Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves Page B

way of life has had time to grow up around the cedar itself, and even in the thirties only a few ancients recollected scraps of the brief richer time.
    So that the shack represented more or less standard shelter, though outside the small circle of the stove’s radiation its temperature was in the thirties and all of them were dressed in denim. They were cozy.
    But coziness is not a lasting satisfaction to persons of that age and breed.…
    “I wisht they was somethin’ to God damn do,” Jim Lemmon said.
    “Could go maybe see old Rosie,” said a third one hopefully, a thin sort named Ike Atterbury.
    “He’s
home.”
    “Oh.”
    “Could gang up and stomp old Bert,” Dave Birdsong said.
    Bert grinned broad-faced into the stove’s glow, bull-necked, stump-bodied. “Could,” he said.
    “I reckon not,” Dave said. They had recently tried it.…
    They had a coal-oil lantern. He took it and rolled up its wick a little and went roaming with it through the corners of the shack. It had stood empty for three years now; the last family who had lived there, not owning it or paying rent, had taken off in a Chalmers touring car for California to goorange-picking and had not been heard of since. Their calendars moralized on the walls; their detritus cluttered the floor. Dave’s foot rolled on a mustard jar; he slapped the wall to keep from falling, and cut his palm on a nail.…
    “You come acrost any sixty-eight-carat gold thunder mug, you holler right loud,” Jim Lemmon said.
    Davis picked up a pair of overalls. Except for having no knees and only one strap, and having suffered the gnawings of mice, and being rotten, they were pretty good overalls.
    He said: “Could make us a dummy.”
    Ike Atterbury said: “Tootie Anson got hisself shot, a-foolin’ with dummies.”
    “Stood too closet,” Davis said. “Looky here, they’s a flarr sack.”
    “Nothin’ to stuff the sommidge with,” Jim Lemmon said.
    “Straw,” Dave told him, jerking his head toward a rear door. “Lean room’s full of it. Seen it.”
    “Who you gonna dummy?” Ike Atterbury said, doubtful.
    “We,” Bert said. “Who
we
gonna dummy, you mean.”
    “What I said.”
    “Sam Sowell,” Davis said. “Ain’t walkin’ no futher’n that, no night like this.”
    “That gold he’s got hid,” Jim Lemmon said, musing. “Five thousand dollars, somebody said.”
    “ ’Pression’s done growed it,” Dave said. “Thousand, used to be.”
    It was a whingding dummy, he told me long years later. They finished the first Mason jar of whisky while they were making it, and started on another, and in the end they took Ike Atterbury’s hat, knocking him down when he objected, and pinned it with baling wire to the dummy’s head. Its flour-sack face glared white; they tied a dog rope to theoveralls’ one shoulder strap and jiggled it from a rafter. It looked fine. Single file then, sodden under the thin horizontal rain that should by rights, Dave said, have been sleet, cold as the air was, they threaded through the thick shinnery brush of the shack’s valley and up a nose into the cedar. For secrecy they had left the lantern at the shack with the dogs, but none of them missed it. (You go hound-hunting with those people on a dark night and you’re lucky to get home with two eyes; they feel out the slapping, scratching branches with another sense, like bats, and lift casual forearms to shield their faces, but you don’t.)
    A quarter-hour later they were standing before Sam Sowell’s storm-cellar house. Smoke from its stovepipe bit warm into their noses; a thin line of yellow light showed at the edge of the trap door.
    “Hod damn, I’m cold,” Ike Atterbury said. “Whine we just go in, say hi?”
    “Shut up,” Jim Lemmon told him. “Drank some whusky.”
    “Thang looks like Bert,” said Davis, who had been stringing the dummy to a live-oak branch, its feet just touching the ground, twenty feet from Sam Sowell’s door. Bert snorted, and