I gave it to Sam and he dropped it into the canvas bag hanging from his shoulder.
“That was good shootin’, Bob, considerin’ you ain’t done none in a couple of years,” he said. Then he added hesitantly, as though he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, “But yore brother’d a’ got ‘em both.”
I nodded, remembering that Lee and Sam had hunted a lot together. “Lee’s a natural,” I agreed. “It’s hard for him to miss.”
“By the way, I seen him last Sat’day.”
“You did?” I said. “How was he?”
“Oh, he looked fine. He was out to the house.” He didn’t say any more, as if he took it for granted I knew what Lee had been out there for. I did. Sam ran a still down in the Black Creek bottoms behind his house. I used to know where it was when I was a kid and living with my grandfather on his place across the other side of the bottom, but I had never advertised the fact. It wasn’t the kind of knowledge that was considered good for you. “I was sorry to hear about yore daddy, Bob,” he said after a while. The Major had been dead about six months now.
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he ever screw you out of anything?”
Sam flushed and looked away in embarrassment and seemed to be trying to think of something to change the subject.
“Ought to be able to go coon hunting pretty soon, Sam,” I said. “How about if I come out some night and we try the bottom down below the house?”
“Why, that’d be fine. Any night you can make it, just let me know.”
I thanked him for letting me shoot the bird and crawled back through the fence and got into the Ford. I rolled on down the grade and clattered over the loose flooring of the little bridge over the creek at the bottom of the hill. The thought of seeing Lee and Mary again made the morning perfect, and I grinned. There wasn’t anybody like him. Maybe he was wild, but then lots of young bucks like him were, and he would settle down. It was funny, too, that when I got to thinking of some of the things he had done it always seemed as if he were the younger brother. As a matter of fact, he was nearly four years older than I. He was almost twenty-six.
When we were growing up, though, and in high school, he had always been an older brother, even though he got into more trouble than I did. He had been a good buffer between the Major and me, and I knew that if it hadn’t been for Lee I would have left home long before I did. It wasn’t that he fought my battles for me; with the Major I fought my own battles. It was more that Lee didn’t have to fight. He knew how to get along with people, knew that charm would get you things from them that obstinacy never could.
The troubles he got into were spectacular. When he was seventeen and still a junior in high school he had run away with a married woman.
Two
It was around ten as I drove slowly up South Street toward the square. The town was quiet and the square almost deserted. It was Friday. Tomorrow the place would be full of Fords parked fender to fender and farmers and their wives would be standing in bunches around the sidewalks and going in and out of the stores, but right now the whole town seemed to drowse under the washed blue of the sky, soaking up the warmth of the sun.
I braked to a standstill at the stop line where South Street opens into the square and looked up at the old courthouse, red and dusty and ugly, with white bird droppings spattering its walls, and swallows and sparrows circling around high up under its ornate eaves.
Swinging through the right-hand side of the square, I turned and went out North Elm, where the trees almost met over the street like a tunnel and the houses were friendly old landmarks and the lawns were wide and well kept. Eight blocks out I turned off the street to the left in the middle of the block onto the graveled driveway.
Nearly all the rest of the houses along the street were close to the sidewalks on small lots and they had grown up there long after the old Crane house was built. It sat back in the far corner of a big sloping lot half as big as a city block, with a driveway going back to it and two enormous oaks in front, and a hedge along the sidewalk.
It was one of the ugliest houses it would be possible to imagine. Built around 1910, it had all the gingerbread and scrollwork and hideousness of its time, and its last coat of white paint was now about six years old and peeling in places. My grandfather, who was a salty old gentleman and possessed of a caustic wit that was widely respected, referred to it invariably as “that architectural abortion.” It was built by the Major while he was still a young man.
At the housewarming he had asked my grandfather, so the story goes, what he thought of the parlor.
“I don’t know why, son,” the old man is said to have answered, “but I keep expecting a woman to come in and say that the girls will be down in a minute.”
I got out and went up the walk under the big oaks, feeling warmly happy about it and wondering why, for there had never been much happiness attached to the old pile when I was growing up.
I banged the big brass knocker and a Negro girl came in a minute. “Is Mrs. Crane in?” I said. “Tell her I’ve got a search warrant.”
Her eyes opened wide, showing a lot of white, and she went back down the dark hallway. I stepped inside and saw it hadn’t changed much; there was the same old milky mirror by the hat-rack and the hard-bottomed bench and the straw carpeting.
From the living room at the end of the hall came the clicking of spike heels and then she was in the doorway.
“Hello, Mary,” I said.
She came down the hall toward me, walking fast, with that long-legged gracefulness I remembered so well, and the red-haired loveliness of her gave me the same old feeling of warmth. I was never really in love with Mary, I guess. As accurately as I can describe it, the feeling she always gave me when I saw her was one of pride that she was a friend of mine and liked me.
She came close to me and I took both her hands. “Hello, you big horse,” she said. “Don’t step on me.”
“I’m glad to see you, Mary,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she demanded. “Don’t just stand there like a stadium or something and grin at me.”
I kissed her lightly on the cheek and was conscious of the amusement in the cool green eyes so close to mine.
“Well,” she said, “that’ll put me in my place, all right. Middle-aged housewife.”
She was twenty-three and she and Lee had been married a little less than a year. “You’re looking great,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, Bob. Come on back to the kitchen and tell me about yourself. Rose just made some coffee.”
We went through the living room, where a small fire was burning in the big fireplace, and on back to the kitchen and sat down at the table.
“Darn it, Bob, but I’m glad to see you. It’s a shame you just missed Lee. He left a little while ago and won’t be back for an hour or two. Tell me about yourself. You’re home for good this time, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you’re through college. But I’ll always hate the way you had to go.”
I stirred my coffee and broke off a piece of the coffee cake Rose had put on the table. “Why? It suited me.”
She leaned back and looked at me and sighed, shaking her head gently. “I guess it did, at that. It’s a wonder you didn’t turn professional like all the rest of the mastodons.”
I didn’t tell her about turning pro fighter and the whipping I’d taken. It was something I’d rather forget. I was good enough in intercollegiate boxing to begin to get the impression I was good, but it didn’t take me long to find out I was slow and too easy to hit, and when those heavies can get to you and keep on getting to you they can hurt you, whether you can take it or not. I’d had eight professional fights and I took the short end of six of them and quit it before I was slapped silly. It’s no racket for the second-rate.