“Times are different now,” another said. “There was game here then.”
“Yes,” the old man said quietly. “There was game here then.”
“Besides, they shot does then too,” Legate said. “As it is now, we aint got but one doe-hunter in — —”
“And better men hunted it,” Edmonds said. He stood at the end of the rough plank table, eating rapidly and steadily as the others ate. But again the old man looked sharply across at the sullen, handsome, brooding face which appeared now darker and more sullen still in the light of the smoky lantern. “Go on. Say it.”
“I didn’t say that,” the old man said. “There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I’ve known some that even the circumstances couldn’t stop.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say—” Legate said.
“So you’ve lived almost eighty years,” Edmonds said. “And that’s what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?”
There was a silence; for the instant even Legate’s jaw stopped chewing while he gaped at Edmonds. “Well, by God, Roth—” the third speaker said. But it was the old man who spoke, his voice still peaceful and untroubled and merely grave:
“Maybe so,” he said. “But if being what you call alive would have learned me any different, I reckon I’m satisfied, wherever it was I’ve been.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth—” Legate said.
The third speaker was still leaning forward a little over the table, looking at Edmonds. “Meaning that it’s only because folks happen to be watching him that a man behaves at all,” he said. “Is that it?”
“Yes,” Edmonds said. “A man in a blue coat, with a badge on it watching him. Maybe just the badge.”
“I deny that,” the old man said. “I dont — —”
The other two paid no attention to him. Even Legate was listening to them for the moment, his mouth still full of food and still open a little, his knife with another lump of something balanced on the tip of the blade arrested halfway to his mouth. “I’m glad I dont have your opinion of folks,” the third speaker said. “I take it you include yourself.”
“I see,” Edmonds said. “You prefer Uncle Ike’s opinion of circumstances. All right. Who makes the circumstances?”
“Luck,” the third said. “Chance. Happen so. I see what you are getting at. But that’s just what Uncle Ike said: that now and then, maybe most of the time, man is a little better than the net result of his and his neighbours’ doings, when he gets the chance to be.”
This time Legate swallowed first. He was not to be stopped this time. “Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth Edmonds can hunt one doe every day and night for two weeks and was a poor hunter or a unlucky one neither. A man that still have the same doe left to hunt on again next year — —”
“Have some meat,” the man next to him said.
“ — aint no unlucky. What?” Legate said.
“Have some meat.” The other offered the dish.
“I got some,” Legate said.
“Have some more,” the third speaker said. “You and Roth Edmonds both. Have a heap of it. Clapping your jaws together that way with nothing to break the shock.” Someone chortled. Then they all laughed, with relief, the tension broken. But the old man was speaking, even into the laughter, in that peaceful and still untroubled voice:
“I still believe. I see proof everywhere.
I grant that man made a heap of his circumstances, him and his living neighbours between them. He even inherited some of them already made, already almost ruined even. A while ago Henry Wyatt there said how there used to be more game here. There was. So much that we even killed does. I seem to remember Will Legate mentioning that too—” Someone laughed, a single guffaw, stillborn. It ceased and they all listened, gravely, looking down at their plates. Edmonds was drinking his coffee, sullen, brooding, inattentive.
“Some folks still kill does,” Wyatt said. “There wont be just one buck hanging in this bottom to-morrow night without any head to fit it.”
“I didn’t say all men,” the old man said. “I said most men. And not just because there is a man with a badge to watch us. We probably wont even see him unless maybe he will stop here about noon tomorrow and eat dinner with us and check our licences — —”
“We dont kill does because if we did kill does in a few years there wouldn’t even be any bucks left to kill, Uncle Ike,” Wyatt said.
“According to Roth yonder, that’s one thing we wont never have to worry about,” the old man said. “He said on the way here this morning that does and fawns — I believe he said women and children — are two things this world aint ever lacked. But that aint all of it,” he said.
“That’s just the mind’s reason a man has to give himself because the heart dont always have time to bother with thinking up words that fit together. God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man — the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn’t put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn’t quite God himself yet — —”
“When will he be?” Wyatt said.
“I think that every man and woman, at the instant when it dont even matter whether they marry or not, I think that whether they marry then or afterward or dont never, at that instant the two of them together were God.”
“Then there are some Gods in this world I wouldn’t want to touch, and with a damn long stick,” Edmonds said. He set his coffee cup down and looked at Wyatt. “And that includes myself, if that’s what you want to know. I’m going to bed.” He was gone. There was a general movement among the others.
But it ceased and they stood again about the table, not looking at the old man, apparently held there yet by his quiet and peaceful voice as the heads of the swimming horses had been held above the water by his weightless hand. The three negroes — the cook and his helper and old Isham — were sitting quietly in the entrance of the kitchen tent, listening too, the three faces dark and motionless and musing.
“He put them both here: man, and the game he would follow and kill, foreknowing it. I believe He said, ‘So be it.’ I reckon He even foreknew the end. But He said, ‘I will give him his chance. I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay.
The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.’ — Bed time,” he said. His voice and inflexion did not change at all. “Breakfast at four o’clock, Isham. We want meat on the ground by sunup time.”
There was a good fire in the sheet-iron heater; the tent was warm and was beginning to dry out, except for the mud underfoot. Edmonds was already rolled into his blankets, motionless, his face to the wall.
Isham had made up his bed too — the strong, battered iron cot, the stained mattress which was not quite soft enough, the worn, often-washed blankets which as the years passed were less and less warm enough. But the tent was warm; presently, when the kitchen was cleaned up and readied for breakfast, the young negro would come in to lie down before the heater, where he could be roused to put fresh wood into it from time to time.
And then, he knew now he would not sleep tonight anyway; he no longer needed to tell himself that perhaps he would. But it was all right now. The day was ended now and night faced him, but alarmless, empty of fret. Maybe I came for this, he thought: Not to hunt, but for this.
I would come anyway, even if only to go back home tomorrow. Wearing only his bagging woollen underwear, his spectacles folded away in the worn case beneath the pillow where he could reach them readily and his lean body fitted easily into the old worn groove of mattress and blankets, he lay on his back, his hands crossed on his breast and his eyes closed while the others undressed and went to bed and the last of the sporadic talking died into snoring.
Then he opened his eyes and lay peaceful and quiet as a child, looking up at the motionless belly of rain-murmured canvas upon which the glow of the heater was dying slowly away and would fade still further until the young negro, lying on two planks before it, would sit up and stoke it and lie back down again.
The had a house once. That was sixty years ago, when the Big Bottom
