He put his hand under the man’s jacket but the Greener got in the way. He pulled the shotgun out by the butt and put his hand under the jacket again and against the man’s chest. The heart beat strongly. But his hand was wet and something was wrong. The fabric of shirt and underwear was matted into flesh like burlap trodden into mud.
Now squatting back on his heels beside the man he took his handkerchief from his pocket with his dry hand and carefully wiped the blood from the other hand. Then he pushed his cap back still farther because his forehead was sweating. He blew into both hands because they were cold and began to think.
What he was thinking about was what he was going to do next but at the same time he noticed that he did not feel bad. Why is it, he wondered, that I feel that I have all the time in the world to figure out what to do and the freedom to do it and that what is more I will do it? It was as if he had contracted into the small core of curiosity and competence he had felt within himself after the man had grabbed him across the fence, spun him around, cursed him, and took his gun away. Now he was blowing into his hands and thinking: This is a problem and problems are for solving. All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it and a center to do it from. He had found his center.
The guide doesn’t live far from here. We passed the cabin. The Negro boy ran home when the man cursed him and shot the dog.
Now he was standing up and looking carefully around. He even made out a speckled quail lying in the speckled leaves. As he waited for the dizziness to clear, he watched the man.
Don’t worry, I’m going to get us both out of here. He knew with certainty that he could.
Later, after it was over, his stepmother had hugged them both. Thank God thank God thank God she said in her fond shouting style. You could have both been killed!
So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true; one which his stepmother had put forward in the way that a woman will instantly and irresistibly construe the world as she will have it and in fact does have it so: that the man had had one of his dizzy spells — he knows with his blood pressure he shouldn’t drink and hunt! — and fell; that in falling he discharged the double-barrel, which wounded the boy and nearly killed the man. The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him. We can thank our lucky stars that this child had the sense and bravery to know what to do. And you a twelve-year-old-mussing up his hair in front in a way she thought of as being both manly and English—We’re so proud of you. My fine brave boy!
But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.
The boy and his father knew better. With a final hug after he was up and around and the boy had recovered, except for a perforated and permanently deafened left middle ear and a pocked cheek like a one-sided acne, the man was able to speak to him by standing in the kitchen and enlisting D’Lo the cook in the conversation and affecting a broad hunter’s lingo not at all like him: I’m going to tell yall one damn thing—Yall? He never said yall. Talking to D’Lo, who stood at the stove with her back to them? I’m getting rid of that savage. He nodded to the Greener on the pantry table. I had no idea that savage had a pattern that wide! So wide it knicked you — did you know that, D’Lo? Hugging the boy, he asked D’Lo. D’Lo must either have known all about it or, most likely, had not been listening closely, for she only voiced her routine but adequate hnnnonnhHM! Now ain’t that something else! — which was what the man wanted her to say because this was the man’s way of telling the boy, through D’Lo, what had happened and soliciting and getting her inattentive assent to the routineness and even inevitability of it. Such things happen! And I’ll tell you something else, the man told D’Lo. When a man comes to the point that all he can think about is tracking a bird and shuts everything out of his mind to the point of shooting somebody, it’s time to quit! D’Lo socked down grits spoon on boiler rim. You right, Mister Barrett! Was she even listening? And now the man finally looking down his cheek at him hugged alongside: Right?
Yes sir. He waited only to be released from the hug.
There was silence. They spoke no more of it. We know, don’t we, the silence said, that the man was somehow wounded by the same shot and there is nothing to be said about it.
But how did he miss the bird? How did he wound himself?
While the sheriff was taking care of the man in the swamp, the guide brought the two shotguns, a dead quail, and three empty shells into the dark clean room smelling of coal oil and newspaper and flour paste where the Negro woman was washing his face. She dried it and patted something light and feathery — spiderwebs? — on his cheek. He didn’t feel bad but his ear still roared. “Here dey,” said the black youth. They yours and hisn. He looked down at the kitchen table at the two shotguns, the three empty Super-X shells, and the dead quail. This black boy was no guide. What guide would pick up empty shotgun shells? You didn’t see the other bird? he asked the guide. Ain’t no other bird, said the black boy. The white boy said: There were two singles and he shot twice and he never misses. The black boy said: Well he done missed this time. The white boy heard himself saying: You just didn’t find the bird, and getting angry and wondering: Why am I worrying about the second bird? Nawsuh, said the woman, whose black arms were sifted with flour. John sho find your bird if he was there. Look, he even found your bullets. Must have been the dogs got him.
He looked at the Greener on the kitchen table in the shotgun cabin, sat down, broke the breech, and took out the one empty shell and set it next to the shells the guide had found. As he gazed he put one hand to his cheek, which had begun to bleed again, and covered his roaring ear.
Now in a green forest glade near a pretty pink-and-green golf links, he touched his deafened ear. Did it still roar a little or was it the seashell roar of the silence of forest? Holding the three-iron in both hands he tested the spring of its steel shaft.
It was as if the thirty years had passed and he had not ever left the Negro cabin but, strange to say, had only now got around to saying what he had not said for thirty years. Again he smelled the close clean smell of kerosene and warm newspaper.
Now in Carolina in a glade in the white pines he said aloud: There was only one shell in the Greener, for some reason smiling a little and examining the three-iron closely as if it had a breech which could be broken, revealing the missing shell. But he only saw the green Winchester Super-X with its slightly wrinkled cylinder smelling of cordite. What happened to the other shell? Nothing. There was no other shell. I broke the breech of the Greener and there was only one shell. Why? Because he reloaded after the first shot. He shot the first single. Then there was a pause. It was then that I heard the geclick of the Greener breech opening and the gecluck of its closing. But why reload with one good shell left? That was all he needed for the second single if I missed it. Because he always liked to be ready. He liked to shoot quick and on the rise. And why, after the second shot, did he reload with only one shell?