Then it had passed. It was over. The solitude did not breathe again yet; it had merely stopped watching me and was looking somewhere else, and I knew as well as if I had seen him that the buck had come to the edge of the cane and had either seen or scented us and had faded back into it. But still the solitude was not breathing, it was merely looking somewhere else. So I did not move yet, and then, a second after I realized what I was listening for, we heard it—the flat single clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle following which you did not need to wait for the horn. Then the sound of the horn itself came down the ridge and something went out of me too and I knew then that I had never really believed that I should get the shot.
“I reckon that’s all,” I said. “Walter got him.”
I had shifted the gun forward, my thumb on the safety again and I was already moving out of the thicket when Sam said:
“Wait.” And I remember how I turned upon him in the truculence of a boy’s grief over the missed chance, the missed luck.
“Wait?” I said. “What for? Don’t you hear that horn?”
And I remember how he was standing. He had not moved. He was not tall, he was rather squat and broad, and I had been growing fast for the past year or so and there was not much difference between us, yet he was looking over my head. He was looking across me and up the ridge toward the sound of Walter’s horn and he did not see me; he just knew I was there, he did not see me. And then I saw the buck. He was coming down the ridge; it was as if he were walking out of the very sound of the horn which signified a kill. He was not running; he was walking, tremendous, unhurried, slanting and tilting his head to pass his antlers through the undergrowth, and I standing there with Sam beside me now instead of behind me as he always stood and the gun which I knew I was not going to use already slanted forward and the safety already off.
Then he saw us. And still he did not begin to flee. He just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at us, then his muscles suppled, gathered. He did not even alter his course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of us, his head high and the eye not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid, and Sam standing beside me now, his right arm lifted at full length and the hand turned palm-outward, and speaking in that tongue which I had learned from listening to him and Joe Baker, while up the ridge Walter Ewell’s horn was still blowing us in to a dead buck.
“Oleh, Chief,” he said. “Grandfather.”
When we reached Walter he was standing with his back toward us, looking down at the deer. He didn’t look up at all.
“Come here, Sam,” he said quietly. When we reached him he still did not look up, standing there over a little spike buck which even last spring had still been a fawn. “He was so little I pretty near let him go,” Walter said. “But just look at the track he was making. It’s pretty near big as a cow’s. If there were any more tracks here besides the ones he is laying in, I would swear there was another buck that I never even saw.”
It was after dark when we reached the road where the surrey was waiting. It was turning cold, the rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to blow clear. Father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike had a fire going. “Did you get him?” father said.
“Got a good-sized swamp-rabbit with spike horns,” Walter said, sliding the little buck down from his mule.
“Nobody saw the big one?” father said.
“I don’t even believe Boon saw it,” Walter said. “He probably jumped a stray cow back there.”
Then Boon started cursing, swearing at Walter and at Sam for not getting the dogs to begin with and at the buck and all.
“Never mind,” father said. “He’ll be here for us next fall. Let’s get started home now.”
And it was after midnight when we let Walter out at his gate two miles from town and it was later still when we put Major de Spain and Uncle Ike down at Major de Spain’s. It was cold, the sky was clear now; there would be a heavy frost by sunup and the ground was frozen beneath the horses’ feet and beneath the wheels. I had slept a little but not much and not because of the cold. And then suddenly I was telling father, the surrey moving on toward home over the frozen ground, the horses trotting again, sensing the stable. He listened quite quietly.
“Why not?” he said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and fierce and strong for living, pleasuring. Grieving and suffering too of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you don’t have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always stop that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is nothing worse than not being alive. But you can’t be alive forever, and you always wear out life before you have completely exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And even that does not want to keep things. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they—” he lifted his hand for an instant toward the sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “—they don’t want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, knocking about out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”
“But we want them,” I said. “We still want them. There is plenty of room among us for them.”
“That’s right,” father said. “Suppose they don’t have substance, can’t cast a shadow—”
“But I saw it!” I cried. “I saw it!”
“Steady,” father said. For an instant his hand rested upon my knee. “Steady. I know you did. So did I. Sam took me in there once after I killed my first deer.”
A Point of Law
Lucas pushed his chair back from the supper table and got up. He gave the sullen and watchful face of his daughter, Nat, a single grim-veiled look. “Gwine down the road,” he said.
“Whar you gwine dis time er night?” his wife demanded. “Messin’ around up yon in de bottom all last night; gittin’ back just in time to hitch up and be in de field when de sun cotch you! You needs to be in bed if you gonter git done plantin’ fo’ Roth Edmonds—”
But then he was out of the house and did not need to hear her any longer, in the road now which ran pale and dim beneath the moonless sky of corn-planting time, between the fields where next month, when the whippoorwills began, he would plant his cotton, to the big gate from which the private road mounted among oaks to the crest where the bright lamps of his landlord’s house gleamed.
He had nothing against George Wilkins personally. If George Wilkins had just stuck to farming, to working the land which he too share-cropped from Roth Edmonds, he, Lucas, would just as soon Nat were married to George as anybody else, sooner than most of the other buck niggers in that neighborhood. But he was not going to let George Wilkins or anybody else move into the country where he had lived for forty-five years and set up in competition with him in a business which he had established and nursed carefully and discreetly for almost twenty years, ever since he built his first still, secretly and at night since nobody needed to tell him what Roth Edmonds would do if he found out about it.
He wasn’t afraid that George would cut into his established clientele, his old regular customers, with the sort of hog swill which George Wilkins had begun to manufacture three months ago and called whisky. But George Wilkins was a fool without discretion, who sooner or later would inevitably be caught, whereupon for the next ten years every bush on Roth Edmonds’ place would have a deputy sheriff squatting behind it all night long. And he, Lucas, not only wasn’t going to let his daughter become the wife of a fool, he didn’t intend to have a fool living on the same p
lace he lived on.
When he reached the big house, he didn’t mount the steps. Instead he stood on the ground, rapping on the edge of the veranda with his knuckles until Edmonds came to the door, peering into the darkness. “Who is it?” he said.
“Luke,” Lucas said.
“Come in to the light,” Edmonds said.
“I’ll talk here,” Lucas said.
Edmonds approached. Lucas was the older of the two; in fact, he had been on the place, living in the same house and working the same acres for twenty-five years when Carothers Edmonds’ father died. Lucas was at least sixty; it was known that he had one daughter with grandchildren, and he was probably more solvent than Edmonds, since he owned nothing he had to pay taxes on and keep repaired and fenced and ditched and fertilized.
Yet now he became, not the Negro which he was, but nigger—not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but standing motionless in the half-dark below the white man in an aura of timeless and impassive stupidity like a smell almost.
“George Wilkins is running a kettle in that gully behind the old west field,” he said in a voice perfectly flat and uninflectioned. “If they wants the whisky too, tell um to look under his kitchen floor.”
“What?” Edmonds said. He began to roar—a quick-tempered man at best: “Didn’t I tell you niggers what I was going to do the first time I found a drop of white mule whisky on this place?”
“George Wilkins gonter hear you too,” Lucas said. “You didn’t need to told me. I been on this place forty-five years and you ain’t never heard of me having no truck with no kind of whisky except that bottle of town whisky you and your paw always give me Christmas.”
“I know it,” Edmonds said. “You’ve got better sense, because you knew good and well what I would do if I ever caught you. And George Wilkins will wish by daylight …” Lucas stood, motionless, blinking a little, listening to the rapid clapping of the white man’s angry heels and then to the prolonged and violent grinding of the telephone crank and Edmonds shouting into the instrument: “Yes! The sheriff! I don’t care where he is! Find him!”
Lucas waited until he had finished. “I don’t reckon you need me no more,” he said.
“No,” Edmonds said in the house. “Go on home to bed. I want your south creek piece all planted by tomorrow night. You doped around in it today like you hadn’t been to bed in a week.”
Lucas returned home. He was tired. He had been up most of last night, first following Nat to see if she was going to meet George Wilkins after he had forbidden her to, then, in his secret place in the creek bottom, finishing his final run and dismantling his still and carrying it piece by piece still farther into the bottom and concealing it, reaching home only an hour before dawn.
His house was dark save for the faint glow among the ashes in the room where he and his wife slept—the fire which he had lit on the hearth when he moved into the house forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since. The room where his daughter slept was dark. He did not need to enter it to know it was empty. He had expected it to be. George Wilkins was entitled to one more evening of female companionship, because tomorrow he was going to take up residence for a long time where he would not have it.
When he got into bed his wife said, without even waking: “Whar you been? Wawkin’ de roads all night wid de ground cryin’ to git planted—” Then she stopped talking without waking either, and sometime later he waked.
It was after midnight; he lay beneath the quilt on the shuck mattress, not triumphant, not vindictive. It would be happening about now. He knew how they did it—the white sheriff and revenue officers and deputies creeping up through the bushes with a drawn pistol or two, surrounding the still and sniffing like hunting dogs at every stump and disfiguration of earth until every jug and keg was found and carried back to where the car waited; maybe they would even take a sup or two to ward off the night’s chill, before returning to the still to squat there until George Wilkins walked innocently in.
Maybe it will be a lesson to George Wilkins about whose daughter to fool with next time, he thought.
Then his wife was leaning over the bed, shaking him and screaming. It was just after dawn. In his shirt and drawers he ran behind her, out onto the back porch. Sitting on the ground was George Wilkins’ patched and battered still; on the porch itself was an assortment of fruit jars and stoneware jugs and a keg or so and one rusted five-gallon oilcan which, to Lucas’ horrified and still sleep-dulled eyes, appeared capable of holding enough liquid to fill a ten-foot horse trough. He could even see it in the glass jars—a pale, colorless fluid in which still floated the shredded corn-husks which George Wilkins’ tenth-hand still had not removed.
“Whar was Nat last night?” he cried, shaking his wife by the shoulder. “Whar was Nat, old woman?”
“She lef’ right behind you!” his wife cried. “She followed you! Didn’t you know it?”
“I knows it now,” Luke said. “Git the ax!” he said. “Bust it! We ain’t got time to git it away.” But they didn’t have time for that either. It was the sheriff himself, followed by a deputy, who came around the corner of the house.
“Dammit, Luke,” the sheriff said, “I thought you had better sense than this.”
“That ain’t none of mine,” Lucas said. “You knows it ain’t. George Wilkins—”
“Never you mind about George Wilkins,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got him too. He’s out there in the car, with that girl of yours. Go get your pants on. We’re going to town.”
Two hours later he was in the commissioner’s office in the federal courthouse in Jefferson, inscrutable of face, blinking a little, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him and to the voices of the white men:
“Confound it, Carothers,” the commissioner said, “what kind of Senegambian Montague and Capulet business is this?”
“Ask them!” Edmonds said violently. “Wilkins and that girl of Luke’s want to get married. Luke won’t hear of it, for some reason—only I seem to be finding out now why. So last night Luke came to the house and told me Wilkins was running a still on my land because he knew damn’ well what I would do because I have been telling every nigger on my place for years just what I would do the first time I caught one drop of that damn’ wildcat whisky on my place—”
“And we got Mr. Roth’s telephone message”—it was one of the deputies now—a plump, voluble man muddy about the lower legs and a little strained and weary in the face—“and we went out there and Mr. Roth told us where to look. But there ain’t no still in the gully where he said, so we set down and thought about just where would we hide a still if we was one of Mr. Roth’s niggers, and we went and looked there and sure enough after a while there it was, all took to pieces and hid careful and neat as you could want, in a brier brake in the creek bottom. Only it’s getting toward daylight by that time, so we decide to come on back to George Wilkins’ house and look under his kitchen floor like Mr. Roth said and then have a little talk with George.
“We get there about daybreak and what do we see but George and that gal legging it up the hill toward Luke’s house with a gallon jug in each hand, only George busted the jugs on a root before we could catch them. Then Luke’s wife starts to yelling in the house and we run around to the back and there is another still setting in Luke’s back yard and about forty gallons of evidence stacked on his back porch like he was fixing to hold a auction sale, and Luke standing there in his drawers and shirttail hollering, ‘Git the ax and bust it! Git the ax and bust it!’ ”
“But who do you charge?” the commissioner said. “You went out there to catch George, but all your evidence is against Luke.”
“There was two stills,” the deputy said. “And George and that gal both say Luke has been making and selling whisky right there in Mr. Roth’s back yard for twenty years.” Blinking, Lucas found Edmonds glaring at him, not in reproach and no longer in surprise, but in grim and furious outrage. Then, without even moving his
eyes and with no change in his face he was no longer looking at Edmonds, but blinking quietly, listening to George Wilkins breathing hard beside him like one in profound slumber, and to the voices:
“But you can’t make his own daughter testify against him.”
“George can though,” the deputy said. “George ain’t no kin to him. Not to mention being in a fix where George has got to think of something good to say and think of it quick.”
“Let the court settle all that, Tom,” the sheriff said. “I was up all last night and I haven’t even had my breakfast yet. I’ve brought you a prisoner and thirty or forty gallons of evidence and two witnesses. Let’s get done with this.”
“I think you’ve brought two prisoners,” the commissioner said. He began to write on the paper before him. Lucas watched the moving hand, blinking. “I’m going to commit them both. George can testify against Luke, if he wants to. And that girl can testify against George. She’s no kin to him, too.”
Lucas could have paid both his and George’s bonds without even altering the number of figures in his bank balance. After Edmonds had paid for the bonds, they returned to his car. George drove now, with Nat beside him in the front seat, huddled down into the corner of it. When the car stopped at the gate seventeen miles later, she sprang out, still without looking at Lucas, and ran on up the road toward his house. They drove on to the stable, where George got out too. His hat was still raked above his right ear, but his sepia face was not full of teeth as it usually was. “Go on and get your mule,” Edmonds said. Then he looked at Lucas. “What are you waiting on?”
“I thought you were fixing to say something,” Lucas said. “So a man’s kinfolks can’t tell on him in court?”