Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

“I didn't stay in school; I was kept in.”

“Well, you say you was, but I don't have to believe it, do I?” Swatty said. “I don't have to believe everything you say just because I'm—because I'm in your yard, do I?”

Well, I saw Swatty wanted a fight, and I wanted a fight anyway. I felt like it. So I said; “Who are you calling a liar?”

I went up close to him, and he went up close to me; and then I pushed him and he pushed me back; and then I hit him and he hit me back. And when he had me down and asked me if I had had enough and got off of me, we went ahead with the capstan. I wasn't hurt anywhere except on the inside of my cheek, where a tooth cut it.

The capstan was a good one. Swatty showed how it worked, and pushed the pole around, and it worked fine. So then I got my sled out of the barn, where it had been since last winter, and we took turns being pulled on the sled. So then we wished we had a house to move, but there wasn't any house or building we dared move. I bet we could have done it. So we looked for something we couldn't move without a capstan, so we could use the capstan to move it. There is no use having a capstan if you haven't anything to do with it. You might just as well not have made one. So I said:

“I'll tell you! Let's pull up the old stump that's in our front yard!”

“All right—let's!” Swatty said.

We had a lot of trees in our yard—a big silver poplar in the back yard that was twice as big around as a barrel, and a yellow-mellow apple, and a Benoni apple, and a black-heart cherry, and a row of pines leading down to the gate, and big maples inside the fence, and maybe some more. There were trees all over town, lots of them, and you would have thought there had always been trees, but I guess that isn't so. People planted them. When people came to Riverbank and made a town of it, they planted the trees because there were none when they came, and I guess they liked it better with trees growing than when it was all bare. I know my grandmother did.

My grandmother was an old, old woman, and she lived with us because the house had been built by my grandfather, and my grandfather had planted the trees. That was a long time before I was ever born. We called my grandmother “Ladylove,” because I guess that is what my grandfather called her. Nobody ever called her anything else but Ladylove, not “Gran'ma” or anything like that.

I guess nobody ever loved trees the way she loved them. I guess she was always sorry she had come away from Pennsylvania where there are lots of trees and hills. Sometimes, early in the morning, she would come out on the porch and look up and say, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills!” and then she would sigh and shake her head. That was because there was no hills in Riverbank when she lifted? up her eyes from our porch, and I guess she was thinking of the hills in Pennsylvania, because when she was a girl and lived there, there were always hills to lift up her eyes to—hills that were covered with trees.