FALL
LINE
A novel by
Joe Samuel Starnes
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Joe Samuel Starnes
Calling
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2011 by Joe Samuel Starnes All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-265-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-081-3
LCCN: 2011033089
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
Contents
Thursday, December 1, 1955
This dog Percy is there when the dawn breaks, running beside the river and then turning away, through the woods and up the hill, leaves crushing under his feet, his path worn more than ten years, stopping to smell the holes where the chipmunks burrow out of sight when he trots by. His fur is black and his paws black and even his tongue black, the blackest of all chows, but he is only half chow and half mutt like the backwoods country dogs that roam the woods around the old lady’s home. His black eyes are steady and see the earth up close in the bridge between light and darkness enshrouded in a cool mist from the Oogasula. Drops of dew sparkle on the evergreens and silvery and bluish reflections dance on the clear water gurgling on the banks and streaming in the middle, small white caps breaking in the slow bend of the river.
He runs up through the woods, farther away from the smell of the cold river water and through the lower hardwoods and into the pine thicket up the hill where the new shortleaf pines begin, growing every day, a few feet each year, their rough bark trunks shooting out of the red clay and yearning for the blue sky. He noses the fresh pine needles that cover the ground like a blanket before he crosses back into the hardwoods and digs in the old stumps, sniffing for the chipmunks down in their holes. He imagines their brown fur with the black stripe punctuated with white dots curled into a tight dusty ball. He can smell the chipmunks clearly, can hear their pitched little grunts and squeals. He growls softly at them, his fangs showing. He runs on and smells the scent of rabbits and a possum and the big hole where the groundhog nests. He is on the lookout for squirrels, the flying one in particular, but they are nowhere to be seen. The old man had taught him when he was a pup to stay after the squirrels and to tree them and to bark and point up with his nose, until he could come along with his shotgun. The old man had become more and more wrinkled until he was carried off in a box a long time ago, and had missed a lot of squirrels Percy had scared up. Percy runs on, keeping his nose to the ground but his eyes look up in case the squirrels appear along the break of blue sky between the pines and oaks and yellow poplars. The image of the flying squirrel coasting like a bird from tree limb to tree limb with his four paws spread and his fur like a cape is etched in Percy’s mind. He watches for the squirrel and dreams about him when he naps.
He crosses into an open field, the land that had been the forest before men with roaring saws cleared the trees, sawing them down to stumps and hauling off the wood down the narrow logging roads. He stops and pees on the stump where the possum hides and then runs over and sprays another stream on the holes burrowed by the chipmunks. He sniffs the fresh sap, hardening in the dry sun, and runs off from the cleared land and up a hill covered in hardwoods.
The woods on the hill still have salt licks where a few deer used to gather this time of year, but he knows only to go there when he can’t smell metal and gunsmoke and the drift of cigarettes or hear the slow deep voices of men, hunched in deer stands they nailed up with makeshift ladders, rungs made of small boards hammered onto the bark of the tree trunks. He sniffs the ground and smells where deer have been out in the early morning, their urine and feces fresh in the dew-covered brown leaves. He darts his eyes around but the whitetails are nowhere to be seen.
Percy pauses. There are no woodsmen out today, a good day for hunting, unseasonably warm and dry, but no hunters have been out for at least a month, not since the trees in the wide valley were cut. There are no lowing cows to listen for either. When he was younger he often crossed the hill into the pastures and chased the cows, scaring the clumsy herd into fits of mooing and clomping. He had heard the cows up until a month ago, but the sound of the herd and the farmers and their dogs are long gone from the low fields farther down the bend of the river. In days past when chasing cows he might fight with the farm dogs, a pack of lab mixes that were big and strong but soft and scared of him, two of them no match for his chow anger. He had put his teeth in their clean hides many times and he had picked up a few wounds from them. He’d twice caught a little birdshot from the farmer’s .410, the second time enough to keep him away from the dumb cows and the domesticated dogs for good, even if the man was using a shotgun he’d seen only little boys carry.
At the end of his romps he goes down to the river and runs along its edge, sniffing out the water and scaring frogs off the bank, their long legs slingshotting them out with a splash. He’d eaten a small frog when he was a pup and got sick and felt the legs kicking and moving all the way down his throat and into his belly. He was ill for three days. But he still likes to sniff out the frogs and scare them into the water, sometimes jumping in after them and paddling with his head above the surface, his black eyes alive with the chase, the smell of river water, the cool breaking of it on his fur, his paws paddling against and across the current. Also in summer he looks for snakes in the flat shoals and tries to catch them, snatching their long bodies up with his teeth, getting one right in the middle lengthwise and shaking it ferociously, all fur and fury and growling, beating it on the ground wildly until it quits hissing and wriggling. Once he had seen a dog that used to run with him get bit on the nose by a rattler. The dog’s head swelled up and it went back in a briar patch and took three days to die, moaning and whimpering in the tangled vines. Percy has never been bitten by a snake and still tries to catch them. He has lashed many cottonmouths to death, although he has not caught one this year and now it is too late, the warm season passed and the frogs and snakes all sleeping in their holes until the days get longer and warmer. Even so, he checks the riverbank every day for snakes and frogs. The cold-blooded creatures are sneaky and he looks out for them year-round.
He expects the old lady to come out into the woods with him like she does once a year about this time and cut down a red cedar and drag it back to the house and dress it up with ribbons and gold balls and then feed him ham, but lately all she has done is sit on the porch and gaze out across the woods, muttering to herself. It seems there will be no decorated tree in the house this season, but he watches for her in the woods every day. He still