I
I straddled, precariously balanced, atop a seven-foot fence marking the northern boundary of the little Vermont school yard. As this was the opening morning for the September term, I had left home painfully dressed in the full armor of country-village scholarship. Already the puckering-string of my blouse was broken and my new dollar-and-a-quarter boots were hot upon my feet. No matter! Noisily on the philosophical old boards I whacked a barrel stave. I had aspirations toward making the lower world of pinafored humanity remark nervously of my valor and horrible propensities for breaking an arm. But I did not address that pinafored world directly. No such aplomb is possessed by a youngster of eight.
A new boy edged his way into the yard twenty minutes before the bell rang and moved along my fence. He concentrated upon tallying its knotholes. I noted that he was a stranger and immediately took his measure.
“’Lo!” I greeted him.
“’Lo, yourself!” he responded.
“What’s yer name?” I demanded, piqued.
“Name, name, Puddin’ Tame; ask me again and I’ll tell yer the same!”
“Aw, don’t get fresh!” I advised him. “I could ‘do’ you with one hand tied behind me—if I wanted.”
“My ma licks me if I fight—when I’m dressed up. If it wasn’t for that, you couldn’t.” And the new boy looked at me gladiatorially, expecting me to believe this bravado without a question.
Incipient hostilities were halted by the appearance—or condition—of the new boy’s face. Twenty-four years have passed since that morning. I have beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock to dry has one human being looked into the features of another, regardless of age, and beheld such freckles.
I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all computation. The Lord might have known the number of hairs in his head, but there He stopped. It would have been hopeless even to try to separate those freckles so to compute them, anyhow.
“Aw, you don’t need to tell me your old name,” I condescended. “You’re one o’ them Forges that’s moved up to Brown’s.”
“Howja guess?”
“I know by your freckles. I heard Lawyer Campbell call your folks ‘them freckled Forges.’ Your ma’s got ’em and so’s your pa. You’ve all got ’em—like measles ’n itch.”
Instead of growing more bellicose, the new boy became apologetic.
“Yeah, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa ain’t. Anyhow, I can’t help it. I got a torpedoed liver.”
“You gotta what?”
“A torpedoed liver!”
“What’s a torpedoed liver?”
He tried to explain. In the light of a maturer understanding, I assume he meant a torpid liver. But I was little wiser than he that morning, so one liver was as good as another.
“Year, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa leaves. Ma says all us Forges has got too much iron in our blood and it makes us rust all over, outside.”
“Iron in yer blood!” I looked at the Forge boy incredulously. Was he spoofing me?
“Howja know?” I demanded. “Can yer hear it clank together?”
I had a mental suggestion of sundry billets and bars of cold steel, wagon springs, old horseshoes, machine castings circulating through the new boy’s system and wondered how he managed it.
“Naw,” he went on. “’Tain’t that kind of iron. It’s all melted or ground up to powder or sumpin’. I ain’t never heard it make no noise, anyway.”
“Maybe we ain’t got no floatin’ iron in our family,” I defended, “but my Aunt Lucy’s got sumpin’ just as good and horrible. She’s got floatin’ ribs, three of ’em. Betcha you ain’t got nobody in your old family with floatin’ ribs.”
It was now the small Forge boy’s turn to show incredulity. And momentarily I exulted.
“But ribs don’t float,” he contradicted. “They’re hitched to yer backbone and run around yer stomach like hoops. I seen a pitcher of a man with his skin off, once. If they was loose and floated, you’d be all flat and hollow and sort of pushed in across your chest.”
“Is that so?” I demanded hotly. “Maybe you know my Aunt Lucy’s shape better’n me!” This stranger asked me to believe he had iron circulating in his system and yet doubted that mere bones could follow suit.
It was true that Aunt Lucy’s irresponsible ribs had given me much perplexity as to just where they floated, or where they would go if they suddenly lost their buoyancy and sank. Still, I knew my claim had a basis in fact. I had overheard too many first-hand testimonials of her abstruse condition from the fearfully and wonderfully unjointed lady herself.
Before I could conjure up more human freaks, however, related to me by facetious Nature, with a diplomacy which has always been charming, young Nathan Forge introduced a new subject.
“We just moved to Brown’s place last month from Gilberts Mills,” he declared. “And we got five bedrooms and a vegetable cellar and cockroaches an’ everything. An’ I got a dog named Ned that don’t get sick when he catches skunks. He caught seven one autumn and brung ’em to me. But one wasn’t shook quite dead yet, and I had to stay in bed a week while they buried my clothes. Pa wanted to bury me, too, but Ma wouldn’t stand for it!”
“That’s nothin’,” I countered. “We gotta cat at our house named Apron-strings ’cause she’s always behind you when you turn ’round. An’ all you gotta do to make her have kittens is watch her! My father says, ‘Look twice at that dratted little beast and she has young all over the place’ He’s goin’ to dig a special well to drown ’em in when he gets time. He said so.”
“We got two wells over to our house already,” Nat retorted,—“one to drink from and one to fish things out of. Campbell’s pants is down the last one.”
“Campbell’s pants!”
“My father said so. Lawyer Campbell come over the day we moved in, to see about the hay. He’d bought some new pants to the Center and had ’em in a bundle. On the way home he missed ’em. When Pa heard, he says to Ma: ‘He might look down that well in the south lot! I’ve fished everything out of it but money!’ he says. ‘Bet I could find Campbell’s pants if I fished long enough.’”
Evidently the Forges occupied exceptionally interesting premises. I congratulated myself that I had been discreet about punching Nat’s jaw. I would cultivate this new boy.
Not once during all this, however, had we looked each other straight in the eye. That is another unethical thing between boys of eight. We went through gyrations with hands, legs, elastic torsos. We kicked at stones in the sand. We pried them loose and threw them. But our faces were always averted.
“Got any brothers or sisters?” I finally demanded.
“Yeah. I gotta sister.”
“Pshaw! How old?”
“Four. But she ain’t no good—only to tag ’round and squeal to Ma when I skip my chores.”
“Sure. I know. Girls always spoil everything. Ain’t it awful?”
“Awful’s no name for it,” agreed Nathan.