Georgia Boy (6 page)

“Wear them like they was meant to be,” Pa said.

“I ain’t never seen it get muddy enough around here in this sandy country to need knee-high rubber boots,” Handsome said.

“That’s because you never took the trouble to notice how damp it gets sometimes when it rains,” Pa said.

“Maybe so,” Handsome said, “but it always manages to dry up half an hour afterward, and it would take that much time to find them boots and put them on. Looks like to me we could have spent all the wasted time fishing. Mis’ Martha’s going to be coming back here tonight, and I won’t have another chance to go fishing until next year. We sure could have caught a lot of fish while you was wasting the time fooling around with them boots.”

“You’d better mind how you talk,” Pa said. “Now, I’ve got half a mind to go off to the creek and leave you behind.”

“Please don’t do that, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said. “I didn’t mean that about the boots. They’re the handsomest rubber boots I ever saw before in all my life. They’re the finest kind of things to have handy when it rains. I wish I owned them, because I’d be mighty proud.”

Pa got out and went to the water bucket for another drink. Then he came back and laid his hand on the cart.

“Where’s the can of worms, son?” he asked.

I ran and got the worms, and all of us climbed in. Pa picked up the reins and was about to slap Ida on the back when Mrs. Fuller came running in through the alley gate. Mrs. Fuller was a widow who lived down on the next street at the end of the alley and took in boarders for a living. She was about fifty or sixty years old, and was always complaining about something.

“Just a minute there, Morris Stroup!” Mrs. Fuller said, running up to the cart and jerking the reins from Pa’s hands.

Pa tried to get out of the cart, but she stood in his way.

“Where’s the things you took off my back porch, Morris Stroup?” she said. “There ain’t a drop of water in my house, and I can’t get none, because you walked off with my pump handle!”

“There must be some sort of mix-up,” Pa said. “You know I’m not the sort of neighbor who’d take a pump handle.”

“One of my boarders saw you sneak in my backyard and make off with a lot of my things, including my pump handle, Morris Stroup,” she said, shaking her finger at Pa. “You took my sadirons, my tongs and poker, and goodness knows what else. Now I want them back right away, or I’ll call the town marshal!”

Handsome slipped off the cart and backed toward the woodshed. He was just opening the woodshed door when my old man turned around and saw him.

“Come back here, Handsome Brown,” Pa said.

Handsome stopped backing away.

“I sure owe you an apology, Mrs. Fuller,” Pa said. “All that was the purest kind of accident. I happened to be walking through the alley this morning and I saw some old rusty iron laying on the ground. I thought you was trying to get shed of it, and so I just kicked it along out of the way. I thought I was doing you a favor. I remembered that the boys was cleaning up around our house and in the alley, and that’s why your things got mixed up with ours.”

“You’d better think about doing yourself a favor,” Mrs. Fuller said, “if you don’t want to go to jail.”

While my old man was calling Handsome, Mrs. Fuller turned around and walked out through the alley gate.

“Handsome,” Pa said, “bring me them rubber boots.”

Handsome went to the porch and brought the boots.

“Now, let this be a lesson to you,” Pa said. “You ought to know better than to pick up just anything you find laying around. It may belong to somebody.”

“Me?” Handsome said, shaking all over. “Is you talking to me, Mr. Morris?”

Pa handed him back the rubber boots. Handsome took them, but he let them fall to the ground.

“Take them boots down to Mr. Frank Dunn’s store and tell him they didn’t fit you,” Pa said. “Then ask him to give you your money back.”

“Me?” Handsome said, backing off. “You mean me, Mr. Morris?”

Pa nodded.

“Then when you get your money back for the boots,” my old man said, “take the money and go over where the man is buying the scrap iron and tell him you’ve changed your mind and want the pieces back. Hand him the four dollars and then start digging in the pile and pick out all the pieces you sold him. When you get everything picked out, especially the pump handle, load them in the cart and bring them straight home. As soon as you get back you can take Mrs. Fuller the things she wants.”

“You don’t mean me, do you, Mr. Morris?” Handsome said. “Ain’t you kind of mixed up a little? Them rubber boots ain’t mine, and I—”

Pa picked up the boots and put them in Handsome’s arms.

“You made me feel so ashamed of myself for buying rubber boots when it wouldn’t be muddy enough to need them that I gave them to you.”

“You did?” Handsome said. “When did you do all that, Mr. Morris?”

“Just a little while ago,” Pa said.

“I declare, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said, “I ain’t never wanted rubber boots in all my life! That’s one thing I never thought about!”

Handsome tried to give them to Pa, but my old man shoved them back at Handsome. Handsome stood trembling and trying to say something.

“Stop arguing and do like I tell you,” Pa said. “I’d hate to see you go to jail on a fine day like this.”

He handed Handsome the reins and pushed him up into the cart. Then he picked up the boots and threw them inside.

After that he slapped Ida on the back with his hand, and she trotted out of the yard and turned down the street. Handsome went on out of sight and holding to the seat with both hands and moaning so loud we could hear him until he got all the way downtown.

My old man walked over to where the can of worms was and looked at it for a while. Then he picked up the can and told me to get the spade. We went around behind the shed where Handsome had dug them that morning and emptied the can on the ground.

The worms started crawling off in every direction, but my old man got a stick and pushed them down into the hole that Handsome had dug.

“Cover them up good, son,” he said. “Help them make themselves feel at home. It’s too late to go fishing today, but the next time your Ma goes off to visit your Aunt Bessie, we’ll do our best to make the most of it.”

I covered up the hole while my old man patted the earth down tight so it would stay damp down where the worms lived until the next time we had a chance to use them.

T
HE SHIRT-TAIL WOODPECKERS
had been bothering us for a long time. There were not so many of them to begin with, but they raised several nests in the spring, and by the time the young ones were old enough to peck on wood they made such a racket early in the morning that nobody could sleep. The ’peckers lived in the old dead sycamore tree in our yard, and Ma said the sensible thing to do was to chop it down. My old man said he would rather see the Republicans win every election in the country for the rest of time than to lose the sycamore. He had been nursing it along ever since I could remember, pruning back the dead limbs and daubing paint around the ’pecker holes. After it had been dead for several years, there was not a single limb left on it, and the trunk jutted straight into the air like a telephone pole.

Up near the top of the sycamore was where the shirt-tail woodpeckers lived. They had pecked at it until they had made more holes than I could count. Handsome Brown said once he had counted them, and he thought there were between forty and fifty. At that time of the year, in early summer, after the young ones had come out of the holes and started pecking, there were always a dozen or more of them around the tree. But early in the morning was the worst time. The ’peckers always got up together at the crack of dawn and started pecking on the dead wood, and my old man said he thought there were about twenty or thirty of them always working from then until six or seven o’clock.

“Mr. Morris,” Handsome told Pa, “I could get me a .22 and get shed of them in no time.”

“If you shoot one of them woodpeckers,” Pa said, “it would be just like you shooting the sheriff of the county. I’d haul off and put you on the chain gang for the rest of your life!”

“Please don’t do that to me, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said. “That’s one thing I won’t stand for.”

The
rat-tat-tat
in the sycamore got worse and worse all the time. The days were growing longer, and that meant that the ’peckers generally started pecking earlier every morning. My old man said they were coming out and starting to peck at three-thirty.

“If them was my peckerwoods,” Handsome said, “I’d chase them off and chop down the tree. Then they couldn’t do no more pecking.”

“You’d better mind how you talk, Handsome Brown,” Pa told him. “If anything ever happens to the littlest one of them woodpeckers, or to my sycamore, you’ll wish you’d never seen a shirt-tail woodpecker.”

During the day nobody minded the ’peckers much, because they were always busy flying off somewhere to get something to eat, or just resting, and if one of them did peck a little on the sycamore, the rest of them did not join in like they all did early every morning for two hours. My old man said he liked to listen to a lone woodpecker pecking, because it was like having company around all the time. Ma didn’t say much, except that she was going to have the sycamore chopped down if my old man didn’t do something about the
rat-tat-tat
that woke us up every morning before dawn.

Then one morning a whole hour before daybreak we heard the worst clatter in the sycamore we’d ever heard before. It sounded as if forty or fifty people were banging on the side of the house with claw-hammers. Ma struck a match and looked at the clock on the mantel, and it was three o’clock. My old man got up and put on his shoes and pants and lit the lantern on the back porch. After that he went across the yard and called Handsome. Handsome always slept in the loft over the woodshed. Pa told him to get dressed and come out in the yard right away.

“Them ’peckers won’t let me get a wink of sleep,” Pa told Handsome. “You come on around to the sycamore with me and help me quiet them down.”

I got up and looked out the window. The sycamore was only about ten feet from the window, and in the lantern light I could see everything that was going on. Handsome came dragging his feet over the ground and yawning.”

“Handsome,” Pa said, “we’ve just got to figure out some way to make them ’peckers quiet down.”

“How you figure on going about it, Mr. Morris?” Handsome asked, leaning against the tree and yawning some more.

“Hitch yourself up there and maybe that’ll stop it,” Pa told him.

“What you mean, Mr. Morris? Go up that sycamore?”

“Of course,” Pa said. “Shin yourself up there right away. I want to get a lot more sleep before the night’s over.”

Handsome stood back and peered in the darkness towards the top of the tree. The lantern light shone only halfway up, and nobody could see all the way to where the ’peckers were. We could hear the ’peckers up there rapping on the dead wood, and once in a while some big chips and splinters showered down.

“I don’t know as how I can,” Handsome said protestingly. “I ain’t never learned how to climb a tree that didn’t have no limbs at all on it. I’d slip backward a heap faster than I could go forward. There wouldn’t be no limbs to clutch to.”

“Never mind that,” Pa said. “When you get halfway up you can get a toe-hold in the woodpecker holes, and it’ll be easier than eating pie.”

My old man gave Handsome a shove towards the sycamore. Handsome put his arms around the trunk and measured the bigness of it. He hugged it for a minute, and then he groaned.

“I ain’t never tried to do nothing like this before, Mr. Morris,” he said, stepping back. “I’m scared.”

Handsome looked up at the tree in the darkness. We could hear the woodpeckers pecking away for all they were worth. They pecked so hard it shook the tree all the way down to the ground, and pretty soon the panes in the window began to rattle.

My old man gave Handsome a hard shove and made him start up the tree. As soon as he got started, he went up out of sight like a squirrel. I couldn’t see a thing after that, because as soon as he was out of sight, Pa blew the light out of the lantern. He said he could see better in the dark without a light.

In another minute there wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere. The woodpeckers were as still as dead mice.

“How are you making out up there, Handsome?” Pa shouted up at him.

There was no answer at all. Pa and I listened, and all we could hear was a sound like a dog panting.

“What’s going on up there, Handsome?” Pa shouted.

A big shower of dead bark thundered down from above, pelting Pa on the head.

“Mr. Morris,” Handsome said, “you’ve got to do something to save me quick!”

“What’s the matter?”

“These peckerwoods has all started pecking on me, just like they do on the tree,” he said. “Can’t you hear them pecking on me, Mr. Morris?”

“I don’t hear a thing in the world,” Pa said. “Don’t let them get you rattled. Just don’t pay them no mind. Hang on and try to quiet them down. They ain’t making nowhere near as much noise as they were before you went up there.”

“That’s because they’re pecking on me, instead of on the tree, Mr. Morris,” he said. “I can’t fight them off, because if I did, I’d lose my grip around this here tree.

“Act like you don’t notice them,” Pa said, “and they’ll quit after a while.”

“But they just keep on pecking at the back of my head. It’s already so sore it feels like it’s going to split wide open.”

“That’s a lot of foolishness,” Pa said. “I’ve lived a long time, and ain’t never heard of a woodpecker pecking on a human being.”

Pa started around the corner of the house towards the back porch.

“You’ve quieted them down real good, Handsome,” he said. “Now just stay there and see that they don’t start up that pecking on the tree again.”

“Mr. Morris!” Handsome yelled. “Where you going, Mr. Morris! Don’t go away and leave me up this tree all by myself with all these peckerwoods!”

Pa came on inside, and I could hear him take off his shoes and drop them beside the bed. Handsome started moaning up in the top of the tree, but after a while he stopped making any sound at all. Pa got into the bed and pulled the covers over his head.