Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

That was the way my grandmother Ladylove was, as old as old, and nobody ever loved trees the way she did. She liked boys too. She liked all the boys that ever came to play with me. She was the only one that never scolded me. Plenty of times when we had fresh cookies and nobody was to touch a single one until the next day, Ladylove would see us playing in the yard and she would come out with a china plate with a napkin on it piled up with cookies. Then she would say a verse of poetry and give us the cookies and go into the house just as happy as could be. Sometimes she would forget she had brought us any and would come right out with another plateful and say the poetry over again and be just as happy over that one as she was over the other.

When I said, “Let's pull the old stump that's in the front yard,” I didn't think anything but that it would be a good thing to pull. I didn't even know it had ever been a tree; it had always been a stump since I was a little bit of a kid, anyway. It wasn't much of a stump any more. It was only about as high as my knee, and right at the ground it was only as big around as a man's knee. Once I had a little hatchet, but it wouldn't cut much, but I chopped the stump with it. I could only chop off a little splinter at a time, and I never got much off. It only made the stump raggedy at the top. It was just an old stump that wasn't worth anything and wasn't any good to anybody.

Swatty and Bony and me started to move the capstan into the front yard where the stump was. It was so heavy we could hardly wiggle it, so after we had moved it an inch or two I said:

“Aw! we can't move it!”

So Bony said the same thing; but Swatty stood and looked at the capstan awhile, and then he said: “Yes, we can move it, too! We can make it move itself.”

“How can we?”

“You come ahead and I'll show you,” he said; and he did. He drove a stake into the ground about as far as our capstan rope would reach, and fastened the rope to it. Then he made Bony turn the capstan pole, and that wound up the rope, and the capstan just had to move toward the stake. When we got it to the stake we knocked the stake out with an axe and put it in again farther along. That way we moved the capstan to where we wanted it. Swatty thought of how to do it.

So then we had the capstan in the front yard, and we tied the rope around the old stump and tried to pull it, but the capstan just moved up to the stump. So Swatty said he knew what was the matter and that we were all crazy because we didn't think of it before, and that all the house-movers, when they were moving houses, drove stakes in front of their capstans to keep them from moving, and stakes behind them to keep them from tipping up.

We got some stakes and did it. Swatty drove the stakes because he was strongest, and anyway, he knew how to swing an axe, because he had often studied how the circus roughnecks swung them. Anyway he said he had. He said he had sat for over an hour and just studied how they swung axes at stakes and that then he asked one roughneck to let him try it, and he did, and he drove over a hundred. He said that while he was driving stakes Mr. Barnum came out of the big tent and watched him, and that he liked the way he was driving stakes so well that he offered him a hundred dollars a year just to drive stakes for the circus. So I asked Swatty if he took up the offer, and he said he did. He said he went with the circus all over the United States, driving stakes, and that he drove so many he got so he could drive a stake with one blow. So then he said he went to Mr. Bamum and asked him to pay him two hundred dollars a year, but Mr. Bamum said he couldn't afford it. He said Swatty was worth two hundred dollars a year but the show couldn't afford it. So, Swatty said, he came home. That's what Swatty said, but I didn't hardly believe it. But, anyway, we had to let him drive the stakes.

Well, the stump didn't come out as easy as we had thought it would. It was pretty rotten, and it pulled off piece by piece, but the inside was tough. Our rope was old, too, and broke nearly every time we tautened it. But it was good fun, anyway. We took turns turning the capstan pole. One would turn and the other would keep the rope on the stump and the other would be boss and shout, “Whoa! Get up! Whoa there, you!” A lot of boys came and looked through the picket fence and wished we would let them come in and help us capstan the stump, but we wouldn't. What's the use of having something somebody else hasn't got, if you are going to let them have it too?