Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

But before the thaw comes the snow blows off some of the smooth places and banks up against the rough places on the ice in drifts. The river don't freeze over all at once—the ice floats down and jams and stops and the bare places between freeze over; but when the ice jams, it crumples up on the edges and makes ridges, and it is where the ridges are that the snow banks up into drifts. Sometimes the drifts are all around a smooth sheet of ice, and then when the snow begins to melt, the smooth ice turns into a sort of pond, and maybe the water on top of the ice is an inch deep and maybe it is more.

Here and there there are air holes, because I guess a river has to breathe like anybody else and the air holes are where it breathes. They are different sizes.

Well, the road across the river on the ice is always crooked. The farmers over in Illinois make the road to bring over cordwood and hay and stuff, because they can bring it over on the ice free and it costs twenty-five cents a load when the ferry is running.

So the first farmer that dares drive across on the ice starts out from the Illinois shore, and he starts straight, but pretty soon he has to curve around a drift, and then he has to curve around an air hole, and then he has to go around a piece of ice that looks thin, and by the time he has got to town he has made a crooked road; and the next farmer drives in the same path, because the first farmer's horses' shoes have roughed it up a little and made it easier to travel.

So that is how the road gets made, and before very long it gets to be quite a road. It gets dark and dirty from the horses and the dirt off the cordwood and maybe some coal the farmers take home, and there are wisps of hay all along, rubbed off loads when they passed other teams.

By the time the thaw comes, a good deal of the river in front of town gets so you know how it looks, just like the town itself. The wood road goes zigzagging across, and maybe—if it is a cold winter—the trotting-horse men have a speed track on the ice that is different from the wood road and marked off to show a mile. Wagon loads of waste stuff get dumped on the ice in piles and maybe a dozen or two dozen dead horses. You get so you know how it looks, and you get to feeling as if the river had always been frozen over and had always looked like that. Maybe you have names for things, so anybody like Swatty or Bony knows what you mean when you say: “You know, where the wood road comes nearest to the horseshoe air hole.”

Well, it was pretty mushy when we started across the river. It was warm, too, warm enough to make us sweat; but there was a good breeze blowing from the Illinois shore and it wasn't as warm as it might have been. But, anyway, it was warm. Swatty showed us where to go. He went first and we went behind him, and pretty soon we were far off the wood road because wherever there was a drier place he went that way.

When we got out toward the middle of the river, away from the town dirt, I wished we hadn't come. Out there the ice hadn't been cut up by being skated on, and there were whole big places where the ice was perfectly smooth and green and clear, and with the snow water on top of it we couldn't tell whether it was ice or air hole. We had to walk on the snow close to the ridges, because there we knew there was ice under us, even if we did wade through slush up to our knees. It was scary enough for anybody and Bony began to cry.

I guess we would have gone back if it hadn't been for Swatty, and even Swatty didn't tell Bony to shut up and stop crying. I guess Swatty felt pretty scared himself. You couldn't see anybody on the ice anywhere; we were the only ones. I guess everybody was afraid to go on the ice, it was getting so rotten. That's what I thought then, but it wasn't the reason; Swatty knew the real reason, but he didn't tell us then because he was afraid we would be more scared than we were. Nobody was on the ice because they were afraid it might go out any minute.

So all Swatty did was to say, “Hurry up!” because he was afraid if we didn't hurry up maybe the ice would go out before we got across, and nobody likes to get drowned in ice water.