We never were anything but dirt-poor and I learned young to worry about whether we were going to make it through another year. I would start dreading mortgage and tax times a whole couple of months before the last days actually came around, and I'd keep asking Daddy and Mama both if they had the money...which they usually didn’t till it was almost too late. All we made on the place came from the three acres of tobacco our allotment allowed, and a small corn crop and a few hogs and a calf or two along. It never was enough. Daddy would get jobs and after a few weeks either get fired or for some cooked-up reason, like backache, quit. It was the same way with Dud and Stack, my oldest and next-to-oldest brothers. Coop, the brother next ahead of me, was a lot more dependable but he never had good paying jobs except for the one down in Nashville the summer when he was sixteen. But he quit that one after two months and came back home. It was like the only place even Coop could put up with in a steady way (for several more years, anyhow) was right there with our family where there wasn’t any work except by spells. They say an idler’s mind is the devil’s workshop, and Dud especially, with Stack to back him, was always coming up with cockeyed schemes that led to trouble. Once in a while it got to be serious trouble, too, like with the law. So you can see my reasons for being such a worrier, even before the worst of our troubles got started.

But I didn’t worry all the time, of course. I have a world of good memories of things that were fun: hunting and fishing and swimming in Stump Creek and playing with Eve, my littlest sister, keeping her happy. And a lot of funny things, too, with me part of them sometimes. One I remember best happened when I was seven or eight. It came from going to the picture show that had started up in town not long before.

Dud and Stack took me. I’d never seen a picture show before and Dud and Stack hadn’t seen but a few. All of us got carried away by it. It was a Western, about cowboys on a ranch and cattle rustlers that slipped up and drove off the cows and got them down and put new brands on them with a red-hot iron. Of course the cowboys finally caught up with them and killed all the rustlers and got the cows back. Then the top cowboy married the rancher’s daughter and they went off to start a new ranch on the prettiest piece of green land you ever laid your eyes on. We talked about it all the way home and then sat down on the edge of the porch and talked about it some more. Dud said he wished he could live out there where there were cattle ranches and rustlers and all. Stack said he did too, and that he shorely wished he could marry a woman like that rancher’s daughter.

The talk finally got around to branding cattle. Dud explained that the cows out there all looked about alike and that you burned your mark on them so you could tell your cows from other people’s. This put Stack to thinking. He said there were plenty of cows around here that looked about the same, too. Mr. Simpson, for instance, had one you couldn’t have told from our cow. And plenty more just like them, he had seen them all over the place. This brought a silence, with Dud and Stack just sitting looking at each other.

“What if our cow wandered off?” Stack said, with his round blue eyes wide open.

“She might get stole,” Dud said. “Let’s do it.”

It was too late that day, because it took a long time to get the fire poker bent to suit them. M for Moss was too hard, so they decided to make the letter U. They finally got the poker bent to shape, but then they decided an S would look better. They would use the U to make half of the S and they hammered and hammered away at it for an hour on that old anvil in the barn. They finally got it looking kind of like an S but they had used the whole stem of the poker doing it, all but the handle. Then they found out they couldn’t make any way at all bending the handle to a right angle from the S. “It don’t matter,” Stack said. “We can just lay the whole thing on sideways.” It looked to me like it was going to make an awful big brand on that cow.

We were dying to do it first thing in the morning but Daddy messed us up. He was getting ready to plow out the tobacco and he spent the best part of an hour in the barn fixing and cussing the mule harness that the rats had gnawed in two or three places. He was still at it when Dud got through milking. We couldn’t do it with him around, so, to make everything look like always, we had to turn the cow out in the lot.

When Daddy was finally out in the field plowing we set about driving the cow back into the barn. It took a while and a lot of running and heading her off, because going back to the barn in the morning wasn’t on her schedule. By the time we managed it she was in the worst kind of humor. She was a big cow with bad horns Daddy had never gotten around to cutting off and she had enough Jersey in her to give her plenty of meanness. Back in the barn she took a kick at Dud. It didn’t hit him square but it tore his britches leg. “Old bitch!” he said. “Th’ow that rope around her horns.”

The cow was standing with her rump in the corner by the shut front door looking white-eyed and down- headed...to me, looking like she might have some notions about charging. “You better look out for her,” I said.

“Ain’t scared of no milk cow,” Stack said. He had moved up within about five feet of her, holding his lasso ready.

“Th’ow it,” Dud said. “Else give it to me.

Stack threw it but the loop caught on just one horn and she shook it right off. Anyway she didn’t charge. Stack gathered his lasso and threw it again. It went right this time, around both horns, and he yanked the rope up tight. “Got you, old fool,” he said. He had her roped, all right, but I couldn’t see how he had her. Neither could Stack or Dud, from the looks of them. Both of them just stood there for a minute or two like they were waiting for the cow to give them instructions. There wasn’t a sound but her breath heaving like an old leaky bellows.

“She ain’t going to stand for us, this-a-way,” Stack said.

“I know what,” Dud said. “Get outside with the rope and then push the door shut on it, all but a crack. Then pull her head around up against it. You can hold her from out there. Put your foot up on the door.”

Stack did it and tightened up on the rope through the crack. He got her head bent around but that was the best he could do. In a straining voice he said, “Y’all push on her. Get side of her and push.”

We did, and after Dud added in a couple of good hard licks with his knee in her side, she came around with her head against the door, groaning. But I got careless. I stepped back without thinking and took a kick in the belly that knocked me for a backward somersault and left me sitting there on my butt seeing two of Dud’s face looking down at me. “You ain’t hurt,” Dud said. “Run get the branding iron.”

I got up and after a few weaving steps I was all right. We already had the branding iron lying in a pile of red hot coals down the slope behind a tree. The handle was sticking out and I grabbed it and dang near burnt my hand off. I had to run get a towsack to hold it with, waving my burnt hand in the air all the way. But I finally got back to the barn with it, where Dud and Stack both were already at cussing me for a slowpoke.

Except for her heaving, the cow was standing quiet when I first came in the barn. But it looked like the smell of that red hot iron upset her all over again. She started fighting the rope and groaning and then came out with a great loud bellow.

“Lay it on her,” Stack yelled through the crack. “I can’t hold her all day.”

Dud reached and grabbed the branding iron out of my hand. “Goddamn!” he screamed and dropped it. But he went down quick and got the sack fixed on the handle and picked it up. “That other sack there.” He meant the one lying in the feed trough beside me. “Put it over her eyes. Quick!” I wasn’t comfortable close around that cow anymore but I did what I was told to pretty fast. Even if I did take a hurting lick on the shoulder from one of them, I got the sack hooked over both her horns so she couldn’t see. That was just about two seconds before Dud came down on her rump with that hot iron.

The bellow that came out of that cow a minute before was just a cat squall compared to this one. It was like it was so loud it ended up in a crashing noise different from anything that ever had come out of a cow’s mouth till then. Really, what I heard was what I was seeing at the same time, that barn door, or part of it, exploding open and the cow right in the middle of it with pieces of lumber floating in the air all around her. There was another noise, though it seemed like I didn’t hear it till a little bit later. It was Stack yelling. Then I could see why. The cow, with that sack still over her face, was running and wheeling and bucking and bellowing all at the same time, and Stack was dragging along the ground just barely not under her hoofs. The fool had wrapped that rope around his arm.

This was about the only clear thought I had for next few minutes. It seemed like everything that could happen did happen. Right off, the dogs got into it, five of them, running and yelling around and under that cow and all over Stack who kept trying to get on his feet and, halfway up, got yanked flat again. Next it was chickens, because the cow ran up against the chicken house where the hens were setting and flushed them out shrieking and screaming and flapping all over the place like lightning had struck them. In no time the whole show was right up behind our house where Mama was hanging out clothes and when the cow finally threw that sack off her head she ran in under a bedsheet that covered her all over clear back to her rump. By then the girls were out there screaming too and running around like crazy. I saw Mama sitting flat on the ground with her feet stretched out and Stack, from one of those blind whirl-arounds the cow kept making, come right over the top of her head like a yo-yo on a string. The next thing I saw, the cow was on the fence beyond the house, and then through it, and Stack was lying there on his back in the gap half wrapped-up in fence wire. Maybe the worse piece of luck was that Daddy was plowing just about the third or fourth tobacco row out from the fence and had stopped his mule right in front of where that big bed-sheeted what-ever-it-was came crashing through. Of course the mule bolted, dragging the plow sideways on the ground uprooting tobacco plants every-which-way clear across to the other side of the field. The last really loud noise I heard was Daddy screaming cuss words in a voice fit to blast his throat open.

When I got there everybody was crowded around Stack, leaning over him. He was sitting up but he didn’t look like he knew where he was. He looked kind of like he had fallen into a threshing machine and come out lacking odd pieces and patches of his clothes and skin both. They finally got him unwrapped and on his feet. For a wonder, he wasn’t really much hurt, except his arm which he couldn’t use for a week. Mama led him off to the house. The only thing he could say, kind of half under his breath, was, “Goddamn, goddamn cow.”

The cow wasn’t much hurt either. The only damage to her was the big burnt mark on her rump that when it healed didn’t look any more like an S than it looked like anything else. The only one in danger of permanent damage was Dud. Daddy went for him, but Dud was quicker. He lit out down the hill and outran Daddy and didn’t come out of the woods till late that night when everybody was asleep. I took a flailing for him, but it wasn’t too bad. I was just a substitute and Daddy’s heart wasn’t really in it.

One other funny thing, though this one finally had a kind of sad ending to it, happened when I was ten or so. That summer a new man named Burger came to Riverton and bought Mr. Vinson’s old ten cent store and opened up an amusement center with electric games and ping-pong and pool tables. I always think of that, and of that whole summer in fact, as the time when Riverton began to change in a way that in not too many years made it into a new kind of place. Which is not really true. It’s only that that was the time in my life when I started noticing and thinking about such things. Really, by then, as Daddy used to say, Riverton was already a different town from what it had been before the war.

Anyway it wasn’t long till a lot of boys and young men were hanging out at the new amusement center. Dud and Stack were sometimes customers, but this day Dud was there by himself. He came home mad as a snake, swearing he would get back at them. “Them” was a group of four boys he barely even knew by sight, lounging around one of the pinball machines. He could hear them talking about girls and getting some pussy and, this being a dry county, about how hard it was to get hold of whisky. Thinking maybe to make some new friends—he didn’t have any to speak of—Dud moved in on them. He said he hadn’t paid much mind before to their way of talking or to the fact that they had on floppy slippers and T-shirts, one of the shirts with ‘U of Tennessee’ printed on it. At least not till he saw how they were looking down their noses at him.

He said that instead of talking to him, they talked to each other about him, and some of the things they said got him really fighting mad. One thing that stuck with him, that a kind of a pink-faced boy said in a mumbling way over the pin-ball machine, was, “The Reds are coming.” Another one was a crack about chickens, how the hens probably hunkered down whenever they saw him, Dud, open the barnyard gate. It took Dud a couple of minutes to figure out that about the Reds coming, but he knew right off what the chicken crack meant. By that time he was not just mad, he was right on the edge of going for the whole bunch of them. Dud was a tall rawboned boy with a lot of tough stringy muscles, and nobody you wanted to be quick to get in a fight with. But there were four of them, two of them pretty good sized, and he finally decided he had better hold off. For the time being. But he was going to get  them.

The question was, how? Dud thought about finding out where they lived—he knew one of them was named Burford—and waiting close around and whipping them one at a time when they came out of their houses. He sat around thinking about it for two or three days, on the front porch or the woodpile, talking about it to Stack or Coop or even me sometimes. “I’m going to get them smart-ass bastards. I’m going to....” His lean jaw would clench and you could see his teeth between his lips. I wasn’t sure what had happened was really worth all this stewing, but I never said it. Anyway Dud kept right on until he finally did come up with a plan. Or rather, Coop came up with the plan and Dud jumped right on it.

It took a while because those boys were never at the amusement center when Dud went to find them. But finally they were there, or two of them were, and by that time Dud had his plan all honed and polished. He said the first step came off just like grease. The two boys were brothers, Burfords, and the pink-faced one that had made him the maddest, the one lounging across the pinball machine, had started off just the same way as last time, looking at him like Dud was something straight out of the hog pen. But they went right for the bait. They even wanted it set for that same night. Dud had already sweetened the pot by promising them it wasn’t ’shine but good store-bought whisky and now he added to it by hinting there might be a couple of girls in it.

I had been in on the plan all along, or listening in, and I begged and begged until they finally gave down and let me go with them. I might come in handy. So just after dark all four of us got in Dud’s old piece of a Ford, hoping it would start, and drove out to the road and on to a place about half a mile beyond the Stump Creek bridge. Dud turned off onto a dirt track through the woods and parked the car there out of sight. Stack got out with Daddy’s old twelve-gauge shotgun and a pocket full of shells. “I’ll get on up there,” he said. There was a little bit of a moon and for a minute or so we could see him like a shadow moving on up the track between the trees. Then the rest of us went back to the road and walked down almost to the bridge and waited.

Just one car went by before they showed up, about fifteen minutes later. I saw right off there were four of them, which was what Dud was hoping for. The driver, the biggest one and the one that did most of the talking, was Joe Burford...which I only found out later, along with the names of the other boys. But they were the right four boys. I was almost shaking for fear Dud would trip up, or something else would happen. But Dud did better than I expected and the only thing that had me going for a minute there at first was when I thought maybe they were sounding suspicious.

“I don’t see anything but woods,” Joe Burford said. “Where the shit is it?”

I could barely see his face. He had a lot of long light-colored hair and a T-shirt on. Dud’s answer came a little slow, like maybe he had to swallow first, but his voice was natural.

“It’s up other side of them woods. It used to be a kind of road in there to it, but the old man blocked it off, won’t let nobody use it.” He hesitated. But Coop’s voice, a relief to me, took it up.

“He don’t want a lot of people tracking in and out. The law’d notice. He’s a sly old man.” Then Coop said, “All right to leave your car here, though. People going past’ll think you’re down there at the creek fishing.”

Joe Burford gave an unpleasant grunt. “I can’t even see a path through there. Just thicket.”

“It is one, though,” Dud said.

“We’ll find it. It ain’t but a little ways,” Coop said, turning and starting into the woods. We all followed him, with Dud second and me right behind him.

For the first few steps it was pretty open between the tree trunks but then there started to be underbrush and after a little while patches of briers. One of the boys behind me said, “Goddamn!” and another one a minute later said, “Shit!” A few more steps and the whole procession stopped, because Coop was having to untangle himself and pick his way around a really big clump of briers. “How much farther?” a voice said. “Fucking briers.”

“Just to the top of the slope up yonder,” Coop said. “We missed the path.”

“Yeah.” This was Joe Burford. “Better be whisky there. Better be good, too. If it’s ’shine, we re not paying you a goddamn penny.”

“Don’t worry. It’s just what you’re wanting,” Coop said.

A boy in back of me said, “What about the gals you mentioned? They going to be there?”

This was for Dud to answer and his need to think about what he would say took a little too long to suit me. But he did all right. “I reckon so. They usually are."

Coop had got his way clear and we followed him on in a winding track that brought us out of the trees to where we could see the shape of a building at the top of the slope. “That’s where he keeps his whisky,” Coop said. “In that barn.”

“That where he keeps his gals too?” Joe Burford said, in a tone of voice I didn’t like.

“Naw,” Coop said. “The other side, down the hill. That’s his main place. When we get to the barn I’ll give him the signal. It’s two whistles. To call him up there.... Come on.”

The clumps of briers had turned into a solid thicket and we had to go on a circle until we came to a thin place. Even then we had to pick our way, so the whole bunch of them behind me were cussing like crazy. When I heard one of them asking if this was the way everybody had to come in, I started worrying. I was scared they were catching on and I tried to think of something. But Coop was quicker. “I got mixed up, missed the path.” Then, “Anyhow we’re out now.”

Another minute or two and we were all out in the clear, at a place maybe a hundred feet from the barn. “Come on,” Coop said. “He’ll show up soon as I whistle.”

Halfway there, with the bunch of them straggling just a little behind me, I could make out the dark hole high up where the barn loft door stood open.Then I thought I saw something, something that moved. It was time. I was holding my breath but I was still walking on, hearing one of them’s voice complaining behind me. I saw the flash before I heard it: Boom!

I don’t think it was more than a few seconds before the next Boom, but that little space was like time stopped cold, without one sound anywhere in it. The next one wasn’t just a Boom. A scream to really curdle your blood, and there was Coop stretched out on the ground kicking. Another Boom and it seemed to me everybody was yelling and there was another one, Dud, lying there kicking just the same way. When I looked up I wasn’t the only one on my feet but I was the only one anywhere close to the writhing wounded on the ground. People were running in every direction but toward the barn, and two of them had already torn themselves pretty good paths straight though that bank of briers.

It still wasn’t enough for Stack, who got carried away. Daddy’s shotgun had the plug out and would take five shells, but Stack was a quick loader and he must have fired twelve or fifteen times before things settled down. The last of those boys had reversed his field before he made for the brier patch. I know he took some birdshot, because I heard him let out a bellow before he hit those briers at a dead run. I could still hear him when I couldn’t see him anymore and everything else had got quiet. I think he was the one that fell in the creek. It wasn’t very far and he was headed toward it. We could hear the splash pretty clear.

It must’ve been half and hour before all of us could quit laughing. We were still at it strong when we got to the car, and Dud and Stack gave a special howl when we had got near to the bridge and saw their car still parked there on the road shoulder. “They still running,” Dud moaned. “Har, har, har! Out in the woods...still running. God a-mighty!” He pretty near collapsed at the wheel with laughing and he was laughing yet, with Stack cutting in sometimes, when we finally pulled up in front of the house. In fact, after few more minutes of it Daddy came out in his long johns and told him to shut up. I was glad when he did. I was more than just tired of it, it was too much. There was something wrong about it, the same way it had seemed to me when he kept on raging around for the best part of a week about how those boys had treated him.

It was all over, though, I thought, except for the satisfied look I kept seeing on Dud’s face for the next few days. But then he decided to go to town. Stack, and especially Coop, kept telling him not to, because there hadn’t been near enough time yet for the dust to get settled. Dud said he wouldn’t, but then he slipped off. He just couldn’t stand it. He was dying to see that bunch limping around town with all their brier scratches and bruises. As it turned out, Coop and Stack were right as rain.

I’ve already said Dud wasn’t long on brains, and this proved it. I don’t think he was even careful. I think he went to strut and rub it in on them. It was a mistake. I started worrying long before the afternoon was over and when he didn’t show up for supper I really got worried. So did Coop and Stack. When Mama wanted to know where he was, Coop told her some lie. After supper we borrowed Daddy’s old truck that kept stalling all the way and went in to town. Dud wasn’t at the amusement center. The man that ran the place couldn’t even remember him. We did find his car parked on the square but no Dud, and driving up and down streets all over town didn’t help a bit. We gave up and came home and stayed awake a long time after everybody else was asleep. Finally we went to bed too, but I couldn’t even get my eyes to stay closed. After a while I got up and went out on the porch and sat down on the steps, with all the dogs lying around me on the ground.

It was getting toward full moon and there was plenty of light and crickets and whip-poor-wills and owls calling. But the sounds just made me more nervous and the light kept me staring off up the road and in every other direction. That was why I saw something moving before it even got close, coming toward me out of the woods. Of course I thought right off it was Dud and heaved a sigh of relief. But less than a minute later I was sure it wasn’t Dud. I didn’t know what it was, and as soon as I could see the thing in a little bit of detail my blood just about froze. First I thought, _SPOOK. But after a few more seconds I thought, _CHICKEN, a great big chicken, big as a man. I got up on my feet. I never saw such a thing in my life. Just about then was when the dogs spotted it and went streaming out through the gate with racket enough to raise up the dead.

I think I’d stopped being scared even before the dogs got to it and right away hushed up their howling. I’d figured it couldn’t be a chicken, it had to be a man fixed up like one, and that that man had to be Dud. By that time, with the dogs prancing all around him, he was almost to the gate. He saw me and stopped, then came on, white feathers from head to foot. I mean he even had them on top of his head, sticking up like a big old crest.

At the gate he stopped again and said, in a whisper I could just make out, “Chester. Come help me.”

As soon as I could get my legs working I stepped down on the ground and went to him. Even his chin had a few feathers stuck on it. I could see there wasn’t a thing under all those feathers but his bare skin. The smell told me they’d used just molasses on him, though.

“You got to help me. Get me some coal oil.”

“We ain’t got any,” I said.

“In the lamps, get it out the lamps. Bring them out here. And don’t wake up nobody.”

I kept looking at him, up and down. “Why didn’t you pull them off?”

“Cause I’m naked. Them goddamn bastards.”

All of a sudden I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing and I couldn’t stop. I almost went down on the ground laughing.

“Goddamnit, shut up! Shut up! And get my coal oil.”

But I couldn’t help it, I went right on laughing. Till I saw there was somebody on the porch behind me. Then I was sorry and I did stop. But it was too late. Dud had already scuttled back across the road and got behind a gum tree there.

I was even sorrier later on because everybody had got waked up and about all of them did just what I’d done, broke down laughing. But they were sorry too, afterwards, because Dud was as shamed as I ever saw a man be. And mad. Mad at us for a long time, and killing mad at those four bastards in town. It did something to him, something that lasted on and on that I could see in him once in a while. In fact I kind of think it was something the whole family finally took from him, in a way. What made it so, I think, was our finding out about those boys, that all of them were sons of new, big folks in town, the ones that were starting to run everything and that people like us couldn’t touch no matter what.

• • •

When you’re a little kid you forget a world of things that could have told you something. They pass you by like the wind and never come back. But sometimes there are things that just get buried in your memory and, for no special reason you can see, pop up years later and tell you something important. It’s been that way with me. Now, whenever I get to thinking much about Daddy I always remember one certain winter night that I had forgot completely till I was almost grown. I’m not saying what happened that night finally told me why Daddy was like he was. But it was a help, like opening a door part ways. I could look through the crack and see some things I never had seen before.

It was raining. Everybody but me, even Mama, had finally gone to sleep, and I was trying to, lying in my bed. But my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. I’d squinch them shut but pretty soon they would fly open and I would be looking at that gray rain-streaming window again. It was the third night Daddy had been gone—just gone without a word or sign to anybody, the way he did every once in a while. But never before for so long. We had looked every place we could think of, starting with the jail because we had found him there the last time. He was lying dead drunk on a cot in there and we had to leave him till the next day. But he wasn’t in jail tonight. He wasn’t anywhere. He had been to the Hilltop Inn and left there drunk, but that was two days ago. My mind kept circling in the dark and ending up where it started.

But on in the night I heard him. I wasn’t sure at first and after waiting a minute for another noise to come, I got up and stood in the door to the front room where the lamp was burning. I heard a bump, then two more, heavy feet on the porch. He was fumbling at the door, feeling for the knob, taking a while to do it. When the door swung open I stepped back into the dark.

Daddy just stood there like even that dim lamplight had struck him blind. A gust of air blew past him. It made the lamp flutter and almost go out and for a second I thought he was going to fall down. He held to the door and after swaying and blundering a little bit managed to get it shut without even much noise. Then he stood with his back against it, his clothes filthy wet and dripping, red mud all over one side of his face and his bald head. He was looking my way but not quite at me. It was like he was looking straight at somebody else in the room across from him, trying to say something to that person. I saw his mouth make a word I couldn’t hear. A little later, barely loud enough, he said, “’Pologize.”

He wasn’t talking to me, I could see that. He wasn’t talking to anybody, though I reckoned he thought he was talking to Mama. A minute later, maybe because of the look on his face, I decided I was wrong. That was when he said the words I remember best of all. “It ain’t none of my fault.”

Who in the world was he talking to? It wasn’t Mama. Then something accusing in his face made me sure of that.

“It was you.” His bald head swayed a little bit and I could see his eyelids starting to droop. “I never been nothing but just like you.”

He had to be plain crazy drunk, I guessed, because he wasn’t making a bit of sense. I saw him looking again like he might be going to fall on his face and I was at the point of running to help him, when all of a sudden Mama in her big patched cotton gown was in the room. She didn’t say a thing. She got hold of his arm, pulling at him, trying to lead him, but he yanked loose and fell back against the door. “Lemme be,” he mumbled, never looking at her. “Lemme be.”

That was when Mama called Dud. She never said another word, even when Dud finally showed up in his long johns, blinking, and took hold of Daddy’s arm on the other side. For a minute there, it looked like Daddy wasn’t going to let them help him and I got the notion he was holding back to say something important. Once they got him moving and almost to his bedroom door he did say something, but it wasn’t important. “Raining. Raint the whole time,” he said. “Never nothing but rain.” I didn’t think, the next day or any day, to ask Mama who it was Daddy thought he was talking to. To me it was all just part of his being mighty drunk and it was years later before it struck me that that person was his own daddy. By then of course I knew a lot of things about my grandfather, knew most of them from Daddy’s mouth. But they never had really come together for me, not in a way to make me see what I finally saw.

I never knew my grandfather. He died about ten years before I was born. I knew he owned this land that he passed on to Daddy and that there used to be a whole lot more of it than there was now.

But for a long time I thought that when Daddy got his hands on the place it was as big as it ever had been. That wasn’t true. I believe the main reason I thought what I did was hearing Daddy say bragging things about his father, like his father was a mighty important man in the county. I thought he must have been rich and bought and farmed all that land, and I thought it was just Daddy, being the way he was, who had whittled it down to the little place we had now. By and by, because I finally asked her, Mama straightened me out. This land had come in the family not by Daddy’s father but by his grandfather, who had got it for nearly nothing back when nobody but the government owned a good part of this country. Daddy’s father had already sold off many an acre before it ever came to Daddy’s hands.

Looking back it’s clear to me how many of the things Daddy said about his father didn’t square with each other. Daddy would tell about working in the log woods with him and it would sound like his father owned the trucks and bossed the men with the saws and axes. But again Daddy would tell about him getting mad and cussing the boss to his face and walking off the job. He was a man that wouldn’t take nothing off of nobody, Daddy would say. A proud man. Daddy would talk about his father making whisky and Daddy helping him. I asked him once if they didn’t ever get in trouble with the law, but Daddy said it was all right back then, the law didn’t mind, a lot of the finest folks made whisky. And drank it, too, I reckoned, because he told me a couple of times about his father and him getting drunk together. But other times he told me about the kind of whippings he would get for coming home drunk, because, he said, his father was a man that wouldn’t put up with a boy not walking the straight and narrow. That one would get by me too. There were so many things I never thought to question. Him and his father digging and selling ginseng was another one, though even at that time I thought people who sold ginseng had to be poor as yard dogs.

I don’t think Daddy’s bragging about his father’s importance was all exactly lies. He was like an awful lot of other people. They want so bad to believe something that they do believe it, no matter for the tricks they have to play on themselves. For one thing Daddy was mighty fond of his father. He wasn’t much more than a boy when his two older brothers, Clarence and Bill, left for parts unknown, and a year or so later his mother ran off with another man. So it was just Daddy and his daddy.

But that was only part of it, and I think the other part was the biggest thing. Daddy had a couple of snapshots of his father. Growing up I saw them a good many times without really studying them up close. Later on when I did study them I could see what I’d missed before. Cut off the old man’s whiskers and he and Daddy were like two peas in a pod. That was what Daddy meant by those words that night when he came home drunk. Except he wasn’t talking just about their looks. He meant it all the way, and that there wasn’t a thing in the world waiting for him but the same old blundering path his daddy had followed to failure. It was a vision that would come down on him just every once in a while and the only answer he ever could think of was to go and get real drunk. Considering everything, it was a mercy that it didn’t come on him oftener than it did.

That might not be right, though, that it was a mercy. Because if you really knew such a thing about yourself, you couldn’t ever put it all the way out of your head, much less keep it out. It would always be kind of lurking in the dark, whispering to you. Probably, without your even realizing, it would be giving you hints and notions that might not make a bit of sense. Thinking about it this way, I believe I can understand why Daddy did a lot of the things he did. Like, for example, the business of that sorry tractor he was set on swapping his good team of mules for.

It was an old Allis Chalmers, about as old as they get, I reckon. He saw it sitting on the square in town with a For Sale sign on it. I was with him that evening and watched him walk around and around that tractor and finally get up on the seat and start working the clutch pedal and the gearshift lever. When he finished fooling with those he just sat there on the high seat and finally took off his straw hat. Sitting or walking, Daddy was naturally a little stooped over, but right then for two or three minutes he sat on that tractor just as straight and stiff and tall as a hickory pole. The evening sunshine lit up his white bald head, and his hands gripped on that steering wheel like a man who didn’t mean to stand for any backtalk. He made me think of a king I saw in a book once, riding on one of those big dray horses. He made me uneasy, too.

He finally got down from the seat and commenced spinning the starting wheel. The tractor didn’t start up but the look on his face stayed the same, kind of victorious-like. “Prob’ly got no fuel,” he said. I watched him spend a while in front of the For Sale sign, his lips moving, memorizing the owner’s name and number. That made me even more uneasy. I said, “It wouldn’t start.”

“Ain’t got no fuel,” he said.

“How’d it get here, then?”

“Likely had just barely enough to make it. Smart man’ll figure them things.”

“Ain’t got much paint on it,” I said. “Got a lot of dents, too.”

But he had stopped paying any attention to me.

He called the man up on the telephone at the grocery. I was standing by and heard him asking questions about the tractor and talking about swapping our team of mules for it. He finally hung up and stood there looking like a man who had just swallowed something so good it was just about too much for him. He kept that same look all the way home in the truck. I kept talking about how good our team of mules was, old Bell and Tom that could pull a house down and never get tired even from plowing new ground all day long. He looked like he couldn’t hear me.

Supper was ready when we got home. We hadn’t been at it but a couple of minutes before everybody noticed there was something up with Daddy. He wasn’t even eating, hardly, just a bite once in awhile, and he had that same expression he had worn the whole way home. We all got kind of quiet, waiting. When he finally put his knife down on his plate we stopped eating too. He kind of reared back. I never in my life saw him look so important.

“We’re fixing to get a tractor,” he said.

Everybody just looked at him. Mama cocked her head sideways.

“I done looked up a mule’s behind all I aim to ever. The time’s come. It ain’t going to be like it was before around here. So you boys might as well get ready. We going to clear up all that west ground and pull all them stumps and plum bushes and grow more corn and barley and stuff than you ever laid your eyes on. It’s time, past time. All a farmer needs is a good tractor and we’re fixing to get one.”

I never had heard Daddy say so many words all at once so you could understand him. It was like it was all spelled out for him in a vision standing in front of his eyes. I thought that if he had got this worked up in half an hour, there was no telling what he’d be like by bedtime.

“How you going to pay for this tractor?” Mama said. Her face was looking hard, the way it did pretty often these days.

“You needn’t to worry your head on that,” Daddy said. “It ain’t going to cost us a penny.”

Mama’s face didn’t change. “Somebody going to give you a free tractor?”

“He’s going to swap the mules for it,” I said. Then I was sorry, because Daddy gave me one of his hot beady-eyed looks.

“Them good mules?” Mama said. “The only thing we got on this place any ’count is them two mules. What you know about a tractor? That man’s liable to cheat you blind. And us to the poor house.”

“They’re mighty good mules,” Coop said. He liked the mules. So did I.

Daddy just reared back a little farther in his chair and looked haughty. “It ain’t too much about a tractor I don’t know,” he said. “Worked on several. Helped old Cairns overhaul his’n from top to bottom.”

Mama’s face, with her mouth shut tight, didn’t change.

Daddy went on, “This ain’t a man to cheat nobody anyhow. Mr. Walt Burns. Got a great big farm out there around Oakton. He’s just selling this’n cause he’s got more tractors than he’s got use for.”

“Never heard of him,” Mama said.

Daddy just drew a long breath and looked up at the ceiling. “A woman don’t understand about things. A man can’t just stand still, he’s got to move on. This here tractor’s going be....”

He was off again. When I looked back at Mama I could see she had already got almost to the point of thinking it was another hopeless case. And it didn’t help that Dud and Stack both started getting in behind him. When Daddy finally hushed for a minute Stack said, “Good tractor’ll work three times fast as a team.”

“A man can make money with a tractor,” Dud said. The girls looked like they weren’t even listening anymore, especially Caress who was getting the kind of expression she got when she thought about some boy. Coop was listening but he didn’t say anything. He had a way, when his mind was busy on something, of looking kind of up and sideways out of his eyesockets.

After a few more seconds, when Daddy started talking again, Mama put her hands on the table and got up and went out the back door.

“There’s a woman for you,” Daddy said.

The man was supposed to come at seven o’clock in the morning to look at the mules and Daddy spent the whole evening till bedtime down at the barn currying them and clipping their manes back and their fetlocks and oiling their hoofs with cottonseed oil. When he got through they looked so pretty it made me sicker than ever to think about them getting swapped off, especially for an old tractor that probably wasn’t any account. But Daddy just wasn’t going to listen, not to me for sure, not even to Mama. He was still riding high when he went to bed and he was up ahead of time the next morning to wait for Mr. Burns. When seven-thirty came and still no Mr. Burns, Daddy was looking even sicker than I had been feeling up till the last little while. He stood there kind of hanging on the front yard fence, looking like all the juice had drained out of him.

About eight o’clock, though, a boy showed up in a truck. Something had happened with Mr. Burns’s wife and he couldn’t make it at all today. But Daddy could count on him for sure tomorrow morning at seven. In a few minutes Daddy was back on his high seat again. I think he would have busted wide open before the day was over if we hadn’t had all that tobacco to set out. I never had seen him work so fast, up and down along those rows like a pump handle, pegging the dirt and putting the plants in. He kept hailing us along too, barely giving us time to get a drink of water. Coop, who finally said he had to go talk to somebody in town about a job, just about had to fight his way loose that afternoon.

We were in the house ready for supper when Coop finally came back. He went in the kitchen and talked quiet to Mama for a few minutes, but all he told us was that he didn’t get the job. It was after dark and almost bedtime before I found out what he told Mama. I overheard her telling it to Daddy in their bedroom. Coop had gone out to Oakton and talked to one of Mr. Burns’s neighbors who told him that tractor wasn’t nothing but a pile of loose nuts and bolts. And Mr. Burns wasn’t any big farmer, either. He had an old frame house without any paint on it and a bunch of run-down cows in a pasture half grown up with sedge and buck bushes. I listened hard, waiting for Daddy’s voice to come in. I didn’t have to wait long, or listen to more than about five words before I knew Daddy wasn’t having any part of it. He said that Coop was just a boy and didn’t know nothing, and that Mr. Burns owned bottom land all along Triple Creek. He said it was just some neighbor that didn’t like Mr. Burns and wanted to harm him. Besides that, Mr. Burns was going to give a solemn sworn guarantee on the tractor. He said that what Coop needed was a good whupping with a hickory limb. In my head I kissed those mules goodbye.

I slept in the same bed with Coop and we both lay there in the dark for a while without saying anything. Then Coop said, whispering, “He’s going to swap them mules for that junk pile, sure.” He had been listening too.

“I know it,” I whispered back.

Coop didn’t say anything else for a long time. Then he said, “I got a idea.”

“What?”

“Something I heard about, once.”

“What was it?”

“You’ll see. You got to help me. I’m going to slip out in a minute and go somewhere. You go on to sleep, but I’m going to wake you up a while before daylight. Just don’t make no noise when I do.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You’ll see.” He wouldn’t tell me. Coop liked secrets. A few minutes later he got up and was out the window as quiet as a snake.

I didn’t think I would but I finally fell asleep. After that it didn’t seem like but a few minutes before Coop was shaking me, whispering, “Come on, get up.” I slipped right in my clothes and followed him out the window and around the back of the house. The dogs tried to come too, but Coop scared them back.

Half of a late dark moon in the west made light enough to see by, and we spotted the mules in the lot just down beyond the barn. “What we going to do, Coop?” I said, still whispering.

“I’m going to show you. Got to get them in the barn. Quiet-like.” We went through the barn and circled down behind them and got them up as easy as grease. “What we going to do?”

Coop struck a match and lit a lantern sitting in the feed trough. I saw two jugs sitting beside it. “What’s in them jugs?”

“Run Bell in the stall, there.”

I did, and a few seconds later Coop came in with the lantern and a bridle and a piece of rope. Then he went out and came back with one of the jugs and a funnel and a short span of hose pipe. “You going to douse her?” I said. “What is that stuff?”

“Wait and see.” He threw the rope up over one of the ceiling beams above the feed box. He put the bridle on the mule good and tight and then he tied the end of the rope to the bit at the side of her mouth. “Now,” he said. “When I get up in the box and get ready, you pull her head up high with that rope. Keep it held tight. Hang on it, if you got to.” He took the hose and the funnel and got up in the feed box. “Now hand me that jug.” I did, and he set it on a cross-brace next to his head and screwed the top off. “Pull the rope.” I pulled and got her head up but she started to struggle. “That’s all right,” Coop said. “Pull it a little more and then hold on.” I managed it but the mule was struggling harder than ever and groaning now. Then I heard that big hee-haw gathering in her throat. Not much of it came out, though, because Coop grabbed hold hard with both hands and held her mouth shut. A few seconds more and he had the hose pipe in her mouth and part way down her throat. He stuck the funnel in the other end of it and then he had that jug up in his hand, kind of hoisted across his wrist, pouring what I knew from the smell was ’shine.

“That’s ’shine,” I said, hanging on the rope.

“One thousand proof,” Coop said and went on pouring. Poor Bell gagged and heaved and slobbered but there wasn’t a thing she could do but keep on swallowing. Coop poured the whole jug, just pausing now and again for her to breathe, and I know he got more than half that gallon down her. After we led her out of the stall she stood there in one place heaving so hard her ears went up and down. Of course by now I knew what Coop was counting on.

“You reckon she’s drunk?” I said.

“She ought to be pretty soon...I hope.”

There was still the other mule to go and it went off just about like before. Except this time, because it was getting daylight, we were running scared. There was no telling what, if Daddy caught us. Then something that made things worse came in my head. “You can smell the ’shine in here,” I said. “Daddy sure ain’t one to miss that smell.”

We were leading Tom out of the stall when I said that and it made Coop stop in his tracks. He didn’t stand there more than a few seconds, though. What Coop came up with showed how smart he was. I think he had just about all the brains that should have gone to Dud and Stack and the girls, except for Eve. “Get that fly spray,” he said. “Th’ow it all around. On the mules too. That ought to kill it.”

We did it quick. We put everything like it was before, taking the jugs, and opened the door out to the lot and left the mules standing there in the barn hall heaving. Then we went down to the branch and got a little wet and muddy to make it look like we had gone early to fish.

We came back to the house worrying. We were worried that Daddy might go to catch up the mules too soon and figure it out, and we were worried besides that all that whisky might have done something worse to the mules than get them drunk. We were lucky both ways, though. It turned out finally that the mules weren’t hurt a bit. And Mr. Burns came early, right as we got up from breakfast, before Daddy had time to do anything but put his hat on.

He was outside before Mr. Burns, moving slow, got all the way down from the cab of his truck. Mr. Burns was a fat man with a face red enough to make you think maybe somebody had poured a gallon of whisky down him. And he had a long straight mouth without any lips, like a snapping turtle. He said in a loud voice, “Come to see them good mules. They good enough, I’ll sho trade wi’ you,” nodding his big round head. “Much as I hate to give up that tractor. It’s a running fool. But I just got too many tractors.”

Daddy had his hat off. “You ain’t going to find no better mules than what I got. Pull a oak stump like it was a pine slip. Work all day and get no more’n a sweat up. Quiet, too.” He turned around and saw all us boys behind him. “Dud and Stack, go get them.”

Coop and I followed along, but before we got quite to the barn Coop slowed down and then stopped, and I did too. We stood there waiting, both of us feeling nervous, while Dud and Stack opened the door and went in. We could see the mules standing there just about where we had left them and pretty soon we heard Dud and Stack talking, but not loud. The only thing I heard plain was Stack saying, “You reckon they asleep?” They had the bridles on them now.

“You boys make haste.” That was Daddy. He and Mr. Burns had walked most of the way down and were waiting there, with Daddy talking about how easy handled his mules were. I could see Dud pulling hard on Bell’s bridle but all he could manage to do was stretch her neck out. “Goddamn!” he said. “What the hell!” He dropped the reins and got around behind her and gave her a powerful kick in the rump. That got her moving, but coming through she bumped hard against the door and then stopped with her front legs spread out wide. I could see her eyes were all the way shut.

“What the hell!” Dud was back on her bridle pulling and yanking, but the only thing that did was make her all of a sudden open her mouth and start hee-hawing. She must have hee-hawed eight or ten times, and before she got done, Tom, that Stack had finally managed to drag out of the barn, joined right in with her. For a minute, there, it sounded like some kind of a mule convention. They made so much noise that the dogs came down to check things out. That wouldn’t have mattered except for what Tom did next. Stack had finally turned loose of his bridle and Tom’s deciding to go for a walk was his own idea. He took a few trial steps up toward where Daddy, looking like he had been hit with something heavy, was standing with Mr. Burns. Then he staggered like he was going to fall down and took off in a different direction and did the same thing over again. Then he did fall down, right flop on his side, and lay there working his legs like a big old bug trying to get them back under him.

That was too much for the dogs. They came in like something a tornado had set swirling around that mule, baying and yelping and snapping at his legs, till that poor mule in a kind of strangled way started in hee-hawing again. Then all of a sudden Daddy was right in the middle of them yelling and cussing and kicking dogs in every direction. He even grabbed little Bitsy by the tail and threw her halfway up to the house, where she hit rolling and yelping and then lit out.

After that, things quieted down, and a minute later Daddy was standing there with his hat gone and his arms hanging long at his sides, looking down at the mule. Poor old Tom had finally got back onto his belly. He tried to get up on his legs and couldn’t because they went every which way, and so he settled for just staying down there, with his head lolling back and forth and his eyes falling shut. Daddy said, like he wasn’t saying it to anybody but himself, “Never have saw any such a goddamn thing in my whole life. What in the hell is the matter with them mules.”

“They got the staggers.”

This came from Mr. Burns. From the way Daddy looked at him, you’d have thought he didn’t know who Mr. Burns was or how in the devil he had got there. Daddy finally said, “Ain’t no staggers. Never have had no staggers.”

“It’s the staggers. Know them when I see them.” Mr. Burns’s words sounded like they might have come from somewhere high up, like maybe God had said them, and I don’t think it was till right then that it came clear to Daddy how his swap was going down the drain. It make him look kind of shrunk inside his clothes, and his arms hang down longer. But he gave it another try.

“I swear to you, Mr. Burns, I swear to God Almighty, them mules ain’t never had no staggers. Ain’t had nothing. Ain’t never even been sick.”

But Mr. Burns shook his head in a grand kind of way. I thought how much his mouth, the way he puckered it up sharp in the middle, make it look like a snapping turtle’s. In a way I was feeling sorry for Daddy, but it did me good to think old Burns was really the one getting beat.

“It could of been laurel,” Stack said, his face getting brighter. “Laurel’ll do them like that.”

It was something possible and for a little space it perked Daddy up. I couldn’t see any change in Mr. Burns’s expression but there was this minute when nobody said anything. Then, “It shore can do that to a mule,” Daddy said.

“But there ain’t no laurel in that lot,” Coop said. “Or the woods around here either.”

Daddy looked at him, looked hard. I know he didn’t really think that about the laurel was going to be any help, but he felt like Coop, his own son, had come in against him. He was still looking at Coop when Mr. Burns turned around and started back up toward his truck. Daddy went after him and caught up with him but nothing he could say was any use. A couple of minutes later Mr. Burns was in his truck and on the way out.

Daddy never did get suspicious about the trick but he kept on holding those words against Coop. He never quite said so, but I think he finally got to where, by some curious working of his mind, he started thinking of Coop as one of the reasons why he never was able to make a success. Right off, Coop was sorry he’d ever said those words. He hoped that what he found out the next day and what he found out a few weeks after that and told Daddy about, would help. The first thing was that Mr. Burns had sold the tractor that same day for just fifty dollars, instead of swapping it for two mules worth a hundred anyhow. The other thing was that the man who bought the tractor said it not only wasn’t worth fifty dollars, it wasn’t worth ten. Coop told Daddy those things but he could see it didn’t help.