Winter Run (18 page)

When Gretchen saw the still visible scars on Donald’s neck she gasped. “Jared, that’s awful. Did that bulldog really make all those scars?”

“Yes ma’am, he sure did. They tell me it took three men to pry him off this pointer, and when he let go, he was so mad he grabbed that boy what takes care of the stable on his arm, and it took the other two to get the dog off of
him
. That bulldog is tough.”

Uncle Dan was invigorated. He raised his head
and pulled his ears back and positively pranced over to Donald. The two of them sniffed noses briefly but then sniffed each other’s hind end to get the real message as to who each was. The hair on their backs went up and Gretchen put her hand to her mouth. Jared Pugh stood looking at the dogs, relaxed. Charlie watched the dogs with one eye and Mr. Pugh with the other in case trouble started. Everything was fine.

“Let’s turn them loose, Charlie, and we’ll see what your dog knows.”

In the course of the introductions, Uncle Dan seemed to have become a different creature. When the leashes were removed, Jared blew a short note on the whistle he had on a cord around his neck. Both the dogs bounced over to him, their tails waving hard. They followed close as the procession moved across the barn lot. Mr. Pugh crossed the creek behind the barn on the stepping-stones. Still the dogs were right with him.

“Mr. Pugh, how did you do that? The only way I could get that dog across the creek would be to drag him.”

What had happened was soon clear. The presence of the other dog and the knowing man with the whistle made the difference. Uncle Dan began to reconnect with his past.

“Come on up with me, Charlie, and you’ll see what to do.”

For the next hour Charlie concentrated with all his power as Jared Pugh took the bird dogs hunting.
Charlie knew that Jared would have little to say and the only way to learn would be to watch and ask very few questions.

It was clear that Uncle Dan had been a field dog and that it had been a long time ago. After fifteen minutes Mr. Pugh said, “He’s a hunting dog all right. But he don’t remember exactly how to do it. See him watching Donald?”

Charlie saw. The first time the pointers came on point together Charlie shivered in spite of the heat. Most people say that the experience of flushing a covey—with its whirr of wings and the rising cloud of birds—is always new no matter how many times you’ve seen and heard it. This was certainly true for Charlie, who in the past had mainly flushed coveys by accident. Somehow the suspense was even greater if you knew what was about to happen because of the dogs.

Mr. Pugh quartered the big field, using the whistle and hand signals to have the dogs hunt where he wanted them to. The man and the two dogs were like a single creature. The dogs were like an extension of Jared Pugh’s mind. He reached out over the fields through them and found the coveys. He paid special attention to the grown-up streambeds. Charlie could see why. The waterways provided both cover and water. The dogs naturally tended to hunt in grown-over areas where the quail would feel secure.

They found three coveys in an hour and a half. The fact that the farm was not really farmed anymore, that
it had been let go, made it nearly perfect country for the bobwhite. The birds were there in abundance. Beginning early in the spring and throughout most of the summer the loud “bob white, bob bob white” call was incessant. By late spring of any year Charlie would have seen a hen cross one of the dusty lanes on the farm with her brood following along single file. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of an especially dusty lane and the whole brood would have a bath, creating a little dust cloud all around themselves in their enthusiasm.

The second time they went out, Jared Pugh let Charlie carry the whistle and work the dogs. Uncle Dan came right along and Donald followed Charlie’s directions from the beginning. Mr. Pugh walked along behind smiling. The boy knew every inch of the fields and was already thinking like a quail.

When Charlie walked into the milking barn that evening, Matthew looked up with a question on his face. Charlie had the dreamy look he got sometimes when thinking back on something good.

“They were fine. Just fine,” he said, answering Matthew’s unspoken question. “They did just what I asked. We went together to find the birds and it all worked. Even with Mr. Pugh there, it was like being totally alone with the fields and the dogs and the birds.” Here he looked up and smiled. “But it wasn’t lonely. Each time I blew the whistle, they both looked
back to see which way I wanted them to hunt. Mr. Pugh says I can come and get Donald any time I want and that it’s okay to go on the pony with them.” He paused. “He says it’s okay to go again tomorrow if I go over to the pond field and leave the birds behind the barn alone.”

Charlie went for Donald early the next morning. When he returned, Uncle Dan fell right in. The two bird dogs waited patiently while Charlie saddled the pony. Charlie mounted. He blew a short note on the whistle and started up the hill toward the cattle guard with the two dogs right behind him. Halfway up he stopped the pony and looked back to be sure the dogs were still with him, that they were willing to follow the pony like they followed him on foot.

He would not go quail shooting with Jared Pugh in the fall. His mind was still on the hounds and the darker pursuit; but for now, in the late spring, he was happy with the pony and his dogs, who looked up at him with adoring eyes, waiting for him to blow the whistle to tell them where to hunt.

Gretchen had come to the porch door when Charlie blew the whistle. She smiled as she watched them start up the hill to the pond field—the nearly white pony and dogs and white-blond Charlie looking back over his shoulder at his dogs, excited about his new thing, his eyes shining.

Charlie knew. You could see it in his eyes at Professor James’s funeral, while Gretchen held on to his arm against his will. Gretchen didn’t approve of funerals the way she didn’t approve of death, but in this case she had no choice. Her slate-gray eyes were flat with grief, for she had come to love the old man. We could all see it. Sally had told it. From her we knew how Gretchen would sometimes on summer afternoons walk up the path to the big house to sit on the veranda and drink tea, which Sally served from the Victorian tea service that had belonged to the professor’s mother. She listened to him talk about the past, sometimes about the curse left on the land by slavery, but also about the high days at Silver Hill when the world seemed to make sense and you could fool yourself in
a minute into thinking that this little patch of ground was somehow exempt. That it was special—that love and respect and forbearance somehow made up for the fact that the colored children went to school in a one-room shack with a dirt yard. And how he believed that justice would one day prevail and the land would be healed, but not in his lifetime—all the same arguments as Mr. Jefferson, who had lived just on the other side of town and told himself the same story. We all knew it. You couldn’t live in that part of the world and not know about Mr. Jefferson.

Once while he was talking, Sally happened to stop, coming out of the pantry and, as she told it later, “seen the look on Miz Lewis’s face while she listened to Professor.” With a smile on her slightly opened lips, as if the craggy-faced, seventy-four-year-old man with the wispy gray hair were giving her a gift or telling her a secret. Sally said—and here she fell into the speech of an older time—she had never seen Missy look so reposed and open and happy, and beautiful, what with her blond hair pulled back from her face in barrettes and her gray eyes shining. But then her face closed again, and she interrupted him in her tight voice.

“But in the meantime, what about Charlie? What will his story be? I’ve tried to make him understand that this is all passing. That he must find something else to love. But of course he won’t listen to me.” And her voice trailed off, nearly into tears.

The old man reached for her hand. And in the late summer silence of birds and insects, they sat. Then he
looked at her. You could see what he was seeing; what old men see—the two of them together and how it would have been, and how they would have had children to come after him instead of their few moments together—and him nearing the end.

Then he spoke in an old man’s voice, in a finished voice, “My love, Charlie tied himself to this ground. I don’t know how it happened. It just did.” Here he paused, and then in a low voice: “I am not called to know the future.”

Two weeks later he died. It was the end of August.

There in the church, Charlie—with the same gray eyes as his mother’s—glanced sideways at Matthew next to him in the pew. It was the first time that they had ever been in a church together. The races didn’t go to church together then. You could see that Charlie wanted to reach over and hold on to Matthew’s sleeve, as he always had done when he was little. But it was too late. Now he was fourteen and as tall as both Matthew and Gretchen, but with all the awkwardness of fourteen. Everything was changing, except his eyes.

The whole county was there at the Episcopal church in town, because the James family had lived in the area long before the Episcopal church in the village was even a mission. That is, everybody except Mrs. James, who was bedridden, lying in the big bedroom on the second floor, and Charlie’s father who was away on business and couldn’t get back in time.
Sally had stayed behind at Silver Hill preparing for the onslaught with three of her sisters to help, saying she didn’t put stock in funerals nohow, while tears made rivers down her black face.

So the three of them were together as they filed past the casket in the parish house. Charlie had never seen a dead man before—lots of animals, including the mule—but never a person. Gretchen had seen her parents. Heaven knew how many dead people Matthew had seen and buried in the cemetery behind the colored church, which instead of a cross on its steeple had a carving in the shape of a clenched fist with the index finger pointing straight up. Some of us thought the finger was to direct our attention to God. Others thought it was the hand of rage pointing in accusation at the God of sorrows.

When they went to the pew to await the minister and the casket, Charlie was very pale. The three of them stood close to one another, Charlie in the middle. The priest came down the aisle followed by the casket. The words were said. Then it was over, and we were at the graveside with the late summer thunder, rain coming, and the minister saying in a half chant, “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother and we commit his body to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection …”

There were tears in Gretchen’s eyes in spite of her anger at them, and they were now pouring down
Matthew’s dark face. Charlie rocked back and forth a little, in cadence with the ancient language as if he knew it by heart.

The three of them stood close to the grave watching the men shovel in the red clay. All of us standing there were somehow drawn to look at them and not the grave—to look at the pale, adolescent white boy, standing between the black man and his mother, waiting for the rain.

There was a mob at Silver Hill. The white people walked up the front brick path through the boxwoods, so thick on either side they almost touched. The storm door was still up from the winter. The screen door had somehow been overlooked the previous spring what with so much sickness in the house and Matthew and Sally feeling slow, knowing that everything was about to end. They had known it for a long time, but now, in that final spring season, somehow they were unable to stand up straight and be brisk and walk on.

Matthew and Sally had made their plans. Their new house across the railroad bridge was finished and neat. Matthew and Robert would do the odd jobs around the neighborhood—“custom work”—and Sally would go to work for Mrs. Buford, whose husband was a doctor at the university and lived on Owens Mountain, around from Luke and Jessie Henry.

Then the professor was gone, and there we all were, standing in the formal parlor in the old part of
the house, brick, built even before the Declaration, when the land was frontier and tobacco land was cut out of the living woods by ringing the trees and planting the tobacco around the stumps and then, in four years, moving on. But the land was forgiving and generations of trees had come and gone, until finally the fully cleared pastures were completely grown up in broom sage and the fence lines choked with the cedars seeded by the birds sitting on the wire fences.

Mrs. James was in an old-fashioned wheelchair with a caned back and bottom, looking frail and nearly finished, which she was. She only lasted two months after they moved her to the nursing home in town. She had lived at Silver Hill for fifty years. Although she cared little for the outdoors or even gardening, she loved the old house with its added electricity and radiators and its creaky, wide-board floors, which if you went barefoot would stick you with a splinter if you weren’t careful. The old kitchen where Sally still churned butter was unchanged since the twenties. It was only in the last five years that they had a refrigerator to take the place of the icebox, only ten years since the icebox was filled from the icehouse next to the garage, which in turn was filled every winter from the ice pond on the lower lane across from the rock, where Charlie had seen the wild dogs kill the doe.

In the dining room, the table and sideboard were laid out with white linen, long ago yellowed, and the silver all polished. Hams cured on the place were sliced paper thin and set on trays with new biscuits.
There was also potato salad surrounded by carrot sticks and sliced celery and sweet pickles. Vernon Maupin, Frank’s brother, stood behind a side table at the end of the room, serving iced tea with lots of mint. And whiskey, too, to them that wanted it.

The kitchen was full of colored people who had come in the screened porch door into the back pantry. Charlie, from custom, had walked around to the back, leaving Gretchen to go up the front walk alone. She had started to say something, but thought better of it. He walked into the kitchen, where his pale skin and nearly white hair were set off in contrast to the black faces. He was more than five and a half feet tall, on the level with most adults. In the kitchen there was age and grief and change. Charlie was the youngest in the room, by a lot.