Hill Girl by Charles Williams 1951(2)

When the deputy started to take Lee away, the old
man had shown fight. “Jest say the word, Buck, an’ I’ll
blow this stinkin’ law’s guts all over the Sabine
bottoms. You don’t have to go back to no goddamned
school if’n you don’t want to.”
I grinned now in the darkness. The people who had
loved him! From the flower-like Sharon to that old
Hill Girl — 22
goat. He was wild and undependable, but he knew how
to make people like him.
Hill Girl — 23
Four
The speedometer of the big roadster climbed up to
sixty as we came over the crest of Five Mile Hill. I
watched it as we started down. It went to sixty-five and
then seventy, and then it hovered just under seventyfive.


Lee lounged behind the wheel in a big hunting
coat and fished in a pocket for a cigarette, brought out
a lighter, and snapped it, and for a brief instant the
little flame lit up the lean Indian face and the polished
smoothness of the brown head. He grinned at me
around the cigarette and winked and said, “We’ll knock
‘em dead, son,” and went on trying to hum “The
Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He couldn’t carry a tune any
more than I could.
It was in the cold half-light of dawn, with a growing
strip of pink in the east, and the Buick seemed the only
thing alive. The countryside was still and ghostly under
a heavy mantle of frost. The side curtains were up on
the car but still I had to shove my hands in my pockets
to keep them warm. When we crossed the little creek
bottom below the Eiler’s place there were patches of
low-lying and filmy mist that hugged the ground and
were torn apart and swirled into the boiling red dust
behind us. We left the loose boards of the old wooden
bridge ringing their complaining clatter on the still air
of the morning, and shot noiselessly up the hill where I
Hill Girl — 24
had met Sam Harley, the car eating up the miles of the
clay and gravel road like a red-tailed projectile.
There had been an argument before we started. I had
wanted to go out to the old Crane farm and hunt over it
so I could have a look at the buildings and the land at
the same time. The farm was mine now and I wanted to
see what kind of shape it was in, but Lee had insisted
that we come this way. I couldn’t understand why, but
had given in to him. I found out later what the
attraction was over here.
Mike sat between us, peering out interestedly
through the windshield at the scenery flashing past. He
would be a surprised dog, I thought, if he ever rode
with anybody else and found out that cars can travel at
thirty and forty miles an hour. He turned and licked
Lee on the face. Lee cuffed him on the head while we
swept around a long curve with that delicately
balanced feeling you have just before the car begins to
skid.
“You old cold-nosed bastard, I’ll throw you out and
make you walk,” he said affectionately.
He stopped the car and turned it around and parked
off the road on top of a long hill five miles beyond. I got
out on the side of the road and old Mike jumped down
and went racing around in ecstatic circles.
“Go get ‘em, Mike,” Lee said, and slapped him
playfully in the ribs.
Mike gave him a look of sheer adoration and cleared
the burrow pit beside the road with one bound and
disappeared down the rows of old cornstalks and pea
vines that lay downhill. We loaded the guns and
followed.
The sun was just coming up over the top of a far-off
ridge to the east and it felt good on my back and strung
the frosty vines with diamonds, and the red-gold shafts
of light broke against the far hill ahead of us in a
spreading extravagance of color among the dogwood
and hickory and red oak. October’s blue haze of smoke
was in the air and the unforgettable smell of it was in
our nostrils, and our breath was steamy in the
absolutely still air.
Hill Girl — 25
“He’s found birds,” Lee said happily. I looked up
ahead and saw Mike had slowed and was coming along
the edge of the field stealthily and his very pose said as
plain as words, “They’re here. And close.” Then he
stiffened in a point.
It was a small covey and they got up from the pea
vines almost at our feet, half a dozen or so small
brown-feathered bombs that ripped the hush of the
morning apart with their explosion. Lee knocked one
down with an effortless swing of his gun, but I was
jumpy and missed with both barrels, missed clean
without drawing a feather, which is the only way to
miss if you have to.
“I used to know a guy once,” Lee said gravely as
Mike brought up his bird and he stowed it in the game
pocket.
“Yeah? You did?”
“Quite a hunter, this guy was. And what he always
did was to shoot at the birds. Or at least in their
general direction.”
“All right, all right.” I grinned. “So I missed one.”
“You missed one?” He grabbed my coat collar and
shook it affectionately. “Why, you big Swede, you
couldn’t hit a Jersey cow in the ass with an ironing
board.”
And that was the way it went most of the morning.
Mike would find the birds, we would kick them out, Lee
would get one and sometimes a clean double, and I
would miss. By noon I had only two birds in the game
pocket of my coat. I couldn’t get the old swing back,
and Lee kidded me unmercifully.
“They went that way, mister,” he would shout
excitedly, pointing after a vanishing covey after I had
missed two shots on the rise.
All hunters have days like that, even exceptional
shots, and I have lots of them, so I didn’t mind. The day
was beautiful and it was all right just to be out with Lee
like this after an absence of two years.
He was in high spirits. “Damn it, Bob,” he said, “I’m
sure glad you’re back. We’ve missed you around here. I
Hill Girl — 26
don’t see why you couldn’t have gone to some school
around home. They’re always just as much in the
market for beef as that place you went. And I always
wished you and the Major could have got together
some way.”
“Well,” I said, “it was just one of those things.”
“I think it got to worrying him the last year. The way
the two of you had split up, I mean. He used to ask me
right often if I’d heard from you.”
“He did?” I tried to work up some interest in it, but it
was pretty thin.
“You missed a lot of fun, Bob.” He stopped and lit a
cigarette and grinned at me in the sunlight. “Don’t go
so fast. We’re not hunting birds for a living.

“But you did miss a lot of fun,” he went on. “You
know how much money he used to give me when I was
going to Rice. And the parties we used to throw the last
few years before he died, when I was working for him.
That last one, in Houston, sweet Jesus! He had a whole
suite of rooms at the Rice Hotel and I don’t know how
much whisky—the real McCoy, too, no moonshine—and
I had all the telephone numbers from the days when I
was going to school down there. And for a man who
was crowding fifty, he was quite a lad with the gals. A
little on the salty side, especially when he’d had a
couple of snorts, and sometimes they didn’t quite know
how to take him, but he was a good sport. You
remember how he used to be sometimes when he’d had
too much, he’d think about when he was in France with
the Engineers, and he’d start talking French to the
girls, and it’s a damn good thing none of ‘em ever
understood anything he was saying. And then he’d sing
the Engineers’ song, you know, the one about ‘Oh, the
Engineers, with hairy ears, they live in caves and
ditches,’ and when he’d come to the third line it was a
little too rough for some of ‘em unless they had a
snootful too, and if they got too snotty about it he’d let
out a roar and say, ‘Lee, take these goddamn campfire
girls back to their sorority house and go down on
Congress Avenue and dig us up some women with
Hill Girl — 27
guts,’ and then I’d have to pacify everybody all over
again.”
“You must have had your hands full,” I said absently.
I was trying to keep an eye on Mike, who was cutting
around the edge of a blackberry patch.
“I’ll say I did. And say, speaking of girls—”
“We were?” I said. “What are girls?”
“Speaking of girls, you sap, I want to take you out to
Sam’s sometime soon so you can see this Angelina.
Until you see that, you haven’t lived, I’m telling you.”
“Lay off,” I said. “Forget this Angelina stuff. You
know what Sam Harley’d do if he caught you fooling
around with one of his girls.”
“What a sucker!” He grinned. “If I ever get a chance
to get into that, d’you think I’m going to do it on the
courthouse lawn and give out invitations to everybody
in the country?”
“For Christ’s sake, Lee,” I said. “Quit talking like
that. You’ll have me believing you mean it before long.”
“O.K.,” he said. “O.K., Grandma. But when you see
her, don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s a lot of fun
there in one pair of flour-sack pants, for the guy that
can get it.”
“Speaking of sport,” I said, “did you ever hunt any
quail? Now, back where I come from, it’s a lot of fun.
You have a dog, see, and a shotgun; and this dog goes
out and finds the birds—”
“All right, all right. Maybe we had better get going,
or I’ll be whinnying and pawing the ground, just
thinking about her. Let’s go.”
We would hunt over a field and then move the car
down the road to another bit of good cover and go over
that. By noon we were close to the field where I had
met Sam Harley the day before. We started across a
piece of pastureland near the road, headed for a spring
branch below, where we could eat the sandwiches we
had brought. Mike found a big covey of quail in the
blackberries along an old fence row and Lee connected
again. I shot and missed.
Hill Girl — 28
“Now, you take croquet. That’s a nice game I could
recommend,” Lee said as we sat down at the base of a
big oak beside the spring. “I knew a man once. Just like
you in a lot of ways. Had eleven thumbs and three left
feet and he got to be a hell of a player. Maybe All-
American.”
“You certainly know a lot of people,” I said. “Any of
‘em named Joe?”
“Sure. All of ‘em. Joe’s a nice name.”
“Had a kind of green mole on the left side of his face,
just under the eye?”
“No. This guy had an aunt named Irma who used to
dance at Elk stag parties.”
I shook my head. “Must be another guy.”
“You’re nuts. I’m glad you’re home, but you’re nuts.”
I threw a chunk of rotten wood at him and he ducked
and it went into the spring and splashed a little water
on Mike, who looked at us sitting there on the ground
laughing like hyenas. He whined eagerly deep in his
throat and started up out of the ravine, padding
noiselessly on the damp brown leaves where the frost
had melted, and his manner clearly indicated that he’d
had enough of this stalling around and thought we
should get back to the pressing business of hunting
birds.
Lee whistled at him. “Don’t work so hard, Mike,” he
said. “You’ll just get promoted to a better job and then
you’ll have worries.”
He lay back at full length on the steep incline of the
bank, with an arm crooked under the back of his head
to keep it off the wet ground and leaves. The sunlight
of a cloudless autumn day poured through an opening
in the trees above and he stretched lazily in the warm
rays and bit enormously into a sandwich.
“This is the life,” he said.
It was, all right, I agreed silently. And I was happy to
see him enjoying it so much and I tried to pretend to
myself that I didn’t know he would be bored with it
before the day was over. There wasn’t enough
Hill Girl — 29
excitement in hunting quail to keep him interested for
a full day.
After lunch we went on down the road and stopped to
hunt over the field where I had met Sam yesterday.
But, as I had known, he began losing interest in it. He
didn’t kid me any more about the shots I missed and he
took less and less pleasure from even the difficult ones
he completed.
The silence between us lengthened out. I tried to
keep him going by bringing up people we knew and
funny things that had happened, but it was no use. He
was growing moody and irritable.
By two o’clock we were down by the little creek at
the lower end of the big Eilers field and the car was a
long way back, a mile or more. Beyond the creek was a
wooded ridge and I remembered that there were a few
scattered sandy fields and open pastures up on top of it
but that it wasn’t good bird country. I couldn’t
understand why Lee kept turning in that direction.
“There’s no use in crossing the creek,” I said. “Let’s
go back to the car.”
“Oh, come on. There are some fields up there, over
by Sam Harley's house.”
I began to see the light, but I followed him. There
wasn’t anything else to do. He had the car keys. And he
was already crossing the creek on the foot log, and he
stalked across the swampy bottom without looking
back.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “you and Mike go on along the
ridge here, cutting back toward the highway, and I’ll go
back and pick up the car and meet you.”
“No,” he said shortly. “It’s only a quarter mile on to
Sam’s. Let’s go on over there and get a drink and he’ll
drive us out to the car. I want to pick up a quart.”
I shrugged. “O.K.”
It was easy to see now where the hunting trip was
going.
Hill Girl — 30

Five
We came out of the scrub pine and there in the clearing
with the sun behind it was Sam’s place, quiet and
apparently deserted. It hadn’t changed any in the two
years since I had seen it. The sandy road ran on past it
and turned to the left beyond the barn, going on down
toward the big bottom country behind the place, and
there was a wire gate leading into the close-cropped
cow pasture surrounding the house and farm buildings.
The house was still the same, the unfinished pine
boards silvery gray with age and weather. A large mud
and stone chimney stood solidly against the south wall,
and there was a long “gallery” extending the width of
the house in front.
On beyond the house was the barn and the corn crib
and the cow lot enclosed in stripped pine sapling poles,
a wagon shed and a crazily leaning rough-board shed
where Sam kept his Ford, a big woodpile, and a little
well house covered with gray oak shakes.
There was no sign of life. The door of the shed was
closed and we couldn’t see whether the car was there
or not. We stopped at the front gate and looked around.
“Hello in there! Hey, Sam!” Lee called
experimentally.
“They’re all in town,” I said. “It’s Saturday evening.”
Hill Girl — 31
“Not like Sam.” Lee shook his head. “He doesn’t go
to town much.”
“Well, let’s go,” I said. “No use hanging around
here.”
“I wonder where he keeps the whisky,” Lee said.
“Well, not in the house. That’s a cinch.”
“We might take a look around.”
“Sure,” I said. “The sheriff has been trying to find it
for ten years, so we’ll just walk right into it.”
Lee swore disgustedly and we had turned to go when
I heard the front door open.
Angelina Harley stood there in the doorway, looking
out at us. I don’t know how I knew it was Angelina
unless it was what I saw on Lee’s face when he turned
around. I knew then it wasn’t Sam he had been hoping
to see.
She came out on the porch. “What did you want?”
she asked. There was no friendliness in her eyes or any
word of greeting; just the question.
Her eyes were on Lee and I doubt that she knew I
was there, but I felt compelled to reply. Any answer
from Lee would have been superfluous anyway. She
could see what he wanted. Not that she seemed to
mind.
“We were looking for Sam,” I said. “Is he home?”
So this was Angelina. This was the scrawny little girl
with the thin arms and legs and chapped knees and the
wide, frightened brown eyes I remembered. I felt
myself growing uncomfortable and tried to take my
eyes off her.
It wasn’t that she had grown so much. She wasn’t
big, even now. But it was as if she had received twentyfive
pounds or so in the mail with instructions to put it
on where she thought she needed it most.
She had on an old cotton dress that she had
outgrown in every direction and overwhelmed until it
had completely surrendered its cheap shapelessness
and lay taut across her hips and breasts in obedient
submission, and it was obvious she had on practically
Hill Girl — 32
nothing underneath that dominated and slavish
garment and that she didn’t give a damn.
Her hair was blonde, a little too dark to be called
golden, but you could see it was natural, and it was
long, thrown back over her shoulders, straight and
fine-spun and silky and slightly damp, and it was
obvious she had just washed it and had been drying it
in the sun in the back yard, for she had an old blue
bath towel pinned across her shoulders.
I learned later that her hair was long because Sam
wouldn’t stand for her bobbing it. Sam was pretty
strong for the Scriptures, aside from his whiskymaking,
and there wasn’t anything in there about
women cutting off their hair. I was to learn that and a
lot of other things about this girl before I was very
much older.
Her eyes were slightly almond-shaped and brown,
but they weren’t soft, as brown eyes usually are, but
rather there was in them an almost indefinable
expression of smoldering defiance. They seemed to be
at once sullen and shy. The face was a little too broad
and the full lips too near pouting for beauty, and the
whole thing too lacking in animation for charm, but she
was damned pretty, or she would have been if she’d
had anything in her eyes but that to-hell-with-you stare.
She answered me, still looking at Lee. “No. He’s
hauling up some wood. But he ought to be here pretty
soon.”
Lee wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking at
her, and I’d never seen him act like that around a girl.
Usually he just moved in on them like Stuart’s Cavalry.
There seemed to be something about her that threw
him off his stride. His face was shiny with sweat and he
couldn’t seem to be able to get his mouth closed.
“Do you mind if we wait for him?” I asked.
“No. I guess not, if you want to.”
We pushed through the gate and came up and sat
down on the porch, one on each side of the steps, with
our backs against the four-by-four posts that supported
the roof.
Hill Girl — 33
“I wonder if we could have a drink of water?” I asked.
For some reason I wanted to get her to talk, if I could. I
couldn’t figure her out. And the silence between the
three of us was oppressive and all that naked staring
was making me uncomfortable. I tried to keep my eyes
off her, for I knew the way I was looking at her and it
embarrassed me slightly, even though it didn’t seem to
bother her at all.

“I guess so,” she said ungraciously. “Wait here and
I’ll bring you some.”
When she had disappeared inside the house, moving
with an effortless grace, Lee looked across at me.
“Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Let’s get going,” I said. “You can see Sam some
other time.”
He didn’t hear me.
She came back out with a wooden bucket full of
water and a long-handled gourd dipper and put it down
on the porch between us and then went over and
curled up in the porch swing, tugging once carelessly
and ineffectually at the skimpy dress. She had on an
old pair of house slippers with no stockings, and her
legs were long and smooth and tanned, and the too
short and too thin dress did nothing to cover them. I
looked out across the cow pasture to where Mike was
investigating a gopher hole. I didn’t want to sit there
and stare at her like the bald-headed row at a
burlesque show.
That silence settled down over us again. As I sat
there and tried to pretend an interest in the dog I could
feel the two of them looking at each other.
I didn’t like it. Not that I cared what they did, for it
wasn’t any of my business. But I knew something about
those backwoods men like Sam and knew how they
regarded outsiders who tried to fool around with their
womenfolks. Sam was soft-spoken and a little shy in the
presence of strangers, but I remembered that when I
was a boy I used to go to court sometimes when my
grandfather was on jury duty and listen to the cases,
and I had seen men on trial for brutal and ruthless
Hill Girl — 34
murder and some of them had been soft-spoken and a
little shy of bearing.
I was remembering other things, too. Remembering
Sam’s telling me one night when we were coon hunting
long ago and were sitting around a fire down in the
Black Creek bottoms there behind the house that
Angelina was going to be a schoolteacher. She was a
right smart girl and she made good grades in her books
and she was going to amount to something, he had said
in that way of his of not wanting to appear boastful
before outsiders but with the quiet pride showing
through nevertheless. Sam thought a lot of his oldest
daughter, and anybody— especially any married man—
he caught fooling around with her was going to be in
one hell of a bad spot mighty fast. I felt cold down
between my shoulder blades as though there were a
draft blowing up my back. I wished Sam would come on
so we could get the whisky and get out of here.
It was Angelina who broke the silence. “What did you
want to see Papa about?”
“We wanted to ask him if it was O.K. To hunt across
the place,” I said,
“I know what you want. You’re after whisky.”
I turned quickly and looked at her. I knew Sam had
always been careful to keep his moonshining activities
away from his family. She said it flatly and distastefully
and she had that sulky challenge in her eyes, as though
she dared me to deny it.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“That’s all you town people would come out here for.
That’s all anybody comes here for.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I know all about it. He thinks I don’t, but I’ve
known about it a long time. Moonshiner!” There was a
biting scorn in her voice.
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” I asked. “Lots of
people make it. And not as good as Sam’s, either.”
“Does your papa make it?”
“No,” I said. “But he drank more of it than Sam has
ever made.”
Hill Girl — 35
“And I guess that ain’t something a whole lot
different, is it?”
“Well, I’ve never given it any thought. Is it?”
“You know damn well it is. How’d you like to live out
here on this backwoodsy farm and not ever go to town
because your papa was a moonshiner, and you never
had any friends because you knew that everybody knew
it and talked about you behind your back?”
Oh, hell, I thought. I was beginning to get a little
tired of Angelina. She had a body that would make a
dead man come back to life, but her conversation got
on your nerves. The very idea of anyone who looked
like that feeling sorry for herself was ridiculous.
“How old are you?” I asked. Anything to change the
subject.
“Eighteen.”
I was sure she was stretching it a little, but I didn’t
say anything.
“When are you going to go to Teachers College?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got enough credits yet. And I
haven’t got enough money saved up.”
She began to be a little less sullen then, as though
Teachers College interested her. Maybe she does have
other hobbies beside waving that chassis in your face
and not liking her father, I thought. I just didn’t like
her.
After a minute she asked, “Did either one of you-all
ever go to Teachers College?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
She hesitated a little as though undecided whether to
go on. She looked down at the floor between us.
“I was just wondering if you knew what kind of
clothes the girls wore down there.”
I was conscious of the traditional male helplessness
when confronted with this type of question. Before I
could think of anything to say she slid out of the swing
with a flashing display of long bare legs and was gone
inside the door.
Hill Girl — 36
She came back almost at once, carrying the mailorder
catalogue of some clothing company. She sat
down between us on the steps and opened it
immediately to the pages she wanted. It was wilted and
dog-eared from constant handling.
“Do they look like any of these?” she asked
hesitantly.
She was so damned near. I could feel the buttoned-up
collar of my wool shirt choking me and I didn’t want to
say anything for fear of the way my voice would sound.
As she leaned forward over the catalogue stray tendrils
of that blonde hair were almost in my face, and to look
down at the pictures she was pointing out I had to look
past some of the places she was fighting with that
dress.
I tried to concentrate on the pictures. They were the
usual mannikins of catalogues, standing in that pose
they all have with one foot pointing out to the side for
some reason, and the dresses and suits they had on
looked just like any other dresses and suits to me.
“Well?” she asked. “Which ones do you like? Like
college girls wear?”

I muttered something lamely and pretended to study
them again. I could hold her off in my mind when she
was sullen, and throwing all that stuff around and
daring you to look at it, and when she was whining, but
when she got up against me like this and dropped the
challenge and was just a girl asking for help she got me
and hit me hard. Not liking her didn’t help any.
“Here, let me look.” It was Lee on the other side of
her, and he slid over slightly. “I can pick out just the
thing for you.” His voice was normal and his tone
confident and I could see he was regaining control of
the situation. This was a girl he could understand.
She switched the catalogue over toward his side and
looked up at him hopefully and I slipped off the porch
steps and walked out into the yard, taking out a
cigarette and lighting it. I noticed how my fingers were
shaking. “God damn her anyway,” I swore under my
breath. The faint stirring of breeze out in the yard felt
good on my face.
Hill Girl — 37
I could hear Lee’s voice going on behind me,
gathering momentum and confidence with every word.
He was getting back into gear again.
“Now you take this one,” he was saying, and it was
the world’s greatest authority on girls’ clothes
speaking. “This isn’t your type. The lines are all wrong.
It’s too conservative. You want something with more
dash and snap to it.”
What a line of crap, I thought. You and your
goddamned dash and snap. What do you know about
women’s clothes?
But it didn’t scare me so much now. He sounded
more like the Lee I knew. He was working on her, all
right, but he seemed to have regained some measure of
sanity. He didn’t remind me so much of a stallion
getting ready to kick his stall apart. He’d try to make
her sometime, but maybe he’d have sense enough not
to get himself killed. Unless he got drunk. And then I
felt the cold wind again.
When they had the clothes question settled to their
satisfaction, they moved up into the porch swing and
went on talking. I went back and sat down on the steps.
There wasn’t anywhere else to go and I could see Lee
wasn’t going to leave.
“Your name is Lee Crane, isn’t it?” she asked, with a
sidewise glance at him.
“Yes.” He nodded. “I know yours, all right. But how'd
you know me?”
“Oh, I’ve seen you come out here a lot of times to see
Papa. And a girl I know told me your name one time
when I saw you in town. You were in a big car.”
“I wish I’d seen you. I would have taken you for a
drive.”
“I wish you had too,” she said. “Who is he?”
She meant me. A gracious little bag, I thought sourly.
I wondered why she didn’t point and say, “What is
that?”
“My kid brother, Bob,” Lee said, and I saw a flicker of
amusement in his eyes as he looked at me.
“Your brother? Why, he don’t look anything like you.”
Hill Girl — 38
The way she said it left little doubt as to what she
meant. How could such a homely character be a
brother of the gorgeous Lee Crane? And I liked being
discussed in the third person that way. I could see that
Angelina and I were going to be great buddies.
“Do you go to many dances?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“Why not? It’s a lot of fun.”
“I never go anywhere. He won’t let me!” she said
hotly.
Lee was tenderly sympathetic. “That’s a darn shame.
A lovely young girl like you should go to lots of parties.
Don’t you think it’s a shame, Bob?”
“Yes,” I said. “What a shame!”
She gave me a dirty look.
“I suppose you think it’s fun being shut up all the
time on this damn stinkin’ farm?”
“I didn’t say so,” I said. “But there could be worse
places.”
“That’s what you think.”
“O.K.,” I said. “That’s what I think.”
“I suppose you think a girl oughtn’t to have any fun?”
“What the hell do I care?” I said.
“Aw, lay off, Bob,” Lee put in protestingly. “Never
mind him, Angelina. He’s all right when you get to
know him.”
“Well, I don’t want to get to know him. He hasn’t got
any more sense than a mule. And he looks like one.”
I got off the porch and walked out into the yard
again. I don’t know why she got on my nerves so much.
I looked down the road and saw Sam coming up from
the bottom with his load of wood. I was glad to see him
and called back to Lee and pointed.
Sam drew up alongside the big woodpile in back of
the house and Angelina gathered up her catalogue and
went inside.
“Hello, Sam,” I said.
Hill Girl — 39
“Howdy, Bob,” he answered quietly. “Been doin’ a
little bird huntin’?” I saw him shoot a fast look across
the yard to where Lee was, coming from the front of
the house.
We offered to pitch off the wood while he went and
got us the quart. He never would let anybody go with
him when he went to the place where he kept it
cached.
While we were up on the loaded wagon heaving the
big fireplace logs off onto the pile, Angelina came out
of the house and headed for the well with her water
bucket. She passed us without a word but I guess she
could feel Lee’s eyes on her, for as she went by she
gave him that long slow look out of the side of her eyes.
“She ought to be against the law,” Lee said slowly
and shakily as she disappeared inside the house. He
was getting that look again.
“She is,” I said. “A little law about contributing to the
delinquency of minors.”
“She’s eighteen. You heard her say it. She’s no
minor.”
I shrugged. “Sam would kill you.”
“It’d be worth it.”
“Like hell it’d be worth it. There isn’t any of it worth
that much.”
“Not if you stop to think about it, no. But how’re you
going to stop and think when you see her?”
I didn’t say anything.

And don't try to give me any of that crap that she
doesn't affect you the same way. I saw you get up from
there and sidle away. You couldn’t take it either.”
“O.K., I said “O.K. So she does it to me too. But you
can stay dead a long time.”
“What the hell, don’t be such a sap. I’ll bet she’s not
any virgin. The way she waves it around, somebody’s
gettin’ to it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. But who’s going to explain
that to Sam? If you get caught, I mean, or she gets
knocked up. I guess you would? Or maybe you think
Hill Girl — 40
she will she’ll just say, ‘Why, Papa, he’s just one of the
crowd. I haven’t got any enemies.’ Like hell she will.”
“Oh, shut up, will you? You preach too much.”
Hill Girl — 41
Six
By the time we had the wood thrown off, Sam was back
from his cache. He stopped behind the corn crib, where
we could see him but he couldn’t be seen from the
house, and motioned to us.
“I didn’t want to tote it across to you there in the
open,” he said when we got there, and he nodded
toward the house, where Angelina was. I thought of the
contemptuous way she had said, “Moonshiner!” and
felt a little sorry for him. He wasn’t fooling that girl
any.
“One of you boys can tote it out in your game
pocket.”
“Sure,” Lee said. He paid Sam for it. “But let’s go
inside here and have a snort. How about it, Sam?”
Sam hesitated slightly, and then he nodded. We
climbed through the small door into the crib and closed
it after us again. I wondered what all the secrecy was
about. What was Angelina supposed to think we were
doing down here? Playing a three-handed game of
bridge?
The crib was built of split logs with the flat sides
inside and it was cool and dim and dusty in there, with
a narrow shaft of sunlight slanting in here and there
from the west side between the logs. The unhusked
corn was piled high toward the back in a steep slope
Hill Girl — 42
and there was a little cleared space by the door. We
hunkered down there with our backs against the
sloping wall of corn and Lee twisted loose the fruit-jar
lid. He held it out to Sam.
“Go ahead,” Sam said politely.
“The first today,” Lee said and took a big swallow,
holding the wide-mouthed jar with both hands. He
made a shuddering face and expelled his breath in a
long “Whoooof!”
I took a drink, not wanting it and disliking the breathcatching
and slightly gagging smell of it in the wide
mouth of the jar, but obliged to abide by the rules
governing these rites. If three men have a bottle, all
three must drink. It was good, as moonshine goes, but I
just couldn’t see the necessity for it at this time of day,
out in the country like this on a hunting trip.
Sam tilted it back and took a long drink without
changing expression. He might have been drinking
water. Lee hurriedly gulped another and passed the jar
to me again.
“You get many birds?” Sam asked.
“About a dozen,” Lee said. “Old Big-and-Ugly here
was blowin’ holes in the air and I had to get ‘em for
him.”
Sam nodded and smiled a little self-consciously at
me. “Well, ev’body has an off day now an’ then.”
“Have another jolt,” Lee said
“Well, I don’t know,” Sam said slowly. Then he picked
up the ax. “Jest one. Then I got to unhitch the mules.”
“Through hauling wood for the day?” Lee asked in
surprise. It was only about three-thirty.
“Well, I had thought I might get in another load, but I
guess not. Might put me kinda late with the chores.
Reckon I’ll unhitch.”
I reckon you will too, I thought. Unhitch and stick
around. You’re not going back down there in the
bottom and leave two potential drunks wallowing
around in your corn crib with a quart of moonshine and
that girl wandering around loose. You might as well go
off and leave an untended bonfire in a gasoline
Hill Girl — 43
refinery. I’ll bet you’ll be a happy man the day she’s
married and some other poor bastard can watch her.
I could feel the two drinks warming me and I was
conscious of the old illusion that about two drinks
always give you of seeing everything more clearly. And
the thing I saw more clearly than anything else was
that I’d better start working on Lee to get him out of
here before he got too much. You never could tell what
it was going to do to him.
“We’d better get started back,” I said. “It’s a long
way out to the car.”
“Plenty of time. Keep your shirt on,” he replied with a
vague irritation.
Sam got up and let himself out to attend to the team.
He gave us a disturbed look as he left. He didn’t like it
a bit. It was plain on his face in spite of the way he
tried to cover it up. And I could see his reasons. If
you’re making and selling booze in a dry county,
there’s no surer way of getting yourself in jail than by
letting your customers drink it on the premises and get
a load on to advertise where they got it. And Sam had a
lot of strict, old-fashioned family virtues. He didn’t
think his home was any place for people to get drunk,
but he didn’t like to say anything. After all, Lee was a
good customer. And, too, the code of hospitality
ingrained in men like Sam would never permit him to
ask anyone to leave his place. Backwoods people just
weren’t like that. They might rip your belly open if
anything unpleasant started, but they couldn’t ask you
to leave.