Anybody Can Do Anything (2 page)

Mary said, “Look, ladees and gentlemen, see how brave
he is. That little tiny child has turned around so he won’t have to look at those wreathy writhy snakes. But he is the most famous tightrope walker in the whole world and he is going to walk that dangerous tightrope, or you won’t get your twenty-five cents,” she hissed sotto voce at Cleve. Cleve looked at the twenty-five cents and then at the two-by-four and finally stood up and started across. His fat little legs wobbled and when he tried to get his balance his arms went around like windmills and at the exact center, and just as Mother came home, he fell and landed on his back on the cellar stairs.

Mother carried him into the house and put him in a tub of hot water and when the doctor came he tested his reflexes and said Cleve wasn’t hurt at all, but it was a long time before he would take an active part in any of Mary’s and Marjorie’s schemes, particularly when he learned that he had dropped his twenty-five cents when he fell and some little ghoul had stolen it.

As I look back on it, I couldn’t have been too bright, because only one year later when I was seven, Mary and Marjorie got me to jump from the loft of a neighbor’s stable on to a very small armful of straw, which they had carelessly thrown on top of an upturned rake.

We were playing vaudeville this time, because Mary and Marjorie had recently been taken to their first vaudeville, whose wonders, substantiated by Joe Doner, had included a human bird and a man who balanced steel balls on his cars. I couldn’t balance steel balls on my ears but I could be Betty, the Human Bird, the Greatest Jumper of All Times, which was why on that bright summer morning I was standing shivering in the little doorway of the unused loft. It was only about a ten- or twelve-foot jump but I’ll never forget how high up I felt.

Big Butte, an extinct volcano which had always seemed to us to be the highest mountain in the world, was right in
front of me. The big M-1915, painted in white on its black rock side by the daring School of Mines boys, was now at eye level. I could see the School of Mines where Daddy taught. I could see Mary the Cook hanging out washing in our back yard. I could see hundreds of great big blue mountains. I could see Mary marching around the yard with a stick pointing at me and shouting, “Ladees and Gentlemen! Look up at her, Betty, the Human Bird, the bravest child in the whole world. Just a little girl of seven who will jump from that terribly high building down onto this little pile of straw!”

I looked down at the pile of straw and it certainly was little. “That’s not enough straw,” I said, backing away from the edge of the doorway. “Sure it is,” Mary said. “Anyway that’s all Mr. Murphy would let us have. Hurry up, Betsy, it’ll be fun,” she called running a few wisps of straw through her fingers to prove it.

My stomach felt ice cold and my heart seemed to have moved up into my head. “Thump, thump, thump,” it was hammering just behind my eyes. Mary had promised me on her word of honor that if I jumped off high enough things often enough, I would be able to fly like the man in the vaudeville show. She had started me jumping off fences, the woodshed roof and our high front porch and as I jumped more and more I was less scared but I hadn’t noticed that I landed any more gently.

Mary had said that some day when I jumped from a high enough place it would suddenly be just like a dream and I would float to earth. This was to be the big test, and if this dream came true and I floated, then there was a good chance that my dreams of having jet black curls down to my ankles and an entire Irish lace dress over a bright pink satin petticoat like the night watchman’s little girl, might come true. Anyway it had been Mary’s best selling point.

“Come on, Betsy, dear,” she was calling. “I’ll count for
you and when I get to ten you jump.” I looked down at the upturned admiring faces of the neighborhood children as Mary began counting in loud ominous tones. “One-ah, two-ah, three-ah.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and jumped when she got to ten-ah. I did not fly. I landed hard on the pile of straw and two tines of the hidden rake went through my foot. Mary and Marjorie, truly appalled by their carelessness, carried me all the way home. At least Mary carried me and Marjorie held up the handle of the rake.

When we got home Mother called the doctor and while we waited for him I soaked my foot in a basin of hot Epsom salts and water and Gammy comforted me by saying, “Cheel-drun are nothing but savages. It won’t surprise me at all if they have to cut off Betsy’s legs.”

“Not both legs,” Mary said. “Only one.” I had been very brave up to this point but now I began to bawl. “I don’t want to have my leg cut off and only wear one roller skate,” I sobbed.

Mary said, “Never mind, Betsy, dear, we’ll make a little tiny roller skate for your crutch and in winter I’ll pull you to school on the sled.” Which, to her dismay, only made me bawl louder.

Then the doctor arrived, examined my foot and gave me a tetanus shot; Daddy came home, examined my foot and gave Mary a spanking with the bristle side of the brush; Mother wiped away my tears, said of course my legs weren’t going to be cut off and called Gammy an old pessimist, which immediately cheered Mary and me because we thought pessimist was a bad word like bastard.

My next memory of being Mary’s test pilot was the following summer, while visiting friends who lived in a small town in the mountains near an abandoned mine. “Don’t ever go near the mine,” we were cautioned. “There is no place as dangerous for children as a mine. Any mine. Particularly an old one with deep, dark, rotten shafts and rusty unsafe machinery.” “We won’t go near the mine,” we promised and we didn’t.

We went wading in the creek. We went fishing. We stuck leeches on our legs because Mary believed it purified us. We picked Indian paintbrush and Mariposa lilies. We took our new pocketknives and made willow whistles. We watched out for rattlesnakes and bulls and we did not go near the mine.

Then one lovely hot summer’s day, Mary and I decided to go huckleberrying. Dressed in overalls and straw hats and each swinging a little lard pail, with a lid, by its wire handle, we started off. It was a wonderful day. The sun was hot and the air was filled with the delicious smell of hot pine needles and huckleberry juice. We found a big spruce gum tree and pried off mildewed-looking hunks and chewed them. We found the bitter pitchy flavor of the gum mixed well with the tart huckleberries. We also found that we could lie on our backs under the huckleberry bushes and scrape the berries into our buckets. The berries went plink, plink, plunk, and it was as easy as shelling peas. We moved from bush to bush by sliding along on the slick brown pine needles. Chipmunks chattered at us and bright green darning needles darted around our heads. We chewed our big wads of spruce gum and were happy.

Then Mary saw the flume. “What’s that big thing over there?” she said, rolling over on her stomach and pointing below us on the mountainside. It looked like a long gray dragon slithering down the side of the mountain. We decided to investigate. We put the lids on our little lard pails and started down the hill.

The flume, used to carry water down to the mine, had once been up on high supports, but just at this point, a small rock slide had knocked the rotting supports away and the flume had broken in two and the bottom part now sloped
down the mountainside like a giant clothes chute. The inside, stained a cool green (by the water it used to carry) was actually very hot and as slippery as glass with the dry pine needles that had drifted into it.

Side by side, Mary and I knelt down and peered into the flume. I could taste the salty perspiration on my upper lip as I chewed my spruce gum and wondered if the flume was endless. From where we were it seemed to go on forever, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a tiny black square in the distance. Mary shouted into it and her voice came back to us with a hollow roar, “Ahhhhh,ooooo.” Then Mary said, her voice tight with excitement, “What a wonderful place to slide. Just like a giant chute the chutes!”

I said nothing but my stomach had a funny feeling. I backed out of the mouth of the flume and sat down on the rock slide in the hot sun. Little rocks, loosed by my feet, went clittering off down the mountain. Far overhead in the bright blue sky an eagle circled in big lazy circles. Then Mary, still kneeling, pulled herself into the mouth of the flume but holding on tight to each side. “You’d have to go belly buster,” she said speculatively as she measured herself with the opening.

“What do you mean ‘you’?” I said. Mary didn’t answer.
“Daddy said flumes are dangerous,” I said edging still further away from it.

Mary said, “He didn’t mean this flume, Betsy dear, he meant flumes that go into dams or end up in waterfalls. Of course, those flumes are very, very dangerous, but this old thing,” she patted the flume like an old dog, “is perfectly safe. Just look at it, Betsy.”

Cautiously I again knelt and peered down into the long green tunnel and it did seem much safer. At least it was perfectly quiet and I couldn’t hear the roar of any waterfalls.

“Let’s just slide a little way in it and then crawl out again,” Mary suggested.

“You go first,” I said.

“Now, Betsy, dear,” Mary always called me “Betsy, dear” when she was going to will me to do some ghastly thing. “I’m the biggest and strongest so I’d better stay outside and hold your feet and help you.”

“You go first,” I repeated stubbornly.

Mary said, “This is going to be more fun than anything we’ve ever done. We’ll slide down just like a train in a tunnel. Zip and well be at the bottom. Crisscross your heart you’ll never tell anyone about our secret chute.”

As I crisscrossed my thumping heart, I had a sudden fleeting feeling that all this had happened before. Mary’s eyes sparkled. She said, “We’ll bring Cleve and Gammy up here and when they aren’t looking well jump into our chute and when they try to find us well be at the bottom of the mountain.” We both peered into the flume again. Referring to it as “our chute” seemed to make it less dangerous and it didn’t seem quite so bottomless and scary now.

Mary said, “If a bear or anything should chase us we could jump right in this chute and it’d never catch us.” I said, “But where does it come out?” Mary said, “Oh, probably in a big pile of sand.” One summer when we were camping in the mountains we had played on an old ore chute that ended in a pile of sand, but I didn’t think of that at the time, and thought that maybe Mary really knew where this chute ended. “How do you know?” I asked.

She changed the subject by looking up into a tall pine tree close at hand. “I wonder if we could fix some kind of a rope that would pull us back up the hill?” she said. I said, “We could fix one of those pulleys like we fixed to send notes on.” Mary said, “Oh, Betsy, you’re so smart!” That’s just what we could fix and then we’d slide down, pull ourselves up,
slide down, pull ourselves up. Up, down, up, down. Why we could even charge like the merry-go-round at Columbia Gardens,” she added as a final persuasion. Why didn’t all that up-down stuff make me remember the experiment in perpetual motion? How could I have been such a dupe and a dope?

Mary said, “Come on, Betty, hurry and get in before Gammy and Cleve get here. You know Gammy said she’d walk up this way before supper.”

I climbed in headfirst. “Grab my feet,” I yelled at Mary. But it was too late. The hot dry pine needles were very slick. In a second I had slithered out of reach. Down I went into the long, endless green tunnel. “Help, help, Mary, help!” I shouted and the words came roaring back at me, “Hulp, hulp!” as though I were shouting into a giant megaphone. The flume grew steeper and steeper and I gained momentum until I was whizzing along, my lard pail bumping the side, my straw hat over one eye. “Help, help, help!” I called again and again to Mary but there was no answer.

Once I slowed down and got stuck in a flat place where there were no pine needles. With swimming motions I tried to get started again but only succeeded in getting a large sliver in my thigh. I pulled my legs up under me and tried crawling. It was slow and I banged my head quite often but as my only alternative was spending the rest of my life in the flume, I kept on. Then suddenly the flume took a sharp plunge downward and I flattened out again, took the hill belly buster, rolled out (the flume was broken at the bottom) and stuck in the crack between the two parts. Slowly and shakily I got to my feet. Directly below me was the dangerous old mine. From high up the mountain I could hear Mary calling, “Betsy, Betsy, are you hurt?” as she ran toward me down the OUTSIDE of the flume.

I grabbed my bucket and started toward her voice, determined that she was going to slide down that flume if I had
to kill her first. Then from down in the valley I heard Mother calling us. “Coming,” I yelled and from up the mountain Mary answered, “Coming.”

The sliver in my thigh was about three inches long and as thick as a darning needle and by a series of clever questions, Daddy finally found out how I had gotten it and sternly forbade our ever going near the flume again.

From then on, as I remember, my life was reasonably safe except for a few minor things, such as the time Mary convinced Cleve and me that she had learned witchcraft and drew large quantities of blood from our veins and fed us smashed-up worms mixed with toenail parings.

And the time after we had moved to Seattle that Mary and I, then ten and twelve, were dressing after swimming and she suggested that I stand naked in the window of our bedroom and wave to the President of the Milwaukee Railroad, who with his wife was being shown the garden by Mother and Daddy. When I seemed a little reluctant to extend this evidence of Western hospitality, Mary tried to convince me and somehow in the course of the convincing she pushed her head and shoulders through the window pane and we both rolled out on the roof into the heap of broken glass, stark naked and yelping like wounded dogs.

The President of the Milwaukee Railroad and his wife, who didn’t have any children, believed our story about my catching my foot in my bathing suit and falling against Mary and forcing us both through the window and were very sympathetic to us when we appeared for tea, swathed in bandages. Daddy, however, waited until his guests had left, then assigned us each a quota of five thousand stones to be removed from the orchard and dumped into the old well back of the barn.