Pa thought about it, standing there in his nightshirt, still holding that shotgun in the crook of his arm. “Maybe,” he said. “But the Panhandle isn't far enough. Tail's got an uncle down on the Brazos. You boys could stay there. I could write you a letter when it looks all right to come back.”
Maybe I was still half asleep. Anyway, it was just coming to me what they were talking about. I said, “Just a minute, Pa. I don't aim to run. This isn't my scrape, it's Ray's.”
“Tall?”
“Yes, sir,” I said from force of habit.
“Now listen to me,” Pa said soberly. “Pretty soon they'll be coming. When they don't find Ray they're going to be mad, and it won't take them long to remember that carpetbagger you clubbed with a rifle stock. You know what kind of a chance you'll have if the scalawags decide to bring it to court.”
For a minute I didn't say anything. I knew Pa was right. If they didn't find Ray, they would be coming for me. The smart thing to do would be to get out of the country for a while. But knowing it didn't make me like it.
I liked things just the way they were. I liked it here on the ranch—being able to ride over to the Bannerman spread every day or so to see Laurin, going into John's City once a month when they held the dances in Community Hall. I liked it just fine right where I was, and I hated the idea of being chased away by a bunch of damned Yankee bluebellies and blacks who had been slaves only a few years ago. And pretty soon some of that hate began to direct itself at Ray Novak.
I looked at Ray and he knew how I was beginning to feel about it. He was sorry. But a hell of a lot of good that was going to do. He stood there shifting from one foot to the other, uncomfortably. He was a big man, and he couldn't have been more than twenty-one years old. But that didn't make him young. In this country a boy started being a man as soon as he could strap on a gun. And about the first thing a boy did, after he learned to walk and ride, was to strap on a gun.
Before I could say what I was thinking, before Ray Novak could put his discomfort into words, Ma came out of the bedroom and stood looking at us with worried eyes. Ma was a thin, work-weary woman, not really old, but looking old. There were deep lines around her pale eyes that came from worry and trying to gouge a living from this wild land. Ma had been pretty as a girl. There were faded pictures of her in an old album that gave you an idea how she must have looked when she married Pa. The pictures showed a young girl dressed in the rather daring fashion of the day—those low-cut dresses that all the great ladies of the Confederacy used to wear with such a casual air, as they sat queenlike, smiling and pouring tea from silver pots into delicate china cups. It was hard to believe that Ma had been one of those great ladies once. Her father had been a rich tobacco buyer in Virginia, but he lost everything in the war and died soon afterward.
I never saw Virginia myself. And those pictures in the album were just pictures to me, but I guess Pa still saw her as she had looked then, because something happened to him every time he looked at her. His wind-reddened face softened and his stern eyes became gentle — even as they did now as he saw her standing in the doorway.
She stood there, holding her cotton wrap-around together, smiling quickly at Ray.
“Good evening, Ray,” she said.
“Good evening, Mrs. Cameron,” Ray said uneasily.
“Mother,” Pa said, “why don't you go back to bed? I'll be along in a few minutes.”
But she shook her head. “I want to know what it's about. Tell me, Rodger, because I'll find out sooner or later.”
“It's nothing serious,” Pa said gently. “Ray just had some trouble in John's City with the state police. It's nothing to worry about.”
“I don't understand,” Ma said vaguely. “What has that to do with Talbert?”
“I just think it's best if they both go away for a while, until it blows over. There's been no killing. Just a fist fight. But there's no telling what the Yankee troopers will do while they're riled up. I'll send Ray and Tall down to my brother's place on the Brazos. You know how the police shift from one place to another. In a few months there won't be anybody around John's City to remember or hold a grudge, and then they can come back.”
She considered it carefully, but I knew she wouldn't question Pa's word. That's the way it always had been.
“All right, Rodger,” she said at last. “Whatever you say.”
Her voice was heavy and edged with hopelessness. She had had great plans for me. Even before I was born she had started making plans to send me to the University of Virginia and make a lawyer out of me, or maybe a preacher. But the war had put an end to that. There wasn't anybody in Texas, except the scalawags and bureau agents, that had money enough to send their children off to places like Virginia. And I hadn't made things any easier for Ma. I had come into the world in the midst of great pain, almost killing her, and I had been a source of pain ever since. Like the time I cut Criss Bagley open with a pocketknife. She had tried to comfort me and to understand, and I had tried to explain to her. But I couldn't explain when I didn't know myself. I just knew that Criss had been coming at me with an elm club and I knew I had to get it away from him, one way or another. Criss was twelve and I was ten, and he outweighed me by thirty pounds or more, so the knife seemed the only way.
I remember the way he looked, standing there with his eyes wide in amazement—before the pain—staring down at his opened belly. We had been swimming down at Double-dare Hole, a muddy, deep hole in the arroyo that cut across our land, and in the spring and early summer it was almost always full. It was June, I remember, and four of us had stopped there on our way from school. And one of the kids—I don't know which one— tied knots in Criss's clothes, and that was the way it started. He thought I did it. He came out of the water yelling, “Goddamn you, Tall Cameron!” And I remember saying, “Don't goddamn me! I didn't tie knots in your dirty damn clothes!”
For a while we just stood there glaring at each other. Criss was naked and dripping, and fat around the belly and hips, like a girl. I had already dried myself in the sun and had my clothes on. The other two boys climbed up on the bank, grinning. Then one of them said, “What's the matter, Criss? You afraid of Tall? You just goin' to stand there and let him get away with tyin' knots in your clothes?”
Criss turned on the boy. “Keep your goddamn mouth shut. I guess I know how to take care of Tall Cameron... unless he wants to untie my clothes, that is.”
I know now that Criss really didn't want to fight. But I didn't know it then. I could have untied his clothes and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I said, “You can untie them yourself if you want them untied. I don't guess I'm bound to wait on you.”
Criss was one of those people who never tanned in the summer, no matter how much he stayed out in the sun. His hair was kind of a dirty yellow, and so were his eyebrows; and his skin was as pink and soft as a baby's bottom. He stood there waiting for me to do something about his clothes. His pale little eyes shut down to angry slits.
“I'll count to ten,” he said tightly. “If you don't have my clothes untied by then, it's goin' be too bad.”
“You can count to ten thousand,” I said. “I told you I didn't do it.”