The Yearling Read online

  He turned and galloped toward home. He drew deep breaths of the pines, aromatic with wetness. The loose sand that had pulled at his feet was firmed by the rain. The return was comfortable going. The sun was not far from its setting when the long-leaf pines around the Baxter clearing came into sight. They stood tall and dark against the redgold west. He heard the chickens clucking and quarreling and knew they had just been fed. He turned into the clearing. The weathered gray of the split-rail fence was luminous in the rich spring light. Smoke curled thickly from the stick-and-clay chimney. Supper would be ready on the hearth and hot bread baking in the Dutch oven. He hoped his father had not returned from Grahamsville. It came to him for the first time that perhaps he should not have left the place while his father was away. If his mother had needed wood, she would be angry. Even his father would shake his head and say, “Son——” He heard old Cæsar snort and knew his father was ahead of him.

  The clearing was in a pleasant clatter. The horse whinnied at the gate, the calf bleated in its stall and the milch cow answered, the chickens scratched and cackled and the dogs barked with the coming of food and evening. It was good to be hungry and to be fed and the stock was eager with an expectant certainty. The end of winter had been meager; corn short, and hay, and dried cow-peas. But now in April the pastures were green and succulent and even the chickens savored the sprouts of young grass. The dogs had found a nest of young rabbits that evening, and after such tid-bits the scraps from the Baxter supper table were a matter of some indifference. Jody saw old Julia lying under the wagon, worn out from her miles of trotting. He swung open the front paling gate and went to find his father.

  Penny Baxter was at the wood-pile. He still wore the coat of the broadcloth suit that he had been married in, that he now wore as badge of his gentility when he went to church, or off trading. The sleeves were too short, not because Penny had grown, but because the years of hanging through the summer dampness, and being pressed with the smoothing iron and pressed again, had somehow shrunk the fabric. Jody saw his father’s hands, big for the rest of him, close around a bundle of wood. He was doing Jody’s work, and in his good coat. Jody ran to him.

  “I’ll git it, Pa.”

  He hoped his willingness, now, would cover his delinquency. His father straightened his back.

  “I near about give you out, son,” he said.

  “I went to the Glen.”

  “Hit were a mighty purty day to go,” Penny said. “Or to go anywhere. How come you to take out such a fur piece?”

  It was as hard to remember why he had gone as though it had been a year ago. He had to think back to the moment when he had laid down his hoe.

  “Oh.” He had it now. “I aimed to foller the honey-bees and find a bee-tree.”

  “You find it?”

  Jody stared blankly.

  “Dogged if I ain’t forgot ’til now to look for it.”

  He felt as foolish as a bird-dog caught chasing field mice. He looked at his father sheepishly. His father’s pale blue eyes were twinkling.

  “Tell the truth, Jody,” he said, “and shame the devil. Wa’n’t the bee-tree a fine excuse to go a-ramblin’?”

  Jody grinned.

  “The notion takened me,” he admitted, “afore I studied on the bee-tree.”

  “That’s what I figgered. How come me to know, was when I was drivin’ along to Grahamsville, I said to myself, ’There’s Jody now, and the hoein’ ain’t goin’ to take him too long. What would I do this fine spring day, was I a boy?’ And then I thought, ’I’d go a-ramblin’.’ Most anywhere, long as it kivered the ground.”

  A warmth filled the boy that was not the low golden sun. He nodded.

  “That’s the way I figgered,” he said.

  “But your Ma, now,” Penny jerked his head toward the house, “don’t hold with ramblin’. Most women-folks cain’t see for their lives, how a man loves so to ramble. I never let on you wasn’t here. She said, ’Where’s Jody?’ and I said, ’Oh, I reckon he’s around some’eres.’”

  He winked one eye and Jody winked back.

  “Men-folks has got to stick together in the name o’ peace. You carry your Ma a good bait o’ wood now.”

  Jody filled his arms and hurried to the house. His mother was kneeling at the hearth. The spiced smells that came to his nose made him weak with hunger.

  “That ain’t sweet ’tater pone, is it, Ma?”

  “Hit’s sweet ’tater pone, and don’t you fellers be too long a time now, piddlin’ around and visitin’. Supper’s done and ready.”

  He dumped the wood in the box and scurried to the lot. His father was milking Trixie.

  “Ma says to git done and come on,” he reported. “Must I feed old Cæsar?”

  “I done fed him, son, sich as I had to give the pore feller.” He stood up from the three-legged milking stool. “Carry in the milk and don’t trip and waste it outen the gourd like you done yestiddy. Easy, Trixie——”

  He moved aside from the cow and went to the stall in the shed, where her calf was tethered.

  “Here, Trixie. Soo, gal——”

  The cow lowed and came to her calf.

  “Easy, there. You greedy as Jody.”

  He stroked the pair and followed the boy to the house. They washed in turn at the water-shelf and dried their hands and faces on the roller towel hanging outside the kitchen door. Ma Baxter sat at the table waiting for them, helping their plates. Her bulky frame filled the end of the long narrow table. Jody and his father sat down on either side of her. It seemed natural to both of them that she should preside.

  “You-all hongry tonight?” she asked.

  “I kin hold a barrel o’ meat and a bushel o’ biscuit,” Jody said.

  “That’s what you say. Your eyes is bigger’n your belly.”

  “I’d about say the same,” Penny said, “if I hadn’t learned better. Goin’ to Grahamsville allus do make me hongry.”

  “You git a snort o’ ’shine there, is the reason,” she said.

  “A mighty small one today. Jim Turnbuckle treated.”

  “Then you shore didn’t git enough to hurt you.”

  Jody heard nothing; saw nothing but his plate. He had never been so hungry in his life, and after a lean winter and slow spring, with food not much more plentiful for the Baxters than for their stock, his mother had cooked a supper good enough for the preacher. There were poke-greens with bits of white bacon buried in them; sand-buggers made of potato and onion and the cooter he had found crawling yesterday; sour orange biscuits and at his mother’s elbow the sweet potato pone. He was torn between his desire for more biscuits and another sand-bugger and the knowledge, born of painful experience, that if he ate them, he would suddenly have no room for pone. The choice was plain.

  “Ma,” he said, “kin I have my pone right now?”

  She was at a pause in the feeding of her own large frame. She cut him, dexterously, a generous portion. He plunged into its spiced and savory goodness.

  “The time it takened me,” she complained, “to make that pone—and you destroy in’ it before I git my breath—”

  “I’m eatin’ it quick,” he admitted, “but I’ll remember it a long time.”

  Supper was done with. Jody was replete. Even his father, who usually ate like a sparrow, had taken a second helping.

  “I’m full, thank the Lord,” he said.

  Ma Baxter sighed.

  “If a feller’d light me a candle,” she said, “I’d git shut o’ the dishwashin’ and mebbe have time to set and enjoy myself.”

  Jody left his seat and lit a tallow candle. As the yellow flame wavered, he looked out of the east window. The full moon was rising.

  “A pity to waste light, ain’t it,” his father said, “and the full moon shinin’.”

  He came to the window and they watched it together.

  “Son, what do it put in your head? Do you mind what we said we’d do, full moon in April?”

  “I dis-remember.”
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  Somehow, the seasons always took him unawares. It must be necessary to be as old as his father to keep them in the mind and memory, to remember moon-time from one year’s end to another.

  “You ain’t forgot what I told you? I’ll swear, Jody. Why, boy, the bears comes outen their winter beds on the full moon in April.”

  “Old Slewfoot! You said we’d lay for him when he come out!”

  “That’s it.”

  “You said we’d go where we seed his tracks comin’ and goin’ and criss-crossin’, and likely find his bed, and him, too, comin’ out in April.”

  “And fat. Fat and lazy. The meat so sweet, from him layin’ up.”

  “And him mebbe easier to ketch, not woke up good.” “That’s it.”

  “When kin we go, Pa?”

  “Soon as we git the hoein’ done. And see bear-sign.”

  “Which-a-way will we begin huntin’ him?”

  “We’d best to go by the Glen springs and see has he come out and watered there.”

  “A big ol’ doe watered there today,” Jody said. “Whilst I was asleep. I built me a flutter-mill, Pa. It run fine.”

  Ma Baxter stopped the clatter of her pots and pans.

  “You sly scaper,” she said. “That’s the first I knowed you been off. You gittin’ slick as a clay road in the rain.”

  He shouted with laughter.

  “I fooled you, Ma. Say it, Ma, I got to fool you oncet.”

  “You fooled me. And me standin’ over the fire makin’ potato pone——”

  She was not truly angry.

  “Now, Ma,” he cajoled her, “suppose I was a varmint and didn’t eat nothin’ but roots and grass.”

  “I’d not have nothin’ then to rile me,” she said.

  At the same time he saw her mouth twist. She tried to straighten it and could not.

  “Ma’s a-laughin’! Ma’s a-laughin’! You ain’t riled when you laugh!”

  He darted behind her and untied her apron strings. The apron slipped to the floor. She turned her bulk quickly and boxed his ears, but the blows were feather-light and playful. The same delirium came over him again that he had felt in the afternoon. He began to whirl around and around as he had done in the broom-sage.

  “You knock them plates offen the table,” she said, “and you’ll see who’s riled.”

  “I cain’t he’p it. I’m dizzy.”

  “You’re addled,” she said. “Just plain addled.”

  It was true. He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night. His head was swimming with the strong brew made up of the sun and the air and the thin gray rain. The fluttermill had made him drunk, and the doe’s coming, and his father’s hiding his absence, and his mother’s making him a pone and laughing at him. He was stabbed with the candlelight inside the safe comfort of the cabin; with the moonlight around it. He pictured old Slewfoot, the great black outlaw bear with one toe missing, rearing up in his winter bed and tasting the soft air and smelling the moonlight, as he, Jody, smelled and tasted them. He went to bed in a fever and could not sleep. A mark was on him from the day’s delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember. A whip-poor-will called across the bright night, and suddenly he was asleep.

  Chapter II

  PENNY BAXTER lay awake beside the vast sleeping bulk of his wife. He was always wakeful on the full moon. He had often wondered whether, with the light so bright, men were not meant to go into their fields and labor. He would like to slip from his bed and perhaps cut down an oak for wood, or finish the hoeing that Jody had left undone.

  “I reckon I’d ought to of crawled him about it,” he thought.

  In his day, he would have been thoroughly thrashed for slipping away and idling. His father would have sent him back to the spring, without his supper, to tear out the flutter-mill.

  “But that’s it,” he thought. “A boy ain’t a boy too long.”

  As he looked back over the years, he himself had had no boyhood. His own father had been a preacher, stern as the Old Testament God. The living had come, however, not from the Word, but from the small farm near Volusia on which he had raised a large family. He had taught them to read and write and to know the Scriptures, but all of them, from the time they could toddle behind him down the corn rows, carrying the sack of seed, had toiled until their small bones ached and their growing fingers cramped. Rations had been short and hookworm abundant. Penny had grown to maturity no bigger than a boy. His feet were small, his shoulders narrow, his ribs and hips jointed together in a continuous fragile framework. He had stood among the Forresters one day, like an ash sapling among giant oaks.

  Lem Forrester looked down at him and said, “Why, you leetle ol’ penny-piece, you. You’re good money, a’right, but hit jest don’t come no smaller. Leetle ol’ Penny Baxter——”

  The name had been his only one ever since. When he voted, he signed himself “Ezra Ezekial Baxter,” but when he paid his taxes, he was put down as “Penny Baxter” and made no protest. But he was a sound amalgam; sound as copper itself; and with something, too, of the copper’s softness. He leaned backward in his honesty, so that he was often a temptation to store-keepers and mill-owners and horse-traders. Store-keeper Boyles at Volusia, as honest as he, had once given him a dollar too much in change. His horse being lame, Penny had walked the long miles back again to return it.

  “The next time you came to trade would have done,” Boyles said.

  “I know,” Penny answered him, “but ’twa’n’t mine and I wouldn’t of wanted to die with it on me. Dead or alive, I only want what’s mine.”

  The remark might have explained, to those who puzzled at him, his migration to the adjacent scrub. Folk who lived along the deep and placid river, alive with craft, with dugouts and scows, lumber rafts and freight and passenger vessels, side-wheel steamers that almost filled the stream, in places, from bank to bank, had said that Penny Baxter was either a brave man or a crazy one to leave the common way of life and take his bride into the very heart of the wild Florida scrub, populous with bears and wolves and panthers. It had been understandable for the Forresters to go there, for the growing family of great burly quarrelsome males needed all the room in the county, and freedom from any hindrance. But who would hinder Penny Baxter?

  It was not hindrance— But in the towns and villages, in farming sections where neighbors were not too far apart, men’s minds and actions and property overlapped. There were intrusions on the individual spirit. There were friendliness and mutual help in time of trouble, true, but there were bickerings and watchfulness, one man suspicious of another. He had grown from under the sternness of his father into a world less direct, less honest, in its harshness, and therefore more disturbing.

  He had perhaps been bruised too often. The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence. Something in him was raw and tender. The touch of men was hurtful upon it, but the touch of the pines was healing. Making a living came harder there, distances were troublesome in the buying of supplies and the marketing of crops. But the clearing was peculiarly his own. The wild animals seemed less predatory to him than people he had known. The forays of bear and wolf and wild-cat and panther on stock were understandable, which was more than he could say of human cruelties.

  In his thirties he had married a buxom girl, already twice his size, loaded her in an ox-cart along with the rudiments of housekeeping, and jogged with her to the clearing, where with his own hands he had reared a cabin. He had chosen his land as well as a man might choose in the brooding expanse of scrawny sand pines. He had bought of the Forresters, who lived a safe four miles away, high good land in the center of a pine island. The island was called by such a name, in an arid forest, because it was literally an island of long-leaf pines, lifted high, a landmark, in the rolling sea that was the scr
ub. There were other such islands scattered to the north and west, where some accident of soil or moisture produced patches of luxuriant growth; even of hammock, the richest growth of all. Live oaks were here and there; the red bay and the magnolia; wild cherry and sweet gum; hickory and holly.

  A scarcity of water was the only draw-back to the location. The water level lay so deep that wells were priceless. Water for inhabitants of Baxter’s Island must come, until bricks and mortar were cheaper, from the great sink-hole on the western boundary of the hundred-acre tract. The sinkhole was a phenomenon common to the Florida limestone regions. Underground rivers ran through such sections. The bubbling springs that turned at once into creeks and runs were outbreaks of these. Sometimes a thin shell of surface soil caved in and a great cavern was revealed, with or without a flow of water. The sink-hole included with Penny Baxter’s land contained, unfortunately, no flowing spring. But a pure filtered water seeped day and night through the high banks and formed a pool at the bottom. The Forresters had tried to sell Penny poor land in the scrub itself, but with cash to back him, he had insisted on the island.

  He had said to them, “The scrub’s a fitten place for the game to raise, and all the wild things. Foxes and deer and panther-cats and rattlesnakes. I cain’t raise young uns in a pure thicket.”

  The Forresters had slapped their thighs and roared with laugher from their beards.

  Lem had bellowed, “How mainy ha’ pennies is in a penny? You’ll do good, be you daddy to a fox-cub.”

  Penny could hear him now, after all the years. He turned over in his bed, cautiously, not to awaken his wife. He had indeed planned boldly for sons and daughters, moving in prolific plenty among the long-leaf pines. The family had come. Ora Baxter was plainly built for child-bearing. But it had seemed as though his seed were as puny as himself.