“Some of them,” I said.
“I heard,” she said, “that you were up Lonesome Hollow and came driving down the road past the Williams place this morning. What in the world would you be doing there?”
Was there anything, I wondered, that she didn’t know about, that all Pilot Knob didn’t know about? Better than tribal drums, more efficient than radio, the news went thrumming through the community—every bit of gossip, every supposition.
“I turned up the road on impulse,” I told her, lying very feebly. “When I was a boy, I went squirrel hunting up there sometimes in the fall.”
She looked at me suspiciously, but she didn’t follow up the reason for my being there. “Maybe it’s all right in daylight,” she declared, “but I wouldn’t, for all the money in the world, go up there after dark.” She leaned closer to me and her braying voice sank to a scratchy whisper. “The place is haunted,” she said, “by a pack of dogs, if you want to call them dogs. They come baying down across the hills, snarling and yapping, and when they go past there is a cold wind going with them. It’s enough to freeze your soul …”
“You’ve heard these dogs?” I asked.
“Heared them? On many a night I’ve heared them, howling down the hills, but I’ve never been that close to them that I’ve felt the wind. Nettie Campbell told me. You remember Nettie Campbell?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, of course you wouldn’t. She was Nettie Graham before she married Andy Campbell. They lived at the end of the road up Lonesome Hollow. The house is deserted now. Just walked away and left. Them dogs drove them off. Maybe you saw it—saw the house, I mean.”
I nodded, not too positively, for I’d not seen the house. I’d only heard of it from Lowizie Smith the night before.
“There are strange things in these hills,” said Linda Bailey. “Things a body, in his right mind, would not believe. It comes, I suppose, from being such wild country. A lot of other places are all settled down, with not a tree left standing and all the land in fields. But this is still wild country. I guess it will always be.”
The schoolroom was beginning to fill up now and I saw George Duncan making his way through the crowd toward me. I stood up to greet him and held out my hand.
“I hear you got settled in all right,” he said. “I knew you’d like the place. I phoned Streeter and told him to look after you. He said you were out fishing. Catch anything worthwhile?”
“A couple of bass,” I told him. “I’ll do better once I get to know the river.”
“I think the program is about to start,” he said. “I’ll see you later on. There are a lot of people here you should say hello to.”
The program got underway. The teacher, Kathy Adams, played the old delapidated organ and different groups of kids came up and sang some songs and others spoke their pieces and a bunch of eighth grade pupils put on a little play that Kathy Adams proudly announced they had worked out themselves.
It all, in its stumbling way, was entirely delightful and I sat there remembering when I had gone to school in this very building and had taken part in exactly such a program. I tried to remember the names of some of the teachers I had had and it was only toward the end of the program that I remembered one of them had been named Miss Stein, a strange, angular, flighty person with an abundance of red hair and most easily upset by some of the pranks we were always thinking up. I wondered where Miss Stein might be this very evening and how life had treated her. Better, I hoped, than some of us kids had treated her when we had gone to school.
Linda Bailey tugged at my jacket sleeve and spoke in a grating whisper. “Them kids are good, ain’t they?”
I nodded that they were.
“This Miss Adams is a right good teacher,” Linda Bailey whispered. “I’m afraid that she won’t stay here long. This little school of ours can’t expect to keep someone as good as her.”
Then the program was over and George Duncan came pushing through the crowd and took me in tow and began to introduce me to some other people. Some of them I remembered and some of them I didn’t, but they seemed to remember me, so I pretended that I did.
But right in the middle of it Miss Adams was standing up on the little platform at the front of the room and calling to George Duncan, “You forgot,” she told him, “or are you pretending to, in hopes you’ll get out of it? But you promised to be our auctioneer tonight.”
George protested, but I could see that he was pleased. One could see with only half an eye that George Duncan was an important person in Pilot Knob. He owned the general store and was the postmaster and a member of the school board and he could turn his hand to many other little civic chores, like auctioneering the baskets at a basket social. He was the man that Pilot Knob always turned to when they needed something done.
So he went up to the platform and turned to the table that was stacked with decorated baskets and boxes and picked one of them up for the crowd to look at. But before he started in on his auctioneering, he made a little speech.
“All of you know,” he said, “what this is all about. The proceeds from this basket social will be used to buy new books for the school library, so you will have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever you spend here will be used to a good purpose. You aren’t just buying the basket and the privilege of eating with the lady whose name you find inside it; you also are contributing to a very praiseworthy public cause. So I’ll ask you fellows out there to loosen up a bit and spend some of that money that is sagging down your pockets.”
He hoisted the basket that he held. “Now here,” he said, “is the kind of basket that I like to offer. I tell you, fellows, this one has a hefty feel to it. There’s a lot of good eating packed into it and the way it’s decorated and all, I’d say the lady who put it up probably paid as much attention to what went into it as how it looks outside. And it might interest you to know that I seem to catch a whiff of good fried chicken.”
“Now,” he asked, “what am I bid?”
“A dollar,” said someone, and someone else immediately made it two and then from the back of the room came a bid of two and a half.
“Two dollars and a half,” said George Duncan in aggrieved surprise. “Are you boys going to stop at two and a half? Why, if you were to buy this basket by the pound, that would be dirt cheap. Now do I hear …”
Someone bid three dollars and George worked it up from there, fifty cents and a quarter at a time, to four seventy-five and finally knocked it down for that.
I looked about the crowd. They were a group of friendly folks and they were having a good time. They were spending an evening with their neighbors and were comfortable with them. Right now _they were intent upon the selling of the baskets, but later on there would be time for talk and there would be little weighty talk, I knew. They’d talk about the crops, the fishing, the new road that had been talked about for twenty years or more but had never come about and now was being talked about again, of the latest scandal (for there always was a scandal of some sort, although often of the very mildest kind), of the sermon the minister had preached last Sunday, of the old gentleman very newly dead and beloved by all of them. They’d talk of many things and then they’d go home through the softness of the late spring evening and they’d have their little worries and their neighborhood concerns, but there would be none of them weighed down by huge official worries. And it was good, I told myself, to be in a place where there were no overpowering and dark official worries.
I felt someone tugging at my sleeve and looked in the direction of the tugging and there was Linda Bailey.
“You’d ought to bid on that one,” she whispered at me. “That one belongs to the preacher’s daughter. She’s a pretty thing. You’d enjoy meeting her.”
“How do you know,” I asked, “that it’s the preacher’s daughter’s basket?”
“I just know,” she said. “Go ahead and bid.”
It was up to three dollars and I said three dollars and a half and immediately,
from across the room, came a bid for four. I looked where the bid had come from and there, standing, ranged with their backs against the wall, were three young men, in their early twenties. When I looked at them I found that all three were looking at me and it seemed to me that they were sneering at me in a very heavy-handed way.
The tug came at my sleeve again. “Go ahead and bid,” urged Linda Bailey. “It’s them Ballard boys and the other one’s a Williams. They are terrible louts. Nancy will just die if any of the three of them should bid in her basket.”
“Four fifty,” I said, unthinking, and, up on the platform George Duncan said, “I have four fifty. Who will make it five?” He turned toward the three ranged along the wall and one of them said five. “Now I have five,” sang George. “Will someone make it six?” He was looking straight at me and I shook my head, so he sold it for the five.
“Why did you do that?” Linda Bailey raged at me in her neighing whisper. “You could have kept on bidding.”
“Not on your life,” I told her. “I’m not going to come into this town and the first night I am here make it tough for some young sprout to buy the basket that he wants. His girl might be involved. She might have told him beforehand how to identify her basket.”
“But Nancy’s not his girl,” said Linda Bailey, much disgusted at me. “Nancy hasn’t got a fellow. She’ll be mortified.”
“You said that they were Ballards. Aren’t they the people who live on our old home farm?”
“That they are,” she said. “And the old folks are nice enough. But them two boys of theirs! They are holy terrors. All the girls are scared of them. They go to dances all the time and they are filthy-mouthed and do a lot of drinking.”
I looked across the room and the three still were watching me, with triumphant leers pasted on their faces. I was a stranger to the town and they had bluffed me out, they had overbid me. It was silly on the face of it, of course, but in a little place like this small triumphs and small insults, because of the lack of any other kind, are often magnified.
Christ, I thought, why did I have to run into this Bailey woman? She’d always been bad news and she hadn’t changed. She was a meddler and a busybody and there was no good in her.
The baskets were going rapidly and only a few of them were left. George was getting tired and the bidding had slowed down. I told myself that perhaps I should buy a basket, to demonstrate, if nothing else, that I was no stranger, but was a man, instead, who had come back to Pilot Knob and meant to stay awhile.
I looked around and there was no sign of Linda Bailey. More than likely she was sore at me and had stalked away. Thinking of her, I felt a little flare of anger. What right had she to demand that I protect the minister’s daughter, Nancy, against the more than likely innocent designs—or at least ineffectual, if not innocent designs—of some loutish farm boy.
There were only three baskets left now and George picked up one of them. It was only half the size some of the others had been and it was not overdecorated. Holding it up, he began his auction singsong.
There were two or three bids and they got it up to three fifty and I made it four.
Someone over against the wall said five and I glanced in that direction and the three were grinning at me—grinning, it seemed to me, with all the clownish malice in the world.
“Make it six,” I said.
“Seven,” said the middle one of the trio.
“I have seven,” said George, somewhat aghast, for this was the highest any bid had run that night. “Do I hear seven and a half or does someone want to make it eight?”
I hesitated for a moment. I was certain that the first few bids had not come from any of the three against the wall. They had only entered the bidding after I had made my bid. They were, I was certain, deliberately baiting me and I was sure, as well, that everyone in the room knew what they were up to.
“Eight?” asked George, still looking at me. “Do I hear an eight?”
“Not eight,” I told him. “Let us make it ten.”
George gulped. “Ten!” he cried. “Do I hear eleven?”
He switched his eyes to the three against the wall. They glared back at him.
“Eleven,” he said. “It takes eleven. No raise smaller than a dollar. Do I hear eleven?”
He didn’t hear eleven.
When I went to the front of the room to pay the auction clerk and to get the basket, I glanced at the wall. The three were no longer there.
Standing to one side, I opened the basket and the name on the slip of paper placed atop the lunch was that of Kathy Adams.
8
The first lilacs were coming out and in the cool, damp evening they had filled the air with a faint suggestion of that fragrance which, in the weeks to come, would hang a heavy perfume along all the streets and footpaths of this little town. A wind, blowing up the hollow from the river, set the suspended street lights at the intersections swinging and the light and shadow on the ground went bouncing back and forth.
“I’m glad that it is over,” Kathy Adams said. “The program, I mean, and the school year too. But I’ll be coming back in September.”
I looked down at the girl walking at my side and she was, it seemed to me; an entirely different person than the one I’d seen that morning in the store. She had done something to her hair and the schoolteacherish look of it was gone and she’d put away her glasses. Protective coloration, I wondered—the way she’d looked that morning, a deliberate effort to make herself appear the kind of teacher who would gain acceptance in this community. And it was a shame, I told myself. Given half a chance, she was a pretty girl.
“You said you’ll be back,” I said. “Where will you spend the summer?”
“Gettysburg,” she said.
“Gettysburg?”
“Gettysburg, P.A.,” she told me. “I was born there and my family still is there. I go back each summer.”
“I was there just a few days ago,” I said. “I stopped on my way here. Spent two full days, wandering the battlefield and wondering what it had all been like that time more than a hundred years ago.”
“You’d never been there before?”
“Once before. Many years ago. When I first went to Washington as a cub reporter. I took one of the bus trips. It was not too satisfactory. I’ve always wanted to be there on my own, to take my time and see what I wanted to see, to poke into all the corners and to stand and look as long as I wished to stand and look.”
“You had a good time, then?”
“Yes, two days of living in the past. And trying to imagine.”
She said, “We’ve lived with it so long, of course, that it’s become commonplace with us. We have pride in it, naturally, and a deep interest in it, but it’s the tourists who get the most out of it. They come to it fresh and eager and they see it, perhaps, with different eyes than we do.”
“That may be right,” I said, although I didn’t think so.
“But Washington,” she said. “There is a place I love. Especially the White House. It fascinates me. I could stand for hours outside that big iron fence and just stare at it.”
“You,” I said, “and millions of other people. There are always people walking up and down the fence, going slow and looking.”
“It’s the squirrels I like,” she told me. “Those cheeky White House squirrels that come up to the fence and beg and sometimes come right out on the sidewalk and sniff around your feet, then sit up, with their little paws dangling on their chests, looking at you with their beady little eyes.”
I laughed, remembering the squirrels. “They’re the ones,” I said, “who have it made.”
“You sound as if you’re envious.”
“I could be that,” I admitted. “The squirrel, I should imagine, has a fairly simple life, while our human life has become so complex that it is never simple. We’ve made a terrible mess of things. Maybe no worse now than it has ever been, but the point is that it’s not getting any better. It’s maybe getting w
orse.”
“You’re going to put some of that into your book?”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Oh,” she said, “everybody knows that you came back to write a book. Did they simply guess or did you tell someone?”
“I suppose that I told George.”
“That was enough,” she said. “All you have to do is mention anything at all to a single person. Within three hours, flat, everyone in town knows exactly what you said. Before noon tomorrow everyone will know that you walked me home and paid ten dollars for my basket. Whatever possessed you to make a bid like that?”
“It wasn’t showing off,” I told her. “I suppose some people will think that and I am sorry for it. I suppose I shouldn’t have done it, but there were those three louts over against the wall …”
She nodded. “I know what you mean. The two Ballard boys and the Williams kid. But you shouldn’t mind them. You were fair game to them. New and from a city. They simply had to show you …”
“Well, I showed them,” I said, “and I suppose it was just as childish of me as it was of them. And with less excuse, for I should know better.”
“How long do you plan to stay?” she asked.
I grinned at her. “I’ll still be here when you get back in September …”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know you didn’t. But the book will take awhile. I’m not going to rush it. I’m going to take my time and do the best job of which I’m capable. And I have to catch up with a lot of fishing. Fishing I’ve been dreaming about all these years. Maybe some hunting in the fall. I imagine this might be a good place for ducks.”
“I think it is,” she said. “There are a lot of local folks who hunt them every fall and all you hear for weeks is when the northern flight will start coming through.”
And that would be the way of it, I knew. That was the lure and the pull of a place like Pilot Knob—the comfortable feeling that you knew what other people were thinking and were able to join with them in a comfortable sort of talk, to sit around the spittle-scarred stove in the store and talk about when the northern flight would be coming through, or about how the fish had started to bite down in Proctor’s Slough, or how the last rain had helped the corn or how the violent storm of the night before had put down all the oats and barley. There had been a chair around that stove, I remembered, for my father—a chair held at once by right and privilege. I wondered, as I walked through the lilac-haunted evening, if there’d be a chair for me.