On the day before Thanksgiving the Spencer clan began to gather. It was a custom that at this time during the year the nine sons would come together in New Dominion. On Thanksgiving Eve they would celebrate their reunion with food and drink and talk. On the day itself the men would leave at dawn to hunt for deer.
All day cars had been arriving at Clay Spencer's house. Each car was greeted by Clay-Boy, a thin boy of fifteen with a serious freckled face topped by an unruly shock of darkening corn-colored hair. Now the day was drawing toward evening, but still the boy lingered at the back gate waiting for the one uncle who had not yet arrived, the one he wanted most to see.
In the west the taller ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains were rimmed with a fading autumn silver, but in the foothills, in the Spencers' back yard, all was in darkness when the ninth and last car stopped at the back gate, Clay-Boy, waving his flashlight excitedly, directed the car to a parking place.
"That you, Clay-Boy?" shouted the man who stepped out of the car.
"Uncle Virgil?" called Clay-Boy, suddenly shy in front of his city uncle. Virgil Spencer was the one who had gone to Richmond during the Depression when the mill had closed for four years. In Richmond, Virgil had found work as a mechanic and had stayed on there even after the mill had reopened.
"We been waiten for you," the boy said.
"Who-all's here?" asked Virgil as he began unloading his gun and shells and hunting coat from the back seat.
"You're the last one," said Clay-Boy.
"Your mama still got that law about no whiskey in the house?" asked Virgil. He reached into the glove compartment and removed a fifth of bourbon.
"There's whiskey there all the same," answered Clay-Boy. "They've been goen back and forth between here and Scottsville all day long." Scottsville was the closest place where store whiskey could be bought.
"What she don't know won't hurt her," laughed Virgil. He concealed the bottle in his hunting coat, and the man and the boy walked toward the crowded little company house where lights beamed cheerfully from each window and the muffled sounds of festive conversation could be heard.
"I'm goen with you-all tomorrow," said Clay-Boy. "On the hunt."
"That's what you said last year," said Virgil.
"Last year I wasn't but fourteen," Clay-Boy objected.
"Last year your mama wouldn't let you," Virgil reminded him.
"This year I'm goen," Clay-Boy said.
Last year's hunt was a shameful memory to Clay-Boy. For as long as he could remember he had wanted to go. Right up until the night before the hunt he had had his father's permission. Then on the eve of the hunt, his mother, learning his plans, had said no. He wasn't old enough, Olivia had claimed. Didn't know how to handle a gun. Might not even come back alive with all those men out there crazy with whiskey and shooting at anything that moved. In the end she had won, and he had retired in an agony of frustration and cried silently into the pillow so late that he had not even wakened the next morning and had been deprived of even the pleasure of watching the men depart.
This year Clay-Boy was using a different strategy. He had spoken to his father about going on the hunt and Clay had agreed that it was all right with him as long as Olivia did not object too much. Clay-Boy then decided he just would not mention it to his mother at all and when the time came to go on the hunt he would simply go with the men.
When Clay-Boy and his uncle came to the kitchen door, Virgil threw it open and shouted, "Let's start the party!"
"Well, Lord, look what the wind blew in," exclaimed Olivia. Virgil was one of the youngest of the Spencer men and a great favorite with his brothers' wives. He kissed each of the sisters-in-law in turn, and came at last to his mother, the undisputed ruler of the clan, old but still beautiful, so tiny it seemed incredible she could have mothered such an enormous brood of sons. In her white hair was a jaunty bunch of artificial violets. She had been enthroned in a rocking chair from which she had been directing the cooking, the conversation, and the setting of the table, all the while delivering a lecture on the advantages of a large family; she was far from satisfied with the number of grandchildren her sons' wives had presented to her.
"How you doen, cutie?" Virgil asked.
"Bend down here and give your old mama a kiss," she demanded, laughing happily. Virgil bent forward and her hands came up and held his head while they kissed.
"When you goen to bring a wife home?" she asked, releasing him.
"Mama," he teased, "what do I want with a wife?"
"What you want with a wife is to get some grandchildren like the rest of the boys," she scolded.
"Where is everybody?" Virgil asked, meaning his brothers.
"They're all in there in the liven room, swappen lies. Go on in there. I reckon they're expecten you."
"I'll be a ring-tail ripstaver!" exclaimed Clay Spencer when his brother entered the room. Clay-Boy watched as Virgil was welcomed into the group. The brothers were intensely fond of each other, and there was much clumsy hugging and back-slapping. More often than not their joy in seeing each other was expressed in an oath or a hearty laugh.
Watching his father and his uncles, Clay-Boy was impatient to be one of them. They were tall men. Not one of them was under six feet. They were small-boned but muscular, and each had some different shade of red hair and brown eyes. But it was not only to be like them physically that Clay-Boy yearned. It was his dream that some day he would earn the reputation his father and his uncles already enjoyed, for they were known to be good providers, hearty eaters, prodigious drinkers, courageous fighters, incomparable lovers and honorable in all dealings with their friends and neighbors. It was a proud thing to be a Spencer man, thought Clay-Boy.
Of the nine sons only Virgil had left the community permanently. The others, Matt, John, Rome, Luke, Anse, Ben, Clayton and Ham had left from time to time to look for better jobs, but they were never satisfied away from New Dominion and always came home again. Some of the boys-like John and Ben-drove to jobs in Charlottesville each day, but that was only twenty-eight miles away and they were always home with their families by nightfall.
Clay-Boy's attention was drawn away from his uncles when he suddenly caught sight of his grandfather. His Grandfather Zebulon was a handsome old man. His hair, like his curling handlebar mustache, was white and carefully combed, and even his great age had failed to dim the zest, the merriment, the celebration of life that shone in his clear brown eyes.
The old man sat near the fire. He was not being ignored intentionally. It was simply that he was too old and inactive to rise and push his way into the group. His lips formed words to welcome his son and his hands would rise up to embrace him, but then Virgil's attention would be attracted by one of his brothers.
Clay-Boy slipped over and stood beside his grandfather's chair, and when a lull came in the conversation called, "Uncle Virgil, here's Granddaddy."
Virgil came and hugged the old man.
"Papa," he scolded fondly, "what you doen up so late? I thought you always hit the hay when the sun set."
"Couldn't go to sleep till you got here, boy," said Zebulon.
"How they treaten you, Papa?" asked Virgil.
"I'll tell you the Lord's truth," answered Zebulon in his thin old voice, "these boys have nearly made an old woman out of me. Took my gun away from me, won't let me drive a car from here to the gate, and they hide every drop of whiskey that comes in the house."
"I'll take care of that, Papa," said Virgil. He reached in his pocket and brought out the bottle of whiskey he had hidden away and passed it to his father.
"Now," said Virgil, "let's get caught up on everythen that's been goen on."
Listening to the talk of his father, his grandfather and his uncles, Clay-Boy sat on the floor curled against the edge of a sofa, storing away each word to be remembered and savored long after the reunion was over. Suddenly he heard his name.
"Where is that boy anyway?" It was Clay speaking.
"Right here, Daddy," he said. "I been here all the time."
"Well, come on out here, son," Clay said. "Your Uncle Virgil brought you somethen from Richmond."
Virgil was holding out a long thin package wrapped in brown paper. "I thought it was about time you had one of your own," Virgil said.
Silence fell among the men while Clay-Boy unwrapped the package. He removed the paper and discovered a hunting knife. It was enclosed in a sheath that had slits along the top so it could be attached to his belt. The handle was of beautifully polished wood and when he withdrew the blade from the sheath he found it razor-sharp. Self-consciously Clay-Boy attached the sheath to his belt and returned the blade to its place.
"I sure do thank you, Uncle Virgil," Clay-Boy said. "I been wanten one."
"You know what to do with it, boy?" Clay asked.
"Sure," said Clay-Boy. "If the deer ain't dead you jump on him and cut his throat."
"When you goen to take that boy on the hunt, Clay?" asked the old grandfather.
"He says he's goen with us tomorrow," said Clay.
"He's old enough," the old grandfather said. "When I was his age I must of killed me twenty-five deer. It wasn't for sport back in them days. Food. Salt 'em down like you fellers do a pig nowadays. I plan on venison tomorrow night."
"Clay-Boy!" His mother called from the kitchen.
"Yes'm?"
"You plannen on some supper you better put some wood in the box. Nearly empty."
Clay-Boy left the men reluctantly and was going through the kitchen when his mother noticed the hunting knife.
"What are you doen with that thing on your hip?" demanded Olivia.
"Uncle Virgil brought it to me from Richmond," he said.
"You be careful of that thing," she warned. "You're liable to fall down and cut yourself on it."
"Aw, Mama," he objected impatiently. It annoyed him that Olivia always pointed out the most impossible and improbable dangers in any situation. Never had he tried out any new thing without having her warn him that it was too dangerous or that he was not old enough or he was sure to get hurt in the endeavor.
"And if you've got any notions about goen deer-hunten tomorrow you can just put it out of mind right now," Olivia warned as the boy was halfway through the door.
Clay-Boy replied by slamming the door behind him as he went to the woodhouse for fuel to feed the ever-hungry old cooking range.
"Livy, you're goen to turn that boy into a sissypants," observed the old grandmother, Elizabeth. "Keepen him here in the house all the time. Never letten him go off and learn men's ways."
"It's just not time for him to go hunten yet," said Olivia. "You start 'em off hunten the next thing you know the old Army or Navy comes in here after 'em and that's just one step away from getten married and leaven home. And where's your child then? Off and gone, that's where."
"Nine of 'em I raised," the old grandmother said. "They all went off and married women, God knows. 'Cept Virgil, and God knows what'll come of that boy, breathen city dirt all day and ruinen his eyes with moven-picture shows at night."
"Boys are a heartache," said Olivia.
"God knows," muttered the old grandmother.
When Clay-Boy returned to the house, his arms laden with wood, supper was ready.
The meal was served in shifts, the men served first at the long kitchen table with their women hovering about, refilling each dish as soon as it came near being empty. The table was laden with the good country food that is abundant at that time of the year when all the summer canning is finished, when the hogs have been slaughtered and salted away in the smokehouse, when the fruits of the harvest are gathered, when the safety from hunger through the winter is assured, and a feast can be enjoyed without concern about whether the extra food can be spared.
During the meal the men ate for the most part in silence, but once Virgil looked up, and, spotting Clay-Boy across the table from him, inquired, "When you comen down to Richmond and let me teach you the mechanic's trade?"
Before Clay-Boy could answer, his mother had spoken for him.
"Don't you go enticen that boy out of school, Virgil Spencer," Olivia said. "He's goen to graduate from high school before he goes looken around to learn a trade. And it looks like if he keeps on the way he has been, he's goen to graduate at the head of his class."
"The boy's got a head on him," said Clay. "That's a fact."
The praise made Clay-Boy uncomfortable, and he was glad when his Uncle Virgil buttered his fifth hot biscuit and observed, "I been down yonder with city folks so long I forgot what real food tasted like."
"You can tell that to look at you," said old Elizabeth. "Thin as a rail. What do they feed you in them old lunch counters anyway?"
"Cardboard mostly," Virgil replied. "You order a steak or pork chops or ham and eggs, it don't matter what. Tastes like cardboard all the same."
"That's what comes from goen off so far from home. You ought to be home. Eaten in them old meal-a-minute places all the time. Wonder you ain't dead. When was the last time you been to church?"
"Land of Goshen, Mama!" exclaimed Clay. "Why don't you shut up and let the man eat his supper?"
"You heish your disrespect, Clay," said the old grandmother. "Here, Virgil, try some more of these butter beans. Me and Livy raised 'em last spring and it's about the best batch we put up all summer."
When the men had finished and each had departed, sated and drowsy from so much food, the women removed the dishes, washed them, and reset the table.
As Clay-Boy was leaving the kitchen to follow the men into the living room, his mother called after him, "You better start getten ready for bed, boy."
"I'll go in a little bit, Mama," he promised.
"Don't you try to stay up with them men," she said. "They're goen to be in there gabben half the night."
"Yes ma'am," said Clay-Boy and slipped into the living room. He sat on the floor at the end of a sofa and watched while the men began to pass a bottle around the room.
The old grandfather had several drinks and the whiskey loosened his tongue.
"There ain't the deer around no more there used to be," he mused. "Nor bear neither for that matter. When I was a young buck look like all you had to do was step out the door and wait for somethen to come along. Bear sometimes, deer sometimes and all the time there was wild turkey. Times is limbered up these days. Ever'thing killed off 'cept some scrawny little old doe that don't know enough to do her grazen while you boys is asleep. That's about all you'll run up on tomorrow."
From the kitchen the old grandmother called, "Don't you-all boys give that old man no more whiskey. You know how he gets."
"Pay no 'tention to her," the old man said. "I been married to that old woman nearly a hundred years and ain't heard a thing from her but belly-achen."
"You see what I mean," from the kitchen. "Not another drop.
"Old woman, you heish your mouth," the old man called. "Any man lived to be a hundred and three on the next Fourth of July got a right."
"Them boys have give that old man too much," Elizabeth grumbled to her daughters-in-law. "Claimen he's a hundred and three! He ain't a day over ninety-five. Man that old ought to be getten ready to meet Old Master Jesus 'stead of sitten in there drinken whiskey and tellen lies."
"Up on the mountain, when I was a boy," the old man began the story he told each year, "there used to be a big old buck deer that was white all over and had pink eyes. Lots of folks that never laid eyes on him used to claim there wasn't no such thing. Some of them even claimed he was a ghost. I don't say one way or the other, ghost or flesh. All I know is I have laid eyes on him."
Sitting almost at his grandfather's feet, Clay-Boy listened to the telling of the story. He had heard it hundreds of times before, but each new telling would send shivers down his spine, and he knew that tonight when he went to sleep he would dream of the white deer; he always did after he had heard the story.
"I never will forget the day," old Zebulon continued. "It was comen long toward fall of the year and I was out on the mountain cutten some wood against the cold weather. Had my gun along just in case any game come by. Around the middle of the day I took a little rest and was eaten a little lunch the old woman had put up in a paper bag, and all of a sudden somethen moved through them woods like a winter wind. Never made no noise, mind, just wind. Well sir, it was that big white deer and I'll tell you the God's truth if I hadn't of reared up right that minute he'd of run over me. I got in two good shots at him. I was a young man in them days, before my eyes turned to water, and I was the best shot in the country. Maybe I missed that deer, maybe he was travelen too fast. Maybe it was like some used to claim, maybe he was a real ghost and buckshot couldn't of done no good even if it went straight through his heart."
"What ever happened to that old buck?" asked Clay, knowing that unless the old man were forced to end the story he might start it somewhere near the beginning and tell the whole thing all over again.
"Nobody killed him yet," the old man said. "The way I figure it he ain't met his match. The way it is, that deer bein' white and all, he stand out where a regular deer don't. He has fought just about ever'thing there is to fight from man to bear and done whopped 'em all. He knows all the tricks there is to know, that deer do."
"Papa," said Virgil, "sometimes I think you made that old white deer up. If he really roams these parts, how come nobody but you ever laid eyes on him?"
"Oh, he's there all right," said the old man. "Maybe the eye sharp enough to see him just ain't come along yet. I've even heard it told that if that deer dies by human hand his spirit will pass into the man that kills him. From that day on that man will be different, marked to follow a path unknown, a man marked for glory!"
The old man's voice had risen so that it could be heard throughout the house, and for a moment after he had uttered his prophecy there was a sober silence.
"That old man is drunk," said Elizabeth from the kitchen. "Them boys is feeden him whiskey just as sure as you're born."
"Clay-Boy!" called Olivia.
"Yes ma'am," the boy answered.
"Bedtime."
"I'm goen, Mama."
Upstairs in the boys' room, Clay-Boy undressed in the darkness so as not to wake his sleeping brothers. As he took off each article of clothing he placed it with care so that he might find it all the easier in the morning. It would still be dark when he dressed again to go on the hunt.
In his bed Clay-Boy sought sleep but it would not come. He was so keyed up that his mind could not hold onto any subject, but kept leaping from one exciting fact to another. Tomorrow he would join the hunters. He owned a knife which was not a secondhand hand-me-down, but a brand-new shining thing that was entirely his own and had come all the way from Richmond. His mother would be angry when she found that he had gone on the hunt, but by then it would be too late. Tomorrow he would become a hunter. So went the thoughts of the boy as he hovered on the brink of sleep.
Finally sleep did overtake him, and as he slept visions of the great white deer came again and again across the fields of his dreams, sometimes distant, a white and marble sculptured ghost at the edge of the forest; another time so close he could hear the swift encounter of its hoofs against the frozen earth before it leapt into the dream sky, so high it would be silhouetted against the moon, white on white; and again so close he could hear the bellowings of its lungs sucking in great gusts of air and exhaling so powerfully that the wind itself changed direction, always its antlers held delicately high above the ensnaring branches of the trees and the bushes. And every time Clay-Boy pulled the trigger he would feel the harsh recoil of the gun against the muscle of his shoulder and wake with the sound of the explosion ringing like a diminishing echo in his ears.
After a while he drifted into a sleep like some gently rocking unguided craft that flowing with the current will drift from shallow into deeper and deeper water, his final coherent thought: Tomorrow it will happen. Finally he drifted so deep into oceans of sleep that not even the dream of the great white deer could reach him, and he rested.
