The Big Sky (52 page)

"What went with his tail?"

"I got so bull-mad at him I bobbed it, thinkin' it would l'arn him some sense. Look at him, will you? Never seen him eye a man that way before, like you were God Almighty." The man raised the stick. "Go back, Blue, you ornery potlicker! Back!"

The dog stood up, his flews hanging loose and his great eyes swimming on Boone. "Back, damn you!" The club beat his hindquarters down. It knocked him half over. It made a hollow thump on the ribs. Boone saw the ribs working for breath.

"That's enough!"

"How's that?" The man stopped with the club upheld.

"You ain't fitten to own a dog."

"This here's my business."

"The hound's goin' with me."

The man let the club down. "Lookie here. That's same as robbery. I'll git the law."

"'Not if he just follers, it ain't. I go for'ard and you back, and let the dog please himself."

"No, by God!"

The hound had got up again.

"It's fight, then."

"That's a top dog. Worth a piece of money, he is. Boar coon never lived that could match him. It ain't right."

"Git on! You ain't goin' to fight, and I don't aim to talk."

Boone reached out with one hand and caught the man by the shoulder and swung him around.

"It ain't right, I say! It ain't right! I'll git the law!" The man shuffled toward the cabin, his red face back-twisted on his neck and his mouth running with words.

With his eye Boone pushed him toward the cabin. Then he swung around and set out, hearing the man half-whispering, "Here, Blue! Here, ol' Blue!" after his back was turned.

The trail ran like a thin, deep canyon through the trees. The forest squeezed in, dark and broody. There wasn't a sound in it, not the rustle of wind or the crack of a twig under a hoof or the chirp of a bird or anything at all unless a man listened close. Then he heard a soft padding behind him.
 
 

The tavern keeper sat in a hickory chair outside the tavern. "Bedwell?" he said, while his good eye lifted to the sky. The other was just a slitted sink in his face. "No, sir," he answered, "don't recall such a name." He swung his good eye back to Boone. "Bedwell? Sure you don't mean Bedwet or Bedwetters? Plenty of them around, no doubt." When he grinned, his good eye slitted, too. He rocked on the heels of his chair.

"I knowed him once, him and a man named Test as was a judge."

"Now you're shortenin' to my range. You'll shoot a long piece to find Test, though. He's laid his burden down, as the sayin' is. Do' know what his burden was, unless it were that big belly, but anyway he's laid it down." The tavern keeper held up one hand and counted off the fingers with the other. "Four years ago it was now, he up and died while court was settin'. Had a growth in him nothin' would tech. Went to Corydon and Tare Holt and all around where men had read medicine, but wasn't no man or no medicine could help him."

"Who's high sheriff now?"

"Had a big funeral. People from hell and gone come, some to grieve and some to guzzle. Good time for drinkin', with the weather cool and all. Biggest day I ever had, I do believe, unless maybe for elections. Never keered much for Test myself, but I declare I always felt some'at grateful to him for dyin' when he did. Yup."

The man patted his leg and looked off into space again. "Take like now, a death don't mean so much, even a big one, with the weather comin' warm." His eye left the sky and fixed on a cow that went creaking in front of his place, her tail fanning at the flies. "A man don't start a fire inside with the sun blazin' out. Leastwise, some don't. Now's for me, a swaller or so makes me forget bein' miserable hot. Trouble with cold-weather drammers, they don't take enough."

Boone leaned on his rifle. Blue shouldered his thigh and sat down by him and sized up the tavern keeper with unwinking eyes. Across the road the courthouse sat, smaller than Boone had pictured it and old with weather. No crowd moved around it, but his mind made one, himself and Bedwell and the sheriff and the people following after, poking at him with their eyes and pecking at him with their lips. Beyond the courthouse he could see the jail. He could see the big, dark figure of the sheriff in the half-dark and the hand lifting with the whip.

"Good hound you got there," the man said, "only them great big eyes knows too damn much."

"Mark York still sheriff?"

"Not here, he ain't."

"What you mean?"

"He ain't sheriff here on account of he's a corpse."

"Dead?"

"Corpses generally is."

"Kilt, I reckon."

"Nope."

"How, then?"

"Died sudden. Died sudden and sodden, as someone put it. Had a fine belly of liquor and died in bed peaceful as a baby, and I bet his blood would run a full fourth proof the way he'd fired it up. How long you been gone?"

"A spell."

"Could be long or short."

"Could be."

"Don't waste wind, do ye? All right. All right. Ain't no law about talkin' or smilin' or such. Anything I can do for you, like settin' out a bottle or anything?"

"Wanted to see York was all."

"Friend of his?"

"I aimed to kill him."

Behind him as he started off Boone heard the front legs of the chair come down.
 
 

The cabin squatted in its hollow, the two-part cabin with the dog trot connecting and the shagbark hickory close by like always, except that lightning had struck it and put a scar high on the trunk. A breath of smoke came from the chimney and lay close over the roof as if it had no place to go. A pig grunted from its pen, and out in the pasture, closed in by the worm fence, an old cow lined her head with her neck and let out a long bawl.

The sun was fading out in the west, not going down in a blaze of clouds, not leaving twilight over the land, but just pulling from sight and letting the dark come on.

A long, thin man came out of the cabin carrying two buckets and made for the pigpen, and afterward his voice floated out in a wail, calling the cow. The cow stood listening, making up her slow mind, and tried a step and then another and settled to a draggy walk.

The woodpile was down almost to nothing. A man running and grabbing for a club might come up with no more than a splinter. For a long time Boone sat on the slope of a hill, his mind not thinking, but feeling running old and deep in him. The blue-tick hound dozed at his side, waking now and then to sniff the air and rolling his sad eyes and fixing them on Boone as if to make double sure he was still there before closing them again.

Not until a window showed yellow with light and the dark had gathered thick in the trees did Boone move. Then he got up and let his feet take him down the slope.
 

"It was the phthisic killed your pap," Ma said. She overflowed the chair she sat on, being big-hipped like an old squaw but wizened from the waist up and not strong and quick in her movements as a squaw would be.

"You told me that."

"It was his sinnin' killed him," Cora put in while she wiped a pan. "It was the Lord in His wrath."

"It ain't becomin' to talk that way, not about your man's pa."

"All the same it was."

Boone sat in the doorway, only half hearing what the two women said. It struck him again, though, that Dan's wife was a fool, laying everything to God or the devil. "If it was the Lord," he said while he watched Dan's two boys climbing a black-oak tree, "He was late gettin' around to it. He should've kilt him sooner."

"Your pap's dead, Boone," Ma said.

"That's what I heerd."

"It was the phthisic done for him."

Boone didn't say anything to that. Ma was getting old and mixed in her mind so that she didn't remember from one word to the next what it was she had said.

"It ain't for us to pass judgment on the dead," she went on. "Pap had good in him."

"Ought to. He never let none out."

"In a way you put me in mind of him, Boone. You're broody-like your own self, and quick to blaze out. Your pap went down to bone with the phthisic, him as was so strong and tall, and couldn't hardly make out to lift his hand to wipe his mouth after a spell of coughin'. Just bones, he was, and the skin lyin' loose, and his eye like glass with the fever. He asked about you, Boone, more'n once. You oughtn't to think hard of him." With one finger she wiped away the wet that had come to her eye.

Boone didn't bother to answer. It beat all how Ma could grieve for the likes of Pap and couldn't talk about him without a sad, rabbity look and the tears leaking. She fumbled with her knitting now, on account of the tears.

Punk had climbed almost to the top of the oak. He hung to it with one hand and waved down at the doorway while the sun shone on his wild suit of rusty hair. "Look at me, Uncle Boone! Look at me!"

Andy, being younger, couldn't climb so high, but he waved from lower down and called, "See me! See me, too!"

"Tell them boys to get out'n that tree and fetch some wood," Cora asked Boone.

Old Blue lay in the dirt, in a spot of shadow at the side of a bush. He rested his muzzle between his paws. A little circle of gnats wheeled around his lids, making him wink. When his big, sad eyes came open afterward, they were always steady on Boone.

Ma said, "Time for Nancy Litsey to git here, if she's comin'. Said she'd bring some late-bloomin' flower seed for them cabbage plants I let her ma have."

"She'll come trottin'," Cora said, "bein' as there's an extry pair of breeches in the house."

"I swear, Cora!"

"She'll have her head high and that little nose openin' and closin' and her hair flyin' loose and no eye but for Boone." Cora put her hand to the rag that was tied over her own hair.

"Purty, to my way of thinkin'," Ma answered, "and comin' eighteen. Ain't she putty, Boone?"

"Good enough, I reckon."

"Can't see why you don't take notice of a good-turned girl like her."

"I seen good-turned ones afore."

"Redskins, I'll warrant," Cora said. "Heathens, that's what." She was a strong-minded woman who never talked quite friendly but not unfriendly enough to make a ruckus about unless a body was on edge. Probably words wouldn't tame her anyway; what she needed was a good lodgepoling. "You look close to a heathen yourself," she said to Boone, "with your hair long and all."

"He don't take after an Indian so much since he took off them buckskins and put on linsey," Ma put in.

"Too hot for leather," said Boone. "Too damn hot for anything." He squirmed his back against the doorsill to stop a tickle that a tear of sweat was making. It was a low, soft, smothering country, Kentucky was, where heat lay on the skin like a wet hand. Even the tail end of the day, with the sun going down and the shadows growing, still kept a man dripping.

Cora put lettuce in a wood bowl and cut radishes into it and went over to the fire and laid slices of hog meat in the spider so's to have some grease for the green stuff. She did most of the women's work, being as Ma's joint water had dried up. Ma said boiled sassafras rubbed on hot didn't do any good, or the wild raspberry wine that Cora had put by. In her slow, creaky way, though, Ma did a fair share of work. Her hands were always busy, with knitting or mending or carding wool from the few sheep Dan had, and every day she crippled down to the garden and tended the lettuce and beans and turnips and such.

Boone looked away from inside the house and saw Nancy Litsey coming up the path. Her hair shone like new straw in the low-blazing sun, and she had a red bow ribbon at the neck of her butternut linsey-woolsey. Homespun hung on most women like a sack, but with Nancy it put a man to wondering a little what was inside. She said "Evenin' " and stepped beyond him into the cabin.

Boone heard Ma and Cora speak to her and heard her answer, without paying much mind to what they said. A body could go along like dead and keep things buried so deep in him they never came to thought, and then one day, seeing maybe a head of hair like wheat straw, he would feel a stirring in him like a finger working. He could go along like dead except sometimes at night when lonesomeness would come on him and he would listen to the small sounds of Kentucky, to crickets chirping and a mouse running in the grass and a mockingbird singing to the dark, while a hankering swelled in him for a wolf howl and the rush of mountain water.

Punk pulled at Boone's sleeve. "Git your rifle, Uncle Boone, and come and shoot a eagle for us."

"Hit's two eagles," Andy said, "nestin' in the big sycamore where the old sow beds down."

"Would you, Uncle Boone? Would you? They're big and black as anything."

"Let it cool off some."

"Promise?" Punk asked. "Promise?" When he nodded, the two of them ran off.

Cora's words sounded from inside. "Wisht I had a cucumber. This here'd be tasty with just a touch. I never took no stock in cucumber's causin' biles and chills and yellow janders."

Nancy had a voice like a small, clear bell. "Pa says whereever jack-o'-lanterns be, there's fever."

By the side of the stones that Dan had put down for a walk the marigolds were getting ready to bloom. Ma took care of them, too, and of the hollyhocks and cornflowers that were pushing up. A gourd was climbing on the palings of the fence, getting mixed up with a trumpet vine. Boone's gaze lazed along the flowers and over to Blue and up the vines and above the palings and on across Dan's tobacco patch to the trees and hills beyond. He could look without really seeing and let his mind go without really thinking. He could look yonder or look inside to where the women were and make out, on a shelf, the little gourds that Ma kept her seed in and see hanging from a roof log the strips of dried pumpkin left over from winter, and it was as if another's eye saw them and another's head took them in. Only the little stirring in him was sharp, only the little finger of hunger working.

Dan came walking from the barn, swinging his legs slow and lazy. "Heat like to done for me," he said, letting himself down on a wood block and drawing his sleeve across his forehead. "Corn's a-wiltin', it's so hot and dry."

Dan had grown to be a long, slow-moving, slow-talking man with an Adam's apple like a point of bone pushing against the skin. There was a slow smile on his face a good part of the time, as if he found a secret, sad fun in most things, even in Cora and her tongue. Dan didn't like much to work, though. He didn't do any more than he had to.