

“Lord’s mercy! Dog days done made him mad.” And the rocker was still.

Sounder was a young dog again. His voice was the same mellow sound that had ridden the November breeze from the lowlands to the hills. The boy and his mother looked at each other. The catbird
stopped her fussing in the wilted lilac bush. On three legs, the dog moved with the same lightning speed that had carried him to the throat of a grounded raccoon.

Sounder’s master had come home. Taking what might have been measured as a halting half step and then pulling a stiff, dead leg forward, dragging a foot turned sideways in the dust, the man limped into the yard. Sounder seemed to understand that to jump up and put his paw against his master’s breast would topple him into the dust, so the great dog smelled and whined and wagged his tail and licked the limp hand dangling at his master’s side. He hopped wildly around his master in a circle that almost brought head and tail together.

The head of the man was pulled to the side where a limp arm dangled and where the foot pointed outward as it was dragged through the dust. What had been a shoulder was now pushed up and back to make a one-sided hump so high that the leaning head seemed to rest upon it. The mouth was askew too, and the voice came out of the part farthest away from the withered, wrinkled, lifeless side.

The woman in the still rocker said, “Lord, Lord,” and sat suffocated in shock.

“Sounder knew it was you just like you was comin home from work,” the boy said in a clear voice.

Half the voice of the man was gone too, so in slow, measured, stuttering he told how he had been caught in a dynamite blast in the prison quarry, how the dead side had been crushed under an avalanche of limestone, and how he had been missed for a whole night in the search for dead and wounded. He told how the pain of the crushing stone had stopped in the night, how doctors had pushed and pulled and encased the numb side of his body in a cast, how they had spoken kindly to him and told him he would die. But he resolved he would not die, even with a half-dead body, because he wanted to come home again.

“For being hurt, they let me have time off my sentence,” the man said, “and since I couldn’t work, I guess they was glad to.”

“The Lord has brought you home,” the woman said.

The boy heard faint laughter somewhere behind the cabin. The children were coming home from the creek. He went around the cabin slowly, then hurried to meet them.

“Pa’s home,” he said and grabbed his sister,
who had started to run toward the cabin. “Wait. He’s mighty crippled up, so behave like nothin’ has happened.”

“Can he walk?” the youngest child asked.

“Yes! And don’t you ask no questions.”

“You been mighty natural and considerate,” the mother said to the younger children later when she went to the woodpile and called them to pick dry kindling for a quick fire. When she came back to the porch she said, “We was gonna just have a cold piece ’cause it’s so sultry, but now I think I’ll cook.”

Everything don’t change much, the boy thought. There’s eatin’ and sleepin’ and talkin’ and settin’ that goes on. One day might be different from another, but there ain’t much difference when they’re put together.

Sometimes there were long quiet spells. Once or twice the boy’s mother said to the boy, “He’s powerful proud of your learnin’. Read somethin’ from the Scriptures.” But mostly they just talked about heat and cold, and wind and clouds, and what’s gonna be done, and time passing.

As the days of August passed and September brought signs of autumn, the crippled man sat on the porch step and leaned the paralyzed, deformed side of his body against a porch post. This
was the only comfortable sitting position he could find. The old coon dog would lie facing his master, with his one eye fixed and his one ear raised. Sometimes he would tap his tail against the earth. Sometimes the ear would droop and the eye would close. Then the great muscles would flex in dreams of the hunt, and the mighty chest would give off the muffled whisper of a bark. Sometimes the two limped together to the edge of the fields, or wandered off into the pine woods. They never went along the road. Perhaps they knew how strange a picture they made when they walked together.

About the middle of September the boy left to go back to his teacher. “It’s the most important thing,” his mother said.

And the crippled man said, “We’re fine. We won’t need nothin’.”

“I’ll come for a few days before it’s cold to help gather wood and walnuts.”

The broken body of the old man withered more and more, but when the smell of harvest and the hunt came with October, his spirit seemed to quicken his dragging step. One day he cleaned the dusty lantern globe, and the old dog, remembering, bounced on his three legs and wagged his tail as if to say “I’m ready.”

The boy had come home. To gather the felled trees and chop the standing dead ones was part of
the field pay too. He had been cutting and dragging timber all day.

Sometimes he had looked longingly at the lantern and possum sack, but something inside him had said “Wait. Wait and go together.” But the boy did not want to go hunting anymore. And without his saying anything, his father had said, “You’re too tired, child. We ain’t goin’ far, no way.”

In the early darkness the halting, hesitant swing of the lantern marked the slow path from fields to pine woods toward the lowlands. The boy stood on the porch, watching until the light was lost behind pine branches. Then he went and sat by the stove. His mother rocked as the mound of kernels grew in the fold of her apron. “He been mighty peart,” she said. “I hope he don’t fall in the dark. Maybe he’ll be happy now he can go hunting again.” And she took up her singing where she had left off.

Sounder’s scratching at the door awakened the boy. It was still night, but the first red glow of
dawn was rising in a faint crescent over the pine woods.

“Sounder just couldn’t poke slow enough for your father,” the mother said to the boy as they stood in the doorway, straining and sifting the dark for some movement.

“Lantern wouldn’t burn out in this time,” the boy said. “No sign of light. He must have fallen or got tired. Sounder will show me.”

Sounder was already across the road into the stalk land, whining, moving his head from one side to the other, looking back to be sure that the boy was following.

Across the stalk land, into the pine woods, into the climbing, brightening glow of the dawn, the boy followed the dog, whose anxious pace slowed from age as they went. “By a dog’s age, Sounder is past dying time,” the boy said half aloud. Fear had always prompted him to talk to himself.

Deep in the pine woods, along a deserted logging road, the boy and dog came to a small open space where there had once been a log ramp. The sun was just beginning to drive its first splinters of light through the pines, bouncing against tree trunks and earth. At the foot of one of the trees the boy’s father sat, the lantern still burning by his side.