Sounder (3 page)

“You know it was the stove,” the mother said as she reached for the poker to push the wood back from the door.

“It sounded outside,” the boy said as he pulled the door closed after him.

Soon he returned carrying the lantern. “I want to look more,” he said. “I keep hearin’ things.” He lit the lantern from the stove as he had done before. His mother said nothing. He had thought she might say “Hang it back, child” as she often did when he wanted to go along the fencerows and hunt with Sounder after dark.

Outside, he murmured to himself, “That was
the stove, I reckon.” He put the lantern on the ground and tried to see under the cabin. Nothing moved in the dim light. He wished the light would shine in Sounder’s eyes and he would see them in the dark, but it didn’t. Backing from under the porch on his hands and knees, he touched the lantern and tipped it over. He grabbed it by the wire rim that held the top of the globe and burned his hand. “Don’t let it fall over; it’ll explode” his father had said to him so many times when they hunted together. He sucked his burned fingers to draw out the fire. Sounder’s pan was on the ground, and someone had stepped on it. The mean man who had kicked him with his big boot, the boy thought. He straightened it as best he could with his hurt fingers and put it on the porch.

He blew out the lantern and hung it by the possum sack. He stood on the porch and listened to the faraway. The lantern he had seen going into the foothills had disappeared. There were gravestones behind the meetin’ house. Some were almost hidden in the brambles. If the deputy sheriff had turned around on the seat of the wagon and shot his father, the visiting preacher and somebody would bring him back and bury him behind the meetin’ house, the boy thought. And if Sounder dies, I won’t drag him over the hard
earth. I’ll carry him. I know I can carry him if I try hard enough, and I will bury him across the field, near the fencerow, under the big jack oak tree.

The boy picked up Sounder’s bent tin pan and carried it into the cabin. The woman pushed back in her chair for a brief second in surprise and half opened her mouth. But, seeing the boy’s face in the lamplight, she closed her mouth, and the rocker came slowly back to its standing position—her head tilted forward again, her eyes fixed on the boy’s uneaten supper, still warming on the back of the stove.

In the corner of the room next to the dish cupboard, the boy filled Sounder’s tin with cold ham-boiling from the possum kettle. “What’s that for, child?” asked the mother slowly, as though she were sorry she had asked and would like to take it back.

“For if he comes out.”

“You’re hungry, child. Feed yourself.”

The boy put Sounder’s tin under the porch, closed the door, pushed the night latch, sat down behind the stove, and began to eat his supper.

IN THE MORNING
the boy’s mother did not cook any pork sausage for breakfast. The ham was on the tin-topped table, but she did not uncover it. Everybody had biscuits and milk gravy. There was still a faint smell of ham, but the boy missed the scent of sausage coming up to him as he stood warming himself. He had hurried out and called Sounder and looked under the house before he had finished buttoning his shirt, but his mother
had made him come in. She knew he would be crawling under the cabin, so she made him put on last year’s worn-out overalls and a ragged jacket of his father’s that came down to his knees. It wouldn’t keep out much cold because it was full of holes.

The boy’s mother put what was left of the pork sausage and the ham in a meal sack. When she had wrapped her walnut kernels in brown paper and tied them with string, she tied a scarf around her head and put on a heavy brown sweater that had pink flannel-outing patches on the elbows. She put the brown package in the basket she always carried when she went to the store. She put the meal sack over her shoulder.

“I’m taking the kernels to the store to sell them,” she said to the boy. She did not say where she was going with the meal sack she had swung over her shoulder.

“Watch the fire, child,” she said. “Don’t go out of hollerin’ distance and leave the young ones. Don’t let them out in the cold.

“Warm some mush in the skillet for you all to eat at dinnertime. I’ll be home before suppertime.

“Whatever you do, child, don’t leave the children with a roaring fire and go lookin’ for Sounder.
You ain’t gonna find him this day. If a stranger comes, don’t say nothin’.”

The boy had nodded each time she spoke. He thought he would say “Yes” or “Don’t worry, I will,” but he didn’t. He pushed the younger children back out of the cold and closed the door.

As his mother stepped off the porch and started for the road she began to hum softly to herself. It was a song the boy had heard her sing many nights in the cabin:

The boy wanted to run after her. He watched as she became smaller and smaller, until the meal sack over her shoulder was just a white speck. The rest of her became a part of the brown road and the gray earth. When the white speck had faded into the earth, the boy looked up at the sky.

“No sun to thaw things out today,” he said aloud to himself. His father always spoke aloud to the wind and the sky, and sometimes to the sun when he stood on the porch in the morning, especially when it rose out of the far lowland cottonwoods and pines like a great ball of fire. “Warmin’ the cold bones” his father would say. And
preparing for a hunt, his father would caution a full moon, hanging over the foothills, “Don’t shine too bright, you’ll make the creatures skittish.” And Sounder too, settin’ on his haunches, would speak to the moon in ghost-stirrin’ tones of lonesome dog-talk.

People would be very mean to his mother today, the boy thought. He wondered if she would tell them that the ham had slid across the floor. If she told them, they might just throw it out and feed it to their dogs. They might let his mother keep it and bring it home again. They wouldn’t let her keep the pork sausage, for it was wrapped in clean white paper and not cooked. They might push and pull his mother and put her in the back of a spring wagon and take her away too. She would spill the walnut kernels, and then she wouldn’t be able to sell them to buy sowbelly and potatoes.

The boy had hoped the sun would shine. It would soften the frozen crust of earth and make it easier for him to dig a grave for Sounder—if he found Sounder. If Sounder was dead, he hoped no one would come along and see him carrying the grub hoe and shovel across the field to the big jack oak. They would ask what he was doing. If anybody passed while he was digging the grave,
he would hide in the fencerow. If they saw him, they might run him off the land.

He felt like crying, but he didn’t. Crying would only bother him. He would have his hands full of tools or be carrying Sounder’s body. His nose would start dripping and be powerful troublesome because he wouldn’t have a free hand to wipe it.

He took in an armload of wood and punched up the fire. “Don’t open the stove door,” he cautioned the younger children. “I have to go out some more.” He went to his bed and took Sounder’s ear from under the pillow. He would bury it with Sounder. He smelled his pillow. It still smelled clean and fresh. He put the ear in his pocket so the children wouldn’t ask questions as he passed them on the way out. He smoothed his pillow. He was glad his mother washed his sheet and pillowcase every week, just like she did for the people who lived in the big houses with curtains on the windows. About twice a year his mother washed a lot of curtains. The clothesline was filled with them, and they were thin and light and ruffled and fluffy. It was more fun to rub your face against the curtains than on the clean sheets every Monday. The curtains, moving in the breeze, were like the sea’s foam. The boy had
never seen sea foam, but his mother had told him that when the Lord calmed the mighty Jordan for people to cross over, the water moved in little ripples like curtains in a breeze, and soft white foam made ruffles on top of the water.

The boy had never looked out of a window that had curtains on it. Whenever he passed houses with curtains on the windows, he remembered that if he put his face close against the curtains on the washline he could see through them. He thought there were always eyes, close against the curtains, looking out at him. He watched the windows out of the corner of his eye; he always felt scared until he had passed. Passing a cabin was different. In a cabin window there were just faces with real eyes looking out.

He could go out now, he thought. The wood in the stove had burned down some, and it would be safe. Besides, he would be close by for a while. Getting the body of Sounder from under the cabin wouldn’t be easy. The younger children would bother him; they would ask a lot of questions like “Why is Sounder dead?” and “Will he stay dead?” and many more that he would not want to answer.

“When I’m out, don’t be yellin’ for me. I’ll be through in a while,” he said to the smallest child,
who was looking out of the window, his chin barely high enough to rest on the sill.

There’s no hurry, the boy thought. I have all day, and it’s still early. And he looked out of the window too. “If you’re inside you look out, and if you’re outside you look in, but what looks both ways? That’s a riddle; what’s the answer?” He directed it to no child in particular. And no one answered. “What’s the answer?” the boy repeated, and then he answered his own riddle. “The window is the answer; it looks both ways.” None of the children paid any attention.

“I must go now,” said the boy to his brother and sisters, “before it gets colder. The wind is starting up, so keep the door shut.”

Sounder had not died in his favorite spot right behind the porch steps where he had a hole dug out and where the boy’s father had put two coffee sacks for a pallet. His mother had said, “Sounder will crawl to the darkest, farthest part of the cabin.” That’s why she had made the boy put on his ragged clothes.

The boy could not see all the way under the cabin. At one time rats had lived there, and they had pushed up the earth in some places so that it almost touched the beams. They did this so they could gnaw through the floor from below.

He hurt his head and shoulders on nails sticking down from above as he crawled. He hurt his knees and elbows on broken glass, rusty sardine cans, and broken pieces of crockery and dishes. The dry dust got in his mouth and tasted like lime and grease. Under the cabin it smelled stale and dead, like old carcasses and snakes. The boy was glad it was winter because in summer there might have been dry-land moccasins and copperheads under the cabin. He crawled from front to back, looking along the spaces between the beams.

Sounder was not to be seen. The boy would have to go back and forth. Maybe Sounder had pushed with his hind feet and dug a hole into which he had settled. The threadbare knees of last year’s overalls opened up, and his bare knees scraped the soil. His father’s long jacket caught under his knees as he crawled and jerked his face down into the dust. Cobwebs drooped over his face and mouth. His mouth was so dry with dust that he could not spit them out.

He crawled over every spot under the cabin, but Sounder’s body was not there. The boy felt in his pocket. He had lost Sounder’s ear under the cabin. It made no difference. It could be buried there.

But where was Sounder’s body? he wondered.
Perhaps the injuries in the side of his head and shoulder were only skin wounds. They looked so terrible, but maybe they were not bad after all. Perhaps Sounder had limped down the road, the way the wagon had taken his master, and died. Perhaps he had only been knocked senseless and that was why he zigzagged so crazily, running for the cabin.

No wild creature could have carried the dead body away. Foxes could carry off dead squirrels and possums. But no animal was big enough to drag Sounder’s body away. Maybe the boy, looking under the cabin with the lantern, had caused Sounder to crawl out the other side and die in the brown stalk land.

The boy was crying now. Not that there was any new or sudden sorrow. There just seemed to be nothing else to fill up the vast lostness of the moment. His nose began to run and itch. The tears ran down through the cobwebs and dust that covered his face, making little rivulets. The boy rubbed his eyes with his dirty hands and mixed dust with tears. His eyes began to smart.

He followed the road the way the wagon had taken his father as far as he dared leave the fire and the children in the cabin, still in hollering distance. There was no sign of Sounder’s body.
He spiraled the brown stalk land in ever-widening circles, searching the fencerows as he went. Under the jack oaks and the cottonwoods there was nothing. In the matted Scotch-broom tangle he visualized the great tan body as he carefully picked each step. But the dog was not there.

AFTER THE BOY
had fed the children and eaten something himself, he sat down by the warm stove and looked out of the window. There was nothing else to do. Now and then a cloud would cross the sun that had finally burned its way out of the gray. The boy watched the cloud shadows roll over the fields and pass over the cabin. They darkened the window as they passed.

He carried in wood for the night before the sun
began to weaken. Then he looked out of the window again to where his mother would appear. Finally he saw a speck moving on the road. He watched it grow.

“She’s coming,” he said to the younger children, and they crowded around him and pushed their faces against the window. “She’s been gone long enough to walk to town and more,” he added.

“What will she bring?” one of the children asked.

“She’ll bring nothin’, but maybe things to eat. She won’t bring no stick candy. Don’t ask her for none. Don’t ask her nothin’.”

Several times during the day the boy had said to himself, “Maybe they’ll let him come home if she takes back the stuff. Some people might, but some won’t.” But his father was not with her.

“I gave the stuff back,” she said when she got to the cabin.

The boy’s throat hurt with a great lump, and when he swallowed, it would hurt more. If his father had come, it would have been easy. Together they could have found Sounder’s body and buried him.

When the boy’s mother heard that he had not found Sounder under the cabin, she stood in the doorway and thought for a long time. If one of
the children had stood in the door that long, she would have said “Go in or out, child.”

“Creatures like to die under somethin’,” she said at last, “and there ain’t nothin’ else close to crawl under. He wasn’t hit in his vitals, I reckon. He’s got a flesh wound. He’s gone into the woods to draw out the poison with oak-leaf acid.”

Now she shut the door and put her basket on the tin-topped table. “Poke up the fire,” she said to the boy. “Oak leaves has strong acid that toughens the skin, just like the oak bark that they use to tan leather in the tannery. The creature beds down with the wound against a heap of oak leaves. The leaves make a poultice that draws out the poison and heals the wound with a hard brown scab. That’s why creatures head for the swampland around the big water when the mange hits. Wet leaves heals better.”

“Sounder’s blood would wettin the leaves,” the boy said after he had stood a long time with the poker in his hand. His eyes were fixed on the open stove door, watching the yellow flame change shape and turn to blue and red.

“Sounder was jumping at the wagon and hard to hit,” the boy’s mother said. “I think maybe he was hit a glancing shot that tore off the hide on his head and shoulder. If he was, he’s gone to the jack-oak woods to heal himself. The Lord shows
His creatures how to do. If he ain’t dead now, he’ll come limpin’ home, powerful hungry, in time.”

“Tomorrow or the day after?” the boy asked.

“Longer, maybe four days, or more like seven. But don’t be all hope, child. If he had deep head wounds, he might be addled crazy and not know where he wandered off to die.”

The boy’s mother had brought home the empty meal sack. In her basket she had some fat meat, potatoes, and a small bottle of vanilla flavoring, which she had bought with the money she got for her walnut kernels. From the bottom of the basket she took the folded brown paper bag into which she poured each night’s pickin’s and put it on the shelf. She also brought home an empty cardboard box which the storekeeper had given her. She didn’t say where she had been, besides the store, or what had happened. The boy could see that her eyes were filled with hurt and said nothing. The younger children remembered not to ask anything except, looking in the empty box, one said, “Nothin in here?”

“I’m gonna use it to put a cake in,” the mother said.

“Better go out and crack nuts for the night’s pickin’ before dark,” she said to the boy.

The boy scooped up a tin pail of nuts from the
big box under the stove and went out to the flat cracking stone. With his knees still sore from crawling under the cabin, he hesitated a long time before he knelt on the frozen earth. Standing, he looked one way and then another, tracing the fencerows that had more oaks than other trees, the far lowland woods and the foothills. “I’ll go there first tomorrow,” he said to himself as he faced the foothills. “There’s big patches of oak trees there. And whenever Sounder was given his head, he picked the hills for huntin’.”

When night came, his mother hummed and picked kernels. She did not tell a story. The boy wanted to ask who carried in wood to keep the people in jail warm. He knew they had big stoves in big jails. Once his mother had told him a story about three people named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego who were in jail. Some mean governor or sheriff got mad and had them thrown right into the jail stove, big as a furnace, but the Lord blew out the fire and cooled the big stove in a second. And when the jail keeper opened the stove door, there stood Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego singing:

Cool water, cool water;

The Lord’s got green pastures and cool water.

“Tell me about Joseph in the jail and the stone
quarry in Egypt and chiselin’ out rocks to make ole Pharaoh’s gravestone,” the boy asked. But his mother went on humming, and the boy went back to his thinking.

No stove could be that big, he thought. He watched the red coals through the open draft in the stove door brighten each time the wind blew loud enough to make a low whistling noise in the stovepipe. A burning chunk-stick fell against the inside of the stove, but the boy did not try to convince himself that it might be the thump of Sounder scratching fleas underneath the floor. He was thinking of tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would go into the woods and look for Sounder. “The wind whistlin’ in the pipe is bothersome,” he said. He hated the cold wind. It blew through his clothes and chilled his body inside and made him shiver. He hoped the wind would not be blowing in the woods tomorrow. The wind made the woods noisy. The boy liked the woods when they were quiet. He understood quiet. He could hear things in the quiet. But quiet was better in the woods than it was in the cabin. He didn’t hear things in cabin quiet. Cabin quiet was long and sad.

“Turn the pipe-damper a little and the whistlin’ will stop,” his mother said at last.

The next day he walked the great woodlands,
calling Sounder’s name. The wind blew through his clothes and chilled him inside. When he got home after dark, his clothes were torn. His throat hurt with a great lump choking him. His mother fed him and said, “Child, child, you must not go into the woods again. Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose, child. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don’t know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon. But Sounder might come back.”

But weeks went by, and Sounder did not come back.

One night the boy learned why his mother had brought home the bottle of vanilla flavoring. Now it was Christmas and she was making a cake. When the four layers were spread out on the tin-topped table and she began to ice them, the boy noticed that she put three together in a large cake and made a small one of the leftover layer.

“Why we having two cakes?” the boy asked. But she was humming to herself and did not answer him. When she had finished, she put the
small cake on the top shelf of the dish cupboard. The big one she put in the cardboard box she had brought from the store.

The sweet smell of baking and vanilla had drawn the smaller children from the stove to the edge of the table. The woman reached over or walked around them as she worked. “I’m done,” she finally said. “You can lick the pans.”

The boy had not moved from his chair by the stove. Today he had searched the oak clumps along the far fencerows for Sounder. He never got the sweet pan till last, anyway. It always went from youngest to oldest, and there was never much left when his turn came.

“You’re tired and worried poorly,” his mother said. And she handed him the icing pan.

In the morning the woman told the boy that she wanted him to walk to town, to the jail behind the courthouse, and take the cake to his father. “It’s a troublesome trip,” she said. “But they won’t let women in the jail. So you must go.” She tied a string around the cardboard box and said, “Carry it flat if your hands don’t get too cold. Then it’ll look mighty pretty when you fetch it to him.” She stood at the edge of the porch until he was far enough away not to be able to look back and see her crying, then called to him,
“Whatever you do, child, act perkish and don’t grieve your father.”

On the road, the boy felt afraid. He had been to the town at Christmastime before. Not on Christmas Day, but a few days before, to help his father carry mistletoe and bunches of bittersweet berries that his father sold by the wall in front of the courthouse or on the corner by the bank. And sometimes, when it was getting late and they still had trimmings to sell, his father would go to the back door of houses along the street and say “Ma’am, would you need some trimmin’s?” and hold up the biggest sprig of mistletoe left in his grain sack. They usually sold most of the mistletoe, the boy remembered, but bunches of bittersweet that the boy had carried all day were always left over to be thrown in a fence corner on the way home. “Ain’t no good for nothin’ now” his father would say.

From early fall until gathering time, the father and boy kept their eyes peered for the golden-green clumps with white berries that grew high up in the forks of water elm and sycamore trees. Bittersweet was easy. “Pull down one vine and trim it, and you’ve got as much as a man can carry” his father always said. “But it takes a heap of fearful climbin’ for mistletoe.” They had already
started gathering, and half a grain sack of mistletoe was still hanging against the side of the cabin. “If she hadn’t had such a big load, she might have taken it,” the boy said to himself.

The boy’s fearful feeling increased as he got nearer town. There were big houses and behind the curtained windows there were eyes looking out at him. There would be more people now, and somebody might say “What you got in that box, boy?” or “Where you goin’, boy?”

Church bells were ringing in the town. It was Christmas, and some people went to church on Christmas. In town the people he saw were laughing and talking. No one noticed him and he was glad. He looked at the store windows out of the corner of his eye. They were silvery and gold and green and red and sparkling. They were filled with toys and beautiful things. With the Christmas money from peddling, his father had bought what toys he could for the boy and his little brother and sisters. They had worn-out toys too. People in the big houses where his mother worked had given them to her to bring home.

He always wished they would give his mother an old book. He was sure he could learn to read if he had a book. He could read some of the town signs and the store signs. He could read price
figures. He wanted to stop and stand and look straight at the windows, but he was afraid. A policeman would come after him. Perhaps the people had offered his mother old books, but she had said “No use, nobody can read in our cabin.” Perhaps the people knew she couldn’t read and thought her feelings would be hurt if they offered her the books their children had used up and worn out. The boy had heard once that some people had so many books they only read each book once. But the boy was sure there were not that many books in the world.

It was cold, but there were a few people standing or sitting along the wall in front of the courthouse. Winter or summer, there were always people there. The boy wondered if they knew it was Christmas. They didn’t look happy like some of the people he had seen. He knew they were looking at him, so he hurried quickly past and around the corner to the back of the courthouse. The front of the courthouse was red brick with great white marble steps going up to a wide door. But the back was gray cement and three floors high, with iron bars over all the windows.

The only door that led into the jail had a small square of glass at about the height of a man, and there were iron bars over the glass. The boy was not tall enough to see through the glass. He clutched the box close to him. He felt that something was about to burst through the door. In the middle of the door there was a great iron knocker. The boy knew he had to knock at the door; he wished he could be back in the great woods. He could hear voices inside the windows with the iron bars. Somewhere a voice was singing “God’s gonna trouble the water.” From one of the windows there came the sound of laughter. Now and then a door slammed with the deep clash of iron on iron. There was a rattle of tin pans. The boy felt very lonely. The town was as lonely as the cabin, he thought.

A large red-faced man opened the door and said, “You’ll have to wait. It ain’t visitin’ hours yet. Who do you want to see? You’ll have to wait.” And he slammed the door before the boy could speak.

It was cold on the gray side of the building, so the boy went to the corner near the wall where the people and visitors stood or sat. The sun was shining there. The boy had forgotten it was still Christmas, the waiting seemed so long. A drunk man staggered along the street in front of the courthouse wall, saying “Merry Christmas” to everyone. He said “Merry Christmas” to the boy, and he smiled at the boy too.

Finally the great clock on the roof of the courthouse
struck twelve. It frightened the boy because it seemed to shake the town. Now the red-faced man opened the door and let several people in. Inside, the man lined everybody up and felt their clothes and pockets. He jerked the cardboard box from the boy and tore off the top. The boy could hear iron doors opening and closing. Long hallways, with iron bars from floor to ceiling, ran from the door into the dim center of the building. The man with the red face squeezed the cake in his hands and broke it into four pieces. “This could have a steel file or hacksaw blade in it,” he said. Then he swore and threw the pieces back in the box. The boy had been very hungry. Now he was not hungry. He was afraid. The man shoved the box into the boy’s hands and swore again. Part of the cake fell to the floor; it was only a box of crumbs now. The man swore again and made the boy pick up the crumbs from the floor.