Home from the Hill by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online

us that it did not seem in the least far-fetched for him, a total stranger, who had never seen the Captain alive or ever heard the rumors which instead of dying down have multiplied in the years since his death, to have noticed a strong family resemblance among a number of young mourners there, in their late teens and twenties now, ostensibly the children of all assorted kinds of looking fathers, yet all with that same sharp and slightly hooked nose, same hard jaw with the muscles always nervously at work in it, the same brown skin and stiff black hair and black eyes—dominant characteristics, as the biologists call them, especially remarkable among a homogeneously sandy, freckled lot of Scotch-English like us. As somebody said there, after the stranger’s blunder, repeating the old quip somebody in town made years ago, “It’s a wise child who knows his own father was not Captain Wade Hunnicutt.” While another, looking around him as the dirt was being dropped into the grave, his eyes picking out especially one boy the spitting image of the Captain—the very ghost of Theron himself—said, there was never a man of whom such a live memory had been kept as Captain Wade.
    Some left after that, but as many stayed and watched the Negroes shovel the old dirt into the hole. The strangers might have gone, and the Doc was for it. Their job was done, and they had miles to make in that hearse. But they were on the expense account and could stay over if they wanted to, and Hot-shot seemed to have had his eye out and found a couple of cute little reasons why a smart fellow from Big D ought to treat himself to a night in our town. Besides, for the moment his curiosity was aroused—lot of good it did him.
    â€œSay, men,” he said in a familiar tone, taking in the three stones of the Hunnicutts with an inclination of his big head, “what is all this anyhow?”
    Nobody answered him.
    â€œWhat did she mean by that—only child of just her?”
    Nobody spoke. He seemed to suspect he was being cold-shouldered, and this determined him to show us he could figure out a thing or two on his own. “Wasn’t he”—pointing towards the black stone—“the kid’s father?” Still nobody spoke. He must have taken this for resentment at his getting warm. “So that was it,” he said. “Christ! That’s one hell of a thing for a woman to want cut on a stone for people to see, ain’t it? Even a crazy woman.”
    He got no rise, nothing but cold looks. Then we thought we would give him just one little piece of information to take home with him, and told him that underneath that white stone in the middle no body lay, that indeed to this day schoolboys on their way home who dare one another to walk across his “grave” are of half a mind that Theron Hunnicutt is still alive.
    He whistled softly and waited for us to go on. We did not. So he reverted to his other topic. “I get it,” he said, again nodding towards the stones. “That black stone. Black! She musta hated him, boy! She didn’t care if it meant she had to give herself away into the bargain, so long as it meant people would know he wasn’t the father of his own child. Christ! She was something! She was crazy, wasn’t she? Say!”
    He was so pleased with his explanation, we let him keep it.

7
    We had had a somewhat similar thought once ourselves. He was awfully close to his mother when he was growing up, and we worried sometimes that he might be turning out a mama’s boy. It was just the kind of trick and the Captain just the kind of man you would expect fate not to overlook—to make the only son who bore his name turn out to seem the one in whom he had not been concerned.
    And certainly in one respect he was not forward in taking after his father. That was the difference Mrs. Hannah had in mind in choosing their respective monuments. Gray, at least, rather than