Home from the Hill (42 page)

Then she saw him before her, erect, bloodless, pale and ghostly, coming towards her, reaching for her. She leapt back in terror, screamed. Then she saw that it was not him, but Theron, and she screamed again. “Some husband,” she murmured hoarsely. “Some husband.” He followed her, she shrank away. She knew who it was. It was Theron. She was afraid of him too, more afraid of him than of anything. “It wasn't me!” she screamed. “I didn't do it! It wasn't me! It wasn't me!”

61

He stopped—barely stopped—at three filling stations to ask, “Did a car with a stuck horn go past here?”

“Yeah—” pointing—“it—”

And then finally, “No. Didn't go past here with a stuck horn. Stopped here with a stuck horn and I fixed it. All you got to do is just disconnect—”

“Who was driving? Did you recognize him? Did you know him?” And then a new thought struck him. “It was a man, wasn't it?”

“It was a man, but I didn't know him cause I didn't even see him. He kept blowing his nose all the time. Hope I don't never see him. He asked how much it'd be, and I said a quarter and he give me a five dollar bill, and I went to get change, and while I was inside at the cash register—Hey! What's up?”

And one last stop—a drowsy little general store with one gas pump where the passing of a car any day of the week was an event, on Sunday an occasion. There they knew him, asked after his father. No, no car had gone past all day except one cattle truck headed the opposite direction. So he turned around and headed back to the last turnoff, and suddenly then he knew where the chase would lead, knew where it would end.

He left the filling stations and the roadhouses behind, and he began to pass fields pale green with the first young shoots of cotton, endless and flat, so that the trees on their far horizons were like more fields, green in the distant atmosphere. He drove with the speedometer needle fixed at 80, and the telephone poles unrolled as off a ribbon past the corners of his eyes. There began to be Negroes hoeing in the fields, distant specks, bent and at that distance immobile, and occasionally a line of wagons like a string of ships motionless far out in a calm clear green sea. Then there were families of choppers in the rows close by the roadside and pickanninies in floursack shifts and swallowed by straw hats, and even above the drone of his motor he caught snatches of their chant, mournful and tuneless and not like a sound, but like the echo of a sound. Then, passing one man, he had to slow for a bad stretch of road, slow enough that the man had time to hear and look up before he was past and gone, and he pushed his hat back off his forehead and shaded his eyes with his hand, and then he waved and the wind whipped his cry past:

“Hiya, Captain!”

He left the blacktop and went south on a gravel road that quickly became a dirt road, and in the dirt he found fresh tire treads of the right pattern. Then he began to pass weevilly little cotton patches and farmhouses each the same as the last, with a gray dirt yard smooth and hard as ironstone, a shade tree or a chinaberry tree with a car-casing swing, a high front porch under which a hog languished, brought in from the shadeless hog pen, a gray, never-painted shotgun house with at least one windowlight stuffed with a towsack or tacked over with pasteboard, a wash bench at the back door with a water bucket and a gourd dipper hanging on the wall above the bucket, a back lot with a castiron washpot and an upended oil drum for scalding the hog in at hog-killing time, a weed-choked kitchen garden gone permanently to seed, with a drunken scarecrow, tatters of faded rag tied to the fence wire and rusty tin cans on top of the fence posts to scare off rabbits, and at each one three or four or five yapping, colorless curs that met him when he was still half a mile off to race alongside in the boiling white dust.

Then—getting nearer now, the road narrower now and the ruts deepening—he began passing houses with fox and coon skins on the walls, and with three or four lean mongrel hounds asleep on the porch, and, passing one finally, swaying in the deep, hard-baked ruts, he saw three pairs of wild wide childish eyes staring out a window, and as he passed, the man of the house lounging on the porch, tousled and unshaved, waved—but not in greeting: waved down the road, as if to say, yep, he went thataway, went by just a short time ago, and smiled; and Theron realized that the man had recognized the first car and had mistaken the driver for his father.

He came to the hill where, ahead, below, rising out of the last pasturelands and stretching as far as he could see, the pines stood thick as bristles in a brush, where Sulphur Bottom, where it seemed the end of the world, began. It was going on three o'clock when he pulled up alongside the abandoned car, his car—in running order because his father had, now and again, in his absence gone out and run the motor—got out and slung the other of his father's shotguns, the big one, the 10 gauge, in his arm and stepped into the woods. It was a long time since he had gone hunting. He remembered telling his father that he was never going again. He was going now, he thought, sobbing, after game of a kind that his father had never brought out of the Bottom.

The tracks were of a man running. Seeing this did not cause Theron to quicken his pace. The more the man ran, the sooner he would tire himself. He studied the tracks as he followed them. It was a town man, or else a country man in his Sunday clothes, for the shoes had pointed toes and thin soles: oxfords. He weighed about 160, and taking into account that fear had lengthened his stride past normal, he was about 5'9”. Shortly, very shortly—the quickness was what gave him the answer—he knew it was a town man. For very quickly the tracks slowed to a walk, a slow walk. A country man would have had more endurance, would be in better condition. And then he smiled to see, suddenly, one pair of prints turned around backwards, and a little beyond, another. He had turned to look behind him, had no doubt stood listening for a second, quaking. It was in fact rather a weakly town man: a deduction made from the depth to which the toe of the prints dug into the ground. He was pressed and had to thrust hard to keep up his pace.

Already the pine trees that fringed the woods were behind him—behind them. Now the oaks began—pinoaks, post-oaks, whiteoaks, redoaks, liveoaks—he knew them all; his father had taught him all of them. This was the squirrel-hunting grounds. He heard at a distance the bark of a squirrel and an answering chatter. He stopped. He looked up into the trees. Drawing his mouth hard to the side and sucking in his breath, he clicked his tongue in almost electrical rapidity, and the sound that emerged was like a hundred billiard balls clicking, or like a squirrel chattering. Blind with tears and choking, he thought, he had never gotten better than pretty good at it; he could never make it sound like the first time he ever heard it done.

He glanced about to take his bearings. They were the same as before. Who was it, he asked himself then. Either a man willing to risk these woods alone, or one unconscious of the risk. Just ahead of him lay a clearing, and he saw that the footprints ran straight across it, unveering, and disappeared into the woods beyond. He began to walk faster, and his heart began to beat fast, not with exertion, but with a cruel excitement. Beyond the clearing the land began to dip. The tracks ran straight on, and now he was running, panting. He paused for just a second at a spot where the tracks came momentarily to a halt. There, in the scattered touchwood and leaf mould, was an impression of the man's whole body, where he had fallen. The footprints just beyond were smeared, showing where he had scampered up in terror. Beyond that the tracks gave him another sign that his father had taught him: as if the man's fear had added a physical burden to his weight, the prints sank deeper into the ground. But over this he paused only for a moment, and it was not this, but another piece of evidence which brought a grim cold smile to his lips. Ahead the tracks stretched on straight as if paced off by a surveyor. He looked at his watch—four-fifteen—and smiled again. He looked at the sky: it was clouding over, making up to rain. He smiled wider.

A cruel pleasure in his mind made him almost pant with anticipation. With mounting anxiety now lest they should veer off course, he followed the slower, more and more closely spaced tracks, until, at five—though it seemed later, for the sky was dark with clouds—he found himself at last in the first of the giant oaks netted with rattan vines. The woods ahead darkened as if the hour was later there. What seemed the very last clearing lay just ahead of him, and the cross light of the low sun below the clouds picked out the human footprints that traversed its otherwise virgin surface. Across that light bare space and towards the darkness beyond, the fugitive had fearfully, hopefully scampered.

Soon the murderer would be where there was not, now, a man alive who could save him. He himself, if he hurried, still could, but not unless he hurried, he thought, and he leaned his back against a tree and looked at the tracks and at the dark woods. He thought of the time he had wandered in beyond his depth in pursuit of the boar, of the night he had spent there, the sights he had seen, and he tried to imagine, to relish, the impressions to be made upon the mind of a murderer by those towering, twisted, black bald cypresses rising out of the swamp into the moonlight (only, tonight there was not going to be a moon), the lonely, haunting hoot of an owl near at hand, the spectral luminosity of gaseous light rising out of the ground at your feet. He tried to imagine how these things would feel on the second night, and what new things, unknown to him, the second night would bring, the third night, the fourth, and, say, a fifth? Or would the third, the second, would even this first night make him (he could see it plainly, all except the man's face) hook the trigger guard over a twig low on a tree trunk and, holding the muzzles in his two hands, give it a sudden sharp pull towards his chest? And would he be thinking, as he heard that blast, heard it not with his ears but with his flesh, of that other body he had made? Yes, he thought, he could if he hurried, still bring the man out to justice, to a trial by jury of his peers. But he could also, here, where now he was a law unto himself, decree and take his own retaliation. With a last look at the tracks to make certain of their unswerving direction, and with a smile for their straightness and the haste they betokened, he turned and started back.

He knew, before he had gone a hundred yards, that he would turn around, would go back. He had not relented. It was not lenience, not mercy that would send him back. He kept walking, walked another quarter of a mile, but he knew he would turn. Furious already at himself for abandoning, for such a paltry human motive, his perfect revenge, he knew he would not be able to resist his curiosity to know who it was. In a gesture of self-control that he knew was in vain, he walked on still another hundred yards. Then abruptly, furiously, he turned about and started back.

He crossed the clearing and the first drops of rain struck his face and, cursing himself—for it was all that his vengeance had wished for—dark, damp, cavernous—he followed the tracks into the deep woods. And, cursing himself further, he saw how quickly the place had unstrung the man, saw in a gulch he had entered the desperate marks of a fall, the print of his knee in the stiff mud, and beside it the print of his outspread hand, and there was stark terror, near-madness, in the splayed clutch of those fingers at the ground. And then, straightening after examining this, his eyes as he raised himself running up the line of prints ahead—dim in the murky, fast-failing light—he saw where they climbed the bank, saw where the man had slipped again there, saw where he had clambered frantically to his feet again, and in the same instant saw, lying on the bank, face down, head buried in his arms, the man.

For a moment he hesitated, and this thought passed through his mind: his father's training had made it hard for him to point a loaded gun at a man. Then he threw the long heavy gun to his shoulder and slammed the stock against his cheek. But his finger disobeyed the command of his mind. He could not pull the trigger. Gnats buzzed at the corners of his eyes and occasional raindrops splashed his face while he stood rigid and unbreathing, looking at the man over the long tapering barrels.

He climbed the bank, slowly, slowly. He took a step forward. He saw lying on the ground beside the man his father's other shotgun. His breath began to come in gasps which he feared were audible. He took another step, stopped; another, and stopped again. Who was it? Then he realized with a start that he had never pushed the safety off. The muzzle wavered, and suddenly he was blinded by tears. He stopped, blind. Then the tears welled over his lids, ran, hot and astringent, down his cheeks, and his sight cleared. He steadied the gun and took three slow stealthy steps. Off in the woods something fell—a dead tree or a branch—and he heard the cry of a bird, a water-bird, a crane. Then silence rushed back upon him. When he had taken five more steps, and as he took the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, he could see a tear in the man's trousers. He saw that his leg had been scratched, had bled slightly, saw the dried blood, and in his mind saw his father's pitiful, blasted, bleeding body and, maddened by the sight, almost pulled the trigger. He took another step and another, and he could suddenly see, despite the encircling arm, that the man's hair was gray, almost white. He stopped in amazement, fearful amazement. Who was it? Had a man that age a wife young enough to—His mind did not finish its thought. He saw over the man's ear a golden glint from the earpiece of eyeglasses. He trembled slightly. Who was it? Two more steps and, though he could see no more distinguishing marks, yet the conviction of familiarity mounted in him, brought his breath up shorter, made his scalp tingle. Who? Who? Another step, another, another, and one more—and he could see that the man was dead.

He jerked the gunstock tight against his shoulder as if the discovery that he was dead had increased the man's danger. Then, recovering himself, he lowered the gun to his waist. He took two heedless, unquiet steps. Suddenly his curiosity was joined by a sense of reluctance, of unwillingness almost, almost of dread. He loudly let out his breath, took another noisy step, and the man came alive. He reached for the gun beside him, started up, half turned, and from the hip, so close together that the two sounds were one, Theron fired both barrels. The recoil knocked him off his feet, sent the gun flying from his hands, and his ears seemed to faint at the blast. He scrambled up, still deaf, saw that the man was dead, saw leaves and twigs, blasted by the shot, still fluttering to the ground, and his hearing returned, bringing with it the echo, fading, spreading out into the endless depths of the woods.