The Yearling Read online

  The sink-hole lay all in shadow. Suddenly it seemed to Jody that Fodder-wing had only now gone away with the raccoons. Something of him had been always where the wild creatures fed and played. Something of him would be always near them. Fodder-wing was like the trees. He was of the earth, as they were earthy, with his gnarled, frail roots deep in the sand. He was like the changing clouds and the setting sun and the rising moon. A part of him had been always outside his twisted body. It had come and gone like the wind. It came to Jody that he need not be lonely for his friend again. He could endure his going.

  He went to the drinking trough and filled the buckets with as much water as he could carry, and went home. He told at table of the ’coons, and even his mother was interested to hear about the spanking, and no one questioned his delay. After supper, he sat with his father and listened to the hootowls and the frogs, and a far wild-cat and still further foxes, and to the north, a wolf that howled and was answered. He tried to tell his father the thing that he had felt that day. Penny listened gravely, and nodded, but Jody could not make the words fit his feeling, and could not quite make his father understand.

  Chapter XIX

  THE first week in September was as parched and dry as old bones. Only the weeds grew. There was a tension in the heat. The dogs were snappish. The snakes were crawling, dog days being past, and their shedding and their blindness ended. Penny killed a rattler under the grape arbor that measured seven feet in length. He had seen the coffee-weed shaking as though an alligator were passing through and had followed. The rattler, he said, was after the quail, to fill his long belly on his way to his winter quarters. He dried the great hide on the smoke-house wall and then hung it on the front-room wall beside the fireplace.

  He said, “I like to look at it. I know there’s one o’ the boogers’ll not harm nobody.”

  The heat was the worst of the whole summer, yet there was a vague change, as though the vegetation sensed the passing of one season and the coming of another. The golden-rod and asters and the deer-tongue thrived on the dryness. The pokeberries ripened and the birds fed on them along the fence-rows. All the creatures, Penny said, were hard put to it for food. The spring and summer berries, the brierberries, the huckleberries, the blueberries and choke-berries and the wild gooseberries, were long since gone. The wild plum and the mayhaw had had no fruit for bird or beast for many a month. The ’coons and foxes had stripped the wild grape-vines.

  The fall fruits were not yet ripe, papaw and gallberry and persimmon. The mast of the pines, the acorns of the oaks, the berries of the palmetto, would not be ready until the first frost. The deer were feeding on the tender growth, bud of sweet bay and of myrtle, sprigs of wire-grass, tips of arrow root in the ponds and prairies, and succulent lily stems and pads. The type of food kept them in the low, wet places, the swamps, the prairies and the bay-heads. They seldom crossed Baxter’s Island. They were hard to hunt in the boggy places. In a month, Penny was able only to bring down one yearling buck. Its spike horns were still in the velvet. They felt like a coarse rough wool. Shreds hung, where the yearling had rubbed them against saplings, to ease the itch of growth and hurry their hardening. Ma Baxter ate them boiled, saying they tasted like marrow. Penny and Jody had no taste for them. They could see too plainly the big eyes under the new horns.

  The bears, too, were in the low places. They were feeding for the most on palmetto buds, ripping out the hearts ruthlessly. The palm hammock around Sweetwater Spring looked as though a hurricane had swept through it. The low-growing palmettos were slashed into ribbons, the sweet creamcolored cores eaten below the level of the ground. Even some of the tall palms looked as though struck by lightning, where a less lazy bear or a hungrier one had scaled the trunk and torn out the bud. The palmettos, Penny said, would die. They were like all living things. They could not live with the heart gone. One low palm had been only shredded from the outside. The heart was intact. Penny cut out the smooth cylinder with his hunting knife to carry home to cook. The Baxters liked swamp cabbage as well as the bears.

  “But when them scapers runs short o’ palmeeters,” Penny said, “hit’s look out for the shoats. You kin look to see the bears climbin’ into the lot most ary night now. And your friend Flag here, you best keep him with you faithful, especial at night. I’ll stand up to your Ma, do she quarrel about it.”

  “Ain’t Flag gittin’ too big for a bear to bother?”

  “A bear’ll kill ary creetur cain’t out-run him. Why, on the prairie one year, a bear killed my bull, was nigh as big as he was. Hit made him a meal for a week. He come back to it ’til there wasn’t nothin’ left o’ the bull but the beller, and that was gone, too.”

  Ma Baxter’s complaint was at lack of rain. Her rain barrels were empty. All her washing must be done at the sinkhole. The clothes were looking dingy.

  She said, “Clothes washes easier, anyways, on a cloudy day. My Ma allus said, ’Soft weather, soft clothes.’”

  She needed rain-water, too, to clabber the milk. The milk turned rankly sour in the heat but would not clabber. In hot weather, she always depended on a few drops of rain-water to clabber it, and at every shower would send Jody to a hickory tree to catch some, for rain-water dripped from a hickory was best for the purpose.

  The Baxters watched the quartering of the September moon anxiously. Penny called his wife and son when the first quarter appeared. The silver crescent was almost perpendicular. He was jubilant.

  “We’ll git rain soon, shore,” he told them. “If the moon was straight acrost, hit’d push the water out and we’d not git none. But look at it. Hit’ll rain to where you kin hang your clothes right on the line and the Lord’ll wash ’em.”

  He was a good prophet. Three days later every sign was of rain. Passing by Juniper Springs from a hunt, he and Jody heard the alligators bellowing. Bats flew in the daytime. Frogs caah-caah-caahed steadily at night. The Dominick rooster crowed in the middle of the day. The jay-birds bunched and flew back and forth together, screaming as one. Ground rattlers crawled across the clearing in the hot sunny afternoon. On the fourth day a flock of white sea-birds flew over. Penny shaded his eyes against the sun and watched after them uneasily.

  He said to Jody, “Now them ocean Jessies don’t belong to be crossin’ Floridy. I don’t like it. Hit means bad weather, and when I say bad, I mean bad.”

  Jody felt a lift of spirit like the sea-birds. He loved storm. It swept in magnificently and shut the family inside in a great coziness. Work was impossible and they sat about together and the rain drummed on the hand-hewn shingles. His mother was good-natured and made him syrup candy, and Penny told tales.

  He said, “I hope it’s a pure hurricane.”

  Penny turned on him sharply.

  “Don’t you wish sich as that. A hurricane flattens the crops and drowns the pore sailors and takes the oranges offen the trees. And down south, why, boy, hit tears down houses and cold-out kills people.”

  Jody said meekly, “I won’t wish it agin. But wind and rain is fine.”

  “All right. Wind and rain. That’s another thing.”

  The sun set strangely that night. The sunset was not red, but green. After the sun was gone, the west turned gray. The east filled with a light the color of young corn. Penny shook his head.

  “I don’t like it. Hit looks mighty boogerish.”

  In the night, a gust of wind moved through and slammed both doors. The fawn came to Jody’s bed and poked its muzzle against his face. He took it up on the bed with him. The morning, however, was clear, but the east was the color of blood. Penny spent the morning repairing the roof of the smoke-house. He brought drinking water twice from the sinkhole, filling all available buckets. In the late morning, the sky turned gray and remained so. There was no air stirring.

  Jody asked, “Is it a hurricane comin’?”

  “I don’t think. But somethin’s comin’, ain’t natural.”

  In mid-afternoon the skies turned so black that the chickens went to roost. Jo
dy drove in Trixie and the calf and Penny milked early. He turned old Cæsar into the lot and put a forkful of the last remaining hay in his manger.

  Penny said, “Git the eggs outen the nests. I’m goin’ to the house. Hurry now, else you’ll git ketched.”

  The hens were not laying and there were only three eggs in the lot nests. Jody climbed into the corn-crib where the old Barred Rock was laying. The left-over husks rustled under his feet. The dry, sweet-scented air was close and thick. He felt stifled. There were two eggs in the nest and he put all five inside his shirt and started for the house. He had not felt the hurry that had infected his father. Suddenly, in the false twilight stillness, he took alarm. A great roaring sounded in the distance. All the bears in the scrub, meeting at the river, might make such a roaring. It was wind. He heard it come closer from the northeast as plainly as though it came on vast webbed feet, brushing the tree-tops in its passing. It seemed to leap the cornfield in one gust. It struck the yard trees with a hissing, and the mulberries bent their boughs to the ground, and the chinaberry creaked in its brittleness. It passed over him with a rustle like the wings of many geese, high-flying. The pines whistled. The rain followed.

  The wind had been high overhead. The rain was a solid wall, from sky to earth. Jody struck it flat, as though he had dived against it from a great height. It hurled him back and threw him off his balance. A second wind seemed now to reach long muscular fingers through the wall of rain and scoop up everything in its path. It reached down his shirt and into his mouth and eyes and ears and tried to strangle him. He dared not drop the eggs in his shirt. He kept one arm cupped under them and put the other over his face and scuttled into the yard. The fawn was waiting, quivering. Its tail hung wet and flat and its ears drooped. It ran to him and tried to find shelter behind him. He ran around the house and to the back door. The fawn bounded close behind him. The kitchen door was latched. The wind and rain blew so hard against it that he could not swing it open. He beat on the thick pine. For a moment he thought he was unheard in the tumult and that he and the fawn would be left outside to drown, like biddies. Then Penny lifted the latch from the inside and pushed the door open into the storm. Jody and the fawn darted inside. Jody stood gasping. He wiped the water from his eyes. The fawn blinked.

  Penny said, “Who was it, now, wishin’ for sich as this?”

  Jody said, “Did I git my wish this quick allus, I’d wish mighty keerful.”

  Ma Baxter said, “Go change them wet clothes right away now. Couldn’t you of shut up that fawn before you come in?”

  “There wasn’t no time, Ma. He was wet and skeert.”

  “Well— Long as he don’t do no mischief. Now don’t put on your good breeches. You got a pair there, full o’ holes as a cast-net, but they’ll hold together in the house.”

  Penny said after him, “Don’t he look like a wet yearlin’ crane. All he needs is tail feathers. My, ain’t he growed since spring.”

  She said, “I think he’ll be right nice-lookin’, do them freckles fade and that hair ever lay flat and them bones git covered with meat.”

  “A few more changes,” he agreed innocently, “and he’ll turn out handsome as the Baxters, thank the Lord.”

  She looked at him belligerently.

  “And mebbe, handsome as the Alverses,” he added.

  “That makes more sense. You better change your tune.”

  “I got no idee o’ startin’ a ruckus, sweetheart, and you and me penned up together by no storm.”

  She chuckled with him. Jody, overhearing from his bedroom, could not tell whether they were making fun of him, or whether there was indeed hope for his appearance.

  He said to Flag, “You think I’m purty, anyways, don’t you?”

  Flag butted him. He took it for assurance and they ambled back to the kitchen.

  Penny said, “Well, hit’s a three-day nor’easter. A mite early, but I’ve seed change o’ season this early, many a year.”

  “How kin you tell it’ll be three days, Pa?”

  “I’d not sign no papers on it, but generally the first September storm be a three-day nor’easter. The whole country changes. I reckon, one way or t’other, the world. I’ve heered Oliver Hutto tell o’ September storm as fur off as China.”

  Ma Baxter asked, “Why ain’t he come to see us this time? Grandma shocks my modesty, but I do like Oliver.”

  “I reckon mebbe he’s had enough o’ the Forresters for a whiles and jest ain’t travelin’ this road.”

  “They’ll not fight without he acts quarrelsome, will they? The fiddle cain’t play without the bow.”

  “I’m feered the Forresters, leastwise Lem, ’ll romp on him ary time they come up with him. Until they git the gal business settled.”

  “Sich doin’s! Nobody acted that-a-way when I were a gal.”

  “No,” Penny said, “I was the only one wanted you.”

  She lifted the broom in pretended threat.

  “But sugar,” he said, “the rest jest wasn’t smart as me.”

  There was a lull in the fierce beating wind. A pitiful whine sounded at the door. Penny went to it. Rip had found adequate shelter, but old Julia stood drenched and shivering. Or perhaps she had found shelter, too, but longed for a comfort that was more than dryness. Penny let her in.

  Ma Baxter said, “Now let in Trixie and old Cæsar, and you’ll have things about to suit you.”

  Penny said to Julia, “Jealous o’ leetle ol’ Flag, eh? Now you’ve been a Baxter longer’n Flag. You jest come dry yourself.”

  She wagged her slow tail and licked his hand. Jody was warmed by his father’s inclusion of the fawn in the family. Flag Baxter——

  Ma Baxter said, “How you men kin take on over a dumb creetur, I cain’t see. Callin’ a dog by your own name— And that fawn, sleepin’ right in the bed with Jody.”

  Jody said, “He don’t seem like a creetur to me, Ma. He seems jest like another boy.”

  “Well, it’s your bed. Long as he don’t bring fleas or lice or ticks or nothin’ into it.”

  He was indignant.

  “Look at him, Ma. Lookit that sleekity coat. Smell him, Ma.”

  “I don’t want to smell him.”

  “But he smells sweet.”

  “Jest like a rose, I s’pose. Well, to my notion, wet fur’s wet fur.”

  “Now I like the smell o’ wet fur,” Penny said. “I mind me one time, on a long hunt, I had me no coat and the weather turned cold. It was over about Salt Springs, at the head o’ the run. My, it was cold. And we shot a bear, and I dressed out the skin nice, and I slept under it, with the fur side out. And in the night come a cold drizzly rain, and I poked my nose out from under, and I smelt that wet fur. Now the other fellers, Noey Ginright and Bert Harper and Milt Revells, they said I purely stunk, but I puttened my head back under the bear-skin and I was warm as a squirrel in a holler tree, and that wet bear-hide smelt better to me than yellow jessamine.”

  The rain drummed on the roof. The wind whistled under the eaves. Old Julia stretched out on the floor near the fawn. The storm was as cozy as Jody had hoped for. He made up his mind privately that he would wish for another in a week or two. Now and then Penny peered out of the window into the dark.

  “Hit’s a toad-strangler of a rain,” he said.

  Supper was generous. There were cowpeas and smoked venison pie and biscuit pudding. Anything that was remotely an occasion stirred Ma Baxter to extra cooking, as though her imagination could speak only by the use of flour and shortening. She fed Flag a bit of pudding with her own fingers. Jody, with a secret gratitude, helped her wash and wipe the supper dishes. Penny went to bed shortly after, for his strength did not hold out, but not to sleep. A candle burned in the bedroom and Ma Baxter brought her piecing, and Jody lay across the foot of the bed. The rain hissed against the window.

  The Burial of Fodder-Wing (p. 196)

  He said, “Pa, tell me a tale.”

  Penny said, “I’ve told you all the tales I know.�
��

  “No, you ain’t. You allus got another.”

  “Well, the only one comes to me I ain’t told, ain’t rightly a tale. I ever tell you about the dog I had when I first come to the island? The dog could cold-out study?”

  Jody wriggled closer up the counterpane.

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, sir, the dog was part fox-hound and part bloodhound and part jest dog. He had long sorrowful ears, nigh about dragged the ground, and he was so bow-legged he couldn’t walk a sweet pertater bed. He had distant kind o’ eyes, lookin’ off some’eres, and them distracted eyes near about caused me to trade him off. Well, I hunted him a whiles, and it begun to come to me, he didn’t act like no other dog I’d ever seed. He’d leave a cat-trail or a fox-trail right in the middle, and go lay down. The first time-two he done it, I figgered I jest didn’t have me no dog a-tall.

  “Well sir, it begun to come to me, he knowed what he was doin’. Jody boy, go fetch me my pipe.”

  The interruption was exasperating. Jody tingled. He scrambled for the pipe and tobacco.

  “All right now, son. You set on the floor or on a chair and keep offen the bed. Ary time I say ’trail’ or ’track’ you jiggle the bed to where I think the slats is busted. That’s better—