The next thing I was in the Emery parlor, a plain room with antlers on the wall and a great painting of a waterfall so huge that the little tourists at its base seemed to cower at its majesty. I reeked of wood smoke. The stairs to the second floor went up at a steep angle like a ladder. The carpet runner was just nailed to the risers. There were a lot of chairs, no two alike. Bill, Buck, and Dalton were in three of these chairs and their father was standing over close to me where I was stretched out on the lumpy divan. Mr. Emery was little and hard and he had already cut a switch. He may very well have used it before I woke up, because the three looked like the most ordinary schoolboys you could picture. I was even scared of their old man.
I tried to tell from the way we walked as we went outside what he thought of me, but all I knew was that he was thinking, as we used to say, “in his mind.” I caught a look of the boys watching. “They’re not like you, are they,” said Mr. Emery, almost to himself.
“No,” I said, barely touching the word.
“They have to go and show off. I’m out of work, and the boys act like they wasn’t all there.”
I looked at the house. It seemed locked up like a dungeon.
“You’ll always have something you can do,” said Mr. Emery. He had a way of holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and curling it in toward the palm of his hand. “My boys will go where they’re kicked. Anyway, why don’t you get out of here where I don’t have to look at you. I won’t tell nobody you tried to burn us out.”
“Thank you,” I said.
TWO HOURS TO KILL
It was about a mile by car to the corrals and kennels. The trees were as tall as the pines in the North, maybe taller. But there was Spanish moss on them and on the cable guys that held up the telephone poles going along the road and turning up toward the house. Off to the north there were strips of lespedeza and partridge peas and some knocked-down field corn with crows flocking in it, tilting wedges of black in the autumn light. The weather that fall afternoon was still and warm, though the sun had the muted feeling of late in the year.
John Ray was waiting at the side of the corrals, a walking horse tied to an oak limb where he stood. He had called Jack at the dealership and given him the news of his mother. Jack had asked John Ray to get him a horse.
“I know you’re shocked at me,” Jack said, “but they can’t get anyone out here for two hours, and I’m just not going to go up to that house.”
John Ray always looked starchy in his khaki working clothes but he twisted around in them in a self-deprecatory way, as if to say that it was all one to him. There was a big bell on the side of the tack shed, and Jack asked him to ring it when the ambulance came.
“What did you find when you went up there?” Jack asked quietly.
“It wasn’t no answer.”
“So you just let yourself in?”
John Ray worked the bill of his cap in his fingers. “Yes, sir.”
“Seem to go quietly?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“In bed?”
“No, off in the side room there.”
Jack looked over at the kennels. Pointers were jumping up and down the chain-link sides of it and barking. “Get Tess and Night for me, John, and I’ll saddle up.”
Jack went into the tack shed and pulled down an old worn trooper saddle with rings on it to tie canteens and check cords. There was a waterproof tied to it that hung down behind the stirrups like a shroud; dust had collected in the folds. Jack saddled the horse and put on its bridle. It was a great big, dignified-looking shooting horse with a roached mane and a long homely head like you saw in old cavalry pictures, a smooth-mouthed bay that had been branded by four or five owners. Jack thought that when the courts were done with the estate, when his sisters came down from Cincinnatti and his brother from Anchorage, this horse might collect some more brands.
John Ray brought Tess and Night on a forked check cord. The two lunged and stretched out on their hind legs as John Ray helped Jack tie the end of the check cord behind the saddle. The two dogs then jumped out in front of the horse at the end of the rope while Jack mounted and started down the road behind them. The dogs dug in and seemed to strive to tow the horse, who sauntered along, absorbing the jerks as he had done with hundreds of other broke and unbroke bird dogs in the course of acquiring the four or five brands on his hip.
Jack went about a half mile off the end of the road. There was an overgrown sorghum field that practically abutted a stand of longleaf pine, and beyond that it was all broken up little fields, some clearcut; and where it had grown brushy, the hedgerows were laced up shut with vines and brambles of kudzu and wild honeysuckle. It was still too green and early. Jack normally waited until it had frozen and the frost-killed foliage had dried in the cold, because the dogs couldn’t smell as well when it lay on the ground and rotted.
Jack got down off the horse, which stood empty-saddled holding the straining dogs. He walked down the check cord and whoaed the two dogs, vaulting at the end of the rope toward the quail fields beyond. “Whoa, Tess,” he said. “Whoa-up now, Night.” The dogs stood on all fours staring ahead and, except for the trembling that shook them, did not move when Jack unsnapped their shackles. He made them stand while he coiled the check cord carefully and walked back to the horse and tied the coil to the back of the saddle. They continued to stand while he remounted and sat for a long moment looking down at the waiting dogs and finally said, in a long-drawn-out utterance, “All right, now.”
The dogs shot off on separate but somehow communicating angles, tails popping, heads high, as they ran through a small field of partridge peas and wire grass and shoemaker berries. They used up this field and cracked through a tall hedge, obliging Jack to canter along after them, losing them at the hedge and picking them up again in the next field, his shotgun slapping up under his left knee and coming out the far side with a strand of honeysuckle trailing from the trigger guard.
A big runoff ditch came up in the red soil, a place Jack normally rode out around, but he took it at a canter today and vaulted over it, seeing the big dark channel fly under him as he sailed into the rough growth. Jack thought about that ditch and wondered if he would jump it coming back. I’ll jump it at great speed, he concluded.
When he came into the next field, the dogs were on point, Tess forward and Night behind at an angle, honoring. When Jack reined the bay past the low sun, the light flared red at the edge of the horse’s nostrils. He stopped and got down, pulling the double-barreled gun from its scabbard, breaking and loading it while he kept one eye on the dogs. Night catwalked a couple of steps, and Jack made a low sound of disapproval in his throat and the dog stopped. Jack walked past the dogs, watching straight ahead for the covey rise. He presumed the birds were on the little elevation of ground under the old pines.
There were no birds. The dogs were still on point, and Jack pulled off his hat to run his hand across his forehead. He didn’t understand it. He went back and stood next to Tess and tried to figure out what she was pointing. Both dogs were quick to honor any shape that might be another dog on point. He got down on one knee and saw the gravestones. Bird dogs back any white shape, and Tess and Night were absorbed in distant knowledge. Jack shouted at them and gestured harshly with the gun. “Get out!” he shouted, and the dogs cowered off and watched him. He got back on the horse and pointed out ahead. The dogs resumed, a little slow at first.