The Yearling

Chapter XIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny turned on him sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jody asked, “Is it a hurricane comin?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at him belligerently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lifted the broom in pretended threat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was indignant.

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

“I don’t want to smell him.”

“But he smells sweet.”

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

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

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

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

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

He said, “Pa, tell me a tale.”

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

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

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

Jody wriggled closer up the counterpane.

“Tell me.”

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

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

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

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

“Well, sir, I was obliged to set down with that dog my ownself, to see what ‘twas he was doin’. Now you know how a wild-cat or a fox’ll fool most dogs? He’ll double back on his own tracks. Yes sir, he’ll double back on his own tracks. He’ll git a good start on the dogs and he’ll light out and put a heap o’ distance between ‘em. Then what do he do? He turns right back over his own trail. He cuts as far back as he’s daresome to do, listenin’ all the while for the dogs. Then he cuts off at another angle, so a picture o’ his trail’d look like a big V, like the ducks makes flyin’. Well, the dogs follers the trail he made in the first place, extry strong on account of him havin’ been over it twicet, and then they come to a place where they jest ain’t no more trail. They nose around and they nose around and they complain, and when they jest cain’t figger no sense to it, they turns back agin, back-trackin’. ‘Course, they picks up then the turn-off where the fox or cat cut off in another direction. But all that time is wasted, and nine to one the cat or fox has made an out of it and got plumb away. Well, what do you figger this lop-eared dog o’ mine done?”

“Tell me.”

“He figgered it out, that’s what he done. He figgered out about when ‘twas time for the creetur to double back — and he’d slip back along the trail and lay down and wait. And when Mister Fox or Mister Cat come slippin’ back, there was old Dandy waitin’ to pop out on him.

“Now sometimes he’d make his cut-off too fur back, and did he hang them long ears when he guessed it wrong! But mostly speakin’, he studied it out right, and he ketched me more wild-cats and more foxes than ary dog I’ve had, before or since.”

He puffed his pipe. Ma Baxter moved her rocker closer to the candle. It was depressing to have the tale end so soon.

“What else did old Dandy do, Pa?”

“Well, one day he met his match.”

“A cat or a fox?”

“Neither one. A big ol’ buck, was as smart a deer as he was smart a dog. He was a buck with a twisted antler. Each year it growed in twisted. Now a deer don’t generally double back on his tracks. But now and again this old buck’d do it. And that was jest to this sly ol’ dog’s likin’. But this is where he wasn’t smart enough. The buck’d do jest the opposite to whatever the dog figgered he’d do. One time he’d double back. Next time he’d keep on runnin.’ He’d change his ways ever’ whip-stitch. That went on, year in, year out, the dog and the buck tryin’ to out-smart each other.”

“Which was the smartest, Pa? How’d it end?”

“You shore you want the answer?”

He hesitated. He wanted the droopy-eared dog to outsmart the buck, and yet he wanted the buck to get away.

“Yes. I got to know. I got to know the answer.”

“Well, hit’s got a answer but no endin’. Old Dandy never come up with him.”

He sighed with relief. That was a proper tale. When he thought of it again, he could picture the dog trailing the buck perpetually.

He said, “Tell another tale like that un, Pa. A tale has got a answer but no endin’.”

“Now boy, they ain’t many tales like that in the world. You best be content with that un.”

Ma Baxter said, “I ain’t much for dogs, but they was a dog oncet I takened a notion to. It was a bitch and she had the purtiest coat. I said to the feller owned her, ‘When she finds pups,’ says I, ‘I’d like one.’ He said, ‘You’re welcome, but ‘twon’t do, for you got no way o’ huntin’ it’—I wasn’t yit married to your Pa—’and a hound’ll die,’ he said, ‘if it ain’t hunted.’ ‘Is she a hound?’ says I, and he said, ‘Yessum.’ And I said, ‘Then I shore don’t want one, for a hound’ll suck eggs.’”

Jody waited eagerly for the rest of the tale, then understood that was all there was to it. It was like all his mother’s tales. They were like hunts where nothing happened. He went back in his thoughts to the dog that could out-smart wild-cats and foxes, but never caught the buck.

He said, “I’ll bet Flag’ll be smart when he grows up.”

Penny said, “What’ll you do, do somebody else’s dogs take out after him?”

His throat constricted.

“I’ll kill ary dog or ary man comes here, huntin’ him. Nobody ain’t likely to come, is they?”

Penny said gently, “We’ll spread the word, so folks’ll be keerful. He’s not likely to roam far, no-how.”

Jody decided to keep his gun always loaded, against marauders. He slept that night with Flag on the bed beside him. The wind shook the windowpanes all night and he slept uneasily, dreaming of clever dogs that ran the fawn mercilessly through the rain.

In the morning he found Penny dressed as for winter, in his heavy coat and with a shawl over his head. He was preparing to go out into the storm to milk Trixie, the only chore that was entirely necessary for the time being. There was no lessening of the torrential downpour.

Ma Baxter said, “Now you be peert and git back in here or you’ll die o’ the pneumony.”

Jody said, “Leave me go,” but Penny said, “The wind’d blow you away, boy.”

It seemed to him, watching the small bones of his father leaning against the tumultuous air, that there was little to choose between them in bulk and sturdiness. Penny came in again, drenched and breathless, the milk in the gourd spotted by the rain.

He said, “Hit’s a mercy I toted water yestiddy.”

The day continued as stormy as it had begun. The rain fell in sheets and the wind whipped it in under the eaves, so that Ma Baxter set pans and gourds to catch it. The rain barrels outside were overflowing and the rain from the roof gurgled into their fullness. Old Julia and the fawn had to be turned out by force. They were both back at the kitchen door in a brief time, wet and shivering. This time Rip was with them, whining. Ma Baxter protested, but Penny admitted the three. Jody dried them all with the crocus sack rug from in front of the hearth.

Penny said, “We’re about due for a lull.”

The lull did not come. Now and then there seemed to be a few moments when the wind and rain were less intense and Penny rose hopefully from his chair and peered outside. But he had no sooner decided that he would risk going out to cut wood and see to the chickens, than the deluge came again, as violent as before. In the late afternoon he went again to milk Trixie, to feed and water Cæsar, and to feed the chickens, huddled and frightened and unable to scratch for their living. Ma Baxter made him change his wet clothes immediately. They steamed and dried by the hearth with the sweet, musty smell of wet cloth.

Supper was not so ample. Penny was not inclined to tales. The dogs were allowed to sleep in the house and the family went to bed early. Darkness had come at an unseemly hour and it was impossible to tell the time. Jody awakened at what would ordinarily have been an hour before daylight. The world was dark and the rain was still falling, the wind still blowing.

Penny said, “We’ll git a break this mornin’. Hit’s a three-day nor’easter a’right, but sich a rain. I’ll be proud to see the sun.”

The sun did not appear. There was no morning break. In mid-afternoon there came the lull that Penny had expected the day before. But it was a gray lull, the roof dripping, the trees soaked, the earth sodden. The chickens came out from their huddle for a few forlorn moments and scratched halfheartedly.

Penny said, “We’ll git a change o’ wind now, and all be clare and fine.”

The change of wind came. The gray sky turned green. The wind roared in from a distance, as before. When it came, it was not from the northeast but from the southeast, and it brought more rain.

Penny said, “I’ve never seed sich a thing.”

The rain was more torrential than before. It poured down as though Juniper Creek and Silver Glen Run and Lake George and the St. John’s River had all emptied over the scrub at once. The wind was no fiercer than before, but it was gusty. And there was no end to it. It blew and rained and blew and rained and blew and rained.

Penny said, “This must be the way the Lord made the blasted ocean.”

Ma Baxter said, “Hush. You’ll be punished.”

“Cain’t be no worse punished, woman. The ‘taters’ll be rotted and the corn flat and the hay ruint, and the cane.”

The yard was afloat. Jody looked out of the window and saw two drowned biddies floating about with upturned bellies.

Penny said, “I’ve seed things in my time, but I’ve never seed a thing like this.”

Jody offered to go to the sink-hole for drinking water.

Penny said, “Hit’ll be nothin’ but rain-water, and riled to boot.”

They drank rain-water from a pan under the northwest corner of the house. It had a faintly woody taste from the cypress shingles. Jody did the evening chores. He went out of the kitchen door with the milk gourd into a strange world. It was a lost and desolate world, like the beginning of time, or the end of it. The vegetation was beaten flat. A river ran down the road, so that a flat-bottomed boat could have gone down it clear to Silver Glen. The familiar pines were like trees at the bottom of the sea, washed across not with mere rain, but with tides and currents. It seemed to him that he might swim to the top of the rain. The water was knee-deep in the lot, which lay at a lower level than the house. Trixie had broken down the bars that separated her from the calf and had taken it with her to a high corner. They stood huddled together. The calf had taken most of the milk and he was able only to draw a quart or so from the drained udders. The passage between the stalls and the corn-crib was a sluiceway. He meant to gather the dry husks for extra feed for Trixie, but the water swept through so discouragingly that he decided to let her make out until morning with the hay from the loft. It was a good thing, he thought, that the new crop of hay would soon be ready. There was little left. He did not know whether to try to separate the overgrown calf from the cow again. There was no place to put it where it would be dry. Yet the Baxters needed the milk as badly. He decided to wait and ask his father, coming back again if necessary. He fought his way outside and plodded to the house. The rain blinded him. The clearing seemed alien and unfriendly. He was glad to push open the door and to be again inside the house. The kitchen seemed safe and intimate. He made his report on conditions.

Penny said, “Best leave the calf stay with its mammy, a time like this. We kin make out without milk ‘til mornin’. Hit’ll shorely be clare by then.”

Morning brought no abatement. Penny paced up and down the kitchen.

He said, “My daddy told of a storm in the ‘50’s was mightly bad, but I don’t reckon all Floridy history has had sich a rain.”

The days passed with no change. Ma Baxter usually left the weather in Penny’s hands, but now she cried, and sat rocking with her hands folded. On the fifth day, Penny and Jody made a rush to the pea-field to pull enough cow-peas for a meal or two. The peas were flattened. They pulled up the whole vines with their backs to the rain and wind. They stopped at the smoke-house for a piece of pickled meat from the bear Buck Forrester had shot on his last night with them. Penny remembered that his wife was short of cooking grease. They tipped the can that held the golden bear grease and filled a stone crock. They laid the meat over the top to protect it and rushed for the house.

The cow-peas were already moulding on the outside, but the peas inside were still firm and good. Supper was again a feast. There was the wild honey to fall back on, and Ma Baxter made a pudding sweetened with its rich flavor, tasting faintly of wood and smoke.

Penny said, “Don’t seem possible it’ll not clare by mornin’, but if so be ‘tain’t, Jody, you and me had best git out in it and pull as many peas as we kin manage.”

Ma Baxter said, “But how’ll I keep ‘em?”

“Cook ‘em, woman, and warm ‘em ever’ day, if need be.”

The morning of the sixth day was exactly like the others. Since they would be drenched in any case, Penny and Jody stripped to their breeches and went to the field with sacks. They worked until noon in the down-pour, pulling the slippery pods from the bushes. They came in for a hurried dinner and went back again without troubling to change their clothes. They covered most of the field. The hay, Penny said, was a total loss, but they would do what they could to save the peas. Some of the pods were mature. They spent the evening and late into the night shelling the peas, sticky and mouldering. Ma Baxter built up a slow fire on the hearth and spread out the peas close to the heat to dry. Jody was awakened several times in the night by the sound of some one going out to the kitchen to replenish the fire.

The morning of the seventh day might have been the morning of the first. The gusty wind whipped around the house as though it had always blown and always would blow. The sound of the rain on the roof and in the rain-barrels was now so familiar that it was not noticed. At daylight, a limb of the chinaberry crashed to the ground. The Baxters sat silently at breakfast.

Penny said, “Well, Job takened worse punishment than this. Leastways none of us ain’t got risin’s.”

Ma Baxter snapped, “Find the good in it, that’s right.”

“They ain’t no good in it. Lest it is to remind a man to be humble, for there’s nary thing on earth he kin call his own.”

After breakfast he took Jody to the cornfield. The corn had been broken on the stalks before the storm. The stalks were beaten to the ground but the ears were unharmed. They gathered them and brought them too into the warm dry refuge of the kitchen.

Ma Baxter said, “I ain’t got the peas dried yit. How’ll I dry all this?”

Penny did not answer but went to the front room and kindled a fire on the hearth. Jody went outside to bring in more wood. The wood was soaked through, but when the fat-wood was heated a little while it would burn. Penny strewed the ears of corn on the floor.

He said to Jody, “Now your job be to keep changin’ it, so’s it’ll all git a mite o’ the heat.”

Ma Baxter said, “How’s the cane?”

“Hit’s flat.”

“What you reckon has happened to the ‘taters?”

He shook his head. In the late afternoon he went to the sweet potato field and dug enough for supper. They were beginning to rot. By trimming, some were usable. Again, supper seemed lavish, because of the sweet potatoes.

Penny said, “If they ain’t no change by mornin’, we jest as good to quit fightin’ and lay down and die.”

Jody had never heard his father speak so disconsolately. It froze him through. Flag was showing the effect of short rations. His ribs and backbone were visible. He bleated often. Penny had given up all attempt to milk the cow, for the sake of the calf.

In the middle of the night Jody awakened and thought he heard his father about. It seemed to him the rain was falling less violently. He was asleep again before he could be certain. He awakened on the morning of the eighth day. Something was different. There was silence instead of tumult. The rain had stopped. The long winds were still. A light the color of pomegranate blossoms sifted through the gray, wet atmosphere. Penny flung all the doors and windows wide open.

“‘Tain’t much of a world to go out to,” he said, “but let’s all go out and be thankful there’s a world at all.”

The dogs pushed past him and bounded out side by side. Penny smiled.

“Dogged if ‘tain’t like goin’ outen the Ark,” he said. “The animals two by two — Ory, come go out with me.”

Jody jumped about and leaped down the steps with the fawn.

“We’re the two deer,” he called.

Ma Baxter looked across the fields and began to cry again. But the air, Jody felt, was cool and sweet and gracious. The fawn shared his feeling and bounded over the yard-gate with swift twinkling heels. The world was devastated with the flood, but it was indeed, as Penny kept reminding his wife, the only world they had.