So I crawled over to where the fashion plate was and took hold of it and began to drag it to where Mamie Little was. A policeman came and took me by the shoulder and lifted me up, but I couldn't stand, and that was the first I knew my ankle was sprained. But Swatty got up himself and sassed the policeman that came to get him. He told him he had a right to go into his father's own shop if he wanted to, and that if the policeman said much more he would go back again.
I guess the whiskey exploded all right. Three more houses burned before they stopped the fire, but we didn't see that because Bony ran all the way home, and somebody carried me to a wagon, and drove home with me, and Swatty's father got him and took him up the main street and waled him on the hotel corner with a half-burned shingle that had blown from the lumber fire.
The next day my ankle hurt pretty bad and I stayed in bed with linament on it and after school Lucy came up to see me. “Come on up in my room and play,” I told her.
“No,” she said, “I don't want to. I want to go down and play with Mamie Little; we're playing paper dolls. We're having lots of fun.”
“Ho!” I said. “Paper dolls! They're no fun.”
“They are, too,” Lucy said. “And we've got to cut out Mamie's fathers. She's got a whole fashion plate full.”
“Where'd she get them?” I asked, because I guessed right away what fashion plate it was.
“Why, Toady Williams gave them to her,” Lucy said. “He got them out of the fire or somewhere and gave them to her. He's helping us cut them out.”
Gee! I felt sore!
After I got out of bed and went back to school I fought Toady Williams a couple of times, but it wasn't much good because he wouldn't fight back. All the good it did was to make Mamie Little tell Lucy I was a mean, bad boy and that she would never speak to me again as long as she lived. Once I almost told her that it was me that got the father fashion plate out of the fire and that Toady Williams didn't do anything but pick it up out of the mud after I had got it for her, but I didn't tell her because then she would have thought I was sweet on her. That would have made me feel cheap.
It made me feel pretty mean, just the same, to see the way Toady Williams was playing with her all the time, when I had picked her out to be my secret girl. He gave her pencils and apples and everything and I guess she liked it. I wished I was grown up, so I could ride up on a bucking bronco and sling a lasso over Toady's head and jerk him into the dust. Then Mamie Little would say, “Hello, Georgie! Can I get up and ride behind you over the wild plains, because I don't want to have anything more to do with a 'fraidy-cat like Toady.”
But it didn't seem as if anything like that was going to happen. Not for years, anyway.
One day Swatty came over to my yard and he said, “Say!” so I said, “Say what?” and he said, “Say, you know Herb's tricycle?” and I said I did. Herb was Swatty's brother that wanted to marry my sister Fan and he had got the tricycle a couple of years ago, when all the bicycles were high-wheel bicycles. He had got it for him and Fan to ride on, and it was a two-seat one—side-by-side seats—and after a few times Fan wouldn't ride on it because it made her as conspicuous as a pig on a flagpole. So Herb rode on it alone some, and with some other fellow some, but mostly he kept it chained up in Swatty's barn and said he would scalp Swatty and skin him alive if Swatty ever touched it.
So this day Swatty came over and he said, “What do you think!” because Herb said when he was married to Fan, Swatty could have the tricycle. You bet Swatty was tickled. So I asked him who would ride on it with him.
“Well—you will,” he said. “And Bony. That's when I ain't taking somebody else.”
He didn't say who else, but I knew, because I knew Swatty was having my sister Lucy for his secret girl.
“And part of the time,” I said, “I can have it alone, can't I, Swatty?”
“It's my tricycle—” he started to say.
“It ain't yet,” I told him, “and I guess if I go to work good and plenty it never will be, because if I want to I can think up how to make Fan mad at Herb again and then you wouldn't get it. And, anyway, if Lucy went to ride on it she might fall off and get hurt, so I guess I'd tell my mother not to let Lucy ride on it. Unless I could take it sometimes and find out that it was safe.”
Because I guessed that if Mamie Little had a chance to ride on that tricycle with me she'd be pretty sick of that fat, old Toady Williams mighty quick. So me and Swatty fixed it up that way, that I was to have the tricycle part of the time and he was to have it part of the time. The only thing was to get Herb and Fan married off as soon as we could, and to look out that nothing turned up to scare them away from each other again like that Miss Murphy fuss did. It wasn't going to take much to scare Herb away. I knew that.
Well, I guess grown folks don't care whether they have a divorce or not, because they are always having them and so maybe they get used to having them and don't think much about it and are not ashamed to have them, but I guess a kid is always kind of ashamed when his folks get them. We never had one in our family but we had babies and I guess a kid feels about the same way when there is a divorce in his family as he does when there is a baby. It makes him feel pretty sick and ashamed and miserable. It ain't his fault but he feels like it was. He goes out the back gate and sneaks to school through the alley and when a kid sees him the kid says: “Ho! you had a baby at your house,” and the kid that had the baby come to his house wishes he could sneak into a crack in the sidewalk or die or something.
I guess that's the way it is when you have a divorce at your house. It ain't your fault but you feel like it was and you don't have any of the fun of fighting and getting the divorce, like your folks do; you just have the feel-miserable part.
So one day about when the river began to fall again, only it was still mighty high, me and Swatty and Bony went up to Bony's room in Bony's house. It was muddy weather, in June, and I guess we had been wading in the mud or something so we knew Bony's mother wouldn't let us go upstairs to his room unless we washed our feet first, unless we sneaked it. So we sneaked it.
The reason we went up was so Bony could prove it that the Victor bicycle his father might maybe buy for him weighed only forty-five pounds. He had a catalogue to prove it with but it was up in his room, so we went up to get it. It proved it, all right. Swatty said that was pretty light for a bicycle to weigh, and I said it, too. So then we said a lot of more things about a lot of other things but mostly we talked about the bicycle, because Bony was going to let me and Swatty learn to ride on it if he got it. Swatty bet he could get right on it and ride right off as slick as a whistle because he had an uncle in Derlingport that had a dozen bicycles. So then Bony said he'd like to know why, if Swatty's uncle had that many, he didn't send Swatty one, and Swatty said maybe he would. We just kind of talked and let the mud dry on our feet and crack off onto the floor.
Well, in the floor in one place there was a hole and Bony showed us how he could look through it down into the dining-room and see what his mother was putting on the table for dinner whenever she was putting anything on. The hole was about as big around as a stovepipe and it had a tin business in it to keep the floor from catching afire because that was where the stovepipe from the dining-room stove came up through the floor to go into a drum to help heat Bony's room when it was winter. So we all looked down into Bony's stovepipe hole to see if it was like he said. And it was.
Just then Bony's father came into the diningroom. He had his hat on but it wasn't time for dinner or anything and he didn't come into the dining-room as if he was coming for dinner. He came in fast and threw his hat on the floor and pounded on the table twice with his fist. The dishes jumped and a milk pitcher fell over on its side and spilled the milk.
“Mary! Mary!” he shouted.
So Bony's mother came in from the kitchen. “Why, Henry!” she said; “what's the matter?”
“Matter? Matter?” he shouted. “I'll tell you what's the matter! I'll show you what's the matter! Look at this! Look at this, will you!”
Me and Swatty looked but Bony kind of drew back from the hole and his mother didn't look. I guess she didn't have to. I guess she knew what it was without looking. It was a bill, all right. Me and Swatty could see that but we didn't know what it was for—whether it was for a hat or a dress or what. So Bony's father threw the bill on the table and stood with one fist on the edge of the table and the other fist opening and shutting. Bony's mother had been paring potatoes or something, I guess. She wiped her hands on her apron but she didn't pick up the bill.
“Well?” she said.
“Of all the useless, idiotic, ill-timed, outrageous, unheard-of extravagance ever incurred by any brainless, gad-about, senseless, vain peacock of a woman—” Bony's father said.
“Henry! Stop right there!” Bony's mother said. “This time I will not listen to your abuse. Year after year I have put up with this browbeating. I go in rags, and if I so much as buy—”
“Rags!” Bony's father shouted. “Rags! You in rags? You dare taunt me with that, when you crowd enough on your back to support a dozen families? Rags? When from year's end to year's end I do nothing but struggle to pay your eternal bills!” Well, maybe I haven't got what Bony's father and mother said just the way they said it, but it was like that. So they had a good start and they went right on and pretty soon Bony's father was walking up and down the room, talking loud and pounding the table every time he passed it, and Bony's mother was sitting with a corner of her apron in each hand and the hands pressed to her cheeks. Her eyes were big and scary. So then Bony's father stopped in front of her and said a lot and she didn't talk back. So that made him mad and he took the tablecloth and jerked it and all the dishes fell on the floor and broke.
Bony just went to the bed and lay on his face and squeezed his hands into his ears. I guess he felt pretty mean. He was crying, but we didn't know that then. We found it out afterward.
So then, when all the dishes broke, Bony's mother sort of yelled and jumped up. Swatty said:
“Garsh! What's she going to do?”
But she didn't do anything like we thought she was going to. She bent down and picked up a dish that wasn't all smashed to pieces and put it on the table as easy as could be and then she untied her apron and folded it up and laid it over the back of a chair as neat as a pin. She looked at herself in the mirror in the sideboard and then walked around Bony's father and went toward the door into the hall.
“Where are you going?” Bony's father asked.
“Going?” she said, or something like that. “I'm going to see if I can't put a stop to this sort of thing. I have had enough years of it. I'm going to see Mr. Rascop.”
Well, we knew who he was; he was a lawyer.
“Very well,” said Bony's father, “go! I assure you you cannot get a divorce too quickly to suit me!”
I guess that when the loud noise stopped Bony thought the fight was over and listened again. Anyway he was listening now and he heard what they said.
“I thought that,” said Bony's mother. “This is not the first time, by many, that I have thought it. You will be glad to be rid of me and I of you. My mother will be glad enough to have me with her. I shall, of course, take the boy.”
“As you like!” said Bony's father.
“The boy” was Bony, so he began to blubber worse than ever. He was pretty much ashamed and when his folks began to talk quiet-like, without shouting, me and Swatty began to be ashamed, too. We felt the way you feel when there's just been a baby at your house—as if we hadn't ought to be there. So Swatty picked up his hat.
“Come on!” he said. “Let's go. It ain't no fun up here in Bony's room.”
“Wait!” Bony whispered, like he was scared to be left there alone, so we waited. He came along with us.
We tiptoed downstairs and outdoors and I tell you it was good to get outside where there wasn't any divorce but just good spring mud and things. So Swatty whistled at a kid down the street but it was a kid Swatty had said he would lick if he caught him, so the kid ran.
Well, we sat down on the grass under the tree and me and Swatty talked pretty loud and fighty because Bony wasn't saying anything at all and was looking so earnest it made us feel sort of ashamed. He was thinking of the divorce. So me and Swatty talked fighty to each other to try and make Bony forget.
But Bony didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. So Swatty took some mud and stuck it on his nose and pretended it was medicine or something; to make Bony laugh. But Bony didn't laugh. I guess he felt pretty bad. Maybe a kid always feels that way when his folks are going to get divorced. So then Swatty said:
“Hey, George! this is the way I'll ride on Bony's bicycle when he gets it!”
So he pretended he was on a bicycle and he pretended to fall off all sorts of ways and to run into a tree and everything. Then I thought of something. I said:
“Say! if they get a divorce and Bony goes away we can't learn bicycle riding on his bicycle!”
We hadn't thought of that before and right away we forgot about whether Bony was feeling sick or not. We hadn't stopped to think that a divorce Bony's folks were getting would make a big difference like that to me and Swatty. It kind of brought us right into the divorce ourselves. Swatty looked frightened.
“Garsh! that's so!” he said. “We can't learn to ride on a bicycle that's in another town.”
“And, say!” I said, frightened, “if Herb hears about it, and how married folks fight and get divorces over hat-bills and things he's going to be scared to marry Fan, because hat-bills are the things father scolds Fan most about. He'll ask Fan if she has hat-bills—”
“Garsh!” said Swatty again, “we've got to stop the divorce,” only he said “diworce,” because that was how he talked.
I thought so, too. If Bony's folks got one and Herb heard about it and got scared of marrying Fan, then Swatty wouldn't have the tricycle and I couldn't take Mamie Little riding on it and make fat, old Toady Williams look sick. So I thought like Swatty did, but I said:
“Well, how are you going to stop it?”
“If Bony was to get the diphtheria, and get it bad, that would stop it,” he said.
I saw that was so. If Bony got the diphtheria, and got it bad, they wouldn't let him travel on the train, and so his mother couldn't go to his grandmother's and that would stop it. So I said:
“Yes, and while he was sick we could use his bicycle all the time. How's he going to get diphtheria?”
“Why, as easy as pie,” Swatty said. “They've got it down at Markses. All he's got to do is to go down there and sneak in and stand around in Billy Markses bedroom until he gets it. Diphtheria is one of the easiest things you can get. Anybody can get it!”
It looked like a mighty good plan to me. Me and Swatty went on talking about it and the more we talked the better it was. We talked about how long it would be after Bony got exposed to it before he would really have it and Swatty said that wouldn't matter. All Bony would have to do would be to go right down to Markses and get exposed and then hurry home and tell his mother. The divorce would stop right away and wouldn't have to wait until he was sick in bed before it stopped. So then I said that, anyway, Bony's father would send for the bicycle right away, because fathers always hurry up to get things when their boys are good and sick. It was all bully and fine and me and Swatty felt pretty good about it, but Bony spoke up.
“I ain't going to get diphtheria!” he said.
Well, that's the way some fellows are! You go and work your brains all to pieces thinking up things to help them out of their troubles and then they say something like that. We saw it wasn't any use to coax him. If we wanted to stop the divorce we would have to do it another way. I said:
“I know the preacher that Bony's mother goes to the church of.”
“Well, what's that got to do with it?” Swatty asked.
“Well, couldn't we tell him about it and get him to stop the divorce? When Jim Carter wouldn't marry our cook my father told the Catholic priest and he made Jim Carter marry her as easy as pie.”
“That's no good,” Swatty said. “That was marrying. That's what priests and preachers are for—marrying folks together—they ain't for diworcing them apart again. If it was somebody I wanted to have married together of course I'd have thought of a preacher right away. You don't think I'm so dumb as not to have thought of that, do you? But this ain't marrying them together, it's keeping them married together; it's keeping them from diworcing apart.” Then, all at once he said, “Garsh!”
“What are you garshing about?” I asked him.
“Garsh!” he said again. “I guess I am dumb! I guess I ought to let a mule kick me! I ought to have thought of it right off!”
“Thought of what, Swatty?”
“Why, the judge! You, talking about preachers and priests and all them and not thinking of the judge! It's a judge that always diworces people apart, ain't it? Well, what we've got to do is see the judge and tell him not to diworce Bony's folks apart!”
“Come on! We'll go see the judge and tell him not to diworce Bony's folks apart.”
Well, I guess we didn't think when we started how we would do it. We just started.
When we got down to the court-house, where the judge stays, I didn't feel so much like doing it and Bony didn't feel like doing it at all. It was different when we got down there than it was when we were sitting on the grass under my apple tree. All along the front edge of the front porch of the court-house were big pillars and each pillar was as big around as twenty boys standing in a lump would be. So me and Bony we sort of peeked into the hall and went out on the porch again, but Swatty went right inside. So we sort of frowned at Swatty and shouted in a whisper: “Aw! come on, Swatty! Let's go home.”
But Swatty spoke right out, as if he wasn't afraid of the court-house at all.
“Aw, come on!” he said. “What are you afraid of?”
I wouldn't have talked out loud like that for anything. His voice came back in echoes: “Aw-waw-come-um-um-on-non-non!” Like that. Every word he said said itself over and over that way.
But Swatty, when we didn't come, went down the hall and when he found an open door he went right in. He asked for the judge. We looked into the hall and we saw Swatty come out of the door he had gone in at and we saw him go up the wide stairs and push open the green door at the head of the stairs and go in. After a while he came out again and came downstairs and out on the porch.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I'd ought to have remembered that this was Saturday. Judges don't have court on Saturday; they go fishing.”
So then Bony began to cry. He leaned against one of the big pillars and began to snigger like a little kid that's lost, and then he turned his face to the pillar and I guess he bawled to himself. I guess he had sort of thought Swatty would have everything fixed so there wouldn't be any divorce when he came from the judge's room and it disappointed him. So Swatty said: “Aw! shut up your bellerin'! We ain't going to let your folks get diworced, are we? You make me sick, acting like we was. I guess me and George knows what we are going to do, don't we, George?” So I says, “Yes; what is it?”
Well, Swatty knew just what we were going to do; and so did I, after he told me. We were going to go to the judge where he was fishing and tell him not to divorce Bony's folks. And that was all right because Bony's mother was afraid of the water and wouldn't ride in a rowboat and so even if she wanted to get divorced quick she couldn't be until the judge came back from fishing. So then I said:
“Aw! there ain't no fishing when the water is so high in the river!”
“Aw! who told you so much?” Swatty said. “You think you know all the kinds of fishing there is, don't you? Well, I guess you don't! I guess me and the judge knows more kinds of fishing than you do.”
So we walked down to the river and Swatty told us. It was buffalo fishing you do with a pitchfork. I guess you know what kind of a fish a buffalo is. At first nobody ate buffalo fish but niggers, and they ate dogfish, too, but pretty soon the fishmarket men got so they shipped buffalo fish to Chicago and everywhere just like they shipped catfish. But nobody in our town ate them but niggers, because they tasted of mud. Maybe the Chicago people liked to taste mud.
Well, anyway, the buffalo fish eat grass or roots or something and in the spring, when the river is high and up over the bottoms, the buffalo fish swim up to wherever the edge of the river has gone in the grass and weeds and sometimes they swim in so close that their backs stick out of water and they sort of swim on their bellies in the mud—dozens and hundreds of them, big fat fellows. So then the farmer can't plough yet, because it is too muddy in the fields, and they get their farm wagons and some pitchforks and drive down to the river. Then they separate apart and wade out and come together again when' they are out about waist deep and they wade in toward shore and the buffalo fish are between them and the shore. Then the farmers go with a rush and the buffalo fish get scared. Some of them get so scared they try to swim right up on shore on their bellies, and some try to swim out into deep water, but whatever they try to do the farmers just pitchfork them up onto shore. Wagon loads of them! So, before the Chicago folks got to like buffalo fish, the farmers chopped the buffalo fish into bits and ploughed them into the ground to make things grow better, but now they mostly hauled them to town and sold them to the fishmarket men for one and one half cents a pound. So that was where the judge was. He was over to a farmer's named Shebberd, in Illinois, because he had never pitchforked buffalo fish before and he wanted to do it once and see what it was like.
Me and Swatty and Bony knew where Shebberd's was, because when you were over in Illinois you could get a drink of water there.
I guess it was almost a mile across the river and then it was almost five miles back to Shebberd's bottom land cornfield. We got a skiff at the boathouse and me and Swatty and Bony rowed across the river. The water was mighty high and the current was everywhere and not just in one place, and it was strong. Bony sat in the stem and me and Swatty rowed and we had to row almost straight up-stream. It was hard work. My wrists swelled up and got hot and tight but we kept thinking about the divorce we didn't want Bony's folks to get and we kept on rowing. Even with the boat pointed almost straight up-stream we were about half a mile below where we started, when we reached the Illinois side and rowed in among the trees. It was easier there; not so much current.
It was fine rowing through the trees, seeing everything, and nothing looking like it usually does. We came to the First Slough and it was just water—like a road of water between the trees—and we kept on rowing and came to the Second Slough and the Third Slough and they were like that, too, and then we came out of the trees and we were in a whale of a lot of water. Bony said, “Oh!” and Swatty looked over his shoulder and said, “Garsh!” and stopped rowing. It looked like miles and miles of water—water we had never seen before—and all at once you felt little and lost and sort of frightened.
“Garsh!” Swatty said. “I was never here before.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
Swatty looked all around.
“I don't know,” he said. “I never heard of a place like this.”
“Swatty!” I said.
“What?”
“Let's go home!”
I guess I sort of whined it, and so Bony began to cry. Swatty stood up and let his oars rest and looked all around. He looked anxious and when Swatty looked anxious it was time to be frightened. Anyway, I thought so.
When Swatty had looked all around and didn't know any more than he did before, he sat down and looked over the edge of the boat at the water. So I did it.
“What do you see, Swatty?” I asked, because I was afraid he saw something to be frightened of. But what he saw was little flecks of leaves and things floating by in the water the way dust floats in the sunlight, and the reason he looked was so he could see which way the current was running, because no matter where we were we wanted to row up-stream. We had gone into the woods below the bottom road and when the water was as high as it was now the bottom road either made a dam across the bottom or the water came over it like a waterfall or rushed through in a rapids nobody could row up. So Swatty knew we couldn't have passed the bottom road but must be below it somewhere and the place we wanted to be at was just where the bottom road hit the hill, so what we had to do—wherever we were then—was to row up-stream. So we rowed. We rowed I don't know how far and all at once Bony said:
“Look out! you're rowing into something!”
Me and Swatty backed water as quick as we could and looked over our shoulders. What we had nearly rowed into was a pile of sticks and a heap of dried grass. It was a good deal as if somebody had chucked a couple of forks full of hay on a lot of driftwood and set it adrift.
“There's something alive in it!” Bony sort of shivered.
Swatty looked and I looked.
“Mush-rat's house!” Swatty said right away, and it was. It was the kind the mush-rats make so that when a flood comes it will float and not sink, and there it was right out in the middle of the lake we were lost in.
Then all at once Swatty said: “Say!”
Gee, but he scared me!
“What, Swatty?” I asked.
“Say!” he said; “we're floating away from that mush-rat house and it ain't floating with us. I never heard of a mush-rat house out in the middle of a lake, with a current floating by, that didn't float with the current!”
“Are you scared, Swatty?” I asked, for if he was scared I didn't know what I would be.
“No, I ain't scared,” he said, “but it ain't right. It ain't possible, that's all! I bet this is a haunted lake. I bet there is a haunted house around here, or an ol' witch, or something.”
“Come on, let's get out of it, then. Let's row!”
I said.
“You bet I'll row!” Swatty said, and we did. We steered off to one side of the mush-rat's house and rowed hard. We had a good double-ender skiff, rounded bottom and not flat bottom, and we made her hump! All of a sudden Swatty's left oar came out of the oarlock and he nearly fell backwards into the bottom of the boat. He got up and slapped the oar back into the oarlock and we both rowed hard.
“We ain't moving!”
Bony said that. He was hanging onto the sides of the skiff with both hands, looking scared and white, and you never heard anybody say anything the way he said that! It was like he had seen a ghost. Me and Swatty stopped rowing and looked. About twenty feet away from us was that old mush-rat house and we could see a little ripple of water on the upper side of it but it wasn't moving and we weren't floating away from it. There was the same kind of ripple against the bow of our boat.
We rowed again and we rowed hard and the skiff didn't move! There we were, out in the middle of that haunted lake, or whatever it was, and no bottom that you could reach with an oar, and we couldn't row up-stream and we didn't float downstream. And over yonder was a mush-rat's house just like we were. It sure looked like we were in a haunted lake and I didn't blame Bony for being scared and crying. I was scared myself. It looked like we were in a haunted lake we could not row out of and that we might have to stay there forever.
“Well, garsh!” Swatty said, “we rowed up here, we ought to be good and able to row back where we come from.” So we swung the skiff around and rowed down-current. No good! We didn't move at all. Or we just moved a foot or two.
It wasn't like when you run up on a snag or a rock. It wasn't stiff like that. We floated all right but we couldn't go anywhere.
“Listen!” Swatty said.
Away off far we heard voices and splashing, sounding the way things sound when you hear them across water. Swatty shouted. “Hello!” he shouted, and his voice came back to him, “Lo-wo-wo!” in an echo, the way echoes do.
“All right!” he said. “Now we know where the Illinois hills are, anyway. That's the way they echo back at you, so they must be over there. And I bet those men splashing in the water are after buffalo with pitchforks. So that's where we want to row.” That was pretty fine, wasn't it, when we couldn't row at all? I told Swatty so. I said we'd better shout and have the men come and get us. Swatty said they'd just think it was kids shouting for fun; and I guess that's what they did think, for we shouted and shouted, and when we quit we could still hear the men laughing and talking and splashing. So then Swatty sat down and put his head in his hands and thought. When we looked up he said:
“Do you believe in haunts and things?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Do you?”
“I don't know, either,” Swatty said. “Maybe I do and maybe I don't, but I know one thing: I ain't going to believe in them until I have to. I ain't going to believe this boat is 'witched here until I know it ain't stuck here some other way. I'm going to find out.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, if we're stuck we're stuck on something under the water and that's sure, and I'm going to skin off my clothes and find out.”
So he did. I wouldn't have done it for a million dollars and I tried to make him not, but he did it. He took off his clothes and lowered himself over the side of the boat and said, garsh! how cold it was! So then he edged himself along, holding onto the side of the boat and all at once he swore.
“What?” me and Bony both asked at once.
“Bob wire!” he said, and he let go with one hand and felt down into the water. Then he took hold of the boat with both hands and felt along under the boat with his feet. “It's a post,” he said. “It's a bob-wire fence.”
So that was what it was. There was a bob-wire fence and we had rowed right on top of one of the posts and stuck there, on a nail or something, and the post was loose in the mud and gave when we rowed, so we couldn't wrench loose by rowing. And that was why the mush-rat house did not float downstream; it was caught on another post. So all at once Swatty said:
“I know where we are; we're in Shebberd's lower cornfield!” And that was where we were. The water had come up and covered it up to the tops of the bob-wire fence posts.
Well, Swatty's teeth were chattering but he wouldn't get right into the boat. He made me and Bony row while he was out, and I guess with the boat lighter it floated off the post easier, for it did float off. So then Swatty got in and dressed and we rowed toward the voices and the splashing.
It was Judge Hannan all right. He was pitch-forking buffalo fish with the Shebberds. He had on rubber hip boots and he was hot and having a good time. We rowed in close to where he was and watched them pitchfork awhile and then Swatty backwatered the skiff up to where the judge was standing and said:
“Say, mister judge!”
The judge leaned his hand on the stem of the boat and said:
“Yes, my lad, what is it?”
“Are you the judge that gives diworces?”
“I'm the one that don't give them unless I have to, son,” the judge laughed. “Looking for one? You don't look as if you had reached that age and state yet.”
“It ain't mine,” Swatty said. “It's Bony's folkses. They're having a fight and they're going to get a diworce and me and Georgie and Bony don't want them to. So we rowed over to tell you not to give them one.”
The judge felt in his pocket and got out his spectacles and put them on and looked at us. He asked which was Bony and then he knew who Bony was and that he knew Bony's folks. He said he did.
“And you don't want any divorces in your family, hey?” he said. “Why not?”
Bony didn't say anything, so Swatty started to tell about the bicycle, but before he got very far Bony just doubled over and put his head on his knees and began to beller like a real baby. So the judge stopped Swatty.
“Son,” he said to Swatty, “I guess you've mistooken the proper legal grounds for not giving divorces. The desire of a youth to learn to ride one of the condemned things when he is related to the separating parties only by neighborhood is not sufficient to sway the court. But you, son,” he said to Bony, “have got exactly the right idea. You've swayed this old, bald-headed court right down to the mud he's standing in and, so help me John Joseph Rogers! if those two parents of yours get a divorce it will only be over my dead body! Hey, Sheb! can these kids go up to your house and get some buttermilk?”
So I said I didn't like buttermilk and the judge said: “Caesar's ghost! I didn't mean get it for you; I meant get it for us!”
So we got it. So Bony's folks didn't get a divorce. Anyway, if they did they didn't separate apart from each other and that was all me and Swatty cared for because Herb Schwartz wouldn't be scared to marry Fan, and maybe we could hurry up the wedding and get the tricycle sooner.
Well, you never can tell how things are going to go in this world, I guess. I don't mean that I spent all my time thinking how getting the tricycle with two seats would make Mamie Little think more of me than she thought of Toady Williams, because I didn't. I had school and my chores and me and Swatty and Bony was building a capstan in our side yard, to pull up stumps and move houses if we wanted to, but once in a while I did think how I would ride up to Mamie Little's front gate on the tricycle and say, “Say! wanta take a ride?”
It looked as if it wouldn't be long before Herb and Fan got married, because they hadn't fought for a long while and Fan was embroidering towels by day and by night. One reason it all looked good was that Miss Murphy, who was my teacher and had had Herb for a while, had gone away for a while and Miss Carter was substituting for her in our room. So Fan needn't be jealous of Miss Murphy any more.
So I felt pretty good mostly but I was feeling pretty mean this day, because Swatty and Bony had been let out on time and Miss Carter had kept me in after school. I was feeling mean because they would be working on the capstan, and it was the day we thought we would get it finished and begin capstaning things with it, and I wouldn't be home when they got it done. I wanted to be there when they started to use it. So that made me feel mean one way, and teacher made me feel meaner, another way.
I liked Miss Carter better than any teacher I ever had. So all I did was not know my geography-lesson, or my arithmetic-lesson or my grammar-lesson, or my history, and I missed in spelling. I guess maybe I read all right, because she didn't say I didn't, but maybe she forgot to talk about that because she was so busy saying my deportment was bad and it was certainly an outrage that my copy-book was so poorly kept. So she kept me in to study, and it was four o'clock pretty soon, and she put her papers in her desk and shut down the lid and came back to my seat. Everybody else had gone home. I was sort of scared. I thought she was going to say her patience was exhausted and then whale me with the rawhide she kept in the closet.
But she didn't. She came back to where I was, and when she got to my seat she sat down in it beside me and I had to move over so she would have room. I guess I ought to have put my hands in my pockets, but of course I didn't know what she was going to do, and the first thing she did was to put her left hand on top of my hand and hold it, like that, on top of my desk. So I tried to pull it away, but she held on. So then she put her arm—her right arm—along the desk back of me, and I felt mighty mean. A boy don't like to be armed around that way, or his hand held like that.
“George,” she said, “what is it? Why are you acting the way you are? Are you doing it to try to distress me?”
Well, I couldn't say anything to that, could I? I just looked at the top of the desk and moved my feet around.
“Tell me!” she said as if she wasn't mad at all but as if she was sorry. “I can't understand it. It is no use for you to pretend you can't learn your lessons, for I have seen that it is no trouble at all for you, when you want to. And you are such a naturally good, well-behaved boy at heart—why are you trying to act as if you were not? Are you doing it to distress me?”
I guess I sort of said “No!” I don't know what I did say. I felt pretty bad, with my hand held like that and her arm right there and liable to get around my shoulders the way she does to the girls when she's fond of them and they disappoint her and she has a talk with them and makes them cry.
“Then what is it, George?” she asked.
Well, you can't blat right out and say nothing is the matter only you don't feel like learning any old lessons or anything, can you? There wasn't anything the matter. I didn't have it in for teacher or anything. I just didn't feel like learning any lessons about then, and it was mean of teacher to let on I was doing things because I didn't like her or something. So I didn't say anything. I sort of scrooged down in my seat so she couldn't put her arm around me any more than it was.
“Is it Mamie Little?” she asked then, all of a sudden.
That was an awful mean thing to say, and I guess she knew it was, because when a fellow has a girl he don't want anybody to know it or talk about it. He'll fight any fellow that says it, but he can't fight his teacher when she says it.
“I think it must be Mamie Little, George,” she said next, “because I have noticed you keep your eyes on her more than you do on your lessons.”
That made me squirm, I guess! But that wasn't the worst. She wasn't hardly started.
“I don't blame you for liking Mamie, George,” she said. “She is a sweet child and I love her, too, and I am glad you are fond of her; but don't you think she would like you better if you learned your lessons and behaved in a manner she could admire, instead of trying to attract her attention by smarty tricks? Don't you think a boy with your ability should try to impress her by his excellence rather than by his smarty tricks?”
Gee! I felt mean! Running a fellow's girl in on him like that! I was so ashamed all over that I couldn't move. I didn't dare to move even a finger. I couldn't do anything but swallow.
“Now, we won't say anything more about it,” she said, and she patted my hand! “You know how much I like you, George, and how proud I usually am of you, and I think Mamie is fond of you, too. I don't think you need to be a smarty to attract her. If you don't care to do it for me, George, tell me you will try to learn your lessons and behave better on Mamie's account. You will, won't you? Say you will!”
I guess I tried to say I would, but I couldn't even swallow. I didn't know how I'd even get away from there, because Miss Carter might stay until I said I would or something, and I couldn't work my voice: it had dried up, I guess. But I didn't have to say anything. Miss Carter put her hand on my head and let it stay there a minute, and then she smiled and jumped up as if everything was fixed and I had said I would, and she said: “All right, George; you can go home.” And I went, you bet.
Well, that settled Miss Carter with me! She had been one of the three women I thought were dandy, because the other two were my mother and my grandmother that everybody calls “Ladylove” because she is so dear, but after that I was done with Miss Carter. Anybody that would talk to a fellow about his girl as if she was his girl! I guessed maybe I would n't go back to school any more unless I could get transferred to another teacher's room.
So I felt pretty mean and sore and everything when I got home, and I started around to the side yard, where Swatty and Bony were finishing the capstan, and all at once my mother came to the end of the porch and pulled the vines aside and said:
“George, come here!”
I tried to think what I had done to make her say it like that, but I couldn't, only a fellow is always doing something, so it didn't matter much what it was. I went around and onto the porch.
“Yes, ma'am,” I said.
“George,” my mother said in the way they call severe, “Mrs. Martin was here.”
“Yes'm,” I said, for I didn't know what else to say, because I didn't know why Mrs. Martin had been there. I knew who Mrs. Martin was and where she lived, because she was the lady that had the lame boy that would never grow up but would always be about five years old. He was thirteen years old, and he played with a rag doll and always stayed in his yard, but sometimes he looked out between the fence-pickets. Sometimes when I went downtown on errands and got a nickel for it and bought some candy, I'd give him a piece when I went by, and so would Swatty and so would Bony. Sometimes he'd say, “Where you get that ball? I want it!” just like a little baby, and if we didn't give it to him, he'd cry, but we couldn't give him our ball, could we? So when we went by his house we hid anything he might cry for, so he wouldn't cry for it. That was all I knew about Mrs. Martin, only she was a widow and she was cross sometimes. Anyway, sometimes she looked cross.
“George,” my mother said—and I guess she never spoke to me any sadder than she did then—“Mrs. Martin told me something I would never have believed of my boy. I have always thought you were a kind-hearted, considerate boy. Oh, George, why—why did you strike that poor, helpless little cripple?”
“I did not! I didn't do any such thing! It ain't so!” I said, because I knew she meant I had hit Sammy Martin.
My mother sort of threw out her hand.
“Don't!” she said. “It is enough without that. It is enough to be a bully without being a liar. Mrs. Martin has told me—”
“I ain't a liar!” I said, because I was so mad I could have cried. “If she said that, she's a liar; that's what she is!”
Well, I oughtn't to have called a lady that, or anybody, but I was so mad I didn't think. I wasn't thinking about how I said it, and when a fellow's mother looks at him the way my mother was looking at me, and won't believe him when he's telling the truth, what's he going to do? I guess my mother was feeling pretty bad herself or she wouldn't have said any such thing to me as that I was one. Because I wasn't one! Not about that! I had never hit Sammy Martin. I had never done anything to him but give him candy once in a while.
“George!” said my mother, and she was sad about it, as if she was now quite hopeless about me.
Then she went on, as quietly as if we were at a funeral:
“That poor child's mother came here to beg me to protect her child against you—to beg me to ask you not to harm him again! You called him to the fence and struck him across the face with a stick or a switch. Oh, don't deny it! She has seen you coax him to the fence before and give him candy, and when he came crying to her with a welt rising on his poor face, he told her you had done it. And I thought you were—I thought—”
So then she cried, and I couldn't do anything but stand there and feel—oh, I don't know how I felt! I guess I had never felt like that in my life. It wasn't so, and I knew it wasn't so, and nobody would ever believe it wasn't so. I couldn't do anything but stand there and wish I was dead or grown up or something. I just stood and looked down, and once in a while I blinked. So then, after a while, my mother wiped her eyes and walked past me without saying anything or looking at me and went into the house, and I stood there awhile and then I sort of turned and went to the edge of the porch and sneaked around to the back yard. It wasn't fair to think such things of me when they were not so, and I felt awful bad. I never wanted to see my mother again. So then Swatty saw me and shouted.
“Come on!” he yelled. “We've got her done! She's a dandy!”
So I ran to where the capstan was, and she was a dandy!
I guess you know what capstans are—the things they use in moving houses? In Riverbank they move a lot of houses, because people are always wanting to build other houses where houses already are, and you can't move a house without a capstan. They have them on boats, too, but not quite the same kind. The house-moving kind is like a square box, without sides. In the middle, up and down, is a kind of roller that the rope rolls onto, and the roller has to stick up above the top of the box so there can be a place to stick a pole into to turn the roller. When they move houses they set the capstan in the middle of the street a long way from the house, and carry a rope back and fasten it to the house, and then a horse that is fastened to the pole walks around and around the capstan, stepping over the rope every time he passes it, and winds up the rope, and that pulls the house. Only we didn't have any horse, so we thought maybe we'd use Swatty's cow. But we didn't. We turned the capstan ourselves. All the time we were making the capstan Swatty said the cow would turn it, but when we got it done he said:
“Who ever heard of a cow turning a capstan?”
“I did,” I said. “In the Bible-book there is a picture of a cow turning a capstan.”
“Well, that ain't the same thing,” Swatty said. “That's a Bible-cow, and ours is part Alderney and part Holstein.”
“And this isn't any cow-capstan, anyway,” Bony said. “A cow couldn't work this capstan, because a cow has two toes, and she'd get the rope caught between her toes and fall and kill herself.”
“Whose cow are you saying would fall and kill herself—my cow?” Swatty asked, the way he did when he meant: “Take it back or I'll lick you!” Then he says: “You'd better not say my cow would fall and kill herself. If my cow couldn't step over a rope without getting it between her toes, I'd take her and kill her.”
“Aw, you would not!” I said.
“Yes, I would, too!” Swatty said. “We had a cow once that couldn't step over a rope without getting it between her toes, and my father took her down to the river and killed her. You needn't say we'd have a cow that can't step over a rope—”
“I never said it,” I said.
“Well, if you didn't say it, who did say it, I'd like to know,” Swatty asked. “Bony didn't say it and you'd better not say he said it, because he came over and helped me finish the capstan, and you stayed in school and let us do it.”
“I didn't stay in school; I was kept in.”
“Well, you say you was, but I don't have to believe it, do I?” Swatty said. “I don't have to believe everything you say just because I'm—because I'm in your yard, do I?”
Well, I saw Swatty wanted a fight, and I wanted a fight anyway. I felt like it. So I said; “Who are you calling a liar?”
I went up close to him, and he went up close to me; and then I pushed him and he pushed me back; and then I hit him and he hit me back. And when he had me down and asked me if I had had enough and got off of me, we went ahead with the capstan. I wasn't hurt anywhere except on the inside of my cheek, where a tooth cut it.
The capstan was a good one. Swatty showed how it worked, and pushed the pole around, and it worked fine. So then I got my sled out of the barn, where it had been since last winter, and we took turns being pulled on the sled. So then we wished we had a house to move, but there wasn't any house or building we dared move. I bet we could have done it. So we looked for something we couldn't move without a capstan, so we could use the capstan to move it. There is no use having a capstan if you haven't anything to do with it. You might just as well not have made one. So I said:
“I'll tell you! Let's pull up the old stump that's in our front yard!”
“All right—let's!” Swatty said.
We had a lot of trees in our yard—a big silver poplar in the back yard that was twice as big around as a barrel, and a yellow-mellow apple, and a Benoni apple, and a black-heart cherry, and a row of pines leading down to the gate, and big maples inside the fence, and maybe some more. There were trees all over town, lots of them, and you would have thought there had always been trees, but I guess that isn't so. People planted them. When people came to Riverbank and made a town of it, they planted the trees because there were none when they came, and I guess they liked it better with trees growing than when it was all bare. I know my grandmother did.
My grandmother was an old, old woman, and she lived with us because the house had been built by my grandfather, and my grandfather had planted the trees. That was a long time before I was ever born. We called my grandmother “Ladylove,” because I guess that is what my grandfather called her. Nobody ever called her anything else but Ladylove, not “Gran'ma” or anything like that.
I guess nobody ever loved trees the way she loved them. I guess she was always sorry she had come away from Pennsylvania where there are lots of trees and hills. Sometimes, early in the morning, she would come out on the porch and look up and say, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills!” and then she would sigh and shake her head. That was because there was no hills in Riverbank when she lifted? up her eyes from our porch, and I guess she was thinking of the hills in Pennsylvania, because when she was a girl and lived there, there were always hills to lift up her eyes to—hills that were covered with trees.
That was the way my grandmother Ladylove was, as old as old, and nobody ever loved trees the way she did. She liked boys too. She liked all the boys that ever came to play with me. She was the only one that never scolded me. Plenty of times when we had fresh cookies and nobody was to touch a single one until the next day, Ladylove would see us playing in the yard and she would come out with a china plate with a napkin on it piled up with cookies. Then she would say a verse of poetry and give us the cookies and go into the house just as happy as could be. Sometimes she would forget she had brought us any and would come right out with another plateful and say the poetry over again and be just as happy over that one as she was over the other.
When I said, “Let's pull the old stump that's in the front yard,” I didn't think anything but that it would be a good thing to pull. I didn't even know it had ever been a tree; it had always been a stump since I was a little bit of a kid, anyway. It wasn't much of a stump any more. It was only about as high as my knee, and right at the ground it was only as big around as a man's knee. Once I had a little hatchet, but it wouldn't cut much, but I chopped the stump with it. I could only chop off a little splinter at a time, and I never got much off. It only made the stump raggedy at the top. It was just an old stump that wasn't worth anything and wasn't any good to anybody.
Swatty and Bony and me started to move the capstan into the front yard where the stump was. It was so heavy we could hardly wiggle it, so after we had moved it an inch or two I said:
“Aw! we can't move it!”
So Bony said the same thing; but Swatty stood and looked at the capstan awhile, and then he said: “Yes, we can move it, too! We can make it move itself.”
“How can we?”
“You come ahead and I'll show you,” he said; and he did. He drove a stake into the ground about as far as our capstan rope would reach, and fastened the rope to it. Then he made Bony turn the capstan pole, and that wound up the rope, and the capstan just had to move toward the stake. When we got it to the stake we knocked the stake out with an axe and put it in again farther along. That way we moved the capstan to where we wanted it. Swatty thought of how to do it.
So then we had the capstan in the front yard, and we tied the rope around the old stump and tried to pull it, but the capstan just moved up to the stump. So Swatty said he knew what was the matter and that we were all crazy because we didn't think of it before, and that all the house-movers, when they were moving houses, drove stakes in front of their capstans to keep them from moving, and stakes behind them to keep them from tipping up.
We got some stakes and did it. Swatty drove the stakes because he was strongest, and anyway, he knew how to swing an axe, because he had often studied how the circus roughnecks swung them. Anyway he said he had. He said he had sat for over an hour and just studied how they swung axes at stakes and that then he asked one roughneck to let him try it, and he did, and he drove over a hundred. He said that while he was driving stakes Mr. Barnum came out of the big tent and watched him, and that he liked the way he was driving stakes so well that he offered him a hundred dollars a year just to drive stakes for the circus. So I asked Swatty if he took up the offer, and he said he did. He said he went with the circus all over the United States, driving stakes, and that he drove so many he got so he could drive a stake with one blow. So then he said he went to Mr. Bamum and asked him to pay him two hundred dollars a year, but Mr. Bamum said he couldn't afford it. He said Swatty was worth two hundred dollars a year but the show couldn't afford it. So, Swatty said, he came home. That's what Swatty said, but I didn't hardly believe it. But, anyway, we had to let him drive the stakes.
Well, the stump didn't come out as easy as we had thought it would. It was pretty rotten, and it pulled off piece by piece, but the inside was tough. Our rope was old, too, and broke nearly every time we tautened it. But it was good fun, anyway. We took turns turning the capstan pole. One would turn and the other would keep the rope on the stump and the other would be boss and shout, “Whoa! Get up! Whoa there, you!” A lot of boys came and looked through the picket fence and wished we would let them come in and help us capstan the stump, but we wouldn't. What's the use of having something somebody else hasn't got, if you are going to let them have it too?
Pretty soon we got the stump all pulled. There was only a hole where it had been and the rotted wood was scattered around on the grass, and we felt pretty good about it, because nobody wants old stumps sticking up in their yards. Swatty said maybe my father would give me a quarter for pulling the stump and I thought maybe he would, too. We all felt as if we had done something pretty fine, and I wished I could go and get my mother and have her come out and see how good our capstan was and have her say, “Why, that's fine, Georgie! I'll have your father give you a quarter when he comes home.” But I remembered about Mrs. Martin. I remembered that my mother would probably never think anything I ever did again was any good at all. So I didn't call her.
Just then Ladylove—my grandmother—came out of the side door. She stood a moment on the top step, looking, and then she came down to the grass and started toward us. She had a plate in her hand, and there were graham crackers on it, because there were no cookies that day. I guess she heard us shouting and thought we would like some graham crackers, because we were boys.
As soon as I saw her I jumped and ran toward her, because she was some one we could show what we had done.
“Come here, Ladylove,” I shouted. “Come on, we want to show you what we did with our capstan!”
“Yes! yes!” she said.
So I took the plate of crackers, and with the other hand I sort of steadied her elbow, because our yard wasn't very smooth and she didn't walk very steady or very fast. We came to where the capstan was, and she steadied herself with one hand on it.
“There!” I said. “See what we did, Ladylove! We pulled that old tree stump right out of the ground. We got rid of that old stump all right!”
Ladylove stood quiet so long that I got frightened. She looked up at the sky and when she looked down at me there were tears in her eyes. I could see them.
“My tree! My beautiful tree!” she said. “Ah, Georgie, could you kill my tree?” And then she closed her eyes and held out her hands and said: