Although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of the others, as though the die were too certain and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have. been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty, was the second son.
They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.
Before they had finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs floated up from the night and seeped through the tight walls into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee cup.
“Where are they, Dick?”
“Right back of de spring-house. Dey got’ ’im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.
“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the top of the cupboard and lit it, and the three of them passed out of the room and into the chill darkness, across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing as frosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed, its rambling low wall broken only by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked.
“’Twon’t freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it, Dick?”
“Naw, suh, Gwine rain.”
“Go on,” Bayard said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Pappy said so,” Buddy replied. “Warmer’n ’twas at sundown.”
“Don’t feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon, motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons; and the long rambling stable, from which placid munchings came and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. Then the lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended.
The clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them and the ghostly shapes of them shifted In the faint glow, and in a sapling just behind the spring-house they found the ’possum curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tall, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.
Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy swung the lantern in and flashed it on to a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled, furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skull-like faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest captive in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazed over a little, losing some of its brittle scintillation.
The others sat in a semicircle before the blazing fire; at the old man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.
“Git ’im?” Mr. MacCallum asked.
“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”
The old man puffed at his pipe. “We’ll give you a shoo ’nough hunt befo’ you leave.”
Rafe said, “How many you got now, Buddy?”
“Ain’t got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.
“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We won’t never eat fo’teen ’possums.”
“Turn ’em loose and run ’em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.
“Buddy ain’t never started yet,” Rafe said.
“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”
“Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”
The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the wood-box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed, waking itself, and raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without words and with very little movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a single thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe out carefully on his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.
“We ’uns gits up at fo’ o’clock, Bayard,” he said. “But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”
“Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork guilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chill air.
“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, racehorse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though,” he added, and in his voice was just a trace of envy and of longing. Never again after twenty-five will sleep in the morning be so golden. His preparations for slumber were simple; he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard, who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy said. “You want one o’ my heavy ’uns?”
“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks: it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.
“Git that ’ere guilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, expelling his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation. He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.
“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two-three years isn’t it?”
“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered, “last time you and him . . .” Then he added quietly “I seen in a paper when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ’twas him. It was a limey paper.”
“You did? Where were you?”
“Up there,” Buddy answered, “where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever git it drained enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”
“Yes.” Bayard’s nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed to him that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush, and he lay beneath it. . . .
He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered, so, that he was breathing in deep, troubled drafts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war.
It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and filled with stumbling references to places wretchedly mispronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiative or background or future, caught timelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.
“How’d you like the army, Buddy?” Bayard asked.
“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment. “They gimme a charm,” he added in a burst of shy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure.
“A charm?” Bayard repeated.
“Uhuh. One of them brass gimcracks on to a colored ribbon. I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ’ere flo’s too dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance tomorrow when pappy’s outen the house.”
“Why? Don’t he know you got it?”
“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee charm. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”
“Yes,” Bayard repeated. Buddy ceased talking and presently he sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly on his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk; whenever you close your eyes, the room starts going round and round, and so you lie rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open, not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking and his breathing had become longer, steady and regular. The shucks shifted with sibilant complaint as Bayard turned slowly on to his side.
Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, enclosing him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained, laboring pants, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for
