Stories of Erskine Caldwell (20 page)

Plunkety plunk . . . plunkety plunk
. . .
plunkety plink!

At five o’clock Signe went into the hotel to start supper. Mal laid his banjo on the seat and he and the dog got out and pushed the automobile up the street to the shed beside his shack. The car would not run. One winter while Mal was up in the woods somebody broke into the shed and took the engine out. When Mal came back in the spring, he got into the habit of pushing his automobile to the hotel where he played his banjo for Signe.

Mal pushed his automobile up the street to the shed. His boss was there waiting to see him. Mal did not like him at all.

“Hello there, Mal,” Scott, the boss, said. “I got some good news for you.”

“I don’t want to hear your news.”

Mal knew that when Scott came to the shack he wanted to get some more work out of him. Nobody in the woods liked Scott.

“Get your stuff together, Mal. We’re pushing up into the woods tomorrow morning at four o’clock.”

“To hell with you and the woods and all your damn spools,” Mal shouted, slamming shut the shed door. The only way to make Mal talk was to get him angry. But it was dangerous to make him mad. He had run half a dozen boss woodsmen out of the country. They went to Canada before he got a chance to hurt them.

Scott went down the road without looking back once. Scott was a brave boss woodsman.

Mal went into his shack and slammed shut the door behind him. The dog curled up under the table waiting for supper.

Everybody in the woods had heard about Mal Anderson. He was the best banjo player between Rangeley and Caribou, for one thing. And he was one of the best woodsmen ever to lay a tree down in the woods. He could stick a stake in the ground where he wanted the tree to fall and make the tree drive the stake into the earth. He took his two axes and went to work. When one ax became too hot he laid it aside and took up the other one. Give any two men the same start on a tree with a saw, axes, or anything they wanted, and Mal would have his tree on the ground before the other one was ready to fall. That was one reason why Mal was paid for eight days’ work a week while the other men were getting paid for six.

It was summertime now and Mal did not want to go into the woods until winter. In summer he liked to stay in town and play his banjo in front of the Penobscot Hotel. The spool mill was running short of squares, however, and Mal had to help get the logs out of the woods. It was a hell of a time of year to make a man work.

Mal went up the river with the crew the next morning and went to work the following day felling trees for squares. He left his dog and banjo at home.

The crew worked in the woods three weeks and then the men began to grumble. When they left town, Scott had said they would be back by the end of two weeks. At the end of the third week Mal got mad. Scott was going to keep them there another month. And long before the end of the fourth week Scott had to watch himself pretty closely. He had to watch himself to keep from getting hurt. For instance, a tree might fall on him.

“Let’s sink the son of a bitch in the river,” one of the woodsmen suggested.

“Tie him to a stump and let the bobcats have him,” another said. “You couldn’t drown the yellow-backed bastard; he was born like a bullfrog.”

“Mal’ll catch him under a tree some of these days,” Sanderson, who was the head teamster, said. “Let Mal have him.”

Mal sat back on his haunches and said nothing.

Scott had enough sense to go into his shack every night after supper and not show himself until daylight. He could have been finished in five minutes in the dark, and he knew it.

But at the end of six weeks Scott was in as good condition as he had ever been. He watched himself pretty closely in the woods and he did not show himself after dark.

In the meantime two of the men got it into their heads that they were going out of the woods, Scott or no Scott. They said nothing about it and got ready to slip out alone. Scott was in his shack washing up for dinner when they ran down to the river and pushed off in a canoe.

Scott missed them a few minutes later when everybody sat down at the table to eat. Calling Mal and another man, they ran down to the river. The two men who had set their heads on going out of the woods were half a mile downsteam paddling like mad. They were standing up in the canoe on the lookout for submerged logs and rocks. Their arms and paddles waved like a windmill in a cyclone.

“Get a canoe, Mal, and pick out a good man to help you and bring those God-damn Canucks back to me,” Scott ordered, swearing and stamping around on the riverbank.

Mal motioned to one of the men nearest him and they shoved off without a word. Mal was the biggest and strongest man in camp. The other man was to help with the canoe.

The river lay in a straight course downstream for two miles or more. It was used for running logs to the spool mill in the spring and summer. In winter it was frozen over to a depth of three or four feet and the logging teams drove over it going and coming to the woods. Scott sent a man to camp for his field glasses.

Mal and the other woodsman struck out down the river after the two runaway men. In both canoes the men worked frantically with their oars. Mal’s canoe shot through the water at a terrific rate of speed. There was no doubt that he would overtake the other canoe within the next mile. He and the man in the stern squatted on their knees so they would be nearer the water. Their canoe shot down the river, leaving a foaming white wake spreading out to the shores behind.

The man came running back from camp with the field glasses for Scott. “I’ll break those God-damn Canucks of wanting to run away from the job,” Scott shouted, snatching the glasses from the man’s hand.

The two canoes looked only a dozen lengths apart now. The leading canoe was about a mile and a quarter downstream. Mal’s canoe closed up on it with every powerful stroke of his blade. Scott thrust the glasses to his eyes and held them there. The woodsmen crowded down to the edge of the water straining their eyes to see Mal overtake the men. It would be a sight worth seeing. What he would probably do would be to hold their heads under the water until they were nearly drowned before hauling them into his canoe and bringing them back to Scott. Scott had already planned enough work to take all the fight out of them.

Mal’s canoe closed up on the one that had had the first start. The men in the canoe were still paddling with all their might, but Mal was stroking faster and faster.

The next instant the two canoes were prow-and-prow, only an oar’s length apart. And then, before anybody could see what had happened, Mal had passed them and the first canoe was a whole length behind.

“The God-damn son of a bloody —” Scott swore, smashing the field glasses against the rocks. He was so mad he was almost speechless, Mal had double-crossed him. He shouted at the men and kicked savagely at the broken field glasses on the shore. “The God-damn son of a bloody —” he shouted from the depths of his powerful lungs.

Both canoes were completely out of sight now. One canoe was actually half a mile ahead of the other.

Scott ordered the men back to the woods. After they had gone he walked slowly up the hillside to the camp. Mal Anderson had put one over on him.

Mal got home early the next afternoon and opened the door of his shack. His dog was sleeping under the shack and woke up when he sniffed Mal’s scent inside. Mal made a fire and cooked something for the dog and himself to eat.

After they had finished eating Mal got his banjo and pushed his automobile out of the shed and down the street as far as the Penobscot Hotel. Signe was sitting on the front porch rocking in her chair. When she saw Mal coming down the street with his automobile, she leaned back in her chair and rocked faster and faster.

Mal pushed the car down the street and stopped it in front of Signe’s hotel. He opened the door and he and the dog got into the back seat and sat down. Mal slammed shut the door and picked up his banjo. Then he began playing a tune for Signe.

The dog curled up and went to sleep. Mal strummed away on the banjo.

Plunkety plunk
. . .
plunkety plunk . . . plunkety plink!

Signe rocked back and forth, smiling out into the street at Mal sitting in his car and glad he was back in town again.

Mal settled down and propped his feet on the back of the driver’s seat. Signe brought a bone for the dog and Mal opened the door. The dog jumped out after the bone and hopped in again and began licking it. Mal slammed shut the automobile door and took up his banjo again.

Plunkety plunk . . . plunkety plunk . . . plunkety plink!

The tune floated to the porch of the Penobscot Hotel and up the street and down it.

(First published in
Hound and Horn
)

J
ULE
R
OBINSON WAS
lying in bed snoring when his foxhounds struck a live trail a mile away and their baying woke him up with a start. He jumped to the floor, jerked on his shoes, and ran out into the front yard. It was about an hour before dawn.

Holding his hat to the side of his head like a swollen hand, he listened to the trailing on the ridge above the house. With his hat to deflect the sound into his ear, he could hear the dogs treading in the dry underbrush as plainly as his own breathing. It had taken him only a few seconds to determine that the hounds were not cold-trailing, and he put his hat back on his head and stooped over to lace his shoes.

“Papa,” a frightened voice said, “please don’t go off again now — wait till daybreak, anyway.”

Jule turned around and saw the dim outline of his two girls. They were huddled together in the window of their bedroom. Jessie and Clara were old enough to take care of themselves, he thought, but that did not stop them from getting in his way when he wanted to go fox hunting.

“Go on back to bed and sleep, Jessie — you and Clara,” he said gruffly. “Those hounds are just up on the ridge. They can’t take me much out of hollering distance before sunup.”

“We’re scared, Papa,” Clara said.

“Scared of what?” Jule asked impatiently. “There ain’t a thing for two big girls like you and Jessie to be scared of. What’s there to be scared of in this big country, anyway?”

The hounds stopped trailing for a moment, and Jule straightened up to listen in the silence. All at once they began again, and he bent down to finish tying his shoes.

Off in the distance he could hear several other packs of trailing hounds, and by looking closely at the horizon he could see the twinkle of campfires where bands of fox hunters had stopped to warm their hands and feet.

“Are you going, anyway, Papa?” Clara asked.

“I’m going, anyway,” he answered.

The two girls ran back to bed and pulled the covers over their heads. There was no way to argue with Jule Robinson when he had set his head on following his foxhounds.

The craze must have started anew sometime during the holidays, because by the end of the first week in January it looked and sounded as if everybody in Georgia were trading foxhounds by day and bellowing “Whoo-way-oh!” by night. From the time the sun went down until the next morning when it came up, the woods, fields, pastures, and swamps were crawling with beggar-liced men and yelping hound-dogs. Nobody would have thought of riding horseback after the hounds in a country where there was a barbwire fence every few hundred yards.

Automobiles roared and rattled over the rough country roads all night long. The fox hunters had to travel fast in order to keep up with the pack.

It was not safe for any living thing with four legs to be out after sundown, because the hounds had the hunting fever too, and packs of those rangy half-starved dogs were running down and devouring calves, hogs, and even yellow-furred bobcats. It had got so during the past two weeks that the chickens knew enough to take to their roosts an hour ahead of time, because those packs of gaunt hunt-hungry hounds could not wait for sunset any more.

Jule finished lacing his shoes and went around the house. The path to the ridge began in the back yard and weaved up the hillside like a cow-path through a thicket. Jule passed the well and stopped to feel in his pockets to see if he had enough smoking tobacco to last him until he got back.

While he was standing there he heard behind him a sound like water gurgling through the neck of a demijohn. Jule listened again. The sound came even more plainly while he listened. There was no creek anywhere within hearing distance, and the nearest water was in the well. He went to the edge and listened again. The well did not have a stand or a windlass; it was merely a twenty-foot hole in the ground with boards laid over the top to keep pigs and chickens from falling into it.

“O Lord, help me now!” a voice said.

Jule got down on his hands and knees and looked at the well cover in the darkness. He felt of the boards with his hands. Three of them had been moved, and there was a black oblong hole that was large enough to drop a calf through.

“Who’s that?” Jule said, stretching out his neck and cocking his ear.

“O Lord, help me now,” the voice said again, weaker than before.

The gurgling sound began again, and Jule knew then that it was the water in the well.

“Who’s down there muddying up my well?” Jule said.

There was no sound then. Even the gurgling stopped.

Jule felt on the ground for a pebble and dropped it into the well. He counted until he could hear the
kerplunk
when it struck the water.

“Doggone your hide, whoever you are down there!” Jule said. “Who’s down there?”

Nobody answered.

Jule felt in the dark for the water bucket, but he could not find it. Instead, his fingers found a larger pebble, a stone almost as big around as his fist, and he dropped it into the well.

The big rock struck something else before it finally went into the water.

“O Lord, I’m going down and can’t help myself,” the voice down there said. “O Lord, a big hand is trying to shove me under.”

The hounds trailing on the ridge swung around to the east and started back again. The fox they were after was trying to back-trail them, but Jule’s hounds were hard to fool. They had got to be almost as smart as a fox.