Harris and me : a summer remembered (6 page)

"Up here—throw me the rope." He had crotch-ridden out on the tree limb and was beckoning down to me. He seemed a mile up and I had to throw the rope several times before he caught it. In a minute he had it tied to the limb with what appeared to be eight or nine knots and had dropped the end to the ground and climbed back down.

I tested the rope gingerly at first, then hanging on it with my full weight, and finally bouncing. It held but had spring to it, a little stretch.

"Here, hold it like this and when I get on the granary roof flip it up to me."

"How are you going to get on the granary roof?" I asked but he was gone again, a dust cloud coming up in back of him as he ran into the granary and disappeared.

He reappeared almost instantly at the small window in the peak of the granary roof. It opened inward and he pushed it over and wriggled until he was half in and half out, then he turned, reached up, and grabbed the peak of the roof and pulled himself up.

"Give me the rope."

I whipped the rope sideways several times and finally managed to get it close enough for him to grab it.

"Way it works is I'm going to swing from here over to the loft door on the barn and just whip inside and drop in the hay."

On the front of the barn there was a large opening for putting hay inside to store for the winter. The door opening was seven or so feet wide and the big door was tied open to ventilate the loft. Inside there was an old pile of hay left from winter.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I called up.

"You bet. And as soon as I do her you can try it."

I had pretty much made up my mind that there was nothing on earth that would get me to "try her"— Harris looked like he was a mile away, sitting up there straddling the peak of the granary—though I was completely willing to help Harris.

He stood, wobbling on the peak, his bare feet holding at the hip and ridge, and held the rope. I eyed the swing it would take to make the barn loft, and while there was still some doubt I nodded up at him to give him confidence. And in truth I thought he might make it.

Yet there were several mistakes that had already been made that would alter Harris's destiny. Wind, humidity, rotation of the earth, stretch of old rope, and springiness of an elm tree limb—all had been ignored in the computations. But worse, far worse— I had laid my board/weapon down and we had both forgotten Ernie completely.

"What did he always say?" Harris yelled down to me.

"Who?"

"Tarzan, you dope. Isn't he always saying something when he does this?"

"He has a yell."

"How does it go?"

I did a Tarzan yell, or a version of it. "Like that."

"When he swings?"

"That's what it says in the comic books."

"Well, then. Here goes."

He started a Tarzan yell and without any hesitation whatsoever jumped off the granary roof into space hanging on to a rotten piece of hemp rope.

We would argue later over many aspects of the Tarzan Leap, as it came to be known. How far it went, how far off the aim really was, how much Harris meant, and how much (I thought all of it) was accident. One of the main points of contention involved the yell.

Harris claimed it was a valid and authentic Tarzan yell, made as he swung down from the roof. I maintained that it became a scream of terror the moment his feet left the granary and that, coupled with Ernie's enthusiasm, was the reason for my own sudden involvement.

In retrospect there was no one point that it fell apart but many smaller disasters that fed the big one.

Ernie had been hiding under the combine. I was standing a few feet off the line of swing with my back to the combine, not twelve feet from the lurking Ernie.

As Harris began his swing, Ernie saw his chance— saw that I had put my board down and was concentrating on Harris.

Just as Harris stepped off the roof Ernie hit me in the back of the head and drove me forward nearly into Harris's path. Rope stretch and poor aim did the rest. Harris veered enough to hit me head on, Ernie still riding me and spurring me. I grabbed at Harris— I would have grabbed at anything to get away from Ernie—and hung on as the momentum of Harris's swing carried me, and the clinging Ernie, along for the ride to the barn loft.

Or what should have been the bam loft. Here again miscalculation intervened. Harris's original swing was off, slightly, to the left. My weight and drag brought it more to the left—as did Ernie's raking and clawing—so that all of us were well off the expected flight path for the loft; were, indeed, aimed perfectly for the pigpens.

The rope almost held us. That we agreed on. And it would have held Harris alone just fine. But the weight was more than doubled with me hanging on to him.

We swung in an arc—Harris, Ernie, and me—back

off the ground, directly over the pigpens and the by-now panicking sows.

Where the rope broke.

We hit in a plume of mud and pig dung—I had the foresight from past experience to close my eyes and mouth this time—propelled by the swing and gravity, with a force that knocked the wind out of me and for an instant even seemed to stun Ernie.

Our surprise arrival did not stun the pigs. They ran over us like stampeding cattle, then back over us, then over us again, and seemed to be thinking of making it a regular part of their exercise when I heard:

''Come here, you gooner!"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harris—never one to waste an opportunity—hit one of the sows on the side of the snout and swing up into the saddle and I thought, as I went down in a new wave of tromping pig feet, that he looked almost exactly like Tarzan riding a triceratops—if Tarzan had worn bib overalls and been covered with pig slop, of course.

In this case the trouble involved playing at being what Harris called "a red Indian."

Definitions are important. I had often played Cowboys and Indians back in the cities where I lived, and played War a great deal in the Philippines, and had ironed out forms and disciplines for both games. In War you were always the hero and you always won and you always were generous with your foe— if he lived. In Cowboys and Indians you were always the cowboy and always won—usually with as much gunplay as possible—and often saved somebody in the winning.

Harris had not had other children to play with as much as I had and so he had to make up some of his own rules.

There were, for instance, no cowboys the way Harris played. This caused some difficulty because I had a revolving cylinder, silver-plated (chrome, really) six-shooter with me. I had not used it for War because it was the wrong kind of gun but it made me, clearly, king of the cowboys. It was hidden in my box beneath the bed, along with the pictures, and I suggested bringing it out but Harris was adamant.

"No. There ain't no cowboys. Only red Indians. And don't nobody win but the red Indians."

This idea was new but I was willing to try it as long as I didn't have to lose. What with Ernie and

the pigpen I had been doing rather a lot of losing lately.

"What do we do?"

"We lurk," Harris said, "and shoot the hell out of everything."

I warped my imagination around and figured a way a red Indian could have come up with a silver-plated six-shooter—something to do with barter and some ponies—but Harris again shook his head.

"You never in your life saw no red Indian with a silver six-shooter."

"Well what do we shoot with—our fingers?"

It was a lesson to me—to never, never underestimate Harris.

He took me around to the back of the granary. There had once been a chicken pen back there, years and years before. It had all fallen down and rotted away but willows had grown where the chicken yard had been. Fed by the chicken manure the willows had gone crazy and made a stand of perfectly straight limbs so thick it was almost impossible to get through them. They were every size from as thick as a little finger to one inch across.

Harris pulled a butcher knife out from beneath the granary. It was Clair's favorite meat knife and only that morning she'd wondered where it had gone and I knew then that Harris had planned to play red

Indians even yesterday. I was pretty sure that Clair wouldn't want Harris to have the knife—or anything with sharp edges or a point, as far as that went— and said as much.

"There's too blamed much of that in the world/ 7 he said.

"Too much of what?"

"Rules. Every time you turn around there's something you can't have or something you can't do. I'll tell you what"—he looked at me and waved the butcher knife—"you never in your life saw no red Indian putting up with rules, did you?"

Which was perhaps true. But it was entirely possible that no red Indian had ever taken Clair's butcher knife and hid it under a granary either, I thought, yet I didn't say anything.

He waded into the willows and started whacking away. The thicker willows became bows and the thin ones became arrows. We worked for an hour or more peeling bark and using heavy sack-cord as string for the bows and stripping the bark from the thin ones to lighten them up for arrows.

We sharpened the arrows—each of us had six— and set out to do as Harris had stipulated: lurk and shoot everything.

Here Harris and I differed dramatically. I thought he meant, literally, things. I was content to shoot at dirt hunks, mounds of hay, clumps of horse drop-

pings—and just pretend they were settlers or cowboys or cavalry.

Harris took it to the next highest plane of realism and went for living objects—cows, horses, and pigs.

I hesitated. Clearly this violated some rule or we— as I pointed out to Harris with what I thought to be impeccable logic—would have seen the grownups out shooting at the animals with bows and arrows.

'They won't see us anyway/ 7 Harris pointed out. "We'll be lurking."

He convinced me. Not directly, but I had started to consider the secondary benefits of this approach. The truth was I had two formidable enemies at the farm. One was Vivian, who had driven my testicles up somewhere around my tonsils and my head down between my shoulders. I still twinged when I thought of her. The second deadly adversary was, of course, Ernie.

It was all right to play red Indians and imagine enemies, I thought, but how much better to have real enemies to shoot at.

We lurked.

Harris led off and I followed, mentally awaiting my chance to get a shot in at Ernie or Vivian, who was out in the pasture in back of the barn.

Harris shot at the sows. I shot at the sows. The

arrows bounced off their sides without hurting them, though they squealed and acted in other ways just like surprised cavalry.

Harris shot at a chicken. I shot at a chicken. We both missed—chickens being a much smaller cavalry than pigs—and undaunted we headed around the back side of the barn. I was watching to the rear, hoping for a shot at Ernie, and turned to the front just in time to see Harris take a quick shot.

There had been a small patch of gray fur by the edge of the corner of the barn, not much bigger than the palm of my hand, so small that Harris would normally have missed. And he would probably have missed, but he shot instinctively and his reflexes carried the day.

This time he hit perfectly. The sharpened point plunked into the center of the fur and there was a screech like somebody drawing a million fingernails across blackboards and about fifty pounds of really angry lynx looked back around the corner directly into Harris's eyes, his soul.

''Oh . . ."he had time to say. "Buzzer. No, Buzzer. I'm sorry, Buzzer. I'm really sorry. Buzzer, no! Please, Buzzer ..."

He had thrown down the bow and by this time was running across the yard trying either to make the granary or the house. It didn't matter which because Buzzer was on him in three bounds and the

two of them went rolling in a cloud of dirt and screeches.

"He's killing me!" Harris screamed. "Help me!" Arms and legs and paws and tufted ears seemed to be everywhere.

I was worried about Harris—though I didn't think he could be killed by anything—but I wasn't about to cross Buzzer. I yelled, "Buzzer, you stop that now . . ."

Which of course had no effect at all. The fight kept roiling and boiling, and I'm not sure what the outcome would have been but suddenly the screen door on the house swung open and Clair was standing there, her hands in her apron.

"Harris! You quit playing with Buzzer now and come inside—we have to get ready for town."

And that stopped Buzzer. When the dust settled he was standing on top of Harris, looking at Clair, spitting out bits of bib overall, his stump tail wriggling happily.

"Get off me, you gooner," Harris said. "Didn't you hear? We got to go inside ..."

He rolled out from under Buzzer and stood. His bibs were in shreds and he was bleeding from a dozen or so cuts but seemed in one piece and he ran to the house. I made a loop around Buzzer, who spat once more and went back toward the barn, and I followed Harris into the house.

"Is there a dance or what, Ma?"

Harris was by the sink where Clair was pumping cold water into a steaming pan of hot water to cool it.

"Yes There's a dance and a party for the Halver-sons—to help them rebuild. Their house burned."

"Is there a picture show?" The tragic news didn't seem to bother Harris much. "Do we get a picture show?"

She smiled and nodded. "I think so, yes."

"Can we have pop?" he added. "Don't we get to have pop for the picture show?"

She didn't answer that one but instead bent his head over the sink and started cleaning it in much the same way she or Glennis cleaned the separator parts after milking: pouring hot water on a spot, scrubbing with a stiff-bristle brush until he screamed—or actually well after he screamed, ignoring the cries for mercy and some first-rate profanity—and then doing another spot.

I stood watching all this, not thinking that I would be next, until Harris was done—literally and figuratively—and then Clair turned to me.

"Put your head over the sink, dear—you look like you've been swimming in manure."

I did so and in moments understood why Harris had screamed so hard. It felt like the brush was made