Spencer's Mountain (2 page)

“God knows,” muttered the old grandmother.

When Clay-Boy returned to the house, his arms laden with wood, supper was ready.

The meal was served in shifts, the men served first at the long kitchen table with their women hovering about, refilling each dish as soon as it came near being empty. The table was laden with the good country food that is abundant at that time of the year when all the summer canning is finished, when the hogs have been slaughtered and salted away in the smokehouse, when the fruits of the harvest are gathered, when the safety from hunger through the winter is assured, and a feast can be enjoyed without concern about whether the extra food can be spared.

During the meal the men ate for the most part in silence, but once Virgil looked up, and, spotting Clay-Boy across the table from him, inquired, “When you comen down to Richmond and let me teach you the mechanic's trade?”

Before Clay-Boy could answer, his mother had spoken for him.

“Don't you go enticen that boy out of school, Virgil Spencer,” Olivia said. “He's goen to graduate from high school before he goes looken around to learn a trade. And it looks like if he keeps on the way he has been, he's goen to graduate at the head of his class.”

“The boy's got a head on him,” said Clay. “That's a fact.”

The praise made Clay-Boy uncomfortable, and he was glad when his Uncle Virgil buttered his fifth hot biscuit and observed, “I been down yonder with city folks so long I forgot what real food tasted like.”

“You can tell that to look at you,” said old Elizabeth. “Thin as a rail. What do they feed you in them old lunch counters anyway?”

“Cardboard mostly,” Virgil replied. “You order a steak or pork chops or ham and eggs, it don't matter what. Tastes like cardboard all the same.”

“That's what comes from goen off so far from home. You ought to be home. Eaten in them old meal-a-minute places all the time. Wonder you ain't dead. When was the last time you been to church?”

“Land of Goshen, Mama!” exclaimed Clay. “Why don't you shut up and let the man eat his supper?”

“You heish your disrespect, Clay,” said the old grandmother. “Here, Virgil, try some more of these butter beans. Me and Livy raised 'em last spring and it's about the best batch we put up all summer.”

When the men had finished and each had departed, sated and drowsy from so much food, the women removed the dishes, washed them, and reset the table.

As Clay-Boy was leaving the kitchen to follow the men into the living room, his mother called after him, “You better start getten ready for bed, boy.”

“I'll go in a little bit, Mama,” he promised.

“Don't you try to stay up with them men,” she said. “They're goen to be in there gabben half the night.”

“Yes ma'am,” said Clay-Boy and slipped into the living room. He sat on the floor at the end of a sofa and watched while the men began to pass a bottle around the room.

The old grandfather had several drinks and the whiskey loosened his tongue.

“There ain't the deer around no more there used to be,” he mused. “Nor bear neither for that matter. When I was a young buck look like all you had to do was step out the door and wait for somethen to come along. Bear sometimes, deer sometimes and all the time there was wild turkey. Times is limbered up these days. Ever'thing killed off 'cept some scrawny little old doe that don't know enough to do her grazen while you boys is asleep. That's about all you'll run up on tomorrow.”

From the kitchen the old grandmother called, “Don't you-all boys give that old man no more whiskey. You know how he gets.”

“Pay no 'tention to her,” the old man said. “I been married to that old woman nearly a hundred years and ain't heard a thing from her but belly-achen.”

“You see what I mean,” from the kitchen. “Not another drop.

“Old woman, you heish your mouth,” the old man called. “Any man lived to be a hundred and three on the next Fourth of July got a right.”

“Them boys have give that old man too much,” Elizabeth grumbled to her daughters-in-law. “Claimen he's a hundred and three! He ain't a day over ninety-five. Man that old ought to be getten ready to meet Old Master Jesus 'stead of sitten in there drinken whiskey and tellen lies.”

“Up on the mountain, when I was a boy,” the old man began the story he told each year, “there used to be a big old buck deer that was white all over and had pink eyes. Lots of folks that never laid eyes on him used to claim there wasn't no such thing. Some of them even claimed he was a ghost. I don't say one way or the other, ghost or flesh. All I know is I have laid eyes on him.”

Sitting almost at his grandfather's feet, Clay-Boy listened to the telling of the story. He had heard it hundreds of times before, but each new telling would send shivers down his spine, and he knew that tonight when he went to sleep he would dream of the white deer; he always did after he had heard the story.

“I never will forget the day,” old Zebulon continued. “It was comen long toward fall of the year and I was out on the mountain cutten some wood against the cold weather. Had my gun along just in case any game come by. Around the middle of the day I took a little rest and was eaten a little lunch the old woman had put up in a paper bag, and all of a sudden somethen moved through them woods like a winter wind. Never made no noise, mind, just wind. Well sir, it was that big white deer and I'll tell you the God's truth if I hadn't of reared up right that minute he'd of run over me. I got in
two good shots at him. I was a young man in them days, before my eyes turned to water, and I was the best shot in the country. Maybe I missed that deer, maybe he was travelen too fast. Maybe it was like some used to claim, maybe he was a real ghost and buckshot couldn't of done no good even if it went straight through his heart.”

“What ever happened to that old buck?” asked Clay, knowing that unless the old man were forced to end the story he might start it somewhere near the beginning and tell the whole thing all over again.

“Nobody killed him yet,” the old man said. “The way I figure it he ain't met his match. The way it is, that deer bein' white and all, he stand out where a regular deer don't. He has fought just about ever'thing there is to fight from man to bear and done whopped 'em all. He knows all the tricks there is to know, that deer do.”

“Papa,” said Virgil, “sometimes I think you made that old white deer up. If he really roams these parts, how come nobody but you ever laid eyes on him?”

“Oh, he's there all right,” said the old man. “Maybe the eye sharp enough to see him just ain't come along yet. I've even heard it told that if that deer dies by human hand his spirit will pass into the man that kills him. From that day on that man will be different, marked to follow a path unknown, a man marked for glory!”

The old man's voice had risen so that it could be heard throughout the house, and for a moment after he had uttered his prophecy there was a sober silence.

“That old man is drunk,” said Elizabeth from the kitchen. “Them boys is feeden him whiskey just as sure as you're born.”

“Clay-Boy!” called Olivia.

“Yes ma'am,” the boy answered.

“Bedtime.”

“I'm goen, Mama.”

Upstairs in the boys' room, Clay-Boy undressed in the darkness so as not to wake his sleeping brothers. As he took off each article of clothing he placed it with care so that he might find it all the easier in the morning. It would still be dark when he dressed again to go on the hunt.

In his bed Clay-Boy sought sleep but it would not come. He was so keyed up that his mind could not hold onto any subject, but kept leaping from one exciting fact to another. Tomorrow he would join the hunters. He owned a knife which was not a secondhand hand-me-down, but a brand-new shining thing that was entirely his own and had come all the way from Richmond. His mother would be angry when she found that he had gone on the hunt, but by then it would be too late. Tomorrow he would become a hunter. So went the thoughts of the boy as he hovered on the brink of sleep.

Finally sleep did overtake him, and as he slept visions of the great white deer came again and again across the fields of his dreams, sometimes distant, a white and marble sculptured ghost at the edge of the forest; another time so close he could hear the swift encounter of its hoofs against the frozen earth before it leapt into the dream sky, so high it would be silhouetted against the moon, white on white; and again so close he could hear the bellowings of its lungs sucking in great gusts of air and exhaling so powerfully that the wind itself changed direction, always its antlers held delicately high above the ensnaring branches of the trees and the bushes. And every time Clay-Boy pulled the trigger he would feel the harsh recoil of the gun against the muscle of his shoulder and wake with the sound of the explosion ringing like a diminishing echo in his ears.

After a while he drifted into a sleep like some gently rocking unguided craft that flowing with the current will drift from shallow into deeper and deeper water, his final coherent thought: Tomorrow
it
will happen. Finally he drifted so deep into oceans of sleep that not even the dream of the great white deer could reach him, and he rested.

It was not yet dawn when Clay-Boy woke to the rich and furtive voices of his father and his uncles that floated up to him from the kitchen. The hours during which he had slept might have been seconds, for he was awake immediately with all the intoxicating thoughts that had been there the moment he had gone to sleep.

He dressed in the darkness. It was no great chore except that he was trembling from the cold and the anticipation of whatever unknown thing lay ahead.

Going down the hall he was careful to tiptoe past the room his mother and father shared. He knew his mother would be awake on account of the noise. Over the years it had become a custom that the men would prepare their own breakfast, and he knew that if he could get safely past his mother's door he would be free to join the men.

“Clay-Boy!” Her voice sounded distant behind the closed door and he pretended not to hear. He kept on tiptoeing down the entire stairway until he was at last on the ground floor. He felt his way along the dark downstairs hallway and came suddenly into the light of the kitchen.

Some somber thing had come over the Spencer men during
the night. Perhaps it was that they had wakened too soon from sleep or perhaps they felt the effects of the whiskey they had drunk. More probably it was a foreboding about the hunt itself, for no matter who faced the deer that day would be put to a test. Before he came out of the forest, something of his character, his reputation as a marksman, his courage, his stealth, or even his very manhood would be challenged and he would either maintain his position among the men of his clan or he would lose something of himself. There was the feeling that anything could happen and each of the hunters had his own secret intention, hope, and desire that it would be he who would bring back the deer which, even as they gathered to kill it, was waiting somewhere in the darkness on Spencer's Mountain.

At the old cooking range Clay was preparing breakfast. Already there was a huge pile of bacon, and into the bacon grease Clay poured a bowl of eggs for scrambling. Two pots of strong coffee were perking on the back of the stove; the aroma of the coffee and the bacon had a restorative effect on the boy.

“Grab yourself a plate there, son,” said Matt.

Clay-Boy went to the kitchen cabinet and took down a plate for himself and placed it with the others heating on the back of the stove.

Before the food was placed on the table and all during breakfast the bottle of bourbon was passed from one man to another. The first time the bottle was passed, Rome automatically handed the bottle around to Clay-Boy's father's place, but since Clay was still at the stove, Clay-Boy took the bottle. Since he had recently wakened from sleep and since in his haste he had not brushed his teeth, the whiskey was the first thing to pass through his throat that morning, and as he swallowed a good slug of the stuff, his first impulse was to vomit it back again. Mercifully, for it would have been unmanly in the eyes of the other men, Clay-Boy was able to hold it down and passed the bottle on to the uncle seated to his right.

“Eat hearty, men,” said Clay, placing the platter of scrambled eggs on the table. Clay-Boy, too excited to eat,
was glad when the men rose from the table, put on their hunting coats and began gathering their guns.

The old grandfather was not going on the hunt, but as each of his sons filed out of the kitchen door he offered advice and admonitions.

“I'd try that ridge over there right above where the minnow creek goes under the footbridge. Best place in the world for deer.”

Or:

“A deer is a heap smarter than a human man so don't go thinken you can outsmart him.”

To Clay-Boy, who was last out of the door, he said, “You know what they'll do to you if you shoot and miss one, don't you, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Clay-Boy. “They'll cut off my shirt-tail.”

And finally, when his sons had reached the back gate, the old man called to them, “Don't nobody shoot each other,” but they were gone beyond the hearing of his voice. He closed the door and sat alone in the kitchen and watched through the window as the silhouette of the mountain began to take form out of the darkness.

***

A light snow had fallen during the night. As Clay-Boy followed along after his father and his uncles, he saw that each of them had stepped in the other's footsteps so that someone coming after them might guess that only one person had made the tracks. Carefully the boy lengthened his stride so that his footsteps coincided with those made by the men he followed.

Ahead of him Spencer's Mountain loomed snow-white, pine-green, arched with the blue of a cold winter morning. The mountain itself housed all those things mysterious to the boy. There were caves there where, long ago, boys had been lost and never found again. One of the caves had a lake in it, so deep and so hidden that if you dropped a stone from the rim you could count to five before the sound of the splash would travel back to you. The mountain itself he had never explored, being forbidden by his mother; it was said to be the home of the largest rattlesnake ever seen, a snake so outsized
and savage that its fame had been carried through several counties by woodsmen who had seen it and had never been able to kill it. The mountain held all that was unexplored for Clay-Boy, but most of all its fascination for him lay in the fact that it was the range of the great white deer imbedded in his memory from the earliest tales he had heard from his grandfather.