Harris and me : a summer remembered (5 page)

"Don't be giving up so easy—that's half a penny every time you let him get away with it."

"You said not to take his mice."

"Well . . . just don't give up so blamed easy. He don't own the whole world."

I nodded to Harris and we continued, working through the morning. Harris caught just under thirty. I didn't do so well, first because I hadn't learned the trick of seeing them as well as Harris and second because of Buzzer. We worked out an agreement after a fashion. To wit: if I caught a mouse and he wanted it, I gave it to him. It turned out he wanted about two out of three mice that I caught, so when Knute pulled the team up in the shade of a huge elm and

unhooked the trace chains and said, 'Time for dinner/ 7 I had only put six mice in the bag. Three cents' worth.

"I'm not doing so well/ 7 I said as we sat under the tree and waited for Glennis and Clair to bring us what I would call lunch but they called dinner. "It's Buzzer. He keeps taking them from me."

Harris nodded. "He's a crook. That's how he got his name, sort of . . ."

"What do you mean?"

"We had an old collie dog somebody gave us last year. It didn't bother Buzzer none but Buzzer, he kept taking food from the dog. One day the dog got sick of it and bit him on the leg a little. That's how he got his name."

"From getting bit?"

"Naw—he killed the dog. Louie said it was like the dog got hit by a buzz saw. So we called him Buzzer after that. Just keep giving him mice. He'll fill up in a little while."

We sat, leaning against some rocks. Knute had taken the bridles off the horses, rubbing their ears and saying low things to them while he did, and they were eating alfalfa off to the side. I liked the sound of their chewing—it made the grass sound like it tasted good.

Knute rolled a cigarette and leaned back, dragging deeply. At the other end of the field I saw Glen-

nis and Clair coming, carrying a double-handled boiler between them.

Harris stood. "Come on, let's help them." He took off running across the field and I followed, and we took a pail of water Glennis had been carrying in her free hand.

"Mind you don't spill," Glennis said. "There's just enough for the horses."

"Mind you don't spill," Harris mimicked, his voice singsong. "There's just enough for the damn horses . . ."

Smack.

He had forgotten himself. By taking the bucket from Glennis we freed up her right arm and she used it to pop him across the back of the head.

"Watch your mouth ..."

He was unfazed. "You ever try that? Watching your mouth? It's impossible. You can't see your mouth without you have a mirror and I don't have a damn mirror . . ."

Smack.

We walked in silence until we came to the horses. I thought it was mean to hit him. He swore naturally, the way I had heard soldiers swear in the Philippines,- swearing was a part of him. It was like hitting him for breathing. But it didn't seem to bother him to be hit.

The horses drank the way they ate. Their sounds

made the water seem delicious. We gave half the bucket to Bill and took it away to give the other half to Bob, after which they stood slobbering water and wiggling their lips before returning to grazing while we ate.

Clair and Glennis had carried what amounted to another full meal out in the boiler. There was sliced bread with butter, cheese, a big pot of beef stew, a whole round cake, three quart jars of rhubarb sauce, a large bowl of cookies, and a couple of two-quart jars wrapped thickly in feed sacks—one full of cool milk and the other full of hot coffee.

I thought I would still be full from the two breakfasts and the forenoon lunch but there was an edge of hunger there and I found myself eating right along with Harris and Knute. The food was so good it made my jaws ache to chew.

Neither Clair nor Glennis ate but sat picking at grass and talking softly, in a teasing way. Every once in a while Glennis would laugh softly and blush and Clair would poke her with a finger and laugh.

Knute leaned back and rolled and lit another cigarette when we were done and Harris flopped on the grass and burped.

"Good food," Knute said to Clair and Glennis by way of a compliment. He seemed about to say more but stopped and watched a hawk swoop low over the new-cut grass and I realized that Knute was always

like that; always seemed about to say something but never quite got it out.

"I like field dinners/' Harris said to no one in particular. "Especially when Louie ain't here. You don't got to fight so damn hard for food."

Glennis was too far away to smack him, sitting on the grass watching the horses, but she turned and threw a clump of dirt at him. "Watch your tongue."

He easily dodged and smiled, and I lay back on the grass at the edge of the field and watched small clouds moving across the sky overhead. A noise off to the side caught my attention and I rolled up to see Clair feeding Buzzer a scrap of meat from the stew pan.

She held it up pinched between her thumb and index finger and Buzzer delicately, with great care, used one needle-point claw in his huge foot to pull it from her fingers and place it into his mouth, the way he had done the mice.

"What kind of cat is he?" I asked.

Knute smiled but said nothing.

"We found a picture in a magazine looks just like him," Harris said. "What was that, Ma? What kind of cat was it?"

"He's a lynx," Clair said. "A big old puppy baby lynx ..." Her voice got soft and you could see she wanted to pet Buzzer but she didn't touch him, and when she didn't feed him more, he walked away and

began hunting the edge of the field looking for more mice.

In a little time Knute shredded his cigarette and put the leftover tobacco back in the sack and stood. The horses watched him, waiting, and he hooked them back up to the mower and sat in the seat and dinner was over.

Harris took the sack of mice and moved to the back of the mower and I followed and the afternoon went that way.

I got seven more mice for myself, Harris about forty, Buzzer six of his own and my other fourteen— he never did fill up. We ate again—Glennis and Clair brought out cake and milk and coffee and meat sandwiches—and then it was evening and we rode the horses back to the barn in time to help with milking. This time Harris took half the time on the separator, which was just as well because I was so tired I could hardly walk.

I vaguely remember eating another huge meal in the evening—watching Louie swallow what seemed like a whole chicken, bones and all—with heaping mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and pie covered with whipped fresh cream for dessert. But I was so tired everything was fuzzy and things seemed to blur together.

After supper—what I would have called dinner and what seemed like the tenth meal of the day but

was really only the sixth—everybody went into the dining/sitting room and sat in chairs while a clock on the wall ticked, and I went face down on the table and started to sleep. I simply couldn't keep my eyes open.

"Poor dear," Clair said. "He's a little tuckered ..."

I felt somebody lift me, smelled Knute's tobacco, and I was carried upstairs and laid on my bed, fully clothed. I kicked out of my shoes and pants, and the events swirled in my head as I lay back in the dark.

Td been kicked in the testicles, slammed in the head, worked at the separator until my arms seemed about to fall off, narrowly averted disaster with a manic rooster, wrestled commie jap pigs in a sea of pig crap, ridden horses as big as dinosaurs, had a losing relationship with a lynx, eaten eighteen or twenty meals, and helped to capture mice for God-knows-what purposes.

And I'd been there one day.

I tried to open my eyes. (I'd heard Harris come in the room as I flopped back and I needed to know the answer, was dying to know the answer: why did Louie want the mice?) But it was impossible. My eyes didn't open, a wave of exhaustion roared over me like a soft train and I was gone.

happened because of the Tarzan of the Apes comic book.

Part of my treasures, along with the "dourty peectures," was a goodly supply of comic books. Some of them were not so good. There were, for instance, two Captain Marvel comics that I didn't like. But among the better ones—Superman, some good Donald Ducks, and a couple of really good Real War comics—there was my favorite, a Tarzan of the Apes bonus edition with a story about Tarzan in the lost land of dinosaurs, where he trains a triceratops to ride by hitting it on the side of the snout with a stick.

Harris shared my enthusiasm for the comics. This interest would diminish slightly when he came to see the "dourty peectures/' but by the end of the first week he hadn't seen them yet and had seen the comics, including the Tarzan of the Apes. His reading wasn't up to my level but it was good enough and the pictures gave him enough information to fill in the gaps.

"That guy was something," he said, closing the comic book. We were sitting in the open granary door. I was watching closely for Ernie, whom I hadn't seen for over fifteen minutes—usually a very bad situation. I now personally had been attacked by Ernie several times, the worst inside the outhouse. It faced the river, away from the house, and so the door could be open and it was fun to sit there and watch things

down by the river while I was going to the bathroom. Ernie had sneaked around the side of the outhouse and jumped me right in the middle of—well, just say that it was very lucky I was sitting on a toilet when it happened—and during the ensuing fight (really, just me trying to get out of the outhouse alive) it looked like the toilet had been hit by artillery.

So I watched closely for him and never went out in the yard without a board, which I was holding now.

"He never seems to touch the ground . . ."

"What?"

"Tarzan," Harris repeated. "He don't never touch the ground. He just swings in them trees on them vines unless he's riding one of them big goon-ers . . ."

"Triceratops."

". . . Whatever. He still ain't touching the ground, is he?"

I thought about it. "No, I guess not."

"Might ought to be a good way to live, just swinging around. Hmmmm."

And herein lay the one shining ability of Harris—he believed everything was real. When he went for the pigs they weren't pigs, they really were commie japs, whatever that was in his mind.

When he read a Tarzan comic it wasn't just a made-up story. It was real. He thought in real terms,

in a real world, in real time. The only instance I saw this vary was when I found out why Louie wanted the mice.

The day after we'd mowed and gathered mice I'd asked Harris why Louie needed mice.

'Tor coats," he'd said. "Little coats."

"Coats?"

"It's better to show you. Come on."

He had led me to the granary. The downstairs of the building was arranged in wooden bins full of oats and barley and some wheat. Upstairs there was a rough wooden floor and a crude ladder on the side wall leading up through a hole. Harris moved up the ladder like a monkey and I followed, still trying to imagine what he could be leading me to.

Upstairs there was a big cleared area and in the middle of this a large wooden table—ten by ten feet, easily—was set on thick wooden legs.

"See?" Harris said. "Here's why Louie needs the mice ..."

The table was covered with small carved figures. At first I couldn't understand. There were men and horses and little cabins and small trees and teams of horses pulling sleighs full of logs.

"It's a winter logging camp," Harris said. "Louie is always carving on it."

"Wow ..." It was incredible. There were

dozens, hundreds of little men working at different aspects of logging, cutting down little trees with axes and small two-man saws, building little cabins, riding little sleighs, sitting in little outhouses. And every horse had gray fur and many of the men were wearing gray fur coats. "He skins the mice to make coats and horsehair," I said, "for this?"

"Yup. Pretty slick, ain't it?" He had shaken his head. "It's all just little carvings. I think he does it because he's got brain worms. Got 'em when he worked up in the Oak Leaf swamp digging drainage ditches when he was young. That's why he does 'em— of course, they ain't real. It's all in his head."

It was the only thing Harris didn't think of as real and I was fascinated by Louie's dream world. I had gone up there several times since and looked at the table and still hadn't seen everything and, indeed, was thinking of climbing up there again now to look at it once more but I noticed that Harris was studying the barnyard with new interest.

I hadn't been there long but I knew when he had that look—it seemed the corner of his right eye went up slightly and it gave him an almost evil gremlin appearance—it meant he had a new idea. Sometimes they were good ideas, oftentimes they were bad ideas, but they were never, never boring ideas and always worth interest.

"What are you looking at?"

"I'm wondering/' he said, "what Tarzan would have done had he lived on a farm."

"I don't think he . . ."

"Do you s'pose he would have had to touch the ground?"

"I don't see how he would have ..."

"Or do you s'pose he would have been able to swing all through the barnyard without touching the dirt?"

He stood and left me and went around to the back of the granary and chicken coop and in moments returned lugging what seemed to be half a mile of thick hemp rope.

"I've been looking," he said, dumping the rope at my feet. "And it seems to me that a man could make it from the granary to the loft of the barn without touching the ground, then from the loft back over to that hayrack. We just tie the rope to that elm limb there and over there to the oak limb. Look, see there? If we get to the hayrack, there's even a place where we can swing out over the river, if we have enough rope for it."

I was looking at the rope. It seemed ancient, so old there was mold and mildew growing on it. "I don't know ..."

"Come on, there's nothing to know about it. I'll just shinny up that elm and you throw me the rope and we'll do her."

He was gone in an instant and halfway up the tree before I could say that I thought the rope would fall apart.