September 25, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Hill Girl by Charles Williams 1951(1)
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.
Hill Girl by Charles Williams 1951(1)
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,
Hill Girl — 19
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
Hill Girl — 20
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.
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,
Hill Girl — 19
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
Hill Girl — 20
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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