“We’uns git up at fo’o’clock, Bayard,” he said.
“But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”
“Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork quilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chilly air.
“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, race-horse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though.” Buddy’s preparations for sleeping were simple: he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy added. ‘You want one o’ my heavy ‘uns?”
“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks; it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.
“Git that ‘ere quilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, emitting his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation and contentment He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.
“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two—three years, wasn’t it?”
“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered. “Last timeyou and him...” He ceased suddenly. Then he added quietly: “I seen in a paper, when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ‘twas him. It was a limey paper.”
“You did? Where were you?”
“Up there,” Buddy answered. “Where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever drained it enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”
“Yes,” Bayard said. His nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed too that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush; and he lay beneath it...He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered so that he was breathing in deep troubled draughts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and with stumbling reference to places wretchedly pronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiation or background or future, caught tunelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.
“How’d you like the army, Buddy?”
“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment.
“They gimme a medal,” he added, in a burst ofshy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure. “I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ‘ere flo’s to dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance when pappy’s outen the house.”
“Why? Don’t he know you got it?”
“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee medal. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”
“Yes,” Bayard repeated. After a while Buddy ceased and sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly oh his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk and whenever you close your eyesthe room starts going round and round, and so you sit rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking; presently his breathing became longer, steady and regular, and the shuck; shifted with sibilant complaint, as Bayard turned slowly onto his side.
But Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, surrounding him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained laboring, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed peacefully and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it again with strained and intense attention from the time he had seen the first tracer smoke, until from his steep side-slip he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived itagain as you might run over a printed tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much: that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved forever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned onto his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision. .
The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vice of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a lead cast about them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and labored breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.
Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice upon his ribs, and he moved with infinite caution while the chill croached from his shoulders downward and the hidden shucks chattered at him, and swung his legs to the floor, and his curling toes. He knew where the door was and he groped his way to it. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice; he fumbled this out of its slots carefully and without noise. The door had sagged from the hinges and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it in his chill fingers and raised it and swung it back, and stood in the door.
In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like chill ghosts in the cold corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the wooden roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.
In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood flowed again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for…not vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.
