Harky Mundee shoved his fork deeply into the hay. He twisted the tines
to gather the biggest possible load; as long as a man had to pitch fool
hay he might as well do so in as few forkfuls as possible and get the
misery over with. Then he tumbled his load down the shute into the cow
stable and leaned on his fork to indulge in some sadly-needed
self-criticism.
Mun sat in the house with a broken leg and that was a bad thing, though
on the whole it was easier to endure than Mun's ruptured temper.
However, Mun's temper was an abstract affair that might erupt at any
moment, while a broken leg was distinctly concrete. Harky told himself
that anything so indisputably tangible should never beset Mun.
Still, hadn't it been wrought by providence? If Mun had not tried to
climb Old Joe's sycamore, he wouldn't have fallen. If he had not fallen,
he wouldn't have a broken leg. He should not have such a thing, but he
had it, and by all the rules of logic Harky should have achieved the
ultimate ideal.
With his leg splinted and bound, Mun's current living space was
restricted to the chair upon which he sat all day long and the cot upon
which he lay all night long. Harky had been prudent enough to remove
from the sweep of his father's arms all sticks of fire wood, dishes,
hatchets, knives, and anything else Mun might throw. Let Mun roar as he
might (and did, whenever Harky was in the house), roaring broke no
bones. For the first time since he could remember, Harky had no need to
outwit his father in order to do as he pleased.
Of course there were some tasks one did not avoid. Livestock was
incapable of caring for itself, and Harky was too close to the earth to
let any living creature suffer for lack of attention. It was far better
to butcher it, an idea Harky had played with, but no matter how long the
winter might be, two people couldn't eat six cows, four pigs, and
sixty-nine chickens. There'd always be the horses left anyway.
Grimacing as he did so, Harky pitched another forkful of hay down the
chute. Livestock should really be taught to eat coon meat so a man, with
complete freedom of conscience, might spend all his time hunting coons.
Maybe, if cows ate something besides hay, they wouldn't be such fools.
Harky thought suddenly of the last time he'd attended Miss Cathby's
school, and shuddered.
One of Miss Cathby's unswerving goals embraced assailing the minds of
her students with literature other than that which their fathers might
exchange behind the barn, and to that end there was a daily reading.
Most of it was not unendurable; all Harky had to do was think about
coons and look as though he were paying attention. On this particular
day, however, he had been unable to think about coons and was forced to
listen while Miss Cathby read a poem all about new-mown hay on a bright
June day.
Harky shuddered again and pitched furiously until he had all the cows
could eat. He jammed his fork into the hay and scrambled down the ladder
to the barn floor.
Formal education could mean the ruin of a man if he didn't watch out.
Miss Cathby had enthused about the poem and its author, but in the first
place, hay was not harvested in June. It wasn't even ripe until July,
and whoever wrote so touchingly of new-mown hay had never stood under a
furnace-hot sun and pitched any.
Duckfoot, who had been waiting in the chaff on the barn floor, sidled up
to Harky. Harky let his dangling hand caress the big dog's ears, and he
tried to do some thinking about Duckfoot. But thoughts of hay just
naturally started him to thinking about corn, and the Mundee corn was
still in the field where it had been shocked.
Therein lay a major point of friction between Mun, who demanded that it
be brought in, and Harky, who wouldn't bring it. He'd long had his own
sensible ideas concerning the proper way to run a farm, and bringing in
shocked corn did not come under the category of sense.
There were arguments pro and con, and pro was summed up by the fact
that if it was not properly harvested, there'd be neither corn for
winter feeding of pigs and chickens nor husks for bedding. This
argument, Harky admitted, was not without a certain validity. But
opposed to it was such an overwhelming weight of evidence that any value
it might possess was puny indeed.
Though unattended corn could not suffer as neglected animals would,
Harky would endure untold agony if he first had to haul it to the barn
and then husk it. If pigs and chickens had nothing to eat they could
always be eaten, thus solving the twin problems of caring for them and
satisfying one's own appetite. Corn in the shock lured coons, but not
even Old Joe could break into a corn crib.
The corn would stay in the shock.
It was, or should have been, a cause for leaping in the air, clicking
one's heels together, and whooping with joy. Unafflicted by any such
desire, Harky stirred nervously and wondered at himself. There was no
special age at which a man started slipping, and if he found no delight
in ignoring tasks Mun ordered him to do, he was already far gone.
Suddenly it occurred to Harky that there had been no particular pleasure
since that night, a week ago, when they had Old Joe up and Mun fell out
of the sycamore. Harky hadn't even wanted to go coon hunting, and then
he knew.
Knowing, he trembled. Coon hunters of the Creeping Hills had flourished
since the first hunter brought the first hound because they did things
properly, and the proper doing was inseparably bound to a proper respect
for the art they pursued. There just hadn't been any trouble.
Until the first time a girl horned in.
Raw Stanfield and Butt Johnson had helped carry Mun home. Then,
understanding the fearful consequences of Melinda's heresy, they'd
summoned Queenie and Thunder to heel and hadn't been seen since.
Shaken from the tips of his toes to the ends of his shaggy hair, Harky
needed another fifteen minutes before he could muster strength to start
milking. Melinda had put a hex on all of them that night she stood
beneath Old Joe's sycamore, with Old Joe up, and declared so loftily
that the sycamore was not a magic tree but merely one that hunters were
too lazy to chop or climb, and that Old Joe was nothing more than a big,
wise, and rather interesting coon.
That accounted for the broken leg of Mun, the aloofness of Raw Stanfield
and Butt Johnson, and the unhappiness of Harky. He sat down to milk, but
he was still so jarred by the dreadful tidings he'd just imparted to
himself that when Old Brindle kicked the pail over Harky didn't even
threaten her with a club. Affairs were already in a state so hopeless
that nothing Old Brindle did could complicate them further. Not even if
she kicked Harky's brains out.
He finished the milking and the other chores and latched the barn door.
Duckfoot trailed behind him as he walked toward the house, but Harky did
not have even his usual friendly pat for the hound's head when they came
to the porch. Duckfoot, who'd shed most of his puppyish ways, crawled
disconsolately into his sleeping box.
Gloom remained Harky's companion. Fifty-one years ago, or approximately
at the beginning of time, his great-grandfather had settled this very
farm. There'd been Mundees on it since, and hounds of the lineage of
Precious Sue, and all of them had hunted Old Joe. Now the spell was
broken because a mere girl, who had been taught by Miss Cathby, who
didn't know anything about anything, had considered it right to trifle
with spells.
Harky recalled the night Melinda had brought Glory to the coon hunt. He
had, he remembered, hoped Melinda would fall in the mud and had promised
to stamp on her head if she did. He could not help thinking that that
had been a flash of purest insight, and that all would now be favorable
if Melinda had fallen in the mud and had her head stamped on.
Harky turned the door knob and made his decision as he did so. The new
and radical, as represented by Melinda and Miss Cathby, must go. The old
and steadfast, as embodied in the immortality of Old Joe and the
probability that Duckfoot's father was really a duck, must be restored
to the pedestal from which it had toppled. But Harky needed Mun's
advice, and he was so intent on the problem at hand that he only half
heard his father's greeting.
"So ya finally come back, eh? Of all the blasted, lazy, pokey,
turtle-brained warts on the face of creation, I jest dunno of a one wust
than you!"