Hill girl Read online

  “Did you want me to? You know whose pocket it’d come out of, don’t you?”

  “Silly. I know how much you’ve always liked Lee. But nobody lets a little affection stand in his way when that much money is concerned in it.”

  “No,” I said. “That wasn’t it. I just never wanted anything from him when he was alive. Why should I after he’s dead?”

  “After all, you were his son. One of the only two he had.”

  “We wore that out a long time ago.”

  “It was a lot your fault, too, Bob. Maybe I’m taking advantage of the fact that you and I always thought so much of each other and I could say things to you nobody else could. But you’ve always been just as hard as he was.”

  “Well, let's forget it,” I said.

  “He was always good to Lee. He let him have anything he wanted.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. I just couldn’t get along with him. I didn’t know how, I guess, or maybe I didn’t try hard enough. But I’m satisfied. Let’s drop it.”

  “You never change, do you, Bob? You’d rather be stubborn than right, always.” She reached over and patted my arm. “But I love you anyway. You’re my favorite bear.”

  I grinned at her. “And you’re my favorite redhead. Whenever you get tired of Lee, let me know.”

  “God forbid. One Crane per lifetime is all any girl should have to face.”

  We went into the living room after a while and sat down on the sofa and stretched our legs out toward the fire. “What are you going to do now, Bob?” she asked. “Now that you’re home?”

  “Take over the farm,” I said.

  She smiled. “I thought you would. That was what you always wanted to do, wasn’t it?”

  “It always seemed like home to me,” I said. “It’s funny, I guess, because I only lived out there three months out of the year, while school was out, but that was the way it seemed.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t because you were so fond of your grandfather? And back here, you didn’t—well . . .” She let it trail off as though she didn’t know how to put it. “Partly, I guess,” I said. “But I like living in the country better anyway.”

  It was almost noon before Lee came home. We were sitting on the big sofa before the fire when we heard the scream of tires on pavement and then a scattering of gravel as he slid to a stop out front under the trees.

  “You know, lots of people think it’s necessary to slow down to make that turn into the driveway,” Mary said musingly.

  I heard his footsteps in the hall, hard-heeled and fast as always, and I could picture his long-legged stride.

  He stopped in the doorway and I got up from the sofa.

  “Sir,” I said, “your wife and I love each other and we think the three of us should be civilized and talk it over. All we want is a divorce and three hundred a month.”

  He came on into the room and hit me on the shoulder and grabbed my hand, and there was that old wild, happy look in his eyes.

  “You big homely bastard! I thought it was you when I saw that junk heap out in the drive. I’ll call a wrecker and have it towed away for you.”

  No one would ever have taken us for brothers. Ever since I can remember, people have been saying, “Isn’t it funny how little resemblance there is between those Crane boys? They don’t look anything alike.”

  Lee always was a handsome devil. He never seemed to go through that pimply, awkward stage the rest of us suffered. Even when we were children, girls could never keep their eyes off him. He was an even six feet tall, a full inch shorter than I, but he always looked taller because he was so rail-thin and walked so erectly. And for all his wildness and the boundless and misdirected energy he had, there was something smooth about him; maybe the self-assurance in his eyes and manner, and the way he wore his clothes.

  His skin was rather dark and his face was thin with high cheekbones, and his eyes were brown and brilliantly alive. Most of the time they gave you an impression of recklessness and high good humor, but when he wanted to put on an act they could be as grave and quiet as those of a Supreme Court justice. When he wanted to turn on that urbane and deferential charm old ladies couldn’t resist him and girls had even less luck. I’d seen him work girls over with his eyes, and I’d hate to have him after one I wanted.

  As for me, I think there must have been some Swede in the Crane family tree away back somewhere and I got all of it. Some girl, I’ve forgotten her name, who used to sit next to me in English, said one time that I looked like a composite picture of all the Minnesota fullbacks since 1910. My face is square and flat-nosed and too damned healthy-looking, and it’s just what you’d pick if you wanted to plug a hole in the right side of the line. In high school they called me Cotton, which will give you an indication of the color of my hair and eyebrows, and Mack, which was short for Mack Truck.

  “By God, it’s good to have you back,” he said, for about the third time. He was leaning against the mantel smoking a cigarette and smiling at me. He was as well dressed as ever. The suit he had on was a gray tweed and had that custom-tailored look and I knew it had cost plenty. He never bought cheap clothes. “It was a shame you couldn’t get back here for the Major’s funeral. But I told everybody you couldn’t get away on account of final exams.”

  “And nobody laughed in your classic face?” I asked.

  “Dammit, Bob, don’t be such a porcupine. There’s such a thing as being outspoken, but you wear it out.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “I couldn’t get away on account of final exams. They have them in April now.”

  He shook his head in exasperation. “You’re hopeless.”

  “I was just telling him,” Mary said, “that he should have gone into the diplomatic service. He’d have been something new.”

  “The world would have been one big battlefield in a week.”

  “I’m shy and sensitive by nature,” I said, “and don’t like to be discussed this way in my presence. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “That we can, Handsome,” he said. “come along, I want to show you a new gun I just bought. Excuse us, Mary.” He led the way up the stairs to the upper hall and back to his old room, the one he had when we were children.

  We went in and he fished into a dresser drawer and hauled out a whisky bottle.

  “Is that the gun?” I asked.

  “Pour one in and shut up.” He grinned. “And then hand it to me. There’s the gun over in the corner.”

  I took a drink and passed him the bottle and looked at the gun. It was a beauty, a Parker double. I went over and picked it up and the feel of it was just right. It had that sweet balance you can get in a shotgun if you don’t care how much money you spend for it.

  “I’ll trade you my old gun for it,” I said.

  “You’ll be the next queen of Rumania, too. Say, let’s go hunting tomorrow. We haven’t been out together in a hell of a time.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I said. “By the way, I got a bird a while ago.” I told him about meeting Sam Harley.

  “Speaking of Sam—” He put the bottle down and made waving motions with his hands and whistled ecstatically. “Jesus, sweet Jesus!”

  “Why, I didn’t know you and Sam were like that,” I said.

  “Shut up, you ugly bastard, and listen. You remember that oldest girl of his, Angelina?”

  “I don’t know. Kind of a thin kid, with brown eyes?”

  “Yeah, she’s kind of a thin kid, all right. You’ve been gone two years, you sap. And don’t ask me what color her eyes are. Anybody who could look at her and notice her eyes is dead and just hasn’t found it out.”

  “Must be great,” I said. “She’s probably all of fifteen.”

  “Fifteen, hell. She’s eighteen if she’s a day. Nothing could be put together like that in fifteen years. I’d give seven hundred dollars and my left leg up to the knee for just one piece of that.”

  “Well, don’t get in an uproar. What’re you trying to do, marry me off?
This is a swell gun, Lee. How’s to use it some tomorrow?”

  He had forgotten about the gun. “What gun? Oh, sure. And don’t worry about me trying to promote you with Angelina. You keep your big hams off her. I saw it first.”

  I looked at him. He was grinning, but I didn’t like the expression in his eyes. I think he meant some of it.

  “Are you nuts? I somehow gathered the impression you were married. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  He held out the bottle. “Have another snort, Grandma, and forget the lecture. We’re not have chapel today.”

  I took another drink and tried to forget it. But it was in my mind and wouldn’t go away. And I knew Sam Harley. Better than he did.

  Three

  That night at supper he turned to me suddenly.

  “Say, Bob, I’ve been meaning to write to you about it ever since the Major died, but I couldn’t think how to put it. He treated you pretty rough in his will, but I want you to know I didn’t know a damn thing about it until the lawyer read it.”

  “Forget it,” I said, winking at Mary, who was watching me a little worriedly from across the table. “We educated people don’t worry about money all the time. There are other things.”

  He laughed. “You educated people! All you ever learned in four years at college was how to twist some poor bastard’s arm out of its socket in the pile-up when you thought nobody was looking.”

  We talked until midnight and I went upstairs to bed feeling happy to be home again. I was pleased with their happiness, the way they seemed to be settling down to married life. Of course, they had been married less than a year, but I had always been a little doubtful that Lee would ever marry, or if he did, that he would make a go of it. Somehow, he didn’t seem to be the type for domestication, although that was exactly what he needed. He needed a wife to give him the stability he somehow lacked, and he needed Mary in particular.

  Of course, there was no question of its being a success as far as Mary was concerned. She would have married him any time he asked her as far back as I could remember. There had never been anybody else for her. Lee had had girls by the dozen, but somehow he always seemed to come back to her. She was a refuge and a home port for him, and whenever he got into a jam of any kind it was Mary to whom he turned.

  Although I was never really in love with Mary myself, she was my personal nomination for the prettiest girl in town and the finest, and I was always proud that I knew her.

  There had been an unhappy experience in her childhood that might have thrown lots of girls, but she had come out of it all right When she was twelve her father had committed suicide, and there had been one of those ugly stories that get started in small towns and never quite the out or come completely out in the open.

  John Easterly had been one of the most respected men in town. He was everybody’s friend; not a glad-hander or a back-slapper, but a quiet, sober man, dependable and honest and slow-spoken. He was fairly well-to-do by our standards, which is to say he owned his own business and his home and had security for his family. His wife was well liked and everyone knew she was devoted to him. He went to church regularly in his steady way and was active in its affairs. His was the well-ordered and unspectacular life that millions of men like him have lived and enjoyed. And yet he had gone quietly out to the woodshed behind the house one spring night after Mary and her mother had gone to bed and hanged himself. There was no note, no explanation, no reason.

  Of course, the town had been horrified. And then the buzzing started. Those “business trips” of his to Dallas. Hadn’t they been more frequent lately? And then, of course, at the funeral, there had been the inevitable “mysterious woman in black.” Only in this case there actually had been a woman. Not in black, but she was there. Lee and I had gone to the funeral with the Major, and I saw her there in the back. She was young, I remembered. And her face had been white and there was a bitter hopelessness in her eyes as she came in and sat in the last row while the service was going on, looking straight ahead and ignoring the whispering and cautious craning of necks and the faintly hostile glances. She hadn’t been in mourning and she left as soon as the church service was over and nobody ever knew where she came from or where she went.

  Mary’s mother had died less than a year after that. The store and the big house had been sold and Mary and her grandmother lived in a small white bungalow on Cherokee Street near the high school. There had been enough money to keep them comfortably and for Mary to go on to college when she was ready and to study music for two years afterward. She loved music. It was as much a part of her as the flaming red hair and the cool gray-green eyes that always seemed to be slightly amused by something.

  I grinned a little as I thought of what she must think, with her love and understanding of music, of the family into which she had married. The Cranes were musically illiterate. That was the term she used herself. Since my mother had died there hadn’t been anyone in the family who knew or cared anything about it. Neither Lee nor I could recognize good music when we heard it, and the Major had had nothing but boundless contempt for musicians of any description. “Long-haired bunch of sissy bastards” was the way he disposed of them.

  I put on my pajamas and turned out the light and lay there a long time thinking of the days when Lee and I were growing up in this old house. Older and smoother than I, and with that quick charm of his, he had many times helped to lighten for me the consequences of my pigheaded rebelliousness and the Major’s hard rule. For some reason the Major, normally suspicious of everybody, would stretch a point to believe Lee and to see his side of it.

  I remembered the time when I was about thirteen and had played hookey from school with another boy and had gone out in the country all day to hunt rabbits with our .22’s. We had, in taking along a recently acquired young setter bitch the Major had penned up in the back yard, committed two unpardonable sins, but we were too young and too careless to know it or to worry about it. I returned home at sunset to find the Major waiting for me on the back porch, his big face dark with wrath.

  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 te
ller 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.