Little Britches (31 page)

Father nodded, "That's the one. How do you remember them all, Mame?" I think that pleased her as much as the four dollars a day.

I had gone to school in Littleton about six weeks before I got into any big trouble. The teacher in our room was a widow. She was almost a Mrs. Corcoran kind of woman. I don't think she ever said anything nice if she could find a way to say it mean. The only times she was really pleasant were when Mr. Purdy brought eggs and butter to her. Mr. Purdy was a widower who lived four or five miles up the Platte River, and he used to bring the eggs and butter during school. Sometimes they would stand at the door of the schoolroom for nearly half an hour, whispering and giggling.

Mr. Purdy came to the door one day in February—just after recess—and just after they had put new gravel on the school yard. The yard was wet, and we had all lugged gravel in on the soles of our shoes. When Mr. Purdy had talked with Mrs. Upson for nearly fifteen minutes, one of the boys started to scuff his feet back and forth. Inside of a minute everybody in the room was scuffing, and it sounded like forty steam engines all puffing at once. Mr. Purdy left in a hurry, and Mrs. Upson went flying out after him.

She was back in two minutes with the principal, but the room was as quiet as if it had been empty. The principal was a big, handsome man with wavy brown hair and red cheeks. I don't suppose he was more than a year or so younger than Father— probably thirty-two or three—but he didn't look within ten years of being as old. He stood up in front of the class and clapped his hands, then he said, "I want all the children who scraped their feet to stand up."

Dutch Gunther was the first one up, and his brother, Bill, was right behind him. When I looked around, there were seven of us boys standing—and not a single girl. There must have been thirty of us in the class and, if the principal had bothered to look, he could have seen scratch marks on the floor under every desk. He folded his arms and glared at us for a couple of minutes. Then he said, "I might have known—the worst boys in the whole school! You follow me!"

He marched out of the room like one of the drill sergeants over at Fort Logan, and we marched after him. When we were going through the coat corridor, Dutch whispered back to me, "Don't let him make you holler, Little Britches."

He led us down to a room in the basement, and took a whip off a hook on the wall. It was a mean-looking whip. It was like a bullwhip, except that it was only about a foot and a half long, and it had three cattails at the end. Bill got fourteen licks before he hollered, and three afterwards. I didn't do so well. I had cracked a couple of ribs at the time we lost Fanny, and knobs had grown over the cracks. The first time he swung the whip, the cattails hit right over the knobs, and it felt as if I were being stabbed by a dozen broken bottles.

I thought Mother would go wild when I got home. She would have gone right over to the schoolhouse if I hadn't told her it would only make it worse for me. She washed the places where the cracker cut through my skin, put some salve on, and put me to bed. Afterwards she brought me up some brandy with sugar and water, but it didn't taste as good as it used to, and my back was so sore I had to lie on my stomach.

She must have told Father as soon as he got home from work. He hadn't been in the house more than a few minutes when I heard him coming up the stairs. After he said, "Hello, Son," he turned down the bedclothes and looked at my back. I couldn't have told by the sound of his voice, or what he said, but I knew he was mad because those muscles at the sides of his jaws were working out and in. After he'd looked at all the welts, he said, "Gave you a good one, didn't he? Well, you've been hurt worse than this and got over it—I guess you'll live. Let's get some clothes on and go down to supper."

While I was dressing, he sat on the edge of my bed, and said, "You know, Son, sometimes a fellow has to take a licking for doing the right thing. A licking only lasts a short while, even if it's a hard one, but failing to do the right thing will often make a mark on a man that will last forever. Let's go down and eat."

Father's house was pretty nearly finished. At supper he said there would only be about another week's work, but a man had come to see him about building another, and he was going to start on it the tenth of March. He talked more at supper than I had heard him for a long time, but he didn't say a word about my getting a whipping at school. Grace started to say something about it, but he kept right on talking about the house, so she had to keep still.

Mother sent us all to bed as soon as the dishes were done, but I couldn't go to sleep. I must have lain there about an hour when I heard Father go out the front door. It was about an hour before I heard him come back.

He called me to get up at the regular time in the morning, and when we were eating breakfast I noticed that his hands were all swollen up and dark-looking across the backs. I wondered what he had been doing, because I was sure I would have noticed if they had been swollen like that when he was talking to me the night before. I thought I could figure it out if I could find out where he had been, so I asked him if I didn't hear him go out somewhere. He was wiping syrup off his plate with a piece of hot biscuit, and said, "Oh, I just had to go see a fellow about a dog."

Mother looked up quickly and said, "I think you got it backwards," but Father just kept wiping up syrup.

Grace had gone back after school and got my coat and cap, and Mother didn't say anything about not going to school, so I went. I think I must have gone past the principal's office seven or eight times that day, but I never saw him. The door of his office was always open but he was never in there. He wasn't there for several more days, either. The kids said somebody had given him an awful beating, but I guess I was the only one who ever had an idea who the "somebody" was. I never even told Grace.

Father finished his house on the fifth of March. I remember the date as well as if it had been yesterday. Ever since we had moved to Littleton, Father had been planning to fix Mother's chicken house, but he was never home in daylight, except on Sundays. The first day after his job was finished he started on our chicken house. I went out to help him as soon as I got home from school.

He must have been thinking about the licking I got from the principal, because I had only been working a little while when he said, "You're getting to be quite a man now, Son. You're well past eleven years old, and you can do quite a few things better than a good many men. I'm going to treat you like a man from now on. I'm never going to spank you again, or scold you for little things, and some day it's going to be 'Moody and Sons, Building Contractors.'"

I HAD never known Lady's oldest colt much till we moved to Littleton, because Father had always pastured her away from our place. After we moved to Littleton he began gentle-breaking her on Sundays. There really wasn't much to it. She was a beautiful thousand-pound sorrel, and as gentle as Lady. By the time Father finished his house-building job he could drive her almost anywhere.

The morning after we fixed the chicken house he was talking about her at breakfast. Lady hadn't had a colt the year before and wasn't going to have one that year. Mother said it was a shame not to be raising a colt after the good price we got for Lady's last one. Father looked up and said, "What would you think about Babe? I've been thinking I might drive her up to Fort Logan this afternoon. Judge Rucker's got a horse up there that I think might make a good husband for her."

I hadn't been home from school more than five minutes that afternoon before Doctor Stone brought Father. They were leading Babe behind the buggy, and there were wire cuts on her shoulder and off foreleg. Father had court plaster on the side of his face, and his arms weren't in the sleeves of his coat. When he got out of the buggy I could see that his leg was bandaged. His overalls were torn half off one leg and the bandage showed through.

Mother, Grace, and I ran out to meet them. We were scared to death, but Father grinned and said it was nothing; that he had just been scratched a little. Doctor Stone didn't talk that way, though. He said it was lucky Father was still alive. After he and Mother had put Father to bed, they came out into the kitchen, and Doctor Stone told us what had really happened.

There were big iron gates at the entrance to Fort Logan, and brick walls ran back both ways. Anyone driving on the road outside the wall couldn't see a team coming out of the Fort till it came through the gates. Father and Babe had been almost up to the entrance when a horseless carriage came racing out of the Fort. Babe had never seen one before and reared. The man who was driving the machine tried to stop it, but it went into a fit of backfiring. Babe whirled off the road and plunged into a gully with a barbed-wire fence running through it. Father was thrown out when the buggy upset, but jumped up and flung his weight onto Babe's head, so as to keep her from destroying herself in the wire. He was badly bruised and torn before he quieted her.

That summer on the ranch, without any crops and only a few days of haying, had been good for Father's lungs. Until the night he was hurt, I don't think I had heard him cough in months, but that night I could hear him long after I had gone to bed. It must have been that he got his chest squeezed when he was wrestling with Babe down there in that gully.

Father called me as usual the next morning, but he looked bad when I came down to breakfast. Where it wasn't skinned, his face was gray, and he had a little hacking cough that sounded as if it started clear in the bottom of his lungs. It was one of those cold drizzly March mornings, and Mother wanted him to go back to bed, but he wouldn't. He said he had promised the undertaker he would dig a grave that day, and it might be his only chance to build a house that would last until doomsday. Mother didn't like it, and said that was no time for banter, because if he worked out in the rain in his condition, he might be digging his own grave. Father chuckled a little when he got up from the table, and he rumpled my hair. "We Moodys are tough fellows, aren't we, Son?" he said. Before he went out, he laid his hand on Mother's shoulder and said, "Don't worry, Mame, I'm not sick; I'm just scratched up a little. This job will only take half a day, and there's three dollars in it."

The job did take longer than half a day. I had been out of school an hour before Father got home. Mother had him put dry clothes on right away, and made him drink some brandy and hot water. I don't know whether it was the brandy that made Father talk that night, or whether he had a premonition. He had never told us youngsters anything about his boyhood, or things he had done before we were old enough to remember. That night we sat at the supper table for nearly two hours while Father told us about the little backwoods farm in Maine where he was brought up by his deaf-mute father and mother. And about going to visit his uncle's family when he was eight years old, so that he could learn to talk with his mouth as well as his fingers. He told us about grafting apple boughs onto birch trees, and about lowering himself down into the well so he could see the stars in the daytime. But he didn't tell us anything about being the New England bicycle-racing champion—Mother told me about that afterwards.

I heard him coughing every time I woke up during that night, and the next morning he stayed in bed. The doctor from Littleton came that evening and said Father had pneumonia. He was so sick that the doctor would only let us go in to see him once during the next week. Mother had sent us all to take a long walk on Sunday afternoon so as to get us out from underfoot. She had spent almost every hour with Father since he was taken sick, and her nerves were so unstrung that we irritated her.

When we came home from our walk, the doctor said we could each go in and see Father for just a minute. Grace went first, and then it was my turn. He looked so bad it frightened me when I went into the room. I couldn't think of a thing to say, and I guess Father was so sick he couldn't either. I had found a coil of inch rope lying beside the road when we had been walking, and had brought it home. I could only think to tell Father about the rope. He raised his hand up a little, and I took it. His voice was almost a whisper, and he said, "You take care of it, partner, you may need it."

That was the last thing I ever heard him say. Afterwards Mother told me he had asked for me his last day, but the doctor wouldn't let her send to school for me.

When we got out of school at noon—ten days after Father was taken sick—Hal was waiting for us with a note. The doctor had sent a nurse to help Mother for the past few days and the note was in her handwriting. It said for us to go to the Roberts' house for our lunch, and not to come home. They lived a block nearer the schoolhouse than we did, and were good neighbors to us. They had the only telephone in the neighborhood and, while we were eating, the nurse came in to use it. I think it was Cousin Phil she called. After she'd told who she was, she said, "We've got to have a tank of oxygen out here right away. Yes. Yes, it's got to get here right away if it's going to do any good."

Hal was waiting for us with another note when school let out. That one named different houses for us to go to until Mother sent for us. I was to go to the Roberts'. When I got there Mrs. Roberts gave me a piece of bread and jam. I was standing just outside the parlor door eating it when the nurse came in. She didn't say anything to Mrs. Roberts or to me, but walked right across the parlor and cranked the telephone. I thought it might be something more about oxygen, so I stepped over where I could hear better. The nurse spoke a number into the telephone, and in a minute she told who she was and said she was talking for Mother. Then she said, "Her husband died about twenty minutes ago. You better pick the body up right away. I want to get rid of it as soon as we can; her nerves are going all to pieces."

It was too big for me to take all at once like that. I didn't feel like crying—I didn't feel like anything. My brain just stopped working for a minute or two. When it started up again it was going round and round like a stuck gramophone cylinder, and was saying over and over, "So long, partner; so long, partner; so long, partner."