There wasn't any sound for what must have been three seconds but seemed like a week while a mourning dove down in the clump of trees in the bottom where the hogs were gave a couple of tries at breaking his heart and mine.
Then I heard the Boss say, "The bastard."
"It was in the afternoon paper–the endorsement," Sadie elaborated. "Matlock telephoned from town. To let you know."
"The two-timing bastard," the Boss said.
Then he heaved up off the wire, and I turned around. I figured the conclave was about to break up. It was. "Come on," the Boss said, and started moving up the hill toward the house, Sadie by his side popping her seersucker skirt to keep up with him, and I trailing.
About the time we got to the gate where the chinaberry tree was and the berries on the ground popped under your feet, the Boss said to Sadie, "Get 'em cleared out."
"Tiny was figuring on having supper out here," Sadie said, "and Sugar-Boy was gonna drive him to Mason City in time for the eight-o'clock train to town. You asked him."
"I'm un-asking him," the Boss replied. "Clear 'em all out."
"It'll be a privilege," Sadie said, and I reckoned she spoke from the heart.
She cleared them out, and fast. Their car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us. I went to the other side of the house where a hammock made out of wire and barrel staves, the kind they rig up in that part of the world, was swung between a post and the live oak. I took off my coat and hung it on the post, and dropped my bottle into the side pocket so it wouldn't break my hip bone when I lay down, and climbed into the hammock.
The Boss was down at the other end of the yard where the crepe myrtles were, prowling up and down on the dusty grass stems. Well, it was all his baby, and he could give it suck. I just lay there in the hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves, dry and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-corroded-looking spots on them. Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long–not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you've been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
Then, while I was watching the leaves I heard a dry, cracking sound down toward the barnyard. Then it came again. Then I figured out what it was. It was Sugar-Boy off down in the lot playing with his.38 Special again. He would set up a tin can or a bottle on a post, and turn his back to the post and start walking away, carrying his baby in his left hand, by the barrel, the safety on, just walking steadily away on his stumpy little legs with his always blue serge pants bagging around his underslung behind and with the last rays of the evening sun faintly glittering on his bald spot among the scrubby patches of hair like bleached lichen. Then, al of a sudden, he would stop walking, and grab the butt of the play-pretty with his right hand, and wheel–all in a quick, awkward motion, as though a spring had exploded inside him–and the play-pretty would go bang, and the tin can would jump off the post or the bottle would spray off in all directions. Or most likely. Then Sugar-Boy would say, "The b-b-b-bas-tud," and shake his head, and the spit would fly.
There would be a single cracking sound and a long wait. That meant he had hit it the first try, and was trudging back to the post to set up another. Then, after a spell, there would be another crack, and a wait. Then, one time, there came two cracks, close together. That meant Sugar-Boy had missed the first try and had got it on the second.
Then I must have dozed off, for I came to with the Boss standing there, saying, "Time to eat."
So we went in and ate.
We sat down at the table, Old Man Stark at one end and Lucy at the other. Lucy wiped the perspiration-soaked wisp of hair back from her face, and gave that last-minute look around the table to see if anything was missing, like a general inspecting troops. She was in her element, all right. She had been out of it for a long time, but when you dropped her back in it she hit running, like a cat out of a sack.
The jaws got to work around the table, and she watched them work. She sat there, not eating much and keeping a sharp eye out for a vacant place on any plate and watching the jaws work, and as she sat there, her face seemed to smooth itself out and relax with an inner faith in happiness the way the face of the chief engineer does when he goes down to the engine room at night and the big wheel is blurred out with its speed and the pistons plunge and return and the big steel throws are leaping in their perfect orbits like a ballet, and the whole place, under the electric glare, hums and glitters and sings like the eternal insides of God's head, and the ship is knocking off twenty-two knots on a glassy, starlit sea.
So the jaw muscles pumped all around the table, and Lucy Stark sat there in the bliss of self-fulfillment.
I had just managed to get down the last spoonful of chocolate ice cream, which I had had to tamp down into my gullet like wet concrete in a posthole, when the Boss, who was a powerful and systematic eater, took his last bite, lifted up his head, wiped off the lower half of his face with a napkin, and said, "Well, it looks like Jack and Sugar-Boy and me are going to take the night air down the highway."
Lucy Stark looked up at the Boss right quick, then looked away, and straightened a salt shaker. At first guess it might have been the look any wife gives her husband when he shoves back after supper and announces he thinks he'll step down for a minute. Then you knew it wasn't that. It didn't have any question, or protest, or rebuke, or command, or self-pity, or whine, or oh-so-you-don't-love-me-any-more in it. It just didn't have anything in it, and that was what made it remarkable. It was a feat. Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime.
But Old Man Stark looked at the Boss, and said, "I sorta reckined–I reckined you was gonna stay out here tonight." There wasn't any trouble figuring out what he said, though. The child come home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn't got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It's not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium. Anyway, that is what I would have said back then, that evening.
So Old Man Stark swallowed his Adam's apple a couple of times and lifted his misty, sad old blue eyes to the Boss, who happened to be flesh of his flesh though you'd never guess it, and threw in the hook. But it didn't snag a thing. Not on Willie.
"Nope," the Boss said, "I gotta shove."
"I sorta reckined–" the old man began, the surrendered, and tailed off, "but if'n it's business–"
"It is not business," the Boss said. "It is pure pleasure. At least I'm aiming for it to be before I'm through." Then he laughed and got up from the table, and gave his wife a smack of a kiss on the left cheek, slapped his son on the shoulder in that awkward way fathers have of slapping their sons on the shoulder (there is always a kind of apology in it, and anybody, even the Boss, who slapped Tom Stark on the shoulder had better apologize, for he was an arrogant bastard and when his father that night slapped him on the shoulder he didn't even bother to look up). Then the Boss said, "Don't wait up," and started out the door. Sugar-Boy and I followed. That was the first news I had had that I was going to take the night air. But it was all the warning you usually got from the Boss. I knew enough to know that.