We drove until almost noon. We were in the hills now, out of the rich flat land, among the pine and bracken, the poor soil, the little tilted and barren patches of gaunt com and cotton which somehow endured, as the people they clothed and fed somehow endured; the roads we followed less than lanes, winding and narrow, rutted and dust choked, the car in second gear half the time. Then we saw the mailbox, the crude lettering: G. A. FENTRY; beyond it, the two-room log house with an open hall, and even I, a boy of twelve, could see that no woman’s hand had touched it in a lot of years. We entered the gate.
Then a voice said, ‘Stop! Stop where you are!’ And we hadn’t even seen him — an old man, barefoot, with a fierce white bristle of mustache, in patched denim faded almost to the color of skim milk, smaller, thinner even than the son, standing at the edge of the worn gallery, holding a shotgun across his middle and shaking with fury or perhaps with the palsy of age.
‘Mr. Fentry—’ Uncle Gavin said.
‘You’ve badgered and harried him enough!’ the old man said. It was fury; the voice seemed to rise suddenly with a fiercer, an uncontrollable blaze of it: ‘Get out of here! Get off my land! Go!’
‘Come,’ Uncle Gavin said quietly. And still his eyes were only bright, eager, intent and grave. We did not drive fast now. The next mailbox was within the mile, and this time the house was even painted, with beds of petunias beside the steps, and the land about it was better, and this time the man rose from the gallery and came down to the gate.
‘Howdy, Mr. Stevens,’ he said. ‘So Jackson Fentry hung your jury for you.’
‘Howdy, Mr. Pruitt,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘It looks like he did. Tell me.’
And Pruitt told him, even though at that time Uncle Gavin would forget now and then and his language would slip back to Harvard and even to Heidelberg. It was as if people looked at his face and knew that what he asked was not just for his own curiosity or his own selfish using.
‘Only ma knows more about it than I do,’ Pruitt said. ‘Come up to the gallery.’
We followed him to the gallery, where a plump, white-haired old lady in a clean gingham sunbonnet and dress and a clean white apron sat in a low rocking chair, shelling field peas into a wooden bowl. ‘This is Lawyer Stevens,’ Pruitt said. ‘Captain Stevens’ son, from town. He wants to know about Jackson Fentry.’
So we sat, too, while they told it, the son and the mother talking in rotation.
That place of theirs,’ Pruitt said. ‘You seen some of it from the road. And what you didn’t see don’t look no better. But his pa and his grandpa worked it, made a living for themselves and raised families and paid their taxes and owed no man. I don’t know how they done it, but they did. And Jackson was helping from the time he got big enough to reach up to the plow handles. He never got much bigger than that neither. None of them ever did. I reckon that was why. And Jackson worked it, too, in his time, until he was about twenty-five and already looking forty, asking no odds of nobody, not married and not nothing, him and his pa living alone and doing their own washing and cooking, because how can a man afford to marry when him and his pa have just one pair of shoes between them. If it had been worth while getting a wife a-tall, since that place had already killed his ma and his grandma both before they were forty years old. Until one night—’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘When your pa and me married, we didn’t even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land—’
‘All right,’ Pruitt said. ‘Until one night he come to me and said how he had got him a sawmilling job down at Frenchman’s Bend.’
‘Frenchman’s Bend?’ Uncle Gavin said, and now his eyes were much brighter and quicker than just intent. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘A day-wage job,’ Pruitt said. ‘Not to get rich; just to earn a little extra money maybe, risking a year or two to earn a little extra money, against the life his grandpa led until he died between the plow handles one day, and that his pa would lead until he died in a com furrow, and then it would be his turn, and not even no son to come and pick him up out of the dirt. And that he had traded with a nigger to help his pa work their place while he was gone, and would I kind of go up there now and then and see that his pa was all right.’
‘Which you did,’ Mrs. Pruitt said.
‘I went close enough,’ Pruitt said. ‘I would get close enough to the field to hear him cussing at the nigger for not moving fast enough and to watch the nigger trying to keep up with him, and to think what a good thing it was Jackson hadn’t got two niggers to work the place while he was gone, because if that old man — and he was close to sixty then — had had to spend one full day sitting in a chair in the shade with nothing in his hands to chop or hoe with, he would have died before sundown. So Jackson left. He walked. They didn’t have but one mule. They ain’t never had but one mule. But it ain’t but about thirty miles. He was gone about two and a half years. Then one day—’
‘He come home that first Christmas,’ Mrs. Pruitt said.
‘That’s right,’ Pruitt said. ‘He walked them thirty miles home and spent Christmas Day, and walked them other thirty miles back to the sawmill.’
‘Whose sawmill?’ Uncle Gavin said.
‘Quick’s,’ Pruitt said. ‘Old Man Ben Quick’s. It was the second Christmas he never come home. Then, about the beginning of March, about when the river bottom at Frenchman’s Bend would be starting to dry out to where you could skid logs through it and you would have thought he would be settled down good to his third year of sawmilling, he come home to stay. He didn’t walk this time. He come in a hired buggy. Because he had the goat and the baby.’
‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.
‘We never knew how he got home,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘Because he had been home over a week before we even found out he had the baby.’
‘Wait,’ Uncle Gavin said.
They waited, looking at him, Pruitt sitting on the gallery railing and Mrs. Pruitt’s fingers still shelling the peas out of the long brittle hulls, looking at Uncle Gavin. His eyes were not exultant now any more than they had been baffled or even very speculative before; they had just got brighter, as if whatever it was behind them had flared up, steady and fiercer, yet still quiet, as if it were going faster than the telling was going.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
‘And when I finally heard about it and went up there,’ Mrs. Pruitt said, ‘that baby wasn’t two weeks old. And how he had kept it alive, and just on goat’s milk—’
‘I don’t know if you know it,’ Pruitt said. ‘A goat ain’t like a cow. You milk a goat every two hours or so. That means all night too.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘He didn’t even have diaper cloths. He had some split floursacks the midwife had showed him how to put on. So I made some cloths and I would go up there; he had kept the nigger on to help his pa in the field and he was doing the cooking and washing and nursing that baby, milking the goat to feed it; and I would say, “Let me take it. At least until he can he weaned. You come stay at my house, too, if you want,” and him just looking at me — little, thin, already wore-out something that never in his whole life had ever set down to a table and et all he could hold — saying, “I thank you, ma’am. I can make out.”’
‘Which was correct,’ Pruitt said. ‘I don’t know how he was at sawmilling, and he never had no farm to find out what kind of a farmer he was. But he raised that boy.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs. Pruitt said. ‘And I kept on after him: “We hadn’t even heard you was married,” I said. “Yessum,” he said. “We was married last year. When the baby come, she died.”
“Who was she?” I said. “Was she a Frenchman Bend girl?”
“No’m,” he said. “She come from downstate.”
“What was her name?” I said. “Miss Smith,” he said.’
‘He hadn’t even had enough time off from hard work to learn how to lie either,’ Pruitt said. ‘But he raised that boy. After their crops were in in the fall, he let the nigger go, and next spring him and the
