Charles Williams: Hill Girl

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.

Four

The speedometer of the big roadster climbed up to sixty as we came over the crest of Five Mile Hill. I watched it as we started down. It went to sixty-five and then seventy, and then it hovered just under seventy-five. Lee lounged behind the wheel in a big hunting coat and fished in a pocket for a cigarette, brought out a lighter, and snapped it, and for a brief instant the little flame lit up the lean Indian face and the polished smoothness of the brown head. He grinned at me around the cigarette and winked and said, “We’ll knock ‘em dead, son,” and went on trying to hum “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He couldn’t carry a tune any more than I could.

It was in the cold half-light of dawn, with a growing strip of pink in the east, and the Buick seemed the only thing alive. The countryside was still and ghostly under a heavy mantle of frost. The side curtains were up on the car but still I had to shove my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. When we crossed the little creek bottom below the Eiler’s place there were patches of low-lying and filmy mist that hugged the ground and were torn apart and swirled into the boiling red dust behind us. We left the loose boards of the old wooden bridge ringing their complaining clatter on the still air of the morning, and shot noiselessly up the hill where I had met Sam Harley, the car eating up the miles of the clay and gravel road like a red-tailed projectile.

There had been an argument before we started. I had wanted to go out to the old Crane farm and hunt over it so I could have a look at the buildings and the land at the same time. The farm was mine now and I wanted to see what kind of shape it was in, but Lee had insisted that we come this way. I couldn’t understand why, but had given in to him. I found out later what the attraction was over here.