Shiloh: Chapters 13-15

Tyler County hasn’t hardly got the money to investigate reports of children being kicked, Dad says, much less dogs.

Around here it’s serious business when you got a quarrel with your neighbor and you got to carry it as far as the law.

If you look for the whole rabbit, you almost never see him because he blends into the scenery.

I wonder what’s going on inside that rabbit—if its heart’s pounding fierce.

He’s wearing this army camouflage shirt, a brown cap, and the weirdest grin that could fit on a human face.

I know he wasn’t out shooting rabbits and happened to get a doe instead, because he doesn’t have his hounds with him; Judd Travers had gone out that morning with the clear intention of getting himself a deer.

He slogs over through waist-high weeds to where the doe lays.

And when he looks up again, I’m right beside him. He whirls around. “Where’d you come from?” he says.

And if I might could tell, but bargain not to, it’s something else again: It’s blackmail.

And if I might could tell, but bargain not to, it’s something else again: It’s blackmail.

It’s on Dad’s hunting regulation papers.

“And I’ll say different. The new game warden won’t make any allowance even if the deer was eating your garden. You just don’t shoot deer out of season no way. ’Specially a doe.”

“You got a bargain,” I tell Judd, and now my feet want to dance, my face wants to smile, but I don’t dare let the delight show through.

Travers grunts and goes in his trailer.

I walk away from Judd’s trailer in a sort of zigzag line, half expecting a bullet in my back any moment, even though I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t.

Could be that once he got rid of the evidence, he’d tell me to go ahead and get the warden, that I wasn’t to have the dog.

What worries me most is that Judd could go through with the bargain, give Shiloh to me, but then someday, when Shiloh’s running free in the woods by himself, Judd might put a bullet in his head, just to spite me.

But Dad’s still studying my face. “I can’t figure it, Marty. Judd seemed pretty definite about keepin’ that dog. What was said between you?”

If I tell Ma and Dad everything except about the deer, that’s lying by omission, Ma says: not telling the whole truth.

“You know, I think it’s because Shiloh was hurt. I think he figures that dog’s never going to be what it was, and that’s why he was willing to let it go. Figured he got rid of a lame dog, and the best of the bargain, too.”

Ma turns off the TV and makes waffles, with a big pat of margarine in the center of each one and hot homemade brown-sugar syrup filling the plates.

I go again, out of joy and jubilation, the way they do in church.

And suddenly Shiloh joins in with a bark. A pitiful kind of bark, like he’s got to be taught how, but it’s a happy bark, and he’s learnin’.

He is looking mean and grumpy, like maybe he’s disgusted with himself for lettin’ me have that dog so easy.

When I finish the woodpile, Judd hands me the hoe. “You see that garden?”

“You see that corn? I want the dirt chopped up so fine I can sift it through my fingers,” he tells me.

Next afternoon, Judd sets me to scrubbing down the sides of his trailer and his porch, shining up the windows, raking the yard.

“He’s the loudest squaller I got. I can tell from his racket whether he’s following a fresh track or an old one, if he’s runnin’ a ditch, swimmin’, or treed a coon.”

“He’s the loudest squaller I got. I can tell from his racket whether he’s following a fresh track or an old one, if he’s runnin’ a ditch, swimmin’, or treed a coon.”

I got to roll a big old piece of locust wood over to the stump in his side yard, drive a wedge in it, then hit the wedge with a sledgehammer, again and again till the wood falls apart in pieces to fit his wood stove.

“Why, that paper’s not good for anything but to blow your nose on. Didn’t have a witness.”

I can’t bear to have Dad know I was so stupid I made an agreement with Judd Travers without a witness.

I can feel the sweat trickle down my back and I ain’t even started yet.

So I go in his shed, put the sledgehammer back, take out the sickle, and go tackle the weeds down by his mailbox.

“Sickle’s gettin’ dull, Judd. You got a whetstone around, I could sharpen it for you.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. Never saw a look on a man’s face like I see on his. Pure puzzlement is what, it is.

If you weighed it on a postal scale, would hardly move the needle at all, but I suppose there was a fraction of an ounce of sorry for him somewhere inside me.

The last day I work for Judd, he inspects every job I do, finds fault with the least little thing.

Just stands in the doorway of his trailer looking at me, and then I get the feeling he’s going to tell me I can take that paper he signed and use it for kindling.

I get home that evening, and Ma’s baked a chocolate layer cake to celebrate—a real cake, too, not no Betty Crocker.