Meanwhile the greater thing breathed deeply and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it with strained attention from the time he had seen the first tracer-smoke until, from his steep bank, he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from the nose of John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived it again as you might run over a printed, oft-read tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his own body or head that might have slain him at the same instant.
That would account for it, would explain so much; that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved for ever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned on to his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision.
The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vise of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering, and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a leaden cast on them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and panting breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.
Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice on his ribs, and he knew where the door was and he groped his way to it on curling toes. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice, and fumbling at it he touched something else beside it, something chill and tubular and upright, and his hand slid down it and then he stood for a moment in the icy pitch darkness with the shotgun in his hands, and as he stood so, his numb fingers fumbling at the breech, he remembered the box of shells on the wooden box on which the lamp sat.
A moment longer he stood so, his head bent a little and the gun in his numb hands; then he leaned it again in the corner and lifted the wooden bar from its slots carefully and without noise. The door sagged from the hinges, and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it and lifted it back and stood in the door.
In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay on the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like sad ghosts in the chill corpse-light—the wood pile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door where he had stumbled, supperward.
The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation; yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, on the plank roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.
In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks beneath him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily on the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves.
His blood ran again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for . . . not vindication so much as comprehension; a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.
The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling, in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all . . . Bible . . . some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Sleep. It comes to all.
At last, through the walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable; yet he knew it was of human origin, made by people whose names and faces he knew, waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose; people to whom he was . . . and he was comforted. The sounds continued; unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice which, with a slight effort of concentration, he knew he could name; and best of all, knew that now he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire, where light was, and warmth.
And he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise and go to them the next moment, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was untroubled now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.
He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dull; his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was a definite, purposeful sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed to the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his boots in his hand, he crossed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.
“We let you sleep,” Rafe said; then he said, “Good Lord, boy, you look like a ha’nt. Didn’t you sleep last night?”
“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth. In the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots, Bayard said:
“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”
“New breed I’m tryin’,” Jackson answered. Rafe returned with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.
“Them’s Ellen’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ’em after you eat. Here, drink this. You look all wore out. Buddy must ’a’ kept you awake talkin’,” he added with dry irony.
Bayard drank the whisky and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” Rafe said.
“Ellen?” Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night. Y’all raise her?”
“Yes. She growed up with last year’s batch of puppies. Buddy caught her. And now Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom and a fox’s smartness and speed.”
Bayard approached the corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity. “I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw anything that looked like them.”
“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered.
Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ’em, but they hain’t no more’n weaned, yit. You wait and see.”
“Don’t know what you’ll do with ’em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”
“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’ ’bout a dawg ’twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.
“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe insisted. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”
He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the
