“Yes,” Jackson agreed, “ef a feller gits into somethin’ on his own accord, he’d ought to go through with hit cheerful.”
“He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,” Mr. MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he up and headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and the next we knowed, here him and the fox come afloatin’ down river on that ’ere drift lawg, and him singin’ away loud as he could yell.”
“That ’uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’thing that come up.”
“He was a fine boy,” Mr. MacCallum said again.
“Listen.”
Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up on the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself might have found voice, grave and sad, and wild with all regret.
Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve and the wagon was going into town, and although with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.
It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small embers that leaped out on the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily, his tired muscles relaxed in cumulate waves of heat as in a warm bath and his stubborn, wakeful heart glozed over too, for the time being.
Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without even offering that explanation which would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.
Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old.
His mother had been the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped close to his round head was a noticeable contrast to his brothers’ brown eyes and black hair.
But the old man had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as anyone of the other boys’, and despite its youth it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave, though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.
The others were at medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lankness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s—Raphael Semmes he was—and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery restlessness; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his seventy-seven years as though they were a thin coat, “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old man would say, with bluff derogation.
“Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s jack-knifed length with the same identical thought; a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.
Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at seventeen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes: at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger.
In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by Authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he called it.
What it was he did, he could never be brought to say, and the gaud not only tailing to placate his lather’s anger over the tact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects, and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle: and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.
“Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ’possums, and a river bottom full of squir’l and ducks, and a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”
“Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little some thin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.
“You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”
“How ’bout town folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”
“Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped, “livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up again’ the next feller’s back do’, eatin’ outen tin cans.”
“’Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you know it.”
“Buyin’ turkeys,” Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’ ’em. I mind the time when I could take a gun and step out that ’ere do’ and git a gobbler in thutty minutes. And a ven’son ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is sto’ winders full of cocoanuts and Yankee popguns and sich.”
“Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard. “That was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”
The old man snorted. “I be damned ef I ain’t raised the damnedest, smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ’em nothin’, can’t learn ’em nothin’, can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ’em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”
Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid sunrise, and looked after the wagon with its four muffled figures and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever.
The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing at the trees from beyond which the dry rattling of the wagon came unimpeded upon the clear and soundless morning.
“Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall. The hounds surged about them with eager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to their pen and huddled them inside and fastened the door on their astonished protests. From another kennel he unleashed the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to lift their baffled and mellow expostulations.
Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming air. The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor, and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.
“I’ve got to go back, Buddy,” he said. “I’m going home this afternoon.”
“All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”
Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy was saddling Perry, Bayard went into the house, where he found Henry laboriously soling a pair of boots and the old man reading a week-old newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.
“I reckon yo’ folks will be lookin’ fer you,” Mr. MacCallum agreed, removing his spectacles. “We’ll be expectin’ you back next month though, to git that ’ere fox. Ef we don’t git ’im soon, Gen’ral won’t be able to hold up his haid befo’ them puppies.”
“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered, “I will.”
“And try to git yo’ grandpappy to come out with you. He kin lay around hyer and eat his haid off well as he kin
