The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (11 page)

“I see other boys and girls your age going out to picnics and parties, Joe. I'm sure it's not that you're never invited.”

“You know that kind of thing don't interest me,” he said impatiently.

She was serious for a moment and said, “You're so old for your age, Joe. Losing your father so young.” Then she altered, forced her tone. “Well, of course, you probably know exactly what you're up to,” she said. “It's the hunters the girls really go for, isn't it? Us girls—us Southern girls—like a hunting man! I did. I'll bet all the little girls just—”

He hated it when she talked like that. She knew that girls meant nothing to him. He liked it when she let him know that she was glad they didn't. He liked to think that when she teased him this way it was to get him to reaffirm how little he cared for girls; and yet she should know that his feeling for her was, like the feeling he had for hunting, too deep a thing for him to be teased into declaring.

He took the shell away from her.

“You're good enough now,” she said.

“No,” he said sullenly. “I'm not.”

“He would think so.”

“I don't think so. I don't think he would.”

“I think so. You're good enough for me,” she said.

“No. No, I'm not. Don't say that,” he said.

He was in the field at daybreak on opening day with Mac, the speckled setter, the only one of his father's dogs left now, the one who in the three seasons he had hunted him had grown to be his father's favorite, whom he had broken that season that he had trained, broken, him, Joe, too, so that between him and the dog, since, a bond had existed less like that of master to beast, more like that of brother to brother, and consequently, he knew, he had never had the dog's final respect and did not have it now, though the coat did fit now.

He had not unleashed the dog yet, but stood with him among the bare alders at the edge of the broom grass meadow that had the blackened pile of sawdust in the middle—the color of fresh cornmeal the first time he ever saw it—to which he, and the big covey of quail, went first each season, the covey which he had certainly not depleted much but which instead had grown since his father's death.

The coat fit now, all right, but he wore it still without presumption, if anything with greater dread and with even less sense of possession than when it came halfway down to his knees and the sleeves hung down to the mid-joints of his fingers and the armpits looped nearly to his waist and made it absolutely impossible to get the gun stock to his shoulder, even if he could have lifted the big gun there in that split second when the feathered balls exploded at his feet and streaked into the air. He had not worn the coat then because he believed he was ready to wear it nor hunted with the big gun because he believed he was the man to. He had not been ready for a lot of things, had had to learn to drive, and drive those first two years seated on a cushion to see over the hood; he had not been ready to sit at the head of the table, to carve the meat, to be the comforter and protector, the man of the house. He had had to wear the coat and shoot the gun and rock on his heels and just grit his teeth at the kick, the recoil.

Maybe there had been moments later—the day he threw away the car cushion was one—when he was pleased to think that he was growing into the coat, but now, as he stood with Mac, hunching and dropping his shoulders and expanding his chest inside it, it seemed to have come to fit him before he was at all prepared for it to. He heard the loose shells rattle in the shell pockets and he smelled the smell of his father, which now, four years later, still clung to it, or else what he smelled was the never-fading, peppery smell of game blood and the clinging smell of gunpowder, the smell of gun oil and the smell of the dog, all mixed on the base of damp, heavy, chill November air, the air of a quail-shooting day, the smells which had gone to make up the smell his father had had for him. Reaching his hand into the shell pocket he felt something clinging in the seam. It was a faded, tangled and blood-stiffened pinfeather of a quail. It was from a bird his father had shot. He himself had never killed so many that the game pockets would not hold them all and he had had to put them in the shell pockets.

He took from among the bright other ones
the
shell and slipped it into the magazine and pumped it into the breech. He would have to make good his boast to his mother, though he knew now that it was a boast made no more out of cockiness than cowardice and the determination born of that cowardice to fix something he could not go back on. He would have to fire the shell today. He had known so all the days as opening day approached. He had known it at breakfast in the lighted kitchen with his mother, remembering the times when she and himself had sat in the lighted kitchen over breakfast on opening day with his father, both in the years when he himself had stayed behind and watched his father drive away into the just-breaking dawn, not even daring yet to yearn for his own time to come, and later when he began to be taken; he had seen it in the dog, Mac's eyes as he put him into the cage, the dog cage his father had had built into the car trunk though it was the family car, the only one they had to go visiting in as well, that he would have to fire the shell today, and he had known it most as he backed out of the drive and waved good-by to his mother, remembering the times when his father had been in the driver's seat and she had stood waving to the two of them.

Now he felt the leash strain against his belt loop and heard the dog whimpering, and out in the field, rising liquid and clear into the liquid air, he heard the first bobwhite and immediately heard a second call in answer from across the field and the first answer back, and then, as though they had tuned up to each other, the two of them fell into a beat, set up a round-song of alternate call and response: bob bob white white, bob bob white white, and then others tuned in until there were five, eight separate and distinctly timed voices, and Joe shivered, not ashamed of his emotion and not trying to tell himself it was the cold, but owning that it was the thrill which nothing else, not even other kinds of hunting, could ever give him and which not even his dread that it was the day when he would have to shoot the shell could take away from him, and knowing for just that one moment that this was the real, the right feeling to have, that it was the coming and trying that mattered, the beginning, not the end of the day, the empty, not the full game pockets, feeling for just that moment in deep accord with his father's spirit, feeling him there with him, beside him, listening, loading up, unleashing the dog.

As soon as the dog was unleashed his whimpering ceased. Joe filled the magazine of the gun with the two ordinary shells and stood rubbing the breech of the gun, watching the dog enter the field. He veered instantly and began systematically quartering the field, his nose high and loose, on no fresh scent yet, but quickening, ranging faster already. They claimed—and of most dogs it was true—that setters forgot their training between seasons, but not Mac, not the dog his father had trained, not even after three seasons, even with no better master than him to keep him in training. He watched him now in the field lower his muzzle slightly as the scent freshened and marveled at the style the dog had, yet remembered paradoxically that first day, his and Mac's, when each of them, the raw, noisy, unpromising-looking pup and the raw, unpromising-looking but anything but noisy boy, had flushed birds, the pup a single but he a whole covey—two of which his father had bagged nonetheless—for which the pup had received a beating and he only a look, not even a scolding look, but a disappointed look worse than any beating he had ever had.

The dog set: broke stride, lowered his muzzle, then planted all four feet as though on the last half-inch of a sudden and unexpected cliff-edge, raised his muzzle and leaned forward into the scent streaming hot and fresh into his nostrils, leaned his whole body so far forward that the raised, rigid, feathered tail seemed necessary as a ballast to keep him from falling on his face. You could tell from his manner that it was the whole big covey.

He called as he set out down the field. “Steady, boy. Toho,” he called, and on the dead misty air his voice did not seem his voice at all but his father's voice, calling as he had heard him call, and he was struck afresh and more powerfully than ever before with the sense of his own unworthiness, his unpreparedness, which seemed now all the more glaringly shown forth by the very nearness he had attained to being prepared; he felt himself a pretender, a callow and clownish usurper.

Now the birds were moving, running in the cover, still banded together, and Mac moved up his stand, so cautiously that he seemed jointless with rigidity. Stock-still, trembling with controlled excitement, his eyes glazed and the hair along his spine bristling—you could have fired an artillery piece an inch above his head and still he would have stood unflinching for an hour, until told to break his stand, and so Joe let him stand, to enjoy the sight, as well as to give his pounding heart a moment's calm, before going in to kick them up. He held the gun half-raised, and the shell in the barrel seemed to have increased its weight tenfold. Alongside the dog he said again, “Steady, boy,” knowing that this time he spoke not to the dog but to himself.

It was as if he had kicked the detonator of a land mine. There was a roaring whir as the birds, twenty of them at least, burst from the grass at his feet like hurtling fragments of shell and gouts of exploding earth, flung up and out and rapidly diminishing in a flat trajectory, sailing earthward almost instantly, as if, though small, deceptively heavy and traveling with incredible velocity.

The gun went automatically to his shoulder, snapped up there more quickly and gracefully than ever before. He had a bird in his eye down the barrel and knew that he had got it there quickly enough to get a second shot easily. But his breath left him as though knocked out by the burst and pounding rush of wings. Fear that he might miss, miss with
the
shell, paralyzed him. He lowered the gun unfired. Turning to the still-rigid dog, he saw—as one in such case is always liable to see on the face of a good bird dog—his look of bewildered disappointment. In that instant it seemed to Joe that the fear of finding just that look was what had unnerved him, and though he was ashamed of the impulse, all his own disappointment and self-contempt centered in hatred for the dog.

As soon as he was given leave, Mac went after the singles. He set on one instantly.

Joe kicked up this single and again the anxiety that he might miss, such that sweat filled his armpits and he felt his mouth go dry, overcame him, and with trembling hands he had to lower the hammer and lower the gun unfired, and was unable to face the dog.

He tried on three more singles. It got worse. He knew then without looking at him that Mac had given him up and would refuse to hunt any more today. He did not even have to put him on the leash. The dog led the way out of the field. Joe found him lying at the rear of the car, and he did not need even to be told, much less dragged, as usual with him on any shooting day but especially on opening day, to get into the cage to go home.

The lemon pie was in the refrigerator, the marshmallow-topped whipped yams in the oven and the biscuits cut and in the pan and on the cabinet waiting to go into the oven the moment the birds were plucked—all as it always was when his father returned in the evening of a quail-shooting day, and as it was later when he and his father, and still later when he came home alone and laid the dead birds in her lap, as he had laid the first dollar he ever earned.

She said, cheerfully, that it was a lucky thing she happened to have some chops in the house. She added that she had learned that long ago. A woman learned, she said, never to trust to a hunter's luck—not even the best hunter. He was both grateful and resentful of those words. He knew she had never bought meat against his father's coming home from a hunt empty-handed.

He rested a day, went to school a week, and practiced, shooting turnips tossed into the air and hitting five out of seven, then he went back. The quail were there, you could hear them, but when he looked at Mac as he was about to loose him and felt himself quaking already, he snapped the leash on again and went back to the car and home.

And so what it turned into, this season for which he finally had the reach and the size, the endurance, in a word the manliness, was the one in which he fired no shell at all.

The Thanksgiving holidays came and he spent every day in the field with the shell in the barrel of the gun—a few bright brass nicks in the dull green now where the ejector had gripped pumping it in and out of the breech—and the magazine full behind it of his own waiting shells and with Mac. He hardly spoke to the dog now, gave him no commands and no encouragements, nor did the dog give tongue or whimper or even frisk, a kind of wordless and even gestureless rapport between them, the two of them hunting now in a grim, cold fury of impotence.

The dog had gone past disappointment, past disgust, past even bewilderment, and seemed now to have divined the reason or else the irresistible lack of all reason behind the coveys kicked up, the boy—almost the man now—raising and cocking his gun, but shaking his head even as he raised it, holding it erect and steady on his mark, then lowering it slowly and soundlessly and releasing him from stand and hunting on. His mother gave up trying to keep him at home, and seemed to have sensed the desperate urgency in him.

And now as the days passed and closing day of the season neared he could feel the whole town watching him, awaiting the climax of his single-minded pursuit, their curiosity first aroused by what they would have been most certain to observe: the lack of interest which they would think he should have begun to show in girls. The boys had noticed, had taken to gathering in a body on his shift at the Greek's confectionery at night, ordering him to make sodas for them and their dates, and ribbing him.