Sounder (7 page)

“So tuckered out he fell asleep,” the boy said to himself.

But the figure did not move when Sounder licked his hand. The boy put his hand on his father’s good shoulder and shook ever so gently. The chin did not lift itself; no eyes turned up to meet the boy. “Tired, so tired.”

When the boy returned to the cabin and told his mother, her lips grew long and thin and pale. But when she finally spoke, they were warm and soft as when she sang. “When life is so tiresome, there ain’t no peace like the greatest peace—the peace of the Lord’s hand holding you. And he’ll have a store-bought box for burial ’cause all these years I paid close attention to his burial insurance.”

They buried the boy’s father in the unfenced lot behind the meetin’ house. The preacher stood amid the sumac and running briars before the mound of fresh red earth and read:

“There’s plenty of wood, and I must go back to school,” the boy told his mother several days after
they had buried his father. “Sounder ain’t got no spirit left for living. He hasn’t gone with me to the woods to chop since Pa died. He doesn’t even whine anymore. He just lies on his coffee sacks under the cabin steps. I’ve dug a grave for him under the big jack oak tree in the stalk land by the fencerow. It’ll be ready if the ground freezes. You can carry him on his coffee sacks and bury him. He’ll be gone before I come home again.”

And the boy was right. Two weeks before he came home for Christmas, Sounder crawled under the cabin and died. The boy’s mother told him all there was to tell.

“He just crawled up under the house and died,” she said.

The boy was glad. He had learned to read his book with the torn cover better now. He had read in it: “Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead.” He had asked the teacher what it meant, and the teacher had said that if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever. It blooms on for whoever has seen it blooming. It was not quite clear to the boy then, but it was now.

Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.

The pine trees would look down forever on a lantern burning out of oil but not going out. A harvest moon would cast shadows forever of a man walking upright, his dog bouncing after him. And the quiet of the night would fill and echo again with the deep voice of Sounder, the great coon dog.

PRAISE FOR
Sounder

“A rarely beautiful, understated novel about a black sharecropper and his family in the 19th-century American South. The human characters’ namelessness lends them universality as oppressed people, while the author’s authentic, detailed descriptions assure their individuality. An extraordinarily sensitive book.” —
School Library Journal

“Written with quiet strength and taut with tragedy. Grim and honest, the book has a moving, elegaic quality that is reminiscent of the stark inevitability of Greek tragedy.”

—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“There is an epic quality in the deeply moving, long-ago story of cruelty, loneliness, and silent suffering. The power of the writing lies in its combination of subtlety and strength.”

—The Horn Book

“The writing is simple, timeless, and extraordinarily moving. An outstanding book.” —
Commonweal

“The main characters, though nameless, are sharply etched and the portrayal of the quiet dignity with which the boy and his parents face adversities not of their own making is powerfully moving.” —ALA
Booklist

Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Sounder

Text copyright © 1969 by William H. Armstrong

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-10556-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armstrong, William Howard, 1911-1999
Sounder / by William H. Armstrong; illustrated by James Barkley.

p. cm.

Summary: Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and through his relationship with his devoted dog Sounder.
ISBN 0-06-440020-4 (pbk.) - ISBN 0-06-073946-0 (special ed. pbk.)
    1. African Americans—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Family Life—Fiction. 4. Poverty—Fiction. [1. African Americans—Juvenile fiction.] I. Title.

Revised Harper Trophy edition, 2002

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