The Crazy Hunter E-Book

Kay Boyle

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 215

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

At 17, Nan wants to leave the family farm and go to study. Caught between her powerful mother and yielding, drunken father, she absorbs the tensions of their divided household and dotes on her new gelding, a gift from her father. When a sudden accident leaves the horse blind, Nan's mother insists he must be put down, initiating a power struggle that brings the family's conflicts explosively to the fore.First published in 1938, The Crazy Hunter is an electrifying short novel - sharply observed, psychologically astute and morally complex. Written in lush, entrancing prose, it is the finest work by a significant modernist writer.

Leseprobe

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‘Few Americans have written so beautifully of the human condition with love and courage as Kay Boyle’

WASHINGTON POST

‘Kay Boyle’s steady hand in rendering detail, authentic characterization and unequivocal moral vision has never faltered’

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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THE CRAZY HUNTER

KAY BOYLE

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

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THE CRAZY HUNTER6

Contents

Title Page1234567About the AuthorAvailable and Coming Soon From Pushkin Press ClassicsCopyright

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1

The woman and the girl began undressing in the bushes near the water, modestly taking their garments off at a little distance from each other and with their backs turned so as not to surprise each other’s abashed flesh. The sun came thin but warm through the just opening buds and the tight flickering leaves of the branches, dappling the two lowered faces and the bared arms and legs with shadow. The girl had ripped her jersey over her head and flung it aside and kicked her sandals off; the tweed skirt lay discarded behind her on the earth beneath the burgeoning spring-like twigs. When she had pulled the tight blue woolen swimming suit up over her belly and breasts, she straightened up and came out onto the bank, buttoning one strap over the shoulder still, and stood there looking: the white naked legs drawn close together, slender and the flesh delicate as southern dogwood flowers, the head held straight upon the round slender neck, the temples hollow and bare with the black hair drawn back above the ears and falling almost to the shoulders. The hair and the skin’s untroubled purity, and the wide, up-tilted, the seemingly drugged or glazed transparent eyes gave her a look un-English as the Orient. 8And now the woman in her bathing-dress came stooping out, picking her own clothes up carefully and folding them over and laying them in order on the meadow grass above the wall of sedges that grew from the running water.

“Fold your things up, Nan,” the woman said. “Pick your clothes up and put them somewhere all together so you’ll know where they are when you get out,” saying it not so much from will or habit as from the need to stop quickly this or any gap of silence between them. The arms, like the body in the black skirted bathing-dress, were full, powder-white, unblemished: these (with the forebone long and prominent in them, despite their unstained beauty, and the flesh gone slack), and the thickening, sloping shoulders and the neck’s yoke signs of the consummation between flesh and time. From now on was the decline, the deterioration towards age, to come. Only the hands, reaching for the plaid blouse to smooth it out and fold it, and the face and the narrow feet in the black tennis shoes, were part still of a thinner, shyer woman’s corporeity: perhaps one who had never entered into marriage willingly or given birth but who remained still tentative, still virgin, still unformed. “Nan, pick up your clothes before you go in,” she said, the slow, still-innocent eyes searching the ground itself for flaw, saying it hopelessly into youth’s deafness and imperviousness.

But the cold was on the girl’s feet already, the water rising slowly on the pure legs as she slid down the bank’s edge to the stream: the blurred face lowered, part in ecstasy, part fear, to watch the thin silver line of cold pass the ankles and 9mount the flesh to the knees and pass them, rising, until it had clasped her waist, her breasts, her throat, and for an instant twisted her shocked face in consternation. Then her arms began moving and she was swimming against the pouring current, the teeth shaking in her head with cold. So the last time I did this I was fifteen, two years back, she began thinking quickly against the rushing slabs of water. I hadn’t been away yet and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what it was yet. Now I can feel everything stopping, the heart, the blood, the muscles hardening as if I were working my way through ice and becoming ice and the land and sky congealing tight around me. But the mother standing on her big bare legs on the grass saw the sun falling on the soft short hair that mounted black against the current, and the girl’s slim arms falling and rising, the shoulders and the bent arms as they fell chalk-white in motion through the dark water, thrusting it down behind her with small quick strokes like someone quickly mounting a steep ladder or jerking up a greased pole at a country fair.

“How is it, Nan?” she called out. “Cold?” And now her own body slumped over and broke through the sedge and the reed-sweet into the stream’s fast deep bed. For a moment she swam strongly, without gasping and her chin high, and then she turned lazily onto her back and rode there, the blue rubber cap edging the longish, pale face, the big arms thrashing backwards. “Warm,” she called peacefully across the water’s rapid murmuring. “Just the first plunge that takes your breath off…”

10The way home takes it from you and doesn’t return it, the girl was saying, because every year of youth is still there in the furniture and the rugs and the marks on the glass. There is a school of children everywhere with me here, all of them that one child I was once running along the house’s east ivy-covered wall and down through the stables and pastures; home putting short skirts on me and picture-books on the shelves in my room. The child who scratched that drawing with a nursery pin on the inside of the banisters above the sixth bar on the first flight is still your bone, your skin, your muscle of the eye, your nail and tooth, the same physically projected child that dies now in the water’s ice. She let the current turn and draw her down-stream towards the blue rubber cap, past the water-beaded floating head with its face turned upward in repose to the sun’s light hanging palely on the meadows and trees.

“I’m not so good as I used to be,” Nan said. “I’m going to get out, mother. I’ve forgotten how to swim in cold water after swimming over there.”

“Climbing mountains ought to give you wind enough,” the woman said, floating quietly with the stream. She lay vast, wide, bloated-seeming, her arms and legs dangling swollen under water.

“Sometimes when you learn one thing you forget another,” Nan said, her teeth knocking in her mouth again. She reached up for the willow’s roots and pulled herself, straining, out of the water. “I spoke German until I learned French, and in Italy I forgot everything I knew in French.” On her hands 11and knees she sought under the bushes for the towel, tossed the tweed skirt and the jersey aside on the fresh, glinting earth, saying: “One year I know algebra and another year geometry. I never know them both the same winter.” In a moment she turned on her knees and came back to the bank and sat there hunched in the towel, shaking, her toe-nails showing bluish at the edge. “Or when I get halfway good in charcoal drawing I forget how to work with oils, and the year I took architectural design I couldn’t do life-class afterwards.” She started drying her hair at the back with her hand inside the towel, shaking the soft dark locks loose. “And it’s the same thing if I admire things,” she said, stopping to pick a blade of pressed grass from her knee inside the towel’s shade. “When I was so keen on the Renaissance I couldn’t—”

“You’re tucked up, that’s what it is,” said the woman smartly from the water, churning backwards with her arms. “You’re still growing, you know, and you’ve been wearing yourself out with all this studying. Yesterday I saw one thing,” she said, drifting wide and peaceful. “You haven’t forgot how to ride a horse.”

Nor have I forgotten to breathe or speak my native tongue, only how to walk into the house and through its rooms as if I belonged there any longer, or swim in water that knew me young, or sit under this tree that knew my legs climbing up it once, or how to look at her and talk to her because she is still talking Then and I am ahead in what there will be for me or in Now. I am home now, this is home, and there is 12no place for me because every place is taken by that child who will not die.

“I don’t think I’m still growing,” she said. “Anyway, my feet aren’t growing. I’ve worn the same size shoes for two years now. I got my navy suède brogues to wear on my fifteenth birthday to go to Pellton to Mary’s lunch party, and I can still wear them without them hurting.”

“Look at your riding-breeches!” said the mother, floating near the sedges. “You’ve shot up four inches at least since September. That’s why I don’t want to get you a top-price twill. You’ll be out of it in six months. It isn’t worth it.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes,” almost in pain, and then as if that was the end of it she sat without speaking, rubbing the damp hair off her neck with her hand inside the towel. Mother, I know my bones, I live in this flesh, I know I have stopped growing. Look at me, I am another woman sitting up here on the grass, only not established, not recognized yet, but I am a woman sitting here watching you refuse the stream its current by your will. Just let me say this and say without looking at you that I’ve been three days, no, three nights and two days back and I can’t stay. It’s June, but it’s just spring here because things are late this year. That’s why the water is cold and the buds hardly open and the sedges the way rushes are in May usually, everything a month or more than that behind the season. But in other countries, in southern countries, things would be different now: the roses out strong and hot and sweet in the gardens, and the students, poets, painters coming back to their rooms along the river not looking like 13other people, their eyes different, and their voices not like other people’s, and their shoes older, and their heads bare the way mine was bare all winter through the galleries and in the art museums and even in the churches, for even in Italy they don’t seem to care if you put a handkerchief over your hair in respect any more. You walk in at noon out of the hot streets and the sun and your blood is consecrated, it becomes cool and pious with the devout pace of your feet across the stones, and you kneel down under the rising pillars in the granite dark, believing, believing. It is not religion, or Catholicism, or the belief of the Church of England, but it is your spirit on its knees at last just learning the words for its articulation. Students, she did not say aloud but sat silent rubbing her cold breasts dry beneath the towel, their faces looking different from other faces because they are still on the adventure, looking for a thing nobody here wants or has heard of wanting: knowledge or the way to knowledge or else simply the way, because of what families or convention want, of keeping curious and keeping free. All last winter I wore my clothes the way they did, as if I were a student instead of just making the pretense at it, and walked like that, and now she watched her mother emerge from the water, draw herself out by the feminine thinnish hand which seized the damp rope of the tree’s uncovered root. The stuff of the wet bathing-skirt shaped the firm muscles in the thighs that gripped toward land, and in some hopeless and unreclaimed contrition, the girl stretched her own bare arm out from the towel and saw the gooseflesh powdering her skin whitely to 14the wrist as her arm stiffened to aid the other woman up the bank. When their fingers met and clasped, the girl’s face flashed suddenly up, fervent, humble, eager, but now the mother burst out laughing, slipping and scrambling there on her broad knees in the mud; either knowing what was to come or else not knowing quite and fearful of what the words might be, she pulled herself finally up laughing onto the grass and ripped the blue rubber casing from her head and shook out her short graying curled hair and glanced quickly across the sky.

“Well, the sun’s thinning out all right, Nan. Your hand’s as cold as charity,” she said, the voice light, inconsequential, speaking merely for the sake of sound. “You’re foolish not to have taken your suit right off as soon as you were out. It chills you sitting in it like that.” She was moving off, rump-high, groping on wet hands and knees to the pile of folded clothing. “Come along. We’ll get our things on and run up to the paddocks,” she said.

It was she who led the way along the foot-worn, cattle-and man-marked path that ran between the wild hedge and the rushes in the water, and the daughter followed, listening to the talk which led up to money now and stopped short there. The price of the seventh brood-mare, and the stud fees; on went the mother’s voice ahead, talking of buying wider pasture while the big arm and the bathing-bag swung at the foxtails as she passed. Nan came over the pressed grass of the walk behind her, her feet in sandals, the vague, dream-drugged, rapt eyes watching the weeds and the branches 15move in the sun while the water slid off through the fields and the woman’s voice went on before her:

“There’s no worse business than this kind of thing we have to do, growing horses on the same ground year after year. I keep racking my brains for some way out of it and how to get hold of another set of paddocks to make use of alternate years like a rich man’s stud where money is no object. There’s the saying that a sheep’s foot is golden and that’s what has saved the ground from going horse-proud.” The voice went quickly, ceaselessly on, faintly contentious, acrimonious, in the drifting light of afternoon. The back of her neck stood broad and thickening beneath her sailor hat and the cropped hairs lay, wet from swimming, flat against the dust-white skin. “Putting cattle on and off the paddocks, in and out while the stud is going on, it’s a heartbreaking business. Salting the rough grasses so the cattle will eat them off or mowing the grasses off and getting the sheep in, there’s no end to it.” She hit out at the foxtails with her bag. “I know what I want,” she said savagely, coming closer to the bitter statement of it. “If I had enough money for it. Grassland kept in good heart by resting, d’ y’ see, Nan? Acres of fresh rested cock’s foot and rye grass and fiorin. Ah, I can see it all right in my mind’s eye, but what can I do about it? Anyone knowing anything about horses would see it like this, but the one man who has anything to do with it goes using the money up in other ways—”

This was not the beginning of it or anywhere near the beginning: it was merely the high-spot of the story restated 16so that she could begin to tell it all over again. It had started in those letters written to the young ladies’ boarding school in Florence, crossed land and water to another country and begun abruptly in the big wide Italian room with the girls’ three beds in it: “Nan, I had put money aside towards buying new pasture and what did your father do but up and buy this stag-faced gelding without any rhyme or reason for doing it, except he’d had too much to drink.”

He hasn’t any preferences or any real will of his own, it went on in the letters or else in the voice carrying it along the cattle and dairy path ahead. He does it out of, what’s the word I want, Nan, I don’t mean out of spite but something almost like it only queerer, because I’m the one who has the money, born with it, kept it, doubled it after your grandfather died, and your father has to show he’s somebody with something, even if it’s only the say-so. He wants to prove to me and everybody else what a man he is by going out and buying an animal I haven’t had a finger or an eye on, and drawing the check out to fool them into thinking any of it’s his, doing it after a few drinks to show them what it’s like, a man’s signature and a man’s bank account. And he knows I’ll stand by him; it’s what he trades on, that I won’t let him down. Seven, eight years back he spent that fortune on cattle when he knew, sober anyway he knew, that polled cattle were the only kind we could use with horses on the farm. He had the breed names in his notebook when he went off to the fair: Galloways, Red Polls or Aberdeen Angus I’d put down for him, thinking to give him the satisfaction of 17the responsibility. But after whatever he had at the Ship he must have said to himself, I’ll show her. If she’s British and the money’s hers, I’m Canadian and I’ll have the choice and the say. I cried a week over it after but that didn’t do any good, and the cattle once re-sold fetched half the price of what he’d paid at the public sales, and I had to swallow that too. And next was the unproved sire he brought home instead of a high-class stallion, without running out its pedigree even. Try always if you can to nick with the sire’s dam’s blood and leave the sire’s sire’s blood as your outcross whenever it’s possible to do it, I’d told him since the beginning. I’d written it down for him, but nothing scientific ever mattered to him. If he likes the look of a thing, or if he’s had enough of someone knowing better than he does, or after a drink or two, he’ll have his head for once whatever the price, so home he comes with this horse and there we were with it, a practical dead-loss on our hands. But even with it down in print before him you can’t teach a Canadian anything about a horse’s predominate blood. Ah, it’s been a heartbreaking business with your father, Nan; if he kept his hands on paints or chess sets it would be one thing, but after he’s started drinking at the sales and has the bee in his bonnet that he knows, it would break your heart wide open. But I’ve never put my foot down about the joint account and that’s what I should have done from the beginning. I’ve always let him go on drawing on the money for the sake of his manliness, or like giving him the tail-end of a career or an occupation because he never had one of his own. And why 18do I keep on doing it like a fool?—only because he comes back crying over what he’s done once he’s seen the folly of it, crying and sorry and swearing never to do it again and ready to die for it and willing to pay back every penny out of tobacco money, and swearing to paint a picture worth more than everything he’s lost…

“He’s only spent the money wrong like that about twice, mother,” the girl said. Hatless, stockingless, she walked behind, the dream-rapt eyes watching the weeds and branches stir and quiver in the sun.

“Three times!” the woman ahead cried out. “There were the horned cattle and the worthless sire, and now this time it’s this crazy hunter! He brings in this stag-faced hack at the price you’d lay out for a thoroughbred beast, and never thinking after what he’d had to drink, of having him up to pass the vet. Jolly as can be he comes in without a certificate either way, and the man who’d sold it to him out of the country so it happened. And why did your father do it? Just to show me he can get the money out of my hands when he wants! We’re stocking a stud-farm, I told him, not a riding-school. But the money was already gone and the price of new paddocks shot again—”

“Was it much? Could it have been as much as that?” the girl said, the black hair back from the hollow temples, the eyes wild-violet soft and tender, the bare blue-veined feet in the sandals wandering dreamily, soundlessly on by the stream.

“Ah, no, not so much as the price of new land, no,” said the mother, striking at the tall fox-grasses with her 19bag. “Nothing like what has been paid for horses, nothing compared to what Sir Mallaby Deeley paid for ‘Solario,’ for instance,” she said with bitter irony. “Never forty-odd thousand pounds, of course, but still for me it was something. It was enough to put off looking at land or even thinking of new paddocks for another year or more until something has had the time to collect and stop the hole up—”

The girl started talking quietly behind her.

“Candy says he bought Brigand for me,” she was saying. “He says he wants me to have Brigand to ride and do with as I please. I told Candy I didn’t want to hunt any more and he said I could have him anyway for mine—if I wanted him—I mean, if I stay—”

“He’s leggy,” the mother said quickly, almost quick enough to stop the sound of the last words short before she would have to hear them said, and she went on talking loud and fast. “There’s bad blood in him somewhere, sire or dam; he’s queer. Your father picked him for his shoulders, but anyone who knows will tell you that’s a luxury item. A bad horse can trick a novice time and again with pretty shoulders.”

Home three days, the mother began thinking now a little wildly, and already that face as if they’d put her in prison for life, and already the words beginning to be dropped and the hints. She went along the stream’s side, irritated now, hitting impatiently at the heads of the weeds, thinking of the girl following a little way behind her and thinking It’s her good-looks that have done it. None of us thought she’d turn out like that, and now summer’s good enough to be wasted at 20home but later she’ll have to be off where the remarks men on the street or men she’s met pass about her will be nourishment enough. Ah, I know very well what it is you want, she thought slyly, and at the same time with an impatient recognition of the slyness, and I’m your mother and I’ll keep you from it as long as I can. It’s all very fine for you but it isn’t fine enough, Nan; you’re seventeen, you can very well wait till you’re twenty to know what you want and to hear the things they’ll always have to say about your face and figure.

“Your father—” she began, but suddenly, as if wakened from the walking dream and crying out in sleep, the girl called:

“Mother, look at that bird up there!”

Once they had been walking along here to the paddocks, perhaps two years back it was, anyway before the boarding-school in Florence, and it was something else that stopped them short like this on the path, and the mother now, as then, turned with her bathing-bag in her hand and the identical sailor hat (which perhaps was not the same one from summer to summer but which might have been) shaded her face from what was not sun or even light so much as merely the absence of rain. I can’t look, if I can’t look down there again I can’t. I can’t bear looking at it, I can’t look again, said Nan’s voice over the two years of almost having forgotten what its shape was and how it lay against the bottom in the mud.

“What are you talking about, Nan?” said the mother with no alteration in the tone or face, neither more impatient or less, saying it now exactly as she had said it then.

21“Mother, look, there’s a bird caught up there in the trees,” the girl said, thinking: Two years ago the thing was lying in the water and I couldn’t look down at it again. I stood staring at her face until she finally turned her face down to see, the hat brim lowering so that I couldn’t see her eyes any more, only the nostrils whitening along the edges and her mouth opening as if to make a sound but not making it, and then she threw her bag down on the path. We’ll have to get him out quick, she said. Nan, I’ll go down and get him and if you can get hold of his arms from the bank while I push him from below we ought to make it. He’s got his cap on still, the mother said. Mother, I can’t, I can’t do anything, said Nan’s voice, dying. I can’t. I’m too afraid.