Authors: Willie Morris
In the springtime there was nothing gentle about nature. It came at you violently or in a rush. When the muddy waters from the river invaded the town, and even the shacks on stilts in the bottoms were covered over, we saw the open trucks with the convicts crowded in the back on their way to bolster the levees with sandbags, their black-and-white stripes somber under the gray, forbidding sky. Sometimes a tornado twisted down and did strange things to whatever it hit, carrying someone fifty yards and leaving him barely hurt, or driving straws into car tires like needles, or sending our garage across the alley into a field of weeds.
One afternoon a modest tornado descended while we were watching a movie in the Dixie. We heard hailstones on the roof, hitting in steady torrents. All the lights inside turned dim, and after a succession of emphatic thumps the movie on the screen broke down. We got out of there, onto the sidewalk under the front marquee. Skip, who had been waiting for us, as was his custom, was standing there barking. In the middle of Main Street bicycles were floating in midair up and down the whole thoroughfare, and Skip, like the spectators at tennis matches who turn their heads right and left while following the ball, was bobbing
his
head back and forth as the bicycles whizzed past. Then the wind began to subside, and a huge rat, caught in the waters of the gutter,
was being carried by the strong current closer and closer to the sewer that would transport him into the river. Skip went out and watched as the rat disappeared, and on the walk home, with trees strewn everywhere, he pushed at the egg-sized hailstones with his nose.
Skip managed to get in everywhere. In school I was away from him for long hours, and he did not like it at all. A disastrous incident happened to me one April when I was in the fifth grade. We had a considerably mean-spirited teacher named Miss Abbott. One day when she was out of the classroom I made a spitball and threw it two rows over at Edith Stillwater. At that precise instant the wretched Miss Abbott came back into the room and shouted my name; the sound of her voice sent terror to my soul.
Each afternoon for six weeks during that incomparable spring I had to “stay in” for two hours, working long division. Miss Abbott would sit at her desk, reading the Bible or
Reader's Digest
, while the shadows got longer and the sound of the boys’ voices at play wafted in through the open windows. On one of these afternoons, who should suddenly burst into the classroom but Skip himself, angry, I suppose, that I had been getting home so late in recent days; he approached me at my desk and licked my hand; then he spotted Miss Abbott and started growling contemptuously at her, prompting her to throw down her
Readers Digest
and retreat into a corner. In a querulous voice she ordered us
both to leave, and the next morning she added another whole week to my incarceration.
A few years after that, during my first year in high school, our English teacher, Mrs. Parker, asked our class to stay after school an entire hour for a special spelling bee. It was a glorious late afternoon of mid-May, and we were not even halfway finished when Skip leapt through one of the open ground-floor windows and landed on his feet near Rivers Applewhite's desk, knocking off all her schoolbooks before walking to me. Happily this teacher, unlike the brutish Miss Abbott, was a kindly personage and lover of dogs, and she said: “Welcome, Skip¡ Can you spell?” The intrusion was a fortunate one for me, because just before his histrionic entrance I had been called upon to spell
purification.
Skip s interruption gave me time to decide that there was only one
r
, rather than two, in
purification.
F
OR
A
BOY AND
HIS DOG
—need it even be said?—the summertimes were the best of all. They came and went for Skip and me in splendid random, touching our mutual boyhood and our getting older with the patina of the passing days.
Three or four times every summer he and I went to Jackson to stay with my grandparents and great-aunts. We always took the Greyhound bus to Jackson. Being a friend of my father's, the driver allowed Skip to make the journey on the bus—the price was a quarter for me and a dime for him—and the loudspeaker in the station just before we boarded would always say: “Central Local Bus now loading on Platform One—for Little Yazoo, Bentonia, Flora, Poca-hontas, and
Jackson-
town !” and off we would go.
Though quintessentially a small-town dog, as the reader by now may have discerned, Old Skip was adequately
sophisticated for the capital city, thank you, and reveled in its own distinctive summer adventures. Our Christmases there had already suggested to him, I can't help thinking, that if grandparents are noteworthy for spoiling a grandson, they can be equally solicitous of the grandson s dog. My grandmother catered to his every whim and foible, which included giving him canned shrimp, potted meat, and even collard greens on occasion, so that by the conclusion of our summer sojourns he had assumed a spirit so magnified and grand that I knew I would have to get him back to more earthly reality on our return home.
To me, my grandfather Percy was old, older than almost anyone I had ever known, but he never let on that Skip's and my pace was more than he had bargained for. He would do everything I wanted, from climbing the fig trees in the backyard to marching down the street beating a dime-store drum. He worked in the place on Griffith Street that made potato chips. Every afternoon at four he would come home smelling of potatoes, and would fetch from his old leather satchel two big bags of chips for Skip and me, crisp and hot. Sometimes he would take the two of us to work with him, and we would watch while he put on his white apron, carry the great sacks of peeled potatoes to a machine that cut them into thin slices, and then transfer them to the prodigious black oven that heated up the finished product. We munched on potato chips all day, from nine to four, and came home so full of salt and potato grease that we had to drink half a gallon of ice water at supper.
Maggie and Susie, my grandmother's eccentric old-maid sisters, were challenges, I could tell, to Skip, and he always observed them quizzically in their ceaseless and directionless peregrinations. They had been born long ago during the Civil War, and neither of them could hear or see very well, getting me confused with a brother of theirs who died in 1908 and Skip with a dog named Beauregard they had owned as girls in 1879; once they even confused Skip with a
cousin
of theirs who had passed on during World War I. They perambulated inside the house and around the yard all day long in their fantastic flowing dresses, running into doors and trees, knocking things off tables; sometimes they bumped into each other in these interminable explorations, and said “Excuse me,” and then pushed off again in opposite directions. Several times a day they tripped over Skip, and once when I saw Maggie trying to strike up a conversation with the garbage can in the backyard, Skip was sitting there moving his head back and forth, and when he saw me he seemed to be asking, “What's going on here?”
We took long walks, my grandparents and great-aunts and Skip and I, down streets shaded by crepe myrtles, where old ladies on decaying verandas would sometimes ask us in for iced tea; and on to the State Capitol with its fine air of permanence, to search for envelopes with foreign stamps on them in the big refuse bin; and on to the cemetery down the way in the hot, glowing dusks; and then the
long walks home, Skip leading the procession because the varied topography of the big town had long since been amply planted in his brain.
If the years of World War II, in Skip's and my childhood, were glorious beyond measure in our own town, they were equally stimulating in the capital city Jackson was crowded with soldiers of all ranks and origins, and one could hear the clipped Yankee accents all along East Capitol Street, and on several occasions my grandfather and Skip and I walked out to the German prisoner-of-war camp to gaze at the captured soldiers behind the high fences; on one of these afternoons a sergeant of the Afrika Korps bent down and tried to pet Skip through the barbed wire, insisting in his halting English that he reminded him of his own dog in Germany
In addition to the northern accents that filled the downtown, you heard the Dutch tongue all around you, because hundreds of pilots from Holland were training at the air base, and exiled Dutch leaders were living here also. One morning my grandmother took Skip and me to the Jitney Jungle across the street, which she used for all practical purposes as her personal pantry, visiting it several times a day to buy a tomato, or a head of lettuce, or a cucumber, but mainly to gossip with the other ladies of the neighborhood, and at the vegetable counter with two other perfectly dressed women, she pointed out to me, was the Queen of the Netherlands: I told Skip this, but I doubt that it registered, and if it did, that he believed it.
At night, as Percy and Skip and I lay half-awake in our beds, I could hear their voices—Mamie's and my great-aunts”—from the parlor. My great-aunts’ world was unexpectedly clearer at this hour, and I loved to lie in the next room, in that lulled awareness just before sleep, and hear the tick-tock of the old clock and the quiet, eclectic talk: about Momma and Poppa, or the other brothers and sisters long dead, or the one brother who went to New York at the turn of the century and was never heard from again, or the family house in Raymond, sold those many years ago. Percy would groan in his half-sleep, and recite “Oh, to be a child again just for tonight.” It was like shifting gears, from boyhood's concerns and the war with the Germans to a different world filled with Yankees, poverty, and death. Later, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I heard snores of such a variety and intensity as were never heard before—tenor and contralto from the back room where Mag and Sue slept, playing to Percy's staccato bass—and moans and sleeptalk-ing into the early hours, and Skip would nuzzle close to me as we listened some more. I knew that Skip and I would never grow old.
And then back home again on the Greyhound.
I can still see the town now on some hot, still weekday afternoon of midsummer: ten thousand souls and nothing doing. Even the red water-truck was a diversion, coming up the boulevard with its sprinklers on full force, the water making sizzling steam-clouds on the pavement while half-naked
little children followed the truck up the street and played in the torrent till they got soaking wet, Skip sometimes joining them in this mindless charade. Over on Broadway where the old men sat drowsily in straw-bottomed chairs, whittling to make the time pass, you could laze around on the sidewalks—barefoot, if your feet were tough enough to stand the scorching concrete—watching the big cars with out-of-state plates whip by, the drivers hardly knowing and certainly not caring what place this was. Way up that fantastic hill where Skip and I had once lost the brakes, Broadway seemed to end in a seething mist—tiny heat mirages that shimmered off the asphalt. On Main Street itself only a handful of cars were parked here and there, and the merchants and the lawyers sat in the shade under their broad awnings, talking slowly, aimlessly, in the cryptic summer way. The one o'clock whistle at the sawmill would send out its loud bellow, reverberating up the street to the bend in the river, hardly making a ripple in the heavy somnolence.
Summer for us was considerably more solitary than the fall, since so many people were out of town on vacation— but what was wrong with that? By nine o'clock we were out of bed and on the move. First I made Kool-Aid in a large glass pitcher, gathered some old comic books, and put my mother's folding card table under the tree in the front yard. On the table I taped a sign that said:
Funny books
, 3
cents, Kool-Aid, 2 cents a glass.
While Skip, so hot that his tongue dripped with sweat, drowsed under the table, I might get
three or four sales by noon, but rarely did commerce thrive in that stifling heat. In the early wartime years, to pass the time between sales I killed flies with a flyswatter, pretending that the flies were Japanese fighter planes, bagging twenty-three in ten minutes one morning near a watermelon rind, or turned over a flat stone and killed ants with a hammer, pretending they were German footsoldiers trying to establish a beachhead. After a while the two of us just sat in the shade of the tree and watched the morning pass by: the red water-truck, horse-drawn wagons heading to town, a group of dogs all bunched together going to the dump. Skip, if of the mood, would socialize with them for a little while. Soon we heard the ice-cream man coming around the corner with the bell on his cart ringing, and if I had cleared a nickel's profit on our mornings sales I would purchase a Fudgsicle and share it with Skip. At noon it was time for a glass of Kool-Aid and a ham sandwich, and some chicken livers for him, and then to amble into town to see what was going on, with me walking along the sidewalks and supersti-tiously avoiding all the cracks, and finally taking a shortcut down the bayou to Main Street.
One day we were standing on Broadway and Main when I spotted a quarter at the bottom of a sewer. I went to the alley behind the Dixie and found a long stick, stuck the wad of gum I was chewing on the end, and returned to the sewer, where, after considerable maneuvering, and with Skip hunched down and gazing at this operation with his usual curiosity,
I speared the quarter with the gum and with a vigorous yank brought it out. With these unexpected earnings I hailed the ice-cream man again, who by now had made it all the way across town from our house, and this time bought
two
Fudg-sicles, one for me, one for Skip. Then, for a nickel, because the driver let Skip ride free, we boarded the new city bus on Jefferson Street and rode in much excitement and pride, since the town had never had a bus line before, up Main and Canal and Brickyard Hill and the boulevard and down Canal to Main again: the limits of our world.
Now we went to my fathers office, where I experimented for a while with his typewriter; then on to the radio station to read the news coming in from all the worlds capitals on the teletype and to hear the announcers promote the virtues of various insecticides and fertilizers and a spectacular locally made patent medicine that cured everything from gallstones to summer itch; then to the offices of the newspaper to observe that weeks issue coming off the flatbed press; and next to the ice house, where on especially scalding days the boy who worked there allowed us to spend a few minutes in the room where they made ice, a dark, frigid, timeless chamber a universe removed from the blazing summer world outside. There was a cotton auction taking place at the auction center, the first of the year, and we watched that for a few minutes: the staccato warble of the auctioneer, the men in khakis milling around in clusters, discussing the quality of that summers product. Then to the Armenians to watch him
make bread, and to the Italians to watch him make coffee, and to Gregorys Funeral Home to watch a funeral procession get started, and to the courthouse to watch part of a trial from an empty balcony, and to the Catholic church to look into the windows and get scared. Once Father Hunter himself caught us at one of the windows and gave us a tour inside: the unfamiliar statuary, the alien baptistery the faint incense odor. Then to a big open field right in the middle of town to play among the rows of cotton bales waiting to be hauled up to Memphis on the train. Then on to the Ricks Memorial Library, where the ancient ladies permitted Skip to go to sleep under the long oaken table in the reading room while I read the latest serials in
Open Road for Boys.
Then up to the firehouse to visit the firemen, playing dominoes while listening to a ballgame, who in their gregarious indomitability had put aside their embarrassment over the fact that the fire-house itself had partially burned because of faulty electrical wiring the previous summer, and who more often than not gave me a Nehi Strawberry and Skip a nibble of ham or hard-boiled egg. Finally, on the way home, we might stop at Bubba's, who would by now be back from weighing cotton at his fathers plantation, and we might bake some more oatmeal cookies using our standard recipe of castor oil, milk of magnesia, and Skip's dog-worming medicine, then gift wrap them and put them on some mean old mans front porch.