Home from the Hill Read Free

man. We—at least we small-town Texans (for the cities are getting to have as many Northerners as Texans in them) have a name abroad for violence: grown men still playing guns and cars. Well, and it must certainly be owned that even those of us who have gone away to college, lived in the East, and ought perhaps to know better, never quite get over admiring a man who is a mighty hunter—and who, for the two things go together, takes many trophies poaching in the preserves of love. One who can hold his liquor, zoom down our flat straight roads at a hundred and more miles an hour, who is fast on the getaway, as the expression goes. It cannot be denied, we are all born machine-crazy, gun-crazy, and car-crazy, and never grow out of it. Is there a Texas boy (if there is one who can’t then he does not grow into any man) who at the age of six cannot, at a distance of half a mile or as it goes past at whatever speed it is capable of, name you the make, the model and the year of not just Chevvies and Plymouths and Fords, but of ancient Reos and Cords and Dusenburgs, and Hudson Terraplanes, a Star, a Whippett, an Auburn Beauty Six? For a Texan the names of guns and caliber numbers are magic: Winchester and Colt and Remington and Smith & Wesson; .30–30 and .22, .44 and .45 and .32 and .38-Special. You could speak of a Texas boy’s growth and manhood as his .410, his 20 and 12 gauge years. Certainly you could have of Theron Hunnicutt, who lived for hunting and who, more than a boy and not quite a man, died at about the 16 gauge. We love machines, and the kind of man we admire is one who handles them well, who masters them to the point of recklessness—such a man as Captain Wade Hunnicutt was, whose duck gun and worn old .30–30, whose car (though he wore one out a year) each took on a personality and might, any one of them, have stood proxy for the man, as the sword of a king off fighting a war in olden times could stand proxy for him to be married back home.
    He would be sixty if he were alive today. More; for Theron was nineteen at the time and that was fifteen years ago, and the Captain and Miss Hannah Griffin were married when he had been back from the war less than a year. But if ever there was a man not meant to reach sixty it was the Captain. Hard enough to believe he was in his forties when he died, with that hair black and smooth as the breast of a crow and those sharp black eyes and that skin too weather-lined ever to show a wrinkle of age.
    He had a regularity about him, as if free from the indecision that troubled other men; it was reflected in the very clothes he wore. Winter and summer he wore the same felt hat, cream colored, of stockman pattern, and it never seemed to age, just as it had never seemed to be new. He had paid a hundred dollars for that hat, it was said—the sort of extravagant small gesture of which legends are made in Texas. Every day of his life he wore a fresh, faded blue denim workshirt with, from May to October, the cuffs rolled two turns above his black wrists, and fresh khaki trousers with creases that even at the end of a wiltering August day still seemed honed to an edge. Summer and winter he wore white socks, and at all times he kept on hand four pairs of shoes of the same pattern, or lack of pattern, plain, of very soft and minutely wrinkled brown kangaroo skin, always freshly polished, which a Ft. Worth cobbler made on his last at fifty dollars a pair. By May already there would be a heavy line across the bridge of his nose and under his eyes like a domino, where the shadow of his hat brim fell, where the lighter, though not light, skin met the sunburned skin. Even when he was fresh from the barber’s chair early in the morning his neck would be bluish with beard right down to the tuft of black hair in the cup of his collarbone that showed above a patch of dazzling white undershirt. He was a very comfortable looking man, without looking as if he strove for