Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

When suddenly, somewhere deep in memory, there was a tree, a single tree. His mother was dead; he couldn’t remember her nor even how old he was when his father married again. So the woman wasn’t even kin to him and she never let him forget it: that she was raising him not from any tie or claim and not because he was weak and hels and a human being, but because she was a Christian. Yet there was more than that behind it. He knew that at once—a gaunt harried slattern of a woman whom he remembered always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding where her husband had struck her. Because he could always depend on her, not to do anything for him because she always failed there, but for constancy, to be always there and always aware of him, surrounding him always with that shield which actually protected, defended him from nothing but on the contrary seemed actually to invite more pain and grief. But simply to be there, lachrymose, harassed, yet constant.

She was still in bed, it was midmorning; she should have been hours since immolated into the ceaseless drudgery which composed her days. She was never ill, so it must have been the man had beat her this time even harder than he knew, lying there in the bed talking about food—the fatback, the coarse meal, the molasses which as far as he knew was the only food all people ate except when they could catch or kill something else; evidently this new blow had been somewhere about her stomach. “I cant eat hit,” she whimpered. “I need to relish something else. Maybe a squirrel.” He knew now; that was the tree. He had to steal the shotgun: his father would have beat him within an inch of his life—to lug the clumsy weapon even taller than he was, into the woods, to the tree, the hickory, to ambush himself beneath it and crouch, waiting, in the drowsy splendor of the October afternoon, until the little creature appeared. Whereupon he began to tremble (he had but the one shell) and he remembered that too: the tremendous effort to raise the heavy gun long enough, panting against the stock, “Please God please God,” into the shock of the recoil and the reek of the black powder until he could drop the gun and run and pick up the still warm small furred body with hands that trembled and shook until he could barely hold it. And her hands trembling too as she fondled the carcass. “We’ll dress hit and cook hit now,” she said. “We’ll relish hit together right now.” The hickory itself was of course gone now, chopped into firewood or wagon spokes or single trees years ago; perhaps the very place where it had stood was eradicated now into plowed land—or so they thought who had felled and destroyed it probably. But he knew better: unaxed in memory and unaxeable, inviolable and immune, golden and splendid with October. Why yes he thought it aint a place a man wants to go back to; the place dont even need to be there no more. What aches a man to go back to is what he remembers.

Suddenly he craned his neck to see out the window. “Hit looks like—” and stopped. But he was free; let all the earth know where he had been for thirty-eight years. “—Parchman,” he said.

“Yep,” the driver said. “P.O.W. camp.”

“What?” he said.

“Prisoners from the war.”

“From the war?”

“Where you been the last five years, dad?” the driver said. “Asleep?”

“I been away,” he said. “I mind one war they fit with the Spaniards when I was a boy, and there was another with the Germans after that one. Who did they fight this time?”

“Everybody.” The driver cursed. “Germans, Japanese, Congress too. Then they quit. If they had let us lick the Russians too, we might a been all right. But they just licked the Krauts and Japs and then decided to choke everybody else to death with money.”

He thought Money. He said: “If you had twenty-five dollars and found thirty-eight more, how much would you have?”

“What?” the driver said. “I wouldn’t even stop to pick up just thirty-eight dollars. What the hell you asking me? You mean you got sixty-three dollars and cant find nothing to do with it?”

Sixty-three he thought. So that’s how old I am. He thought quietly Not justice; I never asked that; jest fairness, that’s all. That was all; not to have anything for him: just not to have anything against him. That was all he wanted, and sure enough, here it was.

LINDA

SIX

V. K. RATLIFF