The Collected Stories of William Humphrey by William Humphrey Page B

you. Oh, I know you’re good with a gun. I’m not afraid you’ll hurt yourself.”
    â€œNot with the training I’ve had,” he said.
    â€œNo,” she said. “What I worry about is the amount of time and thought you give it. Are you keeping up in school? The way you go at it, Joe! It hardly even seems to be a pleasure to you.”
    Pleasure? No, it was not a pleasure, he thought. That was the name he had always given it, but he was older now and no longer had to give the name pleasure to it. Sometimes—often times when he enjoyed it most—it was the opposite of pleasure. What was the proper name for it? He did not know. It was just what he did, the thing he would have been unable to stop doing if he had wanted to; it was what he was.
    â€œI see other boys and girls your age going out to picnics and parties, Joe. I’m sure it’s not that you’re never invited.”
    â€œYou know that kind of thing don’t interest me,” he said impatiently.
    She was serious for a moment and said, “You’re so old for your age, Joe. Losing your father so young.” Then she altered, forced her tone. “Well, of course, you probably know exactly what you’re up to,” she said. “It’s the hunters the girls really go for, isn’t it? Us girls—us Southern girls—like a hunting man! I did. I’ll bet all the little girls just—”
    He hated it when she talked like that. She knew that girls meant nothing to him. He liked it when she let him know that she was glad they didn’t. He liked to think that when she teased him this way it was to get him to reaffirm how little he cared for girls; and yet she should know that his feeling for her was, like the feeling he had for hunting, too deep a thing for him to be teased into declaring.
    He took the shell away from her.
    â€œYou’re good enough now,” she said.
    â€œNo,” he said sullenly. “I’m not.”
    â€œHe would think so.”
    â€œI don’t think so. I don’t think he would.”
    â€œI think so. You’re good enough for me,” she said.
    â€œNo. No, I’m not. Don’t say that,” he said.
    He was in the field at daybreak on opening day with Mac, the speckled setter, the only one of his father’s dogs left now, the one who in the three seasons he had hunted him had grown to be his father’s favorite, whom he had broken that season that he had trained, broken, him, Joe, too, so that between him and the dog, since, a bond had existed less like that of master to beast, more like that of brother to brother, and consequently, he knew, he had never had the dog’s final respect and did not have it now, though the coat did fit now.
    He had not unleashed the dog yet, but stood with him among the bare alders at the edge of the broom grass meadow that had the blackened pile of sawdust in the middle—the color of fresh cornmeal the first time he ever saw it—to which he, and the big covey of quail, went first each season, the covey which he had certainly not depleted much but which instead had grown since his father’s death.
    The coat fit now, all right, but he wore it still without presumption, if anything with greater dread and with even less sense of possession than when it came halfway down to his knees and the sleeves hung down to the mid-joints of his fingers and the armpits looped nearly to his waist and made it absolutely impossible to get the gun stock to his shoulder, even if he could have lifted the big gun there in that split second when the feathered balls exploded at his feet and streaked into the air. He had not worn the coat then because he believed he was ready to wear it nor hunted with the big gun because he believed he was the man to. He had not been ready for a lot of things, had had to learn to drive, and drive those first two years seated on a cushion to see over the hood; he had not been