410
PARTISAN REVIEW
despite chain, a tall man standing in the back of the truck, riding
the sway like a sailor on a tossing deck, hatless, wearing a red-plaid
mackinaw and cow-hide boots, waving a rifle easy as a bookkeeper
waves a lead pencil, yelling like a kid to some crony, yelling, "Yeah,
got two!" then tossing the rifle down, on a tarpaulin-covered heap
in the trunk, and leaning over to come up with a fresh bear skin,
holding the big head high above his own head, the bear-jaw open
in a last white-tusk-studded rage, the eyes staring, fixed and unre–
lenting under the blood-streaked spot where the 30.30 had gone in,
the big hide, black fur side and bloody side, trailing down half over
the red mackinaw, and the bare-headed man's face, with a blood–
streak now on it from the hide, poked around it, grinning with teeth
as white as the bear's.
She was twenty-one then, just that fall come up from the
valley, leaving her mother with the genteel chafing-dish and Haviland
china and the father with his wax-colored hands and consumptive
cough and county-seat law practice, and tidy bank account, leaving
Normal and, she suddenly knew, the silly girls with their silly engage–
ments and the pimply boys, to any number of whom she could have
been engaged to, if she hadn't been honest enough with herself to
know that if their hands ever got into her dress she would just be
stiff as a board. But she hadn't been willing to fake things up, and
now it was three-thirty on a winter afternoon, as she stood beside
one of the other teachers in whose house she had a room and kitchen–
ette, an older woman, a native of J ohntown, daughter of a physician
now deceased, named Abernathy, and heard the woman sniff.
"Who's that?" she asked the woman.
"Just another hillbilly that thinks he is Daniel Boone," the
woman said, and curled her lip in the expression which was the
terror of the Sixth Grade.
"He killed the bear," Celia Hornby said, uttering the super–
fluous words half as though talking to herself. She had never seen
a bear, except in a zoo, at the Glendale Park in Nashville, long back.
"He'll probably claim he choked it to death," the woman said.
"Without gloves on."
"Did he?" the girl asked. "Did he choke one-not this one–
but did he ever choke one to death?"
"No," the woman said, with bitterness, staring unforgivingly at
