I'll help you close it up, he said.
Oh they enjoy it, Omensetter said. They'd cry if I covered it.
The girls pulled gaily at their father's arms. He began to whirl like a ribboned pole.
How long… do you think… that giant's eyes… will last?
Henry held unsteadily to a sapling.
You could shoot him, I guess. You have a gun.
The well wants him… maybe he'll get out… hooh… it's getting dark, girls… no… whoosh… stop.
I'll do it then, Henry said, and he imagined the shot leaping from the barrels of his gun to rush at the fox.
Lamps lit in the house. Henry measured the walls of his sky while he drifted away to the buggy. It wasn't dippered yet, but soon there'd be nothing to aim by, for darkness would silence the fox's eyes. The grass had begun to glisten. Animals felt pain, he understood, but never sorrow. That seemed right. Henry could crush a finger, still the wound might be a war in a distant country for all the concern he could let it cause him, he lived so fearfully; but such a creature as the fox filled up the edges of its body like a lake the shot would dapple as it entered. You could startle an animal, but never surprise. The buggy's seats were slick, the dew heavy. He thought he should have a cloth somewhere, a piece of toweling. There were bats overhead. Yes, here's where he had it. Henry began to dry a place for himself. Fluttering like leaves, the bats flew securely. And would the stars be startled, looking up, to find the fox out burning in their early skies?
There you are, you've been reasonably careful, you've kept your butt dry.
Henry spoke crossly and the carriage began to bounce him.
So the well went through to the land of the giants. Why not? Should he turn away from that — that callousness and that romance — to Mrs. Henry Pimber's firm prim mouth? her festive unlatching hands?
Omensetter's a natural-born politician, Olus Knox had said; he's what they call the magnetic kind. How inadequate that image was, Henry thought, when he could draw the heart right out of your side. Jethro Furber had been dramatic, as usual, painfully pinching his hands together. That man, he declared, lives like a cat asleep in a chair. Mat smiled gently: a view full of charity, he said; but Tott was laughing at the sight of Furber actually holding the pieces of himself together while he tried to condemn Omensetter's simply harmony and ease, as Henry guessed, with such a tranquil image. Yet how could Omensetter bear that terrible pair of eyes? Of — of course, Furber stuttered. A cat's a pretty thing, of course. How pretty a man? Is it attractive in a man to sleep away his life? take a cow's care? refuse a sparrow of responsibility? Tott shrugged. The cat's an unmitigated egotist, a slothful beast, slave to its pleasure. No need to preach, Tott said, nettled; cats were his idols. I've seen him, Furber swiveled to catch each eye, I've seen him — wading. The memory made Henry grin, slowing the buggy, Wading? He pictured Jethro standing in a puddle, trousers rolled. Tott claimed afterward that Furber filled a chair like a leaky bag of potatoes. No — no — an unsteady stack of packages, a teetery tower, an uncertain clutch — yes — a chair full of perilous parcels — or — in sum: a bunch of unbundling bundles. And sleep? sleep? Sleep is like Siam — he's never been there. It was true, Henry thought, they were utter opposites. Furber's body was a box he lived in; his arms and legs propelled and fended for him like a cripple's crutches and a blind man's cane; while Omensetter's hands, for instance, had the same expression as his face; held out his nature to you like an offering of fruit; and added themselves to what they touched, enlarging them, as rivers meet and magnify their streams. Wading. Amused, Henry formed the word again, and allowed himself to watch the woods fill in. Pasting kites, Furber'd said. Rolling hoops. Hollering in the street. Fur-burr (Henry answered now as he should have then), Fur-burr, you're just an old lady… yes — a lacy old lady. But the evening had filled in Furber too, and his fierce puritan intensity. For that, Henry was grateful. He knew he'd never get used to the hot dark white-faced little man, always and seldom the same, who claimed one Sunday that the Lord had made him small and had given him his suit of pulpit clothing so he could represent to everyone the hollow inside of their bodies. No, hardly a lacy old lady. We're all niggers here — within, he'd shouted. You have a stomach cramp, he'd said, doubling, knotting his arms about his knees — then I'm its shadow. Once I was eight feet tall, he'd exclaimed, but God made me small for this purpose. What sort of talk was that?… blackened body-hollows. Jesus, Henry thought, Iike the well's column. Suppose he'd fallen there himself?
Ding dong bell,
Pimber's down our well.
Henry tried to urge his horse into a run, but on the badly rutted road, in the poor light, it refused. He cursed a moment, and gave up.
Who pushed him in?
Little Henry Pim.
Omensetter was no better than an animal himself. That was right. And Henry wondered what it was he loved, since he thought he knew what he hated.
Who'll pull him out?
Nobody's about.
What Omensetter did he did so simply that it seemed a miracle. It eased from him, his life did, like the smooth broad crayon line of the man who drew your cartoon at the fair. He had an ease impossible to imitate, for the moment you were aware, the instant you tried…
What a naughty thing was that,
To catch our little Pimber at,
Who never did him any harm,
But…
Or did he move so easily because, despite his size, he wasn't fat inside; he hadn't packed the past around his bones, or put his soul in suet. Henry had seen the engravings of the skeletons' dance. It was, however, a dance. . and if you had to die to dance…? What were the chances of the fox? The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another — another — another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another — another — another — another?
When he reached home his wife immediately asked him if he had the rent and how much was it, but he passed through the house in a daze, wild and frantic, and went off again with his gun without answering, so she had to yell after him — what fool thing are you up to now? — but she would see, he thought, bitterly observing that she hadn't thought of him as off to murder or to hunt but only as a fool bent on his foolishness; and in the back of Omensetter's house, not bothering anyone, he shot the fox out with both barrels. The shot screamed on the well sides and one pellet flew up and struck him on the arm so hard through his jacket that it stuck; but he, with great effort, since the cool stars watched, paid no mind to his wound, hearing the fox thrash and go still. Furthermore I'll board it up tomorrow, he thought.
Driving home slowly, his joy draining away and leaving him fearful and cold, Henry remembered how, as a boy, he had waited at the top of the cellar stairs for his father to emerge, and how, when his father's waist was level with his eyes, without a motive or any kind of feeling that he recognized, he had struck him a terrible blow in the stomach, driving the air from his father's lungs and forcing him to bend abruptly, dropping his startled face near. Henry's mouth had filled with saliva; the base of his tongue had tingled; he had taken breath. Yet thank God he had run, weeping instead. Saliva washed over his teeth as he fled. He remembered, too, the sound of apples falling slowly on the stairs. His legs had been the first of him to be appalled. They had fallen apart like sticks.