“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!”