He sat motionless for a moment. “Whew,” he said. And then, “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat motionless beside him, his hand still clutching the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette after that,” Bayard added. He dug one from his pocket, and a match; his hands were shaking. “I thought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as we went over,” he explained, apologetically.
He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with his cigarette poised Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.
4
Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him and in the low December sun their shadow fell long across the ridge and into the valley beyond, from which the high shrill yapping of the dogs came on the frosty, windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high-pitched hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air.
Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound, as though the frost in the air had found voice; above them, against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. “There’ll be ice tonight,” he thought, watching them and thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grass about which water would shrink soon in fixed glassy ripples in the brittle darkness.
Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as wood-smoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the sun that spread like a crimson egg broken on the ultimate hills. That meant weather; he snuffed the still, tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.
The pony snorted and tossed his head experimentally and found the reins slack and lowered his nose and snorted again into the dead leaves and delicate sere needles of pine beneath his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, Jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him smartly out of it and into his steady fox trot again.
He had not gone far when the dogs broke again into clamorous uproar to his left and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the fading scar of the road, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of it.
Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time, “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away; still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the horseman. Then Bayard shouted.
The animal glanced at him; the level sun swam redly and fleeting in its eyes; then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The din of them swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack boiled into the road in a chaos of spotted hides and flapping tongues and ears.
None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they surged still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and gazed after them, preceded by yapping in a still higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies swarmed out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes and so away.
He rode on. On either hand was a ridge: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, on the other the final rays of the sun lying redly. The air crackled and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley.
But half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among intermittent trees he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark, and he shook Perry up a little. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road, and he lifted Perry into a canter.
Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sage-grown, its plow scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying gold and he pulled Perry short upstanding; there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there on its haunches like a dog, watching the trees across the glade, and Bayard sent Perry forward again.
The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard halted Perry in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods; yet the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with covert stolen glances, paying the dogs no heed. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly into the glade. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox divided its attention between them and the man.
At last the largest puppy, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they stopped their noise and trotted across the glade and squatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling.
Then with one accord they turned about and faced the darkening woods, from which, and nearer and nearer, came that spent, frantic yapping in a higher key. The largest dog barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies appeared and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up.
Then the fox rose and cast another quick, furtive glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted up the road and vanished among the trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said, gazing after them. “Come up, Perry.”
At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees ahead, and he emerged from the woods and in the rambling wall of the house a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight.
Dogs had already set up a resonant, bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the clear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he halted Perry in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the house. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an ax in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:
“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”
“That’s Ellen,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the ax, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”
“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”
“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’ pony.”
“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll put Perry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him.
“Henry,” Buddy shouted at the house, “Henry.” A door opened on jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it. “Here’s Bayard,” he said. “Go on in and warm,” he added, leading Perry away. Dogs surrounded Bayard; he picked up the wood and the ax and went on toward the house in a ghostly, spotted surge at dogs, and the figure stood in the lighted doorway while he mounted the veranda and leaned the ax against the wall.
“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp, again the band firm and kind; flabbier though than Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house.
The walls of the room were of chinked logs. On them hung two or three out-dated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph in colors. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace.
In it now four-foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the shaggy silver disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat. “Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.
The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he had walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married.
His wife’s dot was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he sat now before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ’66, and
