Hill Girl

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.

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 glad-hander 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 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, 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 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 extra-thin 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 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.

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 goat. He was wild and undependable, but he knew how to make people like him.