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 sassafras bushes and there
Hill Girl — 2
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 sassafras 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, “Hello. 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
Hill Girl — 3
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 shore 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
Hill Girl — 4
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
grass, 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 passed 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
Hill Girl — 5
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?”
Hill Girl — 6
Sam flushed and looked away in embarrassment and
seemed to be trying to think of something to change
the subject.
“Ought to be able to go coon 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.
Hill Girl — 7
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
Hill Girl — 8
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 brass 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.
“Hello, 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,
Hill Girl — 9
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.
“Hello, 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 amusement 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
Hill Girl — 10
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?”
Hill Girl — 11
“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
nobody 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
nobody else could. But you’ve always been just as hard
as he was.”
“Well, let's forget it,” I said.
“He was always good to Lee. He let him have
anything he wanted.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I just couldn’t get along with
him. I didn’t know how, I guess, or maybe I didn’t try
hard enough. But I’m satisfied. Let’s drop it.”
“You never change, do you, Bob? You’d rather be
stubborn than right, always.” She reached over and
patted my arm. “But I love you anyway. You’re my
favorite bear.”
I grinned at her. “And you’re my favorite redhead.
Whenever you get tired of Lee, let me know.”
“God forbid. One Crane per lifetime is all any girl
should have to face.”
We went into the living room after a while and sat
down on the sofa and stretched our legs out toward the
fire. “What are you going to do now, Bob?” she asked.
“Now that you’re home?”
“Take over the farm,” I said.
She smiled. “I thought you would. That was what you
always wanted to do, wasn’t it?”
“It always seemed like home to me,” I said. “It’s
funny, I guess, because I only lived out there three
Hill Girl — 12
months out of the year, while school was out, but that
was the way it seemed.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t because you were so fond of
your grandfather? And back here, you didn’t—well . . .”
She let it trail off as though she didn’t know how to put
it. “Partly, I guess,” I said. “But I like living in the
country better anyway.”
It was almost noon before Lee came home. We were
sitting on the big sofa before the fire when we heard
the scream of tires on pavement and then a scattering
of gravel as he slid to a stop out front under the trees.
“You know, lots of people think it’s necessary to slow
down to make that turn into the driveway,” Mary said
musingly.
I heard his footsteps in the hall, hard-heeled and fast
as always, and I could picture his long-legged stride.
He stopped in the doorway and I got up from the
sofa.
“Sir,” I said, “your wife and I love each other and we
think the three of us should be civilized and talk it over.
All we want is a divorce and three hundred a month.”
He came on into the room and hit me on the shoulder
and grabbed my hand, and there was that old wild,
happy look in his eyes.
“You big homely bastard! I thought it was you when I
saw that junk heap out in the drive. I’ll call a wrecker
and have it towed away for you.”
No one would ever have taken us for brothers. Ever
since I can remember, people have been saying, “Isn’t
it funny how little resemblance there is between those
Crane boys? They don’t look anything alike.”
Lee always was a handsome devil. He never seemed
to go through that pimply, awkward stage the rest of us
suffered. Even when we were children, girls could
never keep their eyes off him. He was an even six feet
tall, a full inch shorter than I, but he always looked
taller because he was so rail-thin and walked so
erectly. And for all his wildness and the boundless and
misdirected energy he had, there was something
Hill Girl — 13
smooth about him; maybe the self-assurance in his eyes
and manner, and the way he wore his clothes.
His skin was rather dark and his face was thin with
high cheekbones, and his eyes were brown and
brilliantly alive. Most of the time they gave you an
impression of recklessness and high good humor, but
when he wanted to put on an act they could be as grave
and quiet as those of a Supreme Court justice. When he
wanted to turn on that urbane and deferential charm
old ladies couldn’t resist him and girls had even less
luck. I’d seen him work girls over with his eyes, and I’d
hate to have him after one I wanted.
As for me, I think there must have been some Swede
in the Crane family tree away back somewhere and I
got all of it. Some girl, I’ve forgotten her name, who
used to sit next to me in English, said one time that I
looked like a composite picture of all the Minnesota
fullbacks since 1910. My face is square and flat-nosed
and too damned healthy-looking, and it’s just what
you’d pick if you wanted to plug a hole in the right side
of the line. In high school they called me Cotton, which
will give you an indication of the color of my hair and
eyebrows, and Mack, which was short for Mack Truck.
“By God, it’s good to have you back,” he said, for
about the third time. He was leaning against the
mantel smoking a cigarette and smiling at me. He was
as well dressed as ever. The suit he had on was a gray
tweed and had that custom-tailored look and I knew it
had cost plenty. He never bought cheap clothes. “It
was a shame you couldn’t get back here for the Major’s
funeral. But I told everybody you couldn’t get away on
account of final exams.”
“And nobody laughed in your classic face?” I asked.
“Dammit, Bob, don’t be such a porcupine. There’s
such a thing as being outspoken, but you wear it out.”
“O.K.,” I said. “I couldn’t get away on account of final
exams. They have them in April now.”
He shook his head in exasperation. “You’re
hopeless.”
Hill Girl — 14
“I was just telling him,” Mary said, “that he should
have gone into the diplomatic service. He’d have been
something new.”
“The world would have been one big battlefield in a
week.”
“I’m shy and sensitive by nature,” I said, “and don’t
like to be discussed this way in my presence. Can’t we
talk about something else?”
“That we can, Handsome,” he said. “come along, I
want to show you a new gun I just bought. Excuse us,
Mary.” He led the way up the stairs to the upper hall
and back to his old room, the one he had when we were
children.
We went in and he fished into a dresser drawer and
hauled out a whisky bottle.
“Is that the gun?” I asked.
“Pour one in and shut up.” He grinned. “And then
hand it to me. There’s the gun over in the corner.”
I took a drink and passed him the bottle and looked
at the gun. It was a beauty, a Parker double. I went
over and picked it up and the feel of it was just right. It
had that sweet balance you can get in a shotgun if you
don’t care how much money you spend for it.
“I’ll trade you my old gun for it,” I said.
“You’ll be the next queen of Rumania, too. Say, let’s
go hunting tomorrow. We haven’t been out together in
a hell of a time.”
“Now you’re talking,” I said. “By the way, I got a bird
a while ago.” I told him about meeting Sam Harley.
“Speaking of Sam—” He put the bottle down and
made waving motions with his hands and whistled
ecstatically. “Jesus, sweet Jesus!”
“Why, I didn’t know you and Sam were like that,” I
said.
“Shut up, you ugly bastard, and listen. You remember
that oldest girl of his, Angelina?”
“I don’t know. Kind of a thin kid, with brown eyes?”
“Yeah, she’s kind of a thin kid, all right. You’ve been
gone two years, you sap. And don’t ask me what color
Hill Girl — 15
her eyes are. Anybody who could look at her and notice
her eyes is dead and just hasn’t found it out.”
“Must be great,” I said. “She’s probably all of
fifteen.”
“Fifteen, hell. She’s eighteen if she’s a day. Nothing
could be put together like that in fifteen years. I’d give
seven hundred dollars and my left leg up to the knee
for just one piece of that.”
“Well, don’t get in an uproar. What’re you trying to
do, marry me off? This is a swell gun, Lee. How’s to use
it some tomorrow?”
He had forgotten about the gun. “What gun? Oh,
sure. And don’t worry about me trying to promote you
with Angelina. You keep your big hams off her. I saw it
first.”
I looked at him. He was grinning, but I didn’t like the
expression in his eyes. I think he meant some of it.
“Are you nuts? I somehow gathered the impression
you were married. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
He held out the bottle. “Have another snort,
Grandma, and forget the lecture. We’re not have
chapel today.”
I took another drink and tried to forget it. But it was
in my mind and wouldn’t go away. And I knew Sam
Harley. Better than he did.
Hill Girl — 16
Three
That night at supper he turned to me suddenly.
“Say, Bob, I’ve been meaning to write to you about it
ever since the Major died, but I couldn’t think how to
put it. He treated you pretty rough in his will, but I
want you to know I didn’t know a damn thing about it
until the lawyer read it.”
“Forget it,” I said, winking at Mary, who was
watching me a little worriedly from across the table.
“We educated people don’t worry about money all the
time. There are other things.”
He laughed. “You educated people! All you ever
learned in four years at college was how to twist some
poor bastard’s arm out of its socket in the pile-up when
you thought nobody was looking.”
We talked until midnight and I went upstairs to bed
feeling happy to be home again. I was pleased with
their happiness, the way they seemed to be settling
down to married life. Of course, they had been married
less than a year, but I had always been a little doubtful
that Lee would ever marry, or if he did, that he would
make a go of it. Somehow, he didn’t seem to be the
type for domestication, although that was exactly what
he needed. He needed a wife to give him the stability
he somehow lacked, and he needed Mary in particular.
Hill Girl — 17
Of course, there was no question of its being a
success as far as Mary was concerned. She would have
married him any time he asked her as far back as I
could remember. There had never been anybody else
for her. Lee had had girls by the dozen, but somehow
he always seemed to come back to her. She was a
refuge and a home port for him, and whenever he got
into a jam of any kind it was Mary to whom he turned.
Although I was never really in love with Mary myself,
she was my personal nomination for the prettiest girl in
town and the finest, and I was always proud that I
knew her.
There had been an unhappy experience in her
childhood that might have thrown lots of girls, but she
had come out of it all right When she was twelve her
father had committed suicide, and there had been one
of those ugly stories that get started in small towns and
never quite the out or come completely out in the open.
John Easterly had been one of the most respected
men in town. He was everybody’s friend; not a gladhander
or a back-slapper, but a quiet, sober man,
dependable and honest and slow-spoken. He was fairly
well-to-do by our standards, which is to say he owned
his own business and his home and had security for his
family. His wife was well liked and everyone knew she
was devoted to him. He went to church regularly in his
steady way and was active in its affairs. His was the
well-ordered and unspectacular life that millions of
men like him have lived and enjoyed. And yet he had
gone quietly out to the woodshed behind the house one
spring night after Mary and her mother had gone to
bed and hanged himself. There was no note, no
explanation, no reason.
Of course, the town had been horrified. And then the
buzzing started. Those “business trips” of his to Dallas.
Hadn’t they been more frequent lately? And then, of
course, at the funeral, there had been the inevitable
“mysterious woman in black.” Only in this case there
actually had been a woman. Not in black, but she was
there. Lee and I had gone to the funeral with the
Major, and I saw her there in the back. She was young,
I remembered. And her face had been white and there
Hill Girl — 18
was a bitter hopelessness in her eyes as she came in
and sat in the last row while the service was going on,
looking straight ahead and ignoring the whispering and
cautious craning of necks and the faintly hostile
glances. She hadn’t been in mourning and she left as
soon as the church service was over and nobody ever
knew where she came from or where she went.
Mary’s mother had died less than a year after that.
The store and the big house had been sold and Mary
and her grandmother lived in a small white bungalow
on Cherokee Street near the high school. There had
been enough money to keep them comfortably and for
Mary to go on to college when she was ready and to
study music for two years afterward. She loved music.
It was as much a part of her as the flaming red hair and
the cool gray-green eyes that always seemed to be
slightly amused by something.
I grinned a little as I thought of what she must think,
with her love and understanding of music, of the family
into which she had married. The Cranes were musically
illiterate. That was the term she used herself. Since my
mother had died there hadn’t been anyone in the family
who knew or cared anything about it. Neither Lee nor I
could recognize good music when we heard it, and the
Major had had nothing but boundless contempt for
musicians of any description. “Long-haired bunch of
sissy bastards” was the way he disposed of them.
I put on my pajamas and turned out the light and lay
there a long time thinking of the days when Lee and I
were growing up in this old house. Older and smoother
than I, and with that quick charm of his, he had many
times helped to lighten for me the consequences of my
pigheaded rebelliousness and the Major’s hard rule.
For some reason the Major, normally suspicious of
everybody, would stretch a point to believe Lee and to
see his side of it.
I remembered the time when I was about thirteen
and had played hookey from school with another boy
and had gone out in the country all day to hunt rabbits
with our .22’s. We had, in taking along a recently
acquired young setter bitch the Major had penned up
in the back yard, committed two unpardonable sins,
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but we were too young and too careless to know it or to
worry about it. I returned home at sunset to find the
Major waiting for me on the back porch, his big face
dark with wrath.
I saw Lee come out of the kitchen door just as the
Major slapped me alongside the head with his open
hand, a stinging blow that made my ears ring and
brought tears to my eyes. He was a big man and the
clout rocked me and hurt.
“Who told you you could run rabbits with that bitch?”
he roared. “And what in the name of hell did you think I
had her penned up for, you little fool? Don’t you know
she’s in heat, and now every mongrel in the county’s
had a crack at her? When she has ‘em, I ought to take
the whole goddamned litter and tie ‘em around your
neck.”
Between the fright and the unreasoning anger his
outbursts always aroused in me, I was speechless and
intent only on backing away and trying to keep out of
his reach, but Lee came to my rescue.
“I don’t think it makes much difference, Dad,” he said
quietly, with that unusual poise he had for one only
seventeen. “That bitch hasn’t got much of a nose.”
The Major turned his attention to Lee momentarily.
“Who says she hasn’t?” he demanded truculently.
“I’ve had her out twice and both times she’s gone
right over birds. Something’s wrong with her.”
“You sure of that?”
“Well, when that old pointer of Billy Gordon’s can
find birds behind her, three times that I know of . . .”
Lee said, shrugging and letting it trail off suggestively.
The Major grunted suspiciously, but he growled
something about getting rid of her, and then glared
once more at me and went in the house and slammed
the door.
Lee grinned at me and slapped me on the shoulder
and I knew then he hadn’t hunted with the dog at all.
He could think fast when the heat was on.
The only time the Major ever really cracked down on
Lee was that same year, and it was over that affair with
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Sharon Rankin, the married woman he had run off to
New Orleans with.
The woman had been only twenty-three and I guess
pretty wild herself, and she had been married only
about a year to Rankin, who was a teller at the bank.
As I remembered her now, she was one of those extrathin
blondes who look so ethereal with their untroubled
eyes and clear, transparent complexions, who can drink
the average man deaf, dumb, and blind, and then look
as dewy and fresh the next morning as an armful of
lilies. I never could understand, and neither could
anybody else, why she should want to run off with a
seventeen-year-old boy, but I guess she knew what she
was doing. At least, she made enough fuss when they
caught up with the two of them and took Lee away
from her.
The police picked them up in New Orleans, living at
the St. Charles and going to the races every day.
Neither Rankin nor the girl had ever come back home
again. Lee had never talked about it and in all the years
since I had never learned any more about it, except
that sometimes when he was very drunk he mentioned
her name. “Sharon liked horses,” he said once when we
were alone in the back of Billy Gordon’s café and he
was so drunk he couldn’t stand and I was trying to get
him out of there before Billy’s so-called rye killed him.
“She said horses mos’ beautiful animal in the world.”
That ended high school for him. The Major sent him
off to military school at midterm, the first of a
succession of them. He ran out of them as blithely as
quicksilver out of a straw hat and turned up in the most
unpredictable places.
I remembered the cold December night during my
second year in high school when I awakened to find
him leaning over me in the dark room with a match
burning in his hand. He was shaking me by the
shoulder and grinning and when I sat up he motioned
for silence. He had on the military-school uniform and
it was dirty and thick with coal dust from the gondola
car he had been riding. He wanted to borrow some
money and had taken the last I had, which was ten
dollars, and then had collected some breeches and
Hill Girl — 21
boots and a heavy windbreaker out of his room,
gathered up his shotgun and a .32-caliber revolver he
owned, and disappeared again, making me promise I
wouldn’t tell where he was going. It wasn’t until after
he had gone back into the black norther and the
spitting rain and I lay there thinking about him that I
realized that I didn’t know where he was going. He had
made me promise not to tell, and then hadn’t told me.
It was two weeks before they found him this time. He
was living with a half-wild trapper in the Sabine River
bottoms, a drunken old swamp rat who was believed to
be slightly crazy and known to be dangerous, and who
had once served fifteen years for killing a bottom-land
farmer in a fight over a rowboat.
It was several years later that I happened to run into
the deputy sheriff who had gone in there to bring Lee
out, acting on a tip that a boy answering Lee’s
description had been seen hanging around with Old
Man Epps. The deputy, who had been in World War I,
said it sounded like the second battle of the Marne as
he walked up to the dilapidated old shack. He’d had to
leave his car several miles back because of mudholes in
the swamp road. He said he had been as scared as he
had ever been in his life, walking up to the shanty and
hearing the guns roaring and seeing pieces of rotten
oak flying off the roof in the rain. When he finally
screwed up his courage to the point of looking in the
window, he saw Lee and Old Man Epps lying side by
side on a pair of canvas cots and Epps as drunk as a
lord, and both of them shooting, Lee with his .32 and
Epps with an Army .45, at a frantic rat scurrying back
and forth across the rafters. Every time they would
shoot, another hole would appear in the roof and more
rain would come in and Old Man Epps would curse
sulphurously and Lee would laugh.
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