WHAT SHALL HE HAVE WHO KILLED THE DEER?
WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months
much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she
knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finically clean
about her housekeeping, she spent days scouring, rubbing,
putting to rights and rearranging that which none used, nobody
came to see; but she could not cook acceptably, and their scant
fare suffered in her inept hands till she nearly starved them
both.
Here, with some show of reason, she blamed her mother. Having
never seen the time when she could go back to the Gentry place
with a gift in her hand, she had not been there at all since her
marriage. And here she blamed Lance. Between her incapacity and
his earlier recklessness, they were desperately pinched. The
season for hauling closed even sooner than he had feared. After
it was past, he got a bit of work now and again, often walking
long distances to it, since he had been obliged, as he had
foreseen, to leave Satan and Cindy in the Settlement; and when
the black horses came no more to the log stable behind the [183]
cabin, Callista accepted it as the first open confession of
defeat.
Lance was one who sought a medicine for his spiritual hurts with
as sure an instinct as that by which the animals medicate their
bodies, creeping away like them to have the pain and wounding
out alone. With the first cold weather he was afoot, his long
brown rifle in the hollow of his arm, tramping the ridges for
game. The wide, silent spaces spoke restfully to his spirit.
Half the time he left the cabin ill provided with firewood and
other necessities, but he brought back rabbits, quail, an
occasional possum--which latter Callista despised and refused to
cook, even when Lance had carefully prepared it, so that the
dogs got it for their share. The undercurrent of the material
struggle to make a living was always the pitiful duel between
these two, who really loved well, and who were striving as much
each for the mastery of self, as for the mastery of the other,
could they but have realized it.
In late November, the days began to break with a thin, piercing
sleet in the air, under an even gray sky. On the brown sedge,
dry as paper, it whispered, whispered through the clinging
white-oak leaves, with a sharp sibilance, as of one who draws
breath at the end of a pageant; for the last flickerings of the
gold and glory of Autumn were gone; the radiance and warmth and
beauty of life all circled now around a hearth-stone. [184]
"If we get much more weather like this, I'll go out and bring ye
in a deer," Lance told his Callista; "then we'll have fresh meat
a-plenty."
"Well, see that there's firewood enough to cook your deer after
you've killed it," Callista retorted, resentfully mindful of
Lance's having forgotten to provide her with sufficient fuel the
last time he went on an unsuccessful hunting trip.
"You don't roast a deer whole," Lance told her tolerantly.
"We'll dry some of the meat, and some we'll salt."
To Callista's exacting, practical nature, this figuring on the
disposal of a deer one had not yet killed was exasperating. She
wanted Lance to know that she lacked many things which she
should have had. She wished him plainly to admit that he ought
to furnish those things, and that he was sorry he could not. She
had a blind feeling that, if he did so, it would in a measure
atone.
"Well, it wouldn't take much wood to cook all the deer you brought
home last time," she said with a little bitter half-smile.
Taunt of taunts--to reproach the unsuccessful hunter with his
empty bag! Lance was not one to give reasons for his failure, to
tell of the long, hard miles he had tramped on an unsuccessful
quest. He merely picked up his gun and walked out of the house
without looking to right or left, leaving his young wife
breathing a little short, but sure of herself. [185]
So far as he was concerned, he could find good counsel in the
wild to which, he fled. This morning there was come over
everything a blind fog, which was gradually thinning a little
with the dawn, showing to his eyes, where it lifted, hundreds of
little ripples fleeing across the pond from icy verge to verge,
with a mist smoking to leeward. The forest swam about him in a
milky haze; the trees stood, huge silver feathers, soft gray
against the paler sky, their coating not glassy, like real
sleet, but a white fringe, a narrow strip of wool, composed of
the finest pointed crystals, along every twig. The yard grass,
as he crossed it, was a fleece; the weeds by the garden fence,
where he vaulted over, a cloud.
Dulling one sense, the obscuring fog seemed to muffle all
others. Lance was shut in a little white world of his own, that
moved and shifted about him as he went forward. In his heart was
the beginning of self-distrust; a very small beginning, which he
cried down and would none of; yet the mood sent him seeking a
spot he had not seen for months. Straight as an arrow he went
through the forest, guiding himself by his sense of direction
alone, since he could neither see far nor recognize any familiar
landmark in its changed guise.
An hour after he and Callista had parted in the kitchen of his
own home, he was before that outside cabin of the Gentry place,
at whose casement he had first held her in his arms, looking up
at the [186] blank square of closed panes. It was so early that
none of the household was yet astir. The dogs knew him, and made
no clamorous outcry. Shut in by the wavering walls of mist which
clung and chilled, he stood long beneath her window, staring
fixedly up at it. Something ominous and symbolic in the change
which had come upon the spot since he last stood there, checked
the beating of his heart, strive as he might to reject its
message. The yard grass, green and lush on that September night,
stood stark, dry, white wool; the bullace vine, whose trunk had
borne his eager love up to her kiss, gleamed steel-like along its
twisted stems; the sill itself was a bar of humid ice. All looked
bleak, inhospitable, forbidding; the place was winter-smitten,
like--like--
Some blind rage at the power which makes us other than we would be,
which gives us stones for bread, stirred within him. He shivered.
She was not there now--she was at home in his house--his wife.
What had he come here for? This was a gun in the hollow of his
arm--not a banjo; he was out trying to find some wild meat to
keep them alive. She was waiting at home to--no, not in the
gropings of his own mind, would he complain too bitterly of his
bride. Heaven knows what the disillusioning was when Lance found for
the first time that he and Callista could seriously quarrel--their
old days of what might be termed histrionic bickerings for the
amusement of an audience, he had put aside, as of no portent.
When he discovered that Callista could look at him with actually
alien eyes, and say stinging things in an even tone, the boundaries
of his island drew in till there was barely room for his own feet
amid the wash of estranging waters. But he turned resolutely from
the thought. His concern should be all with his own conduct, his
own failings. Callista must do what she would do--and he would play
up to the situation as best he might.
Somebody moved in the house and called one of the hounds. He
laughed at himself a bit drearily, and struck off across the
hill, assured in his own mind that he had merely taken this as a
short cut to the glen at the head of the gulch, where he hoped
to find his deer. The clean winds of Heaven soothed the pain
that throbbed under his careless bearing. He had not been five
hours afoot, he was but just preparing to make his noon halt and
eat the bit of cold pone in his pocket, when he was ready to
smile whimsically at the ill-made, ill-flavored thing and decide
that it would be "just as fillin'," even though Callista had not
yet learned the bread-maker's art.
He must needs consider it rare good luck that he found a deer at
all; but it was five miles from home, in the breaks of Chestnut
Creek, that he finally made his kill. He had no horse to carry
the bulk of wild meat; and, in his pride refusing to leave a [188]
part swung up out of harm's way, he undertook to pack the whole
deer home on his shoulder--a piece of exhausting, heart-breaking
toil, though the buck was but a half-grown one. He was not
willing to risk the loss of a pound. There were no antlers; but
he would make Callista a pair of moccasins out of the soft-tanned
skin. Sunday he was due at old man Fuson's for a couple of days,
to repair a chimney; but, come Tuesday or Wednesday, he would
return and be ready to look after the venison. It ought to keep
so long in this cold.
Callista, pent indoors all day, chained to distasteful tasks for
which she was incompetent, had not won to as serene a temper as
her mate. She saw him approaching, laden, through the grove, and
hurried into the cold, closed far room to be busy about some
task so that she need not meet him as he entered. When she
emerged, he had skinned the deer and hung up the meat safely
between two trees, and was already washed and sitting in the
chimney-corner. His clear eyes went swiftly to her face with its
coldly down-dropped lids. The man who can bring home a deer and
not boast of it has self-control; but when Lance noted the line
of his wife's lips, he reached for his banjo without a word, and
began to hold his communications with it.
She knelt at the hearth to continue her supper preparations. For
the first time since they had [189] quarreled, she wished that she
could make some advance toward a reconciliation. Yet there was
Lance; look at him! Head thrown back a little, chin atilt, his
eyes almost closed, showing a bright line under the shadowing
lash, the firelight played on her husband's face and painted the
ghost of a flickering smile about his mouth as he strummed
lightly on the strings. Was that a countenance asking sympathy,
begging for quarter? And listen to the banjo; it was no wistful,
questing melody of "How many miles, how many years?" now; a
light, jigging dance-tune rippled under his finger ends.
Callista wondered angrily if he wished he were at Derf's. No
doubt they would be dancing there to-night, as commonly on
Saturday.
Lance, the man who wouldn't take a dare from the Lord A'mighty
Himself, answered her silence with silence, and her unconcern
with a forgetfulness so vast as to make her attitude seem
actually resentful.
By and by she called him to supper, and when he came she refused
to eat, dwelling angrily on the thought that he should have
regarded her bidding as an overture to peace, and have made some
answering movement himself.
In short, she was not yet done interrogating this nature,
fascinating, complex, inscrutable, to know what was the ultimate
point, the place where he would cry "Enough!"
The next morning saw him leaving early for [190] Fuson's, and he
went before Callista was out of bed. When she rose, she looked
remorsefully at the tidy, small preparations for breakfast which
he had made. It suddenly came home to her that, for a man in
Lance's situation, the marrying of a wholly inept wife was daily
tragedy. She decided that she would learn, that she would try to
do better; and, as a first peace-offering, she hurried out to
the grove and possessed herself of Lance's venison, that she
might cure and prepare it.
After she had dragged the big, raw, bloody thing into her
immaculate kitchen, she felt a little sense of repulsion at it,
yet her good intentions held while she hacked and hewed and
salted and pickled, on some vague remembrance of what she had
heard her grandfather say concerning the curing of wild meat. It
was noon when she went into the other room, leaving the outer
door open so that the hound carried away the only portion of the
meat which she had left fresh for immediate use. Tired, ready to
cry, she consoled herself with the reflection that there was
plenty remaining; she could freshen a piece of that which she
had salted, for Lance's supper when he should return. For
herself, she felt that she should never want to taste venison
again.
Under her handling the meat deteriorated rapidly, and was in
danger of becoming an uneatable mess. At last she turned a weary
and disgusted back upon it, and left it soaking in weak [191] brine.
Ever since Saturday night the weather had been softening; it was
almost warm when Lance came hurrying home Tuesday evening,
meaning to take care of his prize at once. He arrived at supper
time, ate some of Callista's bread and drank his coffee eagerly,
turning in mute distaste from the hunk of ill-prepared meat upon
the table. Supper over he hastened out to where he had hung the
deer. His wife had a wild impulse to stop him; he might have
guessed from the venison she had cooked that the meat was
attended to. She resented the dismay in his face when he came
back asking:
"Do you know what's come of that deer? I got Jasper Fuson to let
me off sooner, so's I could make haste and tend to it."
The sense of failure closed in on Callista intolerably.
"I fixed it," she returned without looking up.
"All of it?" inquired Lance sharply. "Fixed it like that, do you
mean?" indicating the untouched piece on the platter.
"Yes," returned Callista with secret despair; "all but what the
dogs got."
"The dogs!" echoed Lance.
"Yes," repeated Callista with a sort of stubborn composure. "I
[192] left about a third of it fresh whilst I was putting the rest
in the brine, and that old hound of yours came in and stole the
fresh piece." She looked at his face and then at the meat. "I
reckon you think that even a dog wouldn't eat this--the way I've
got it."
The two young people confronted each other across the ruined food
which his skill and labor had provided, her bungling destroyed.
The subject for quarrel was a very real one, terrifyingly concrete
and pressing. They were afraid of it; nor did they at that moment
fail to realize the mighty bond of love which still was strong
between them. Both would have been glad to make some advance toward
peace, some movement of reconciliation; neither knew how to do it.
In Lance, the torture of the thing expressed itself only in a fiery
glance turned upon his wife's handiwork. To Callista, this was so
intolerable that she laid about her for an adequate retort.
"Well," she said, affecting a judicial coolness, "it's true I
don't know much about taking care of wild meat. We never had
such in my home. There was always plenty of chickens and
turkeys; and if we put up meat, it was our own shoats and beef."
Deer are growing scarce in the Cumberlands; not in half a dozen
cabins throughout the Turkey Tracks would venison be eaten that
season. But Lance adduced nothing of this.
"I think you might as well let the dogs have the rest of it," he
said finally, with a singular gentleness in his tone. Then he
added with a sudden upswelling of resentment, "Give it to 'em if
they'll eat it--which I misdoubt they'll never do." [193]