Hardcastle (44 page)

His legs are crossed at the knees, and at the end of his raised, skinny shank, one scuffed work shoe keeps time with his heartbeat while he eats his Popsicle and considers his life. It is not the one he had in mind when he started out, or the one he would have chosen, but merely the one that claimed him. And, all things considered, it has been good enough. Still, years ago he confessed to Bydee Flann that a feeling of homesickness bothered him now and again. But Bydee, while he lived, never lacked an answer for anything. He had been born and raised in Switch County and, except for the trip to Chicago, had never been as much as fifty miles away, and he was homesick too, he told Music. “All men are homesick,” he’d said, “ever since God Almighty scourged them from the garden.”

Maybe so, Music thinks, but he suspects otherwise. He suspects home is simply not a place after all, but a time, and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever. He twiddles his foot and agrees with himself.

“What did you say, Pappaw?” she asks him.

He has no idea. “I said less us get on back and see what them mean little brothers of yours are a-doin.”

The sun is dropping behind the ridge above Mink Slide, and it is cooler. He looks, as he knew he would, at the mountain across the river, at its raw and naked terraces, and he clucks to himself. Hellkatoot, he thinks, if Regus were alive, he wouldn’t even know where he was, nor would Ella. And all at once, out of nowhere, he understands something. He understands why his two small grandsons, clearly too young for such matters, were told he had once shot down a pair of deputy sheriffs. It is suddenly as plain as a pikestaff to him that he has become some sort of oddity, some sort of curiosity, to his youngest son. No doubt Switch County has too. And why wouldn’t it be all right to tell any kind of story about an oddity, after all? Sure, going off to school, living so long away from home in a city with a good job and a fine house, has given the boy notions. Music realizes he has sensed it before and couldn’t quite put a name to it. He can even understand it a little, but he decides it cuts no mustard with him, is no proper excuse, and he intends to collar his son and take him aside.

In a little while he and his granddaughter come in sight of the huge chicken house he raised in the forties, the field around it covered with hundreds of white pullets; and a little beyond, the new house he built in the fifties, where the kitchen garden used to be; and a little beyond and below that, the old one, still standing, which he could never persuade Ella to leave. And somehow he relents a little. The boys have been sent off to fish the river with their brand-new and untried rods and reels. They will catch very little, for he could see at once they had no experience to help them. Perhaps he should teach them real fishing, depression fishing, where you wade the river and, when the fish spook under the bank or under rocks, you reach in after them and grab them. It was one of the ways he got grub for Ella and Aunt Sylvie and Merlee and Anna Mae during the hard times, and he feels up to showing his grandsons how.

As he and the little girl mount the dirt road up to the house, he remembers with perfect clarity a particular March evening in 1932, and how he had climbed up out of the river, his bare feet purple with the cold and his clothes soaked, but carrying enough fish in the sack over his shoulder to feed the five of them, for he had worked hard and culled nothing. He remembers sitting in the withered bracken to lace his brogans about his sockless shanks, realizing at last that the worst of the season was over. Already a few red-winged blackbirds had shown up to ride the slender tips of the elderberry bushes along the river and fluff their feathers and creak to each other like rusty hinges. In no more than a week or so, he knew, he would be able to gather pokeweed and dock and other wild greens for them to eat. He remembers climbing the riverbank to the highway and coming in view of what had once been Easy Street and Silk Stocking Row, and how nothing remained of them but the heavily trodden earth and a little debris, as though what had once been squatterville might have been only the abandoned site of a carnival. And he remembers vividly how, in the aspect of that particular evening, he could look upon the place without so much bitterness and shame.

Yes, he thinks, he will teach his grandsons a different manner of fishing. And perhaps he will tell them stories, and if not quite the story they wish to hear, then maybe stories about Chicago and riding the freights, or getting caught sleeping in Regus Bone’s haystack. Perhaps, indeed, he will tell them Regus’s story about shooting the bear and getting trapped in the hollow tree with its mother. He wonders, after all, if it won’t be all the same to them.

About the Author

John Yount is the author of five critically acclaimed novels:
Wolf at the Door, The Trapper’s Last Shot, Hardcastle, Toots in Solitude
, and
Thief of Dreams
. A longtime professor at the University of New Hampshire, he has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. According to John Irving, Yount is “a completely original voice in contemporary American fiction.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1980 by John Yount

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-4976-6977-2

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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