“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale, ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.
“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Henry, tell Mandy to set another plate.”
Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came and touched its cold nose to his hand. “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said, rubbing its ears, whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.
“Pull up a cheer,” Mr. MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed. The dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees. “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ granpappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ’tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ’em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared. “Drive these damn dogs out of hyer till after supper.”
Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr. MacCallum picked up a long sliver of pine from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out with them in a waggin. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’ own hoss.”
“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would know. He stared into the fire for a time, rubbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw its entirety like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which he had been warned against and that any fool might have forseen. Well, damn it, suppose it had: was he to blame?
Had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? Had he given the old fellow a bum heart? and then, coldly: You were afraid to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out to you. You, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts.
Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what, Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all; you killed Johnny.
Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest. “Half after five,” he said. “Ain’t them boys got in yet?”
“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ’em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”
“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and presently feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered.
“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean, dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. His eyes were black and restless; behind them lurked something wild and sad. He shook Bayard’s hand without a word.
But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning. Was it possible that he could have been to town, yet not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him; remembered how he had slumped suddenly as though the very fiber of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and the perverse necessity of his family doom, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last. Mr. MacCallum spoke.
“Did you git to the express office?”
“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”
“Well, hit don’t matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said. Bayard drew a long breath and lit a cigarette, and on a draft of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimney corner.
“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.
“Sure. And we’ll get him, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”
“Snow?”
“Might be. What’s it gain’ to do tonight, pappy?”
“Rain,” the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent won’t lay good till We’n’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted “Henry” again, and Henry entered with a blackened kettle trailing a faint plume of vapor and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it.
There was something domestic, womanish, about Henry, with his squat, slightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the time, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky and for family consumption alone, in a secret fastness known only to his father and the” negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his usquebaugh-bred forbears.
He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel and reached down a cracked cup of sugar and seven tumblers, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and solemn deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Ain’t them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two glasses back on the mantel.
Mandy came to the door presently, filling it with her homely calico expanse. “Y’all kin come on in now,” she said, and as she turned, waddling, Bayard spoke to her and she stopped as the men rose and trooped from the room. The old man was straight as an Indian, and with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door and gave Bayard her hand. “You ain’t been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you ain’t fergot Mandy, neither.”
“Sure I haven’t,” Bayard answered. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into the frosty darkness. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars, He stumbled a little behind the crowding backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building and stood aside until they had entered.
This room was filled with warmth and a thin blue haze pungent with cooking odors, in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily on a long table. At one end of the table was a single chair; the other three sides were paralleled by backless wooden benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split planks, and a wood-box.
Behind the stove two negro men and a half-grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and their eyeballs rolling whitely; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ motionless ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.
“Howdy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed their heads at him with diffident flashes of teeth and polite murmurs.
“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and tumbled them into a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with sundry scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest.
From time to time during the meal a head would appear, staring above the rim of the box with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and the moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up, dawgs! G’wan to sleep now,” Richard would say, rapping on the box with his knuckles. After a while the noises ceased.
The old man took the lone chair, his sons around him and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with their dark, saturnine faces all stamped clearly from the same die. They ate—sausage and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and corn bread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot.
In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-two, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of
