Hill Girl.

by Charles Williams.

One

I stopped the Ford on a bench halfway down a long, gentle hill and got out and stretched and felt suddenly warm outside and inside; the morning sun was climbing higher now, and I was almost home. It was October and the colors were running down the hillsides and along the little creek bottoms like a fire that couldn't make up its mind where it wanted to go.

There had been a light frost and now all that was left of it was where the shadows still lay a little dark and cool behind the old fence posts and in the burrow pit beside the dry red clay and dust of the road. The dewberry vines didn't have any leaves now and their runners were a dead tangle, white-rimmed with frost in the shade and shiny and black and wet where the sun had struck them.

Part of the big field on the left had been in cotton that year, and I could look down the rows for a long way until they curved around, following the contour of the slope and the terrace rows. The stalks were dead now, and bare, and the sharp bolls empty, and they were all wet with the melted frost. It was the old Eilers place and I wondered idly if Sam Harley were still farming it.

The rest of the field had lain fallow for years and was grown up in weeds and sa.s.safras bushes and there were persimmon sprouts waist-high, and now, as I was watching it, I saw a bird dog casting through it, coming up the hill toward the road. He was still a long way off, but was easy to see, a big black-and-white pointer, and he was beautiful to watch, quartering up the field in long casts with his head high, and the sight of him made me homesick and happy at the same time and I hated the years I had been away.

Soon I saw the man behind him, and then the dog froze into a beautiful point. The man came up,, with the shotgun held ready, and went in, kicking at the weeds, and the birds came boiling up with that sudden roar, as they always did, the sound carrying across the stillness of the morning to me as if they were only fifty yards away. The man's gun came up and he shot, all with one fluid motion, and I saw one bird collapse and fold up in the air. He shot again and missed. The covey scattered, and almost mechanically I marked a pair of them down in a tangle of vines and sa.s.safras near the road.

The man came on up the slope toward the road and I began to think there was something vaguely familiar in his big figure and the long, slouching walk. He was dressed in a bleached-out blue shirt, the worn, faded coat of an old blue serge suit, and patched overalls that were tucked into knee-high laced boots. Over his shoulder was the strap of one of those little canvas bags we used to carry our books to school in. When he was close enough to me so I could see his face I saw it was Sam Harley, and I walked across the road and climbed through the rusty wire of the fence to meet him. He hadn't changed much that I could see, and then I grinned suddenly to myself and wondered why I had expected some great change in a period of two years in a man who was past forty. He still had the slightly flat nose and high cheekbones and the very shiny black eyes that gave his face a suggestion of primitive strength.

I waved at him and said, "h.e.l.lo. How's hunting?"

"Howdy," he replied, politely enough, but with no great warmth or a great deal of interest, and I could see his black eyes faintly suspicious under the brim of the shapeless old felt hat he wore. It was obvious he didn't recognize me.

"I'm Bob Crane," I said, and held out my hand. Then recognition came into his eyes and he grinned widely, exposing well-shaped but darkly tobacco-stained teeth, shifted the gun to the crook of his left arm, and shook my hand warmly.

"I'd never a' knowed you, Bob. You've sh.o.r.e growed. Le's see, how long's it been since I seen you?"

"About two years, I think."

He continued to grin at me happily, and at the same time just a trifle self-consciously, with the lack of poise so characteristic of the people who live off in the bottoms and rarely meet people other than the neighbors they have known all their lives.

"Been a little over two years, I reckon," he went on, feeling under some compulsion to be saying something. "You recollect the syrup-makin' down at Sully's an' we all went possum huntin' afterward? That was two years ago about the first of the month."

"I guess you're right," I agreed, looking about for the dog and wishing he would come in. Pointers are a weakness of mine. Then I saw him, coming back down the slope.

"Is that old Buck?" I asked.

"Yeah," he replied. "Belle's dead. Died last spring. She was awful old."

"Two of your birds went down in that clump over there. I marked them down just after you shot. In there, Buck!"

I waved the dog in toward the vines, which were about sixty or seventy yards away, up the hill and near the road. He wheeled and started in and then froze, beautifully, in the sunlight, with his tail straight and rigid, one foot off the ground and his head swung around to the right.

I grinned at Sam and there was a happy pride in his eyes as he smiled back at me. We both laughed then, and I said, with grave understatement, "That's a pretty good dog, Sam. I'll give you twenty-five dollars for him."

He pretended to consider the offer seriously, pulling off his old greenish-black hat and scratching his head slowly, and then replied, "Well, Bob, I don't rightly see how I could let him go for that. Him bein' so well trained and all."

I shook my head in affected disbelief that this generous offer had been refused. I knew, of course, that he wouldn't have taken five hundred for the dog, even though the sum probably represented as much as he made off the Eilers place in a year. You love hunting dogs, or you don't.

"You'd better get in there." I waved toward Buck. "He's not going to hold it all day."

"Now, Bob, you know him better'n that." He smiled, trying to keep some of the pride out of his voice because of an ingrained reluctance to appear boastful before someone outside his immediate circle. After all, I lived in town.

"Here." He handed me the gun. Perhaps he had seen me eying it hungrily.

I started to protest, but then I had it in my hand and I was going toward Buck. I made a lot of noise as I kicked in through the old sandburs and vines and high gra.s.s, and then one of the birds rocketed out right from under my feet, twisting around toward the right and downhill, and I swung around toward him and the gun caught him and pa.s.sed slightly and I shot and missed. I never could hit a bird going to the right. I don't know why.

When I shot, the other one got up, fifteen yards ahead of me, the roar of his beating wings seeming almost a continuation of the noise of the gun, and I swung back and he was going away and climbing, a shot I very seldom miss, and I let go with the left barrel and he seemed to stop in the air as though there had been a string on him and I had pulled it back. And there was that old sharp thrill in it, that feeling that is part fierce exultation and part a sudden pang of remorse or something like it. A bob-white quail is a gallant little bundle of dynamite and no one should want to kill one, but you do, and in that frozen second when he stops in the air and you feel the pride of a clean kill there is also that sharp stab that is almost regret and then it is gone and there is only pride.

For the first time since they had helped me up off the canvas there in Jersey City, some of the bitterness and the galling taste of defeat had begun to wear off. This was home and I was glad I was back.

I broke the gun and took out the two empties and before I threw them down I held them up to my nose and smelled the burned powder. I took the bird from Buck and patted him on the head and he seemed to feel all right then about giving it to me instead of going all the way back to Sam with it.

I gave it to Sam and he dropped it into the canvas bag hanging from his shoulder.

"That was good shootin', Bob, considerin' you ain't done none in a couple of years," he said. Then he added hesitantly, as though he didn't want to hurt my feelings, "But yore brother'd a' got 'em both."

I nodded, remembering that Lee and Sam had hunted a lot together. "Lee's a natural," I agreed. "It's hard for him to miss."

"By the way, I seen him last Sat'day."

"You did?" I said. "How was he?"

"Oh, he looked fine. He was out to the house." He didn't say any more, as if he took it for granted I knew what Lee had been out there for. I did. Sam ran a still down in the Black Creek bottoms behind his house. I used to know where it was when I was a kid and living with my grandfather on his place across the other side of the bottom, but I had never advertised the fact. It wasn't the kind of knowledge that was considered good for you. "I was sorry to hear about yore daddy, Bob," he said after a while. The Major had been dead about six months now.

"Why?" I asked. "Didn't he ever screw you out of anything?"

Sam flushed and looked away in embarra.s.sment and seemed to be trying to think of something to change the subject.

"Ought to be able to go c.o.o.n hunting pretty soon, Sam," I said. "How about if I come out some night and we try the bottom down below the house?"

"Why, that'd be fine. Any night you can make it, just let me know."

I thanked him for letting me shoot the bird and crawled back through the fence and got into the Ford. I rolled on down the grade and clattered over the loose flooring of the little bridge over the creek at the bottom of the hill. The thought of seeing Lee and Mary again made the morning perfect, and I grinned. There wasn't anybody like him. Maybe he was wild, but then lots of young bucks like him were, and he would settle down. It was funny, too, that when I got to thinking of some of the things he had done it always seemed as if he were the younger brother. As a matter of fact, he was nearly four years older than I. He was almost twenty-six.

When we were growing up, though, and in high school, he had always been an older brother, even though he got into more trouble than I did. He had been a good buffer between the Major and me, and I knew that if it hadn't been for Lee I would have left home long before I did. It wasn't that he fought my battles for me; with the Major I fought my own battles. It was more that Lee didn't have to fight. He knew how to get along with people, knew that charm would get you things from them that obstinacy never could.

The troubles he got into were spectacular. When he was seventeen and still a junior in high school he had run away with a married woman.

Two

It was around ten as I drove slowly up South Street toward the square. The town was quiet and the square almost deserted. It was Friday. Tomorrow the place would be full of Fords parked fender to fender and farmers and their wives would be standing in bunches around the sidewalks and going in and out of the stores, but right now the whole town seemed to drowse under the washed blue of the sky, soaking up the warmth of the sun.

I braked to a standstill at the stop line where South Street opens into the square and looked up at the old courthouse, red and dusty and ugly, with white bird droppings spattering its walls, and swallows and sparrows circling around high up under its ornate eaves.

Swinging through the right-hand side of the square, I turned and went out North Elm, where the trees almost met over the street like a tunnel and the houses were friendly old landmarks and the lawns were wide and well kept. Eight blocks out I turned off the street to the left in the middle of the block onto the graveled driveway.

Nearly all the rest of the houses along the street were close to the sidewalks on small lots and they had grown up there long after the old Crane house was built. It sat back in the far corner of a big sloping lot half as big as a city block, with a driveway going back to it and two enormous oaks in front, and a hedge along the sidewalk.

It was one of the ugliest houses it would be possible to imagine. Built around 1910, it had all the gingerbread and scrollwork and hideousness of its time, and its last coat of white paint was now about six years old and peeling in places. My grandfather, who was a salty old gentleman and possessed of a caustic wit that was widely respected, referred to it invariably as "that architectural abortion." It was built by the Major while he was still a young man.

At the housewarming he had asked my grandfather, so the story goes, what he thought of the parlor.

"I don't know why, son," the old man is said to have answered, "but I keep expecting a woman to come in and say that the girls will be down in a minute."

I got out and went up the walk under the big oaks, feeling warmly happy about it and wondering why, for there had never been much happiness attached to the old pile when I was growing up.

I banged the big bra.s.s knocker and a Negro girl came in a minute. "Is Mrs. Crane in?" I said. "Tell her I've got a search warrant."

Her eyes opened wide, showing a lot of white, and she went back down the dark hallway. I stepped inside and saw it hadn't changed much; there was the same old milky mirror by the hat-rack and the hard-bottomed bench and the straw carpeting.

From the living room at the end of the hall came the clicking of spike heels and then she was in the doorway.

"h.e.l.lo, Mary," I said.

She came down the hall toward me, walking fast, with that long-legged gracefulness I remembered so well, and the red-haired loveliness of her gave me the same old feeling of warmth. I was never really in love with Mary, I guess. As accurately as I can describe it, the feeling she always gave me when I saw her was one of pride that she was a friend of mine and liked me.

She came close to me and I took both her hands. "h.e.l.lo, you big horse," she said. "Don't step on me."

"I'm glad to see you, Mary," I said.

"Aren't you going to kiss me?" she demanded. "Don't just stand there like a stadium or something and grin at me."

I kissed her lightly on the cheek and was conscious of the amus.e.m.e.nt in the cool green eyes so close to mine.

"Well," she said, "that'll put me in my place, all right. Middle-aged housewife."

She was twenty-three and she and Lee had been married a little less than a year. "You're looking great," I said. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, Bob. Come on back to the kitchen and tell me about yourself. Rose just made some coffee."

We went through the living room, where a small fire was burning in the big fireplace, and on back to the kitchen and sat down at the table.

"Darn it, Bob, but I'm glad to see you. It's a shame you just missed Lee. He left a little while ago and won't be back for an hour or two. Tell me about yourself. You're home for good this time, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad you're through college. But I'll always hate the way you had to go."

I stirred my coffee and broke off a piece of the coffee cake Rose had put on the table. "Why? It suited me."

She leaned back and looked at me and sighed, shaking her head gently. "I guess it did, at that. It's a wonder you didn't turn professional like all the rest of the mastodons."

I didn't tell her about turning pro fighter and the whipping I'd taken. It was something I'd rather forget. I was good enough in intercollegiate boxing to begin to get the impression I was good, but it didn't take me long to find out I was slow and too easy to hit, and when those heavies can get to you and keep on getting to you they can hurt you, whether you can take it or not. I'd had eight professional fights and I took the short end of six of them and quit it before I was slapped silly. It's no racket for the second-rate.

"I see your nose has been broken again," she said, leaning her elbows on the table and cupping her chin in her hands. "I suppose they gave you credit for six semester hours in Romance languages for that."

"What's Lee doing now?" I asked. My face doesn't intrigue me as a topic of conversation.

"Nothing." She grinned at me suddenly. "Why? Did you think he was going to be doing something?"

"Well, people have been known to work."

"Oh, he's working, all right. I was just being feminine and cynical. He's busy with something called 'looking into a couple of little deals.' I understand it isn't at all vague to the masculine mind."

"I guess he sold out all the rest of the Major's holdings when the estate was settled, didn't he?"

"The Major sold most of it before he died, Bob. He lost a lot in some big lawsuit over a timber tract-I never did try to get it straight-and he sold both the sawmills and the gin and said he was going to quit trying to make money. You know how he could be."

"Yes," I said. "I know." I took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. She held out her hand and I looked at her in surprise.

"I took it up about six months ago, Bob. Am I depraved?"

I lit it for her. She exhaled and gazed moodily at the cloud of smoke. "You're funny," she said. "You're funny, Bob."

"Why?"

"Why didn't you ever try to break the will?"

"Why should I?"

"Well, Lee said the estate, house and all, amounted to nearly thirty thousand. And he left you one dollar, and you didn't contest it. Why?"

"Did you want me to? You know whose pocket it'd come out of, don't you?"

"Silly. I know how much you've always liked Lee. But n.o.body lets a little affection stand in his way when that much money is concerned in it."

"No," I said. "That wasn't it. I just never wanted anything from him when he was alive. Why should I after he's dead?"

"After all, you were his son. One of the only two he had."

"We wore that out a long time ago."

"It was a lot your fault, too, Bob. Maybe I'm taking advantage of the fact that you and I always thought so much of each other and I could say things to you n.o.body else could. But you've always been just as hard as he was."