Home from the Hill (28 page)

He went back up to the cemetery only because he felt he had to know more about the discovery he had made. But he experienced a strange delicacy about asking just anyone. He found his mother, violating, as she always did, the polite form and custom of the day by cleaning her father's grave herself. She wore the customary sunbonnet tied with a ribbon under her chin and the long gray dress to protect her against the brush, with tight sleeves down to the wrists, which made her look like a woman of fifty years before, for unlike some of the younger women, she did not take to slacks. She straightened and leaned on her hoe. He told her he had just found the place, that he had never known it was there, that it contained many graves.

She sighed. Yes, there had always been enough of them, God knew, she said. “That is what is known as the Reprobates' Field,” she said. “It's where people who are not fit to be buried with Christians are put. Though plenty of those up here in the high ground,” she said, taking a vicious whack with her hoe at a bull-nettle flourishing on her father's grave, “belong by rights down there.”

He turned and sat down behind her on the corner post of the Griffin plot. He thought of that still unoccupied part of the Reprobates' Field, laid out in advance, in expectation that the world was going to go on producing its percentage of bad cases. He looked up at the things close around him and in his thoughts compared the size of that poor crowded field with the size of the cemetery here, where those, more numerous, who were allowed to have died decent, were interred, and he too wondered whether the comparative sizes really fitted the truth of things as they were.

He had stumbled in the vale wherein the town hid from its sight the memory of those who had disgraced it. Forgotten in death because it would have been better if they had never lived, they were the outcasts, those whom relatives, if they had any, were ashamed to own.

After a while he roused himself and got up, and Mrs. Hannah saw him take a hoe and a rake from one of the many stacks. He set off. She returned to her work.

By four p.m. the cemetery was clean, the last fires were smouldering. Everyone assembled near the gates for dinner-on-the-ground. Mrs. Hannah saw her husband, but could not find Theron.

“I know where he is,” said a little boy who overheard her asking Wade about him. It was one of the children whose game of tag had driven Theron to the back edge of the cemetery. “I'll run get him,” he said.

In five minutes the child was back, alone.

“Couldn't you find him?” asked Mrs. Hannah.

“Yessum, I found him. But he wouldn't come when I called.”

“Where was he?”

“He's working. I called but he wouldn't come.”

“Working? But everything is finished.”

“Nome, it ain't. Not where he's working. I'll show you.” He reached out his hand to her, and she took it.

Recalling Theron's questions about the spot, she understood at once where she was being led. The little boy drew her along the paths, through the hovering smoke, occasionally smiling over his shoulder at her. Again he said, “I called, but he wouldn't come.” They were nearing the place, and Mrs. Hannah began to feel something like dread.

“See?” said the little boy, pointing. “That's him, ain't it?”

She shaded her eyes against the sun. Down in the valley, his back to her, Theron was bent over, hoeing. Before him lay a patch of weeds, into which he was furiously chopping. Behind him lay his afternoon's work. Spaced close in the cleared ground were the tiny markers with their blue stems, all erect. Here and there among them a smouldering fire sent up a thin column of smoke.

“I'll call him for you,” said Mrs. Hannah's small guide, cupping his hands to his mouth. “I guess he'll come when he sees his mama!”

“No,” she said. “Don't.”

The boy took his hands from his mouth and looked at her enquiringly. His look hardened into a stare, his stare then followed hers.

What did it mean? Even asking herself that question gave her a chill of fright. It showed her that she knew it did mean something, and something more than mere kindness of heart, to which she tried, unsuccessfully, for a moment to attribute it. She knew him, he was hers, like her, knew the symbolic, somewhat theatrical gestures of which he was capable, and knew in her heart that this one somehow symbolized a rejection of her.

“He ain't never gonna finish all that in time to get any supper,” the little boy opined.

The lady said nothing, just kept staring. After a while the boy said, “And I ain't gonna get any supper either, looks like.”

Then she noticed him. “Oh,” she said. “We'll go back.” And now it was she who took his hand.

“Ain't you gonna call him?” said the boy.

“No,” she said. “I guess he wants to finish what he's doing.”

38

“Hannah,” said the Captain at breakfast a few days later, “I don't know whether you've noticed, but something seems to be bothering Theron lately.”

She looked up quickly from her plate, and as quickly looked down again. “Yes, I've noticed,” she said, in a way that reminded him of having noticed that something was bothering her lately too. On that day of the barbecue he had been pleased at the signs of a thaw in their relations. But the freeze had set in again. She had returned to her old, icy manner.

One little mark of that hostile manner was her refusal to volunteer anything in conversation. It vexed him always to have to draw information from her by questions, piecemeal. “Have you any idea what it is?” he asked.

“Yes. I have an idea,” she said.

“May I ask what your idea is?” he said.

“He is in love,” she said.

With his mouth full of hot coffee, he pondered that. If any boy could make so much of a case of calf-love, it was Theron, all right, he thought. But he remembered his recent encounter with him. Even for Theron, lovesickness seemed too mild an infection to have brought on that announcement that he was never going hunting again. He set down his cup and shook his head, just as his wife, to his surprise, did volunteer:

“And that's not all.”

“I wouldn't have thought so,” he said.

She tried to relish the unconscious irony in his words. But she could no longer despise him for his ignorance of the cause of Theron's troubles. She had exulted at the thought of telling him. “What!” she could hear him cry. “A son of mine!” and she could hear herself then thinking,
Exactly!
A son of yours!
But the pleasure she had promised herself failed to come. Now that she could no longer pride herself on keeping his guilty secret from his son, she seemed to have relinquished her moral superiority over him.

“And what is the rest?” the Captain, weary of this game, asked impatiently.

It was his impatience that provoked her. “The rest is,” she said, “that the girl's father won't let him come near her. He put him out of his house.”

She saw his neck go stiff, his jaw harden, his eyes narrow.
Yes! A son of yours. Exactly
! she cried in her mind. But there was no pleasure in it. She was afraid of him.

“Who?” he said.

“The girl,” she said, “is the little Halstead girl—Libby.”

He said nothing for fully a minute. Then, “What has Albert Halstead got against Theron?” he said.

“What could anyone have against Theron?” she said, and she saw that the emphasis she had given to the name was lost on him.

He finished his breakfast in silence, and when he was finished rose silently from the table. She sat still and listened. She heard his determined tread, heard the back door slam, heard, an instant later, the car leap to a start, growl down the drive, hit the street, the bois-d'arc bricks, with a whop like four flat tires going ninety, roar out of hearing. She exulted then to think of the shock his dudgeon was in for. If only Mr. Halstead would not lack the nerve to tell him! And she exulted to think of the fate in store for Mr. Halstead if he did speak his mind. Not that Wade would strike him; he was too old—and too old-womanish. But he would do something to make Mr. Halstead regret turning his son—her son—out of his house. He would revenge Theron, and Mr. Halstead would revenge her!

Mrs. Hannah's predictions were just half right. She might have dictated Albert Halstead's words, spoken with all the trembling Dutch courage of a pusillanimous man:

“I don't want any son of yours around my daughter.”

But there the accuracy of Mrs. Hannah's predictions ended. What she had not been able to foresee, what she had not given him credit for, was that the Captain could be humbled with shame for having hurt his son's chances in anything.

In this Mrs. Hannah was not alone. The town, too, was puzzled by the show it witnessed. We did not hear the words that passed between them, but you did not need to hear the words to know that they were quarrelling, nor to tell who had won. It was not like the Captain, we said. He must have been very much in the wrong to make him take a public dressing-down from any man, and we said that a mild little fellow like Albert Halstead must have felt himself powerfully in the right to dare to give him one. We spoke more of it, uncertain whether to take it as a symptom or the cause, when in the weeks following, the Captain appeared more and more a subdued, a worried, a changed man.

He had been himself when he rammed his car into the curb, slammed the door, sprang up on the sidewalk and said, “Just a minute. I'd like a word with you, Albert.”

Mr. Halstead did not need to be told what he wanted, surprised though he was. It was now some months since he had turned the Hunnicutt boy out of his house, and he had expected the Captain hourly during the days immediately following. He had rehearsed his speech. “Yes, I turned your boy out of my house. I'll tell you why. I'm not afraid of you. I turned him out because I don't want any son of yours around my daughter. Is that plain enough for you?” But a week passed quietly and another week, and Mr. Halstead began to suspect he would not be receiving any such call. This was his reasoning: a kind of father-son professional pride would keep the boy from confessing to the Captain that he had been ignominiously put to rout by the father of a girl whom he had been planning to add to his list. By nature a man who would have liked to think well of everyone, Mr. Halstead always had to over-do it whenever he thought badly of anyone, and to justify himself in the radical step he had taken, he had come now to regard Theron Hunnicutt as a menace to the town's young womanhood second only to his legendary father.

“I hear,” said the Captain, drawing Mr. Halsted to the curb, further away from the knot of men collected on the corner, “that you have been inhospitable to my son Theron.”

“I turned him out of my house. Yes,” said Mr. Halstead. “I'll tell you why. I'm not—”

“Yes. I'd like to hear why you did it,” said the Captain.

“I'll tell you,” said Mr. Halstead. “I'm not afraid of you. I'd do it again. I don't want any son of yours around my daughter. There. Is that plain enough for you?” Fear had choked his throat with phlegm: his voice was thin and gravelly. He didn't think anybody would speak up to him like that, thought Mr. Halstead. He didn't think I would, anyhow, he thought. His opponent said nothing, and Mr. Halstead could see no point in prolonging the discussion. He took a step away.

The Captain reached out a hand and stayed him. “You had never heard anything against the boy himself? Is that right?” he said.

Mr. Halstead was not touched by that question. He missed the plea, missed the paternity in it. Mr. Halstead had not much paternal feeling himself. What he was touched by was a prick from his conscience. He had been hasty, perhaps unfair to that boy. This irritated him, and his irritation, plus the unexpected submissiveness in the other man's attitude, emboldened him. “I've told you!” he said. “I don't want any son of yours around my daughter.” And with that, squaring his shoulders and swinging his arms, yet expecting at any moment to feel himself clasped by the nape of his neck, Mr. Halstead strode away.

The Captain stood like a man dazed. He did not turn to watch Mr. Halstead's departure. He did not do anything. At last he brought his hand up and stroked his chin. After a while he became conscious of his beard.

The men on the corner watched all this and exchanged interested looks. They watched him, hand still on his jaw, fail to respond to two good-mornings. He entered the barber shop. They gave him a minute, then followed.

The Captain lay stretched out in the chair, his face covered with steaming towels. Dub Haskell, the barber, finished stropping his razor, then whipped up a lather in a mug. He removed the towels and lathered the Captain's face. This done, he set the mug on the shelf and picked up the razor and flourished it in the air.

He bent over, grasped the Captain's earlobe and poised his razor for the first long stroke down the cheek, as he had done every morning for twenty-five years. But this morning the razor did not swoop down. Dub paused, arrested by something in his best customer's gaze, then he twisted his neck to glance up at the ceiling. We all looked up, and all saw nothing more there than Dub saw.

He returned to his job. The long strokes of the razor scraped with a sound like a carpenter's plane.

When the job was finished, Dub Haskell grasped the chair lever, saying, “Yessir! There we are,” and tilted the Captain upright.

But these words, the formula of a quarter century, failed of their effect today. The Captain said nothing, neither did he climb down. Grasping the armpads of the chair, he sat staring at himself in the mirror. He did not even hear when, to break the embarrassing long silence, Dub Haskell said loudly, “Next!”

39

So severe was Mrs. Hannah's insomnia that over the years she had practically reversed night and day. Always tired by an early hour, and ever hopeful, she would switch off her lamp and stretch out in the bed, and at once, as if switching off the lamp had tripped on a current inside her, the blood would begin to pulse steadily through all the mazes of her brain. When, exhausted, she finally dropped off, it was like going into a coma. When she came out of it, sometimes it was noon.