with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door until they had passed, and gave Bayard her hand. “You ain’t been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you ain’t fergot Mandy, neither.”
“Sure, I haven’t,” Bayard agreed. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into thefrosty darkness again. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars; He stumbled a little behind the clotted backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building, upon a room filled with warmth and a thin blue haze in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily, and odors of food, and stood aside until they had entered In the middle of the floor the table was laid, on it the lamp stood and at one end was placed a chair. The two sides and the other end were paralleled by backless benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split boards, and a woodbox. Behind the stove two negro men and a half-grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and with white rolling eyes; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ static ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.
“Howdy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed at him with diffident flashes of teeth.
“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and stowed them away in a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest. From time to time during the meal a head would appear suddenly, staring over the box edge with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up, dawgs! G’awn to sleep now,” Richard would say, rapping the box with his knuckles. At last the noise ceased.
The old man took the chair, his sons around him, and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with theirdark, saturnine faces stamped all clearly from the same die. They ate. Sausage, and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and cornbread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot. In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-five, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus; and Stuart, forty-four and Rafe’s twin. Yet although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of them. As though thediewas too firm and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty-three, was the second son.
They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.
Before the meal was finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs floated up and seeped, muted by the tight walls, into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee.
“Where are they, Dick?”
“Right back of de spring house. Dey got ‘im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.
“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the cupboard top and lit it, and the three of them stepped out into the chill darkness across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing asfrosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed its rambling low wall broken by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked,
“‘Twon’t freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it,Dick?”
“Naw, suh. Gwine rain.”
“Go on,” Bayard said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Pappy said
“Don’t feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons, and the long, rambling stable, from which placid munchings came, and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. The lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended; the clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them, and in a sapling just behind the spring house they found the ‘possum, curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tail, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.
Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at. least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy swung the lantern in... and flashed it onto a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skull-like faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest capture in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazing over a ‘ little, losing its brittle brilliance.
The others sat in a semicircle before the fire; at theold man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.
“Git ‘im?”Mr. MacCallum asked.
“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”
The old man puffed again. “We’ll give you a sho’‘nough hunt befo’you leave.”
Rafe said: “How many you got now, Buddy?”
“Ain’t got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.
“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We won’t never eat fo’teen ‘possums.”
“Turn ‘em loose and run ‘em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.
“Buddy ain’t never started yet,” Rafe said.
“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”
“Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”
The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed and woke, raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without word or movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a angle thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe carefully out upon his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.
