30th Post THE PAST IS MYSELF

COLEY MOKE

In Order to get back to Coley Moke’s place outside of Monck’s Corner, South Carolina, you have to run down a Peevy or a Taylor or another Moke and make him take you back. Charley, Jim and I got us a Taylor and went back one day.
There were too many dogs in the yard to count but there were four runty gray pigs who’d been talked into believing they were hounds. When we petted the dogs we had to scratch the pigs. It was hot and the dogs were panting so Coley led us into his front room. There was a bed, and a wood stove in the room and nothing else. No tables, no chairs, no lights; it was the only room in the house.
“Make yourself to home.”
And then, “You bring any funny books?”
Charley pulled a roll out of his back pocket. Coley thumbed through them and said, “Fine.”
He emptied a Mason jar f corn whisky into a water bucket, placed a tin dipper in the bucket and set it down on the floor.
Three of the older dogs got up on the bed with Coley. One of the little razorbacks tried to make it but couldn’t.
We sat down against the wall near the bucket and when we started drinking, Coley started talking.
“See this dog here . . . His name’s Brownie.”
He was a long thin brown dog; his eyes were closed.
“Well, when I tell him the law is coming he picks up that steel bucket and runs out into the swamp, and I mean he doesn’t come back until I call him. Couple of the others would do that for me but they go so they were spilling too much.
“Brownie here knows I got me only one small still going now and don’t waste a drop. One old time - Trig - he’s gone now - would take it out there by the creek. He was a mess. He’d drink a while and then swim a while and then sleep until he was sober and then start in all over again . . .”
Charley nudged Jim and Jim nudged me. We drank some more.
Coley laughed and rasseled the head of the red bone hound on his left. “This here’s Bob, and they don’t come any smarter than him. One day he convinced these Federal men he would lead them back to the house. And they followed him. He led them poor bastards between the quicksand and the ‘gators and showed them every cottonmouth moccasin in the swamp. He got them so scared they were just begging him to lead them back on the road - any road. They promised him steaks and that they’d never raid me again. Well, sir, Bob kept them going until it was dark and after he walked them over a couple long ‘gators that looked like logs he finally put them up on the road. It was the right road but it was about twelve miles from their car. Old Bob sue had himself some fun that night. He told Brownie here all about it and Brownie told me.”
Charley took a big drink; Jim and I took a big drink. There was more. About how Spot and Whip would team up on a moccasin or a rattlesnake and while one faked the snake off of his coil the other would grab him by the tail and pop his head off lie a buggy whip.
Jim said, “Man, that is some dog to do that.”
Coley began to drink a little more and when started talking about his wife his voice changed. “Yeah, I suspect I miss that old gal. Wonder what she looks like now. She was something, all right. Up at dawn, cook a first-class meal and then go out and outplow any man and mule in the county and every Sunday, rain or shine we had white linen on the table and apple pie . . . Ain’t nothing I like better than apple pie.
“Sometimes we didn’t speak for a week. It was nice then, real nice. As long as I kept quiet and minded the still and my dogs everything was fine. Be we started talking and then the first thing you know we are arguing and then she began to throw the dogs up in my face. Let’s see . . . It was right in the middle of the Compression. Right here in this room. She had to go and try and turn me against my dogs . . . Well, the Compression hit us bad - real bad. I had no money, no copper for the still, and no way of getting any up. I was doing a lot of fishing and hunting then. . . . Yeah, right here . . . Oh, it was different then. There were four cane chairs and a dresser and a mirror from Sears Roebuck against that wall, and there was a couple insurance calendars from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company hanging over there.”
He took a big drink. The light was fading but we could still see his face. A bull alligator deep in the swamp rumbled once and decided it was too early.
“Yeah, I was lying here with old Sport. He was Brownie here’s father. He was young then and high-spirited and, you know, sensitive. When Emma Louise got up from her chair and came over he must have seen it in her face. They never had gotten along. He crawled off the bed and went outside. If I live to be two hundred, I’ll never forget those words. . . .
“She said, ‘Coley Mike, you are the sorriest ma on God’s green earth. Here it is almost winter, we got no money, we got no food, and you just lay there and stare up at that leaky rook. And what’s more, you’ve gone out and taken our last hog and traded it for another dog.’”
Coley smiled and leaned forward. Then his face set mean and hard. “’Emma, Emma Louise,’ I said, ‘if I told you once I told you a hundred times. . . . But since you seem to not hear I’m going to tell you one more time. I traded that hog and I got me a dog for the plain and simple reason that I can’t go running no fox with no hog.’
“Com on me, drink her up. When that’s gone there’s more where it came from. And if we get too drunk to walk we can send my old buddy Brownie here.”
He rasseled the dog’s head. “How about it, boy, what d’you say?”
We drank until it was time to eat. Coley lighted a fire in the wood stove and warmed up some red-horse bread. He served it on folded newspapers and with the little light from the stove we sat back down where we had been sitting and ate.
Later he chased the two pigs outside and we heard their hooves clopping down the porch and on the steps. The pigs slept under the house with the dogs. Coley said they generally got to bed a little earlier that the dogs.
An owl sounded, a bull alligator answered, and the moon glided out of the tall cypress trees in the swamp and the room began to streak with silver light. We slept. . . .
It was raining in the morning and all the dogs and hogs were in the living room. Spot, Trip and Buckles were on the bed with Coley. The two hogs wee under the unlit stove and the rest of the dogs were against the wall. Charley, Jim and I were sitting on the floor.
Coley was talking. “Bob’s father - that was Earl Brown - -he’s been dead a long time now. Let’s see, next month it’ll be eleven years. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. Eleven year, man, but don’t it drive by?”
Charley took a drink and handed me the dipper. I took one and gave it to Jim
“Buried him out on that hill knuckle in front. He always liked it up there. Some mornings I’d wake up and look out and there he’d be sitting up there just as pretty as you please. All the other dogs would still be sleeping. But not Earl Brown, he was always the first one up.
“He wasn’t like the others. Now I ain’t saying the others weren’t smart, but it was a different kind of smartness. You know how it is with hounds. They’ll do anything you tell them. But there’s a lot of them that just don’t have any initiative. Now that’s right where Earl Brown was different. Earl Brown was always trying to better himself. Trying to improve himself, you might say.
“I could tell it when he was a pup. The other dogs would fall all over one another getting at the food and when they’d get to it they’d bolt it down like they hadn’t eaten in a month. But not Earl Brown, no sir. He’d wait and let them take their places at the trough. Then he’d walk over, slow-like, and commence eating. He wouldn’t rush. He even chewed his food longer.”
Coley got down off the bed and took a drink. He studied the bottom of the empty dipper.
“Yeah, they don’t make any finer dog that Earl Brown.”
He put the dipper in the bucket of whisky on the floor and sat back down on the bed.
“That dog was a loner, too. The others would all sleep in the wood box. Sometimes there’d be as many as seventeen all flopped in there on top of one another. But not Earl Brown. From the day that scutter was weaned he slept by himself outside the box.
“I guess I miss Earl Brown as much or more than any of them. He was a marvelous dog, all right. Marvelous, that’ what he was.
“I told you how he’d sit up on the hill early in the morning. Well, he wasn’t out here lapping the dew off the grass for nothing. He was working on something.
“Boys, I want you to know what that dog was working on. I wouldn’t tell this to just anyone else. They’d say that fool Coley Moke has gone slap out of his mind, living out there with all them dogs.
“First of all I wouldn’t have known a thing if it hadn’t been for the chickens. But they started making a lot of noise during the night. I thought a weasel or a snake was getting at them so I started watching from the window. It wasn’t no weasel and it wasn’t no snake. It was two foxes. Beg red ones, long as dogs, and five times smarter. But hose foxes didn’t go inside the coop. They just stood there. They must have been there five minutes and then I thought I saw another fox. I looked again and you know who it was?
“It was Earl Brown. Well sir, those two red foxes and Earl Brown stood outside that chicken coop for ten minutes. My other dogs were all inside the house and they were going crazy. The poor hens were clucking and screeching for help. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I heard Earl Brown growl and then the next6 thing you know the three of them ran off into the woods.
“I kind of figured Earl Brown was setting those foxes up for me to shoot so I decided to wait until he gave me some kind of sign. Well, next night it happened again. Same time, right around three o’clock they came out o the woods. Well, they had their little meeting right outside the coop and then they ran off again.
“Of course, during all this I had to make sure Earl Brown got out at night and my other dogs stayed in. That took some doing. The others all knew that Earl Brown was getting special treatment and they got mad as hell. And they smelled those foxes on him and they wouldn’t have a thing to do with him.
“But Earl Brown didn’t care what they thought about him. He even like it better that way. But he got to looking peaked and red-eyed. Like he wasn’t getting any sleep. I put a couple extra eggs in his rations. That boy was on a rough schedule. He’d go to sleep around ten with the others but he’d be up a two and off with his friends.
“Things began looking bad. My dogs were giving me a fit to be let out at night. I wasn’t getting any sleep. And those hens. Lord, those poor hens were going right out of their minds. They got so nervous they were laying eggs at midnight. The rooster worried so he began losing weight and limping. He got so he wouldn’t even crow. They wee one sad-looking sight in the mornings. Wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I mean it got so bad them hens were stumbling around and bumping into one another.
“I decided to give Earl Brown two more nights and then end it. I was determined to shoot those damn foxes and bet my chickens back on some decent schedule.
“And that was the very night it happened. . . .
“Earl Brown stepped aside and let one of those foxes go into the coop. Those poor chickens were so scared and tired. I guess they were relieved when that fox walked in and picked one out. He took a Rhode Island Red. That hen didn’t even squawk. Just hung there in his mouth and across that red fox’s back like she was glad it was all over. Those chickens slept the rest of the night. It was the first good night’s sleep they’d ;had in three weeks.”
Coley stopped. “you boys ain’t drinking.”
Charley said, “I just this minute put the dipper down.”
Coley drank again and hunched himself back up between the dogs. “Well, I figured that was the end for Earl Brown. I saw where he had thrown in with the foxes and I knew it would be best if I shot him and the foxes. I had it worked out in my mind that those three were going to take a chicken a night until I was stripped clean. So I loaded up my four-ten over and under and got the four-cell flashlight ready and waited. I was praying Earl Brown wouldn’t run off that night. But tow o’clock came and he sneaked one and lit out through the woods. . . . You know what happened?
“What?”
“They never showed up.”
“Never?”
?Never . . . But still every night Earl Brown would leave the ;house at two. About a week later, I followed that dog out through the woods. I was downwind and I stood behind a big sweet gum and watched them.
“They were out in this little field and the moon was good and I could see everything. They were playing some kind of game out there in that moonlight. The foxes would run and Earl Brown would chase them in little circles. Then the foxes would chase him back and forth. And then it all ended and Earl Brown started back through the woods home.
“Mind you, I said ‘started back.’ Because the minute that rascal figured those foxes figured he was going home, he doubled back. I tell you that was one funny sight. Here I’m behind one tree and Earl Brown is behind another tree and we’re both watching those foxes.
“They were running around in circles and making little barking sounds like they were laughing. I tell you, I don’t know when I’ve been so fascinated. I shore wish I had had me a camera about then.
“All of a sudden it hits me what was going on. Old Earl Brown was picking up the foxes’ secret about running. That rascal had paid them foxes to show him something. He’s paid them with that Rhode Island Red and now he was checking on the foxes to make sure he’d get ;his money’s worth. Well, by God, I thought I knew something about hounds and foxes but I was shore learning something that night standing out behind that sweet gum tree. And Earl Brown not twenty yards away tipping his head around his tree . . . Man, that was one funny night.
“Well, that running secret ain’t easy and Earl Brown had to go back several nights. And every night he went, I went. It took him, all told, about three weeks but I’ll be dogged if he didn’t finally get it.”
Coley got off of the bed and squatted down by us. He took another drink and we followed. He spoke lower now.
“I don’t want them dogs hearing the rest of this. They’ll get out and try it out and wind up breaking their necks. It’s too tricky. As smart as Earl Brown was he had a ;hard time learning it. He took a few pretty bad falls himself before he got it.”
Coley stopped and let the bait trail. . . .
Charley rose to it. “Learned what, Coley?”
Coley spoke even lower than before. “How to run like a fox, that’ what. Oh, that was one fine dog. He set his mind to it and he learned it. He was marvelous.”
Charley was getting jumpy. “What id he learn Coley” What did he learn?”
“Don’t rush me, boy You don’t know much about foxes, do you, boy?”
“I guess not.”
“Well you know a fox can outrun any living dog if he feels like it, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Usually they don’t feel like it. They’re too smart to just do straight running. Most of the time they work in pairs and they get the dogs so confused they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll be running one way and then all of a sudden the other fox will pop up from another direction. Hell, they have signals. Sometimes they’ll run the dogs through briar patches, skunk cabbage, anything, and lots of time round and round in the same circles. A good fox will give a pack of dogs a fit. Lot of time a fox will hide and when the dog pack comes by he’ll jump in and run along with them. He’ll be barking and carrying on and having himself a marvelous time and the dons won’t know a thing.
“Oh, them red foxes are smart. And a good running fox on a straightaway, I mean, no cover, no nothing, can burn a dog down to the ground. He can run that hound right into the ground and he’ll be as fresh as when he started. He won’t even be breathing hard. You think back. You ever seen a tired fox? No. They don’t get tired. And it’s all because they got this secret way of running.”
Coley was whispering. He really didn’t want the dogs to hear. “It’s like this. When a fox runs he only uses three legs. Next time you see one running, you watch. You gotta look close, those reds are smart devils. They keep it secret and they only do it when they’re off by themselves or when they get in trouble. Kind of emergency you might say.”
Charley said, “Whoa now. What do you mean three legs?”
“They rotate, that’s what they do. They rotate. They run on three and keep rotating. That way they always got one resting. That’s why they give the impression that they’re limping all the time and got that little hop in their run.”
“Coley,” Charley said, “I just can’t believe that one.”
Coley jumped up and walked across the room twice. He raised his hand. “The Lord will snatch out my tongue and strike me dead right here and now if that ain’t the God’s truth.”
It continued raining . . . And the Lord didn’t make a move. . . . .