Tales from a Free-Range Childhood Page 5

  As soon as Joe and I started up the stairs, I knew that this was going to be worth it. He did not even want to go up there. “Why can’t I sleep downstairs with Grandma and Granddaddy?” he objected.

  “Because”—I had already thought through this—“you are a big boy. Big boys sleep upstairs. Come on. I am going to take good care of you!”

  His eyes got bigger and bigger every time we climbed another step.

  We got to the top, and I shined the flashlight all around the long room so he could see all that was up there.

  “Are we going to sleep together?” he asked, hoping.

  “No! You are a big boy! You don’t need anyone to sleep with you. You will be fine. Remember, you were the one who wanted to stay in the first place.”

  He whimpered agreement.

  “Here is the plan. This bed right here, near the steps, is my bed. This is where I sleep because I am in charge, and I can watch the steps in case anything goes wrong. Now, for you, the best bed in the whole house is that bed back there by the back wall. I don’t think many people ever go back there and sleep in it. It is fresh and good. You will like it back there.”

  Joe was so scared to go to the back of the room that I had to take him back there with the flashlight and hold it for him to get his clothes off and get into bed. Then I told him good night and made my way back to the bed at the other end of the room. Now, it was time to stay awake and wait for the wind to blow. It did not take long.

  Gradually, the wind came slipping around the corner of the house. It got stronger and bolder. Then it happened: Skreeek, skreeek, skreeek!

  “What’s that?” Joe wailed.

  “What’s what?” I replied innocently. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “That little screeching noise. It sounds like something is right through the wall!” He was scared.

  “Oh! They must be coming!” This was going to be good.

  “What?”

  “The little critters!” I was trying not to sound tickled.

  “What little critters?”

  I had had a full year to think about this, so I was ready to make it really good. “Little critters who live out in the woods. They are scaly and hairy at the same time. They are not very big. Five or six of them could fit under your bed. You hear them climbing up the wall outside because they have sharp claws instead of fingernails.”

  Joe was listening to every word. “What are they going to do?”

  “I think they are looking for a little hole in the wall.”

  “What for?”

  Suddenly, I got a new idea! “They are hungry.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “I’ve heard that they like tender meat. I’ve heard that they eat the meat off of your legs and then suck all the blood out of you while you are trying to run away on the bare bones!” Even I knew that this was over the edge.

  For the next twenty minutes or so, the only sound I could hear was my little brother sobbing and wailing. The only reason that Grandma could not hear him was that his head was deeply buried away under the covers of the bed, as he tried to be so far out of sight that the little critters could not eat him.

  Finally, he cried until no more sound would come out. It got so quiet that I thought he might have actually fallen asleep. Then I heard another distinct sound. It was the Drip, drip, drip, drip sound of water.

  Then I realized what was happening. He could not hold it as long as I could, and he had so totally wet the bed that it had gone through the feather mattress and was now flooding down into the floor. I did not sleep much after that. I knew that there would be payment time in the morning.

  When morning came, there was nothing in the world that could have stopped the story he told Grandma. She listened as I emerged as the main character in Joe’s story of the long night before.

  When he was all finished, she looked at me and called me the same thing Mama called me when she was mad. “Well, mister, you have a few things to do.”

  There were three.

  I had to take my brother around to the back of the house and show him the big maple tree and promise him that there were no little critters back there or anywhere at all in the woods.

  Then I had to give him my dry clothes. Since we had stayed without preparation, I had to spend two days with no underwear until Mama came back to get us on Sunday. It was not pleasant.

  I also had to clean up the floor under the bed and pull off all the covers. Grandma helped me pull the feather mattress out into the sunshine for it to dry. It dried, but when we put it back and I had to make up the bed, it still had a memorable smell.

  Once I got that done, I thought everything was over. I was wrong. We had another night to spend before returning home on the next day. When it came to be time for bed, Grandma walked the two of us upstairs. When we got there, her new announcement came: “Joe, I want you to sleep here in the bed at the top of the stairs. That way, you can call me if you have any trouble.”

  Then she looked at me. “And you, mister, since you think that the bed at the end of the room is the best bed, I think you should sleep back there.”

  “It stinks!” The words came out before I even thought about what I was saying.

  “Good! So does what you did. You can sleep back there, and maybe the smell will help you remember how you treated your brother, and you will not do that again.”

  Chapter 6

  BOYS ARE SMARTER?

  After that first time Joe and I stayed together at Grandma’s house, there was no problem in our being there together ever again. I had learned good lessons about what “take care of” actually meant, and Mama and Grandma knew that I could now forever be trusted with him. There were hardly any new trips there alone. From that time on, I was stuck with my brother.

  The following summer, when I was nine and he was approaching seven, a new opportunity came. Mother again made the announcement: “Boys, get your stuff together. Your grandmother and granddaddy want both of you to come for a week. Tomorrow is Friday. I will take you out there, and you will not have to come back home until the next Friday.” As happy as we were to hear this plan, Mama somehow sounded even happier.

  The following afternoon, we climbed into the Plymouth with her. We each had our own grocery-bag suitcase filled with all the clothes and other things we needed for the week. Joe was even taking his very own flashlight.

  When we got to Grandma’s house, there was another surprise awaiting us. Two of our cousins, Andy and Kay, were going to be there at the same time. There would be four of us to play together for an entire parentless week.

  Andy and Kay were our nearest cousins, both in age and in where we lived. Their mother was our aunt Eddie, Mama’s next younger sister. They lived only seven or eight miles from us out at Jonathan’s Creek and were even closer to Grandma’s house than we were.

  Kay was ten years old, I was nine, Andy was eight, and Joe was nearly seven. We were set. Four cousins—three boys and one girl. This was the setup for the week.

  The very first day we were there, the three of us who were boys isolated ourselves from Kay and would not play with her. She complained first to us, then to Grandma. Grandma’s advice was simply, “Work it out.”

  Three boys had no interest in working it out. Our main activity that day was writing a special song to sing to Kay. We worked hard on it, and when we got it just right, we began to sing it to her over and over again:

  Boys are smarter than girls are,

  Boys are smarter than girls are,

  Boys are smarter than girls are!

  That was the entire first verse. When we finished the first verse, we went on to the second verse:

  Boys are smarter than girls are,

  Boys are smarter than girls are,

  Boys are smarter than girls are!

  There were more than two hundred verses to our song, and every one of the verses was just the same as every other. We loved it! Kay got so mad that she puffed up and turned red. She could not cat
ch us, however, because we all ran from her in different directions.

  After this kind of play went on for a day or two, Grandma was beginning to get tired of us. Suddenly, it was Monday morning. At breakfast, she made an announcement: “Today, children, is going to be a good day. Today is the day that the bookmobile comes from the library in town. Today, you may all go out to meet the bookmobile and check out books. That should keep you happy and occupied for the rest of the week.”

  The bookmobile was a little green panel truck with sides that opened up, revealing built-in shelves of traveling books. It came from the Haywood County Library in Waynesville. Every week, there was a schedule for travel all over the county to serve people who had no cars and had no way to get to town to check out books. We loved the bookmobile. It was summertime, a time when reading was encouraged at the library. And the summertime book limit was ten books per person. The four of us were going to end up with forty books for the week.

  There was only one hardship: the bookmobile stopped up at the main road where Grandma and Granddaddy’s farm road turned off at Rush Fork Gap. To get there, you had to walk a long mile back up the rough farm road to the paved road, then you had to carry the books all the way back.

  Forty books was a number that we could not possibly successfully carry that mile back to the house. We complained to Grandma.

  “I have already thought about that,” she said. “The solution is on the way.” She then went into a storage shed behind the house and came out with a little wooden wagon that Granddaddy had made for our mothers when they were children.

  “Here, take this. You should be able to haul all your books home at one time. But you have to be careful with it. Your granddaddy made it, and both of your mothers played with it when they were little. I don’t want any harm to come to it. Now, which one of you is smart enough to pull the wagon carefully?”

  Smart enough! We had just heard the magic theme word of our song! The three boys immediately started singing, “Boys are smarter than girls are!”

  With that, Grandma made her decision. She gave the wagon to the one girl, Kay, and we had to follow as we watched her pull the wagon up the road. We did all we could to annoy her, kicking up dust, sticking sticks under the wheels, actually sitting down in the wagon like she was going to give us a free ride the rest of the way. Kay was not a happy girl when we arrived at the waiting place for the bookmobile.

  The little green panel truck arrived. Miss Margaret Boyd was in charge of the bookmobile while school was out for the summer. We all knew her, and she was actually Andy and Kay’s aunt on the other side of the family. She opened up the sides of the truck and helped us reach the books we wanted. In no time, we had forty books checked out and loaded onto the little wooden wagon.

  When we started back down the rough road, a problem developed. The little wagon had solid wheels, and it had very low sides on the wagon bed. With the load of forty library books, every time one of the wheels hit a big rock in the road, about half of the books would slide off the side of the wagon and land on the ground. The only way we could figure out to handle it was for me to get on one side of the wagon and Joe to get on the other side of the wagon and hold the books in place with our hands every time it came to a rocky place. It did work, but it left Andy wandering around with nothing to do.

  We were about halfway back to the house when the road passed beside a big barn where Granddaddy fed his cows in the wintertime. Andy was poking around the front of the barn, and he happened to see a corncob on the ground. All the corn had been shelled from it; it was simply a bare, empty corncob that was minding its own business.

  Andy reported later that he had heard the corncob speak to him. He told us that it spoke to him and clearly said, “Throw me!” So he picked up the corncob and threw it at his sister. He missed, and the corncob fell beyond her on the ground.

  He then went over to where the corncob had landed so he could pick it up and throw it again. That is when he discovered that the corncob had not landed on the ground. No, it had stuck up right in the middle of a pile of brownish stuff that one of Granddaddy’s cows had deposited on the ground.

  So Andy reached down, grabbed the clean end of the corncob, stirred it around a bit, then pulled it out and again threw it at Kay. This time, his aim was perfect. He hit her square between the shoulders.

  All of a sudden, all of us began to notice things we had not noticed before. Right there in front of the big cow barn, there was a gigantic pile of corncobs, and Granddaddy’s cows had been almost everywhere. In no time, a full-scale battle broke out.

  We all understood that battles are pointless unless you have opponents and sides. So we divided ourselves into two armies. One army was made up of three boys. The other army was totally composed of one girl. The fight was under way.

  We would grab the corncobs from the big pile by the barn, swirl them in the cow-pie ammo, and be ready to throw. The three of us boys surrounded Kay and threw at her from all sides while she desperately tried to grab anything to throw back at us. We did not even realize that, encircling her, when we missed, we most of the time then hit one another. In no time, we were all a terrible mess.

  Soon, our battle degenerated into laughter. All four of us got the silly giggles. We had never made such an overall delightful mess. Andy and Joe and Kay and I all four staggered around laughing until we were crying and falling on the ground. Kay laughed harder than anyone.

  Kay was laughing so hard that, as she once bent over, she split her pants. At that moment, for her, nothing in the world was funny anymore. The other three of us thought that this was funnier than ever. We were out of control.

  Kay started trying to run backwards down the road, holding her split pants together, hoping she could get to Grandma’s house and escape from us. We followed her, continuing to toss the last of the corncobs as we went. She was calling all of us a variety of interesting names along the way.

  When we got close to Grandma’s house, she was out on the front porch sweeping. She stopped sweeping and stood there, watching our scene with amused amazement. As Kay arrived, Grandma asked her, “Oh, little sister, what in this world happened to you?”

  Kay told her the entire story, with three boys as the guilty characters.

  With no bathroom, there was no easy way for us to clean ourselves up. Grandma herself took care of that. After our clothes were removed and discarded, we were each subjected to a cold-water-in-the-tin-tub bath with our grandmother scrubbing us using a brush so rough you could have taken the paint off a car with it. The bath itself was serious punishment.

  While we were getting into new and dry clothes, I heard her ask Kay, “Why do you even play with those mean little boys?”

  The answer was simple: “They are the only things here to play with.”

  “Then,” Grandma smiled, “you are going to have to get smart enough to take care of yourself!”

  When we were all settled, other questions came: “Children, I thought you went to get library books. Did you? Where are they, and where is my little wagon?”

  We had totally forgotten about the library books. Heading back up the road to where the wagon had been abandoned, we discovered what had happened. The little wagon, with forty library books falling off the sides, had been right in the middle of our battlefield. Many of the books what had been one color when we checked them out had now become a new color. They looked like a terrible mess. We tried to wipe them off on the grass before taking them all down to the house, but they smelled terrible.

  Even Grandma noticed. “I have never read a book before that had a smell to go with it.”

  We hoped it would fade away.

  The rest of the week was calmer. We played each day, and gradually each read most of the books that had been rescued.

  On Friday, a new announcement came from our grandmother: “Today, children, the bookmobile comes back. Since you will be going home before it comes again, I believe that you had better take your books back and turn them
in today. Now, who is smart enough to pull the wagon on the trip back?”

  We could not resist. The three of us boys started instantly singing again, “Boys are smarter than girls are!” We were unstoppable.

  Instead of an objection, we heard a strange sound from Kay in the background. She was whimpering, “They’re right, Grandma. They are smarter than I am. They can just take the old wagon. I am not even smart enough to go back up there with them. They can take it, and I will stay here with you!”

  We felt wonderfully victorious. We had not only won the rights to the wagon, we had disposed of the girl. This would be a very pleasant trip.

  Andy, Joe, and I loaded the books and pulled them all back up the road. We got to the big road just before the bookmobile got there. Our plan was to drop the books into the return box and run.

  We did not get away with that plan. Miss Margaret Boyd knew that something was up, and she collared all three of us. She began to look at the books and smell each of them. The forty books were divided into two piles. Then she pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote our three names at the top. She made a long list on the paper and added a note at the bottom. Then she sealed it in an envelope and told us to take it to our grandmother.

  When we got back to the house, Grandma and Kay were sitting on the porch talking and laughing and stringing beans. We handed the envelope to Grandma. She read us the message inside:

  Dear Zephie,

  When your three grandsons returned their library books, I discovered that twenty-two of them had been damaged beyond repair. I am afraid that they must be paid for so that they may be replaced.

  It took me fourteen weeks of my total allowance to pay my part of the bill. I do not know how long it took Andy, but Joe was broke at least as long as I was.

  And Kay, the one girl . . . she did not have to pay a cent. Her name was not on the letter because she had been “not smart enough” to go with us to return the books.

  After supper that night, when the three boys were bringing in wood for the cookstove and Kay was helping Grandma finish washing the dishes, we could hear the two of them softly singing together over and over again: