Coon’s hard on a walker, he said. Walker’s got too much heart. Old redbone like that — he motioned toward the blackness that encircled them — he’ll quit if it gets too rough. Little old walker though — he addressed the dog now — she jest got too much heart, ain’t she?
When Sylder let him out of the car his clothes were still wet. You better scoot in there fast, he told him. Your maw raise hell with you?
Naw, he said, she’ll be asleep.
Well, Sylder said. We’ll go again. You got to stay out of the creek though. Here, I got to get on. My old lady’ll be standin straight up.
All right, we’ll see ye. He let the door fall.
Night, Sylder said. The car pulled away trailing ropy plumes of smoke, the one red taillight bobbing. He turned toward the house, lightless and archaic among the crumbling oaks, crossed the frosted yard. His shadow swept upward to the lean-to roof, dangled from a limb, upward again, laced with branches, stood suddenly upon the roof. He slid downward over the eaves and disappeared in the black square of the gable window.
PART III
1
Some time after midnight on the twenty-first of December it began to snow. By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay deadwhite and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.
On that morning the old man rose early and stared long out at the little valley. Nothing moved. The snow fell ceaselessly. When he pushed the screendoor it dragged heavily in the drifts packed on the porch and against the house. He stood there in his shirtsleeves watching the great wafers of snow list and slide, dodging the posts at the corner of the house. It was very cold. The hiss of the coffeepot boiling over on the stove brought him in again.
All day it darkened so that when night came no one could tell just when it had come about. Yet the snow fell, undiminished. Windless, pillowed in silence, down-sifting … No one was about. All the dogs were quiet. In his house the old man lit a lamp and settled back in a stout rocker near the stove. He selected a magazine from a rack alongside, an ancient issue of Field and Stream, limp and worn, the pages soft as chamois, spread it on his lap and began to leaf through it who knew it now almost by heart — stories, pictures, advertisements. From time to time he could hear scuffling sounds beneath him, scratchings in the darkness under the floor where Scout turned uneasily in his nest of rotting sacks.
He turned the pages for a while and then got up and went to the kitchen where from a high cupboard above the tapless sink he fetched down a molasses jar near filled with a viscous brickcolored liquid opaque as clay. He screwed off the cap, took a clean jelly jar from the sideboard and poured it full. Then he went back to his chair, settled the drink on its broad arm, adjusted the magazine in his lap and began to rock gently back and forth, the liquid in the glass lapping sluggishly with the motion. Now and again he took a sip, staining the white stubble beneath his lip a deep maroon. The oil-lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window-glass where a curled and withered spider dangled from a dusty thread.
The old man rocked, dwarflike in his ponderous chair. He seemed to be weighing some dark problem posed in the yellowed pages before him.
Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man’s window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray. The rooster called once again, questioningly, and shortly the old man jerked awake in his chair, knocking the jelly glass to the floor where it rolled about woodenly.
He peered through the hazy light of the room. It was morning, the lamp out and the stove too, and he found himself stiff and shivering with the cold, rubbing his eyes now, then his back. He rose gingerly and opened the door of the stove, poked among the feathery ashes. He went to the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. Scout was standing in snow to his belly, gazing out at the fantastic landscape with his bleary eyes. Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.
There were three of them coming up the trackless road past the house, and two dogs. One of them carried a rabbit, holding it loosely by the hind legs, its head jerking limply as they went. The other two carried guns and the boy knew one of them. He hadn’t seen him since school started in September.
They were talking and gesturing and they didn’t notice him standing there in the yard so he moved out toward the road, making for the mailbox, plopping his feet into the dazzling and unbroken drifts. The one carrying the rabbit had his feet wrapped — wound and encased in burlap sacks to the knee and held with twine. He saw him coming and then Warn turned and saw him too and waved.
Heyo, John Wesley.
Howdy, he said, sliding down the bank.
He met Warn Pulliam in the summer, headed toward the pond one afternoon when he saw the buzzard circling low over Tipton’s field and noticed that there was a string looping down from its leg. He came up through the field to the crest of the hill and there was Warn holding the other end of the string while the buzzard soared with lazy unconcern above his head.
Howdy, Warn said.
Howdy. He was looking up at the buzzard. What you doin?
Ah, jest flyin the buzzard some. He cain’t get up lessen they’s some wind. So when we get a little wind I gen’ly fly him some.
Where’d you get him, he asked. The back of his neck was already beginning to ache from staring up at the wheeling bird.
Caught him in a steel trap. You want to see him?
Sure.
He pulled the bird out of the sky by main force, heaving on the cord against the huge and ungiving expanse of wing, lowering him circle by circle until he brought him to earth. There the buzzard flopped about on its one good leg and came to rest eying them truculently, beady eyes unblinking in the naked and obscene-looking skull.
Turkey buzzard, Warn explained. They’s the ones got red heads.
Where do you keep him?
Been keepin him in the smokehouse, he said.
Don’t nobody care for you to keep him?
Naw. The old lady set up a fuss but I told her I was goin to bring him in the house and learn him to set at table and that calmed her down some. Here, don’t get too close or he’ll puke on ye. He puked on Rock and Rock like to never got over it — stit won’t have nothin to do with him. Don’t nobody think much of him I reckon but me. I like him cause he’s about a mean son of a bitch and twice as ugly. What’s your name?
The two dogs were beagles, shortlegged and frantic, leaping in and out of the chest-high fall of snow, or plowing their noses through it and furrowing snow up and past their ears, their tails spinning, then looking up with white brows and whiskers, gnomic and hoary-faced as little old men.