Harris and me : a summer remembered

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Harris and Me

lasted a short time, and it grew shorter as time progressed until they were pretty much mean whenever they were conscious.

Home became, finally, something of an impossibility for me and I would go to stay with relatives for extended periods of time.

By the time I was eleven I had stayed with several uncles, my grandmother, and an old Norwegian bachelor farmer who thought God lived in the haymow of his barn, where he was afraid to go without wearing a feed sack over his head. He told me God couldn't see through feed sacks and if God couldn't see you, you never died.

I had many uncles and shirttail relatives and when I was eleven a kind of rotation dumped me with Harris and his family.

The sheriff sent a deputy to pick me up and we left for the Larsons' place in late afternoon. They lived on a farm forty miles north of the town I lived in, yet it might as well have been on a different planet. The ride took about an hour and a half but it went through such varied terrain that before we had gone five miles I was in despair. For two or three of those miles the car moved past farm country that still seemed rather settled. Frequently there were tractors working in the fields and people who waved cheerfully, walking down the sides of the road. But soon

the trees closed in, closer and thicker until they were a wall on either side and the road and car were enveloped in a curtain of green darkness. And there were no more open fields or driveways, just dirt tracks that disappeared into the forest and brush. It was like going off the edge of the earth on those old maps used by early explorers, into places where it said: There Be Monsters Here.

The deputy I was with spit constantly out the side window while extolling the virtues of the car— a 1949 Ford.

"It's got the V-eight," he told me. "Gets you a lot of power, the V-eight." Spit. "You need power for catching criminals while in hot pursuit." Spit.

"You want to be able to move this thing when you go into a hot pursuit situation." Spit.

There was absolutely no break in the forest. Black-green, densely vegetated, the summer northern woods fought right to the shoulder of the asphalt. Indeed, in places the trees came out over the road and made a green tunnel. I kept looking for an indication of life.

"People live here?" I asked finally.

"Sure." Spit. "Must be two, three hundred of 'em scattered around. You know, back in a ways."

The road grew more narrow, closed in until it nearly disappeared ahead of the car, and just when it

seemed the car would have to dive into the trees, the deputy hung a left and the car bounced as we turned onto a dirt road—or, more accurately, a set of ruts.

We drove on this track for some miles—probably seven or eight—and again, just as the car seemed to run out of road, the deputy turned left once more. The tracks were still more narrow and I thought we would surely get stuck in the ruts, but suddenly we exploded out into a large area of cleared land.

"The Larson place," the deputy said.

The cleared land must have been more than half a square mile. It was planted in corn and small grain and looked rich and even. Along one side of the rectangular field lay a half-mile-long driveway, straight along the edge, and we now turned down it.

By this time I was nervous and had trouble sitting still. I had met the Larsons only once, though they were in some distant way related to me, and that had been four years earlier, when I was just seven. I had lived considerably since then—including almost three years in the Philippines where my father had been stationed—and I had almost no memory of how they looked, what they were like. There were four of them, I knew that: Knute, some kind of second uncle; his wife and my second aunt by marriage, Clair,- their daughter, Glennis, who was fourteen; and my second cousin, Harris, who was nine.

I thought of what to do as we moved down the

drive. I had done this many times—been put in new places—and I had devised a method that worked. I pretended to be shy. Actually it was only partly pretending since I had a caution of meeting new people that often translated as flight. But shyness had served me well, and as we approached the house and farm buildings I began to withdraw.

They must have been expecting us because as the deputy worked the Ford down the driveway and we bounced into the yard, they were all standing there, waiting, one next to the other, where the driveway turned and widened next to the house.

The deputy lifted his weight out of the car— holding on to the top of the car door and grunting— and motioned for me to get out the other side.

I held back—the shyness kicking in—but in a moment realized that I would appear ridiculous if I stayed in the car and so got out but stood by the door waiting.

"Well, here he is," the deputy said. "I think we might be a bit early . . ."

His voice was fishing, ending in half a question, which didn't make any sense until my aunt Clair smiled, wiping her hands on her apron—an act I found later she did when worrying or thinking—and said, "Don't worry, Orlo. I made rhubarb pie and it's done. You aren't that early."

The deputy smiled, nodded, and turned back to

me and the car. "Don't hold back that way. Fetch your box and come on."

I still didn't move but Glennis, Harris's sister, who was coltish and smiled with her whole face, came forward and took my box out of the backseat of the car and started for the house with it. It was meant in a helpful way but posed a problem because I had my private stuff in the box. Even that wouldn't have been bad except that part of my private stuff was a collection of "art" photographs that I had bought for seventy centavos in the Philippines from a man on the street in Manila.

In higher circles the pictures would be known as artistic anatomical studies but the man who sold them to me called them "dourty peectures," which seemed far more accurate.

I enjoyed looking at them—being a student of art and at an age when the hormones seemed to dominate my every waking moment—but was fairly certain neither Glennis nor her mother would approve of them. This nervousness was compounded by the fact that the deputy was still there and I had somehow picked up the idea that the pictures were illegal. A mental image of me being arrested in front of all of them for possessing "dourty peectures" overcame my shyness, and I jumped forward and grabbed the box from Glennis.

All this time Harris had been standing, watching,

his hands behind him. I hadn't really looked at him, but when I moved to take the box from Glennis the grown-ups fell in together and started walking toward the house and Harris came up alongside me just as I grabbed the box.

Physically he was of a set piece with Glennis. Blond—hair bleached white by sun—face perpetually sunburned and red with a peeling nose, freckles sprinkled like brown pepper over everything, and even, white teeth, except that when Harris smiled there were two gone from the front. He was wearing a set of patched bib overalls. No shirt, no shoes—just freckles and the bibs, which were so large he seemed to move inside them.

"Hi."

He walked beside me, his hands still to his rear. I would subsequently find that this posture could be dangerous, meant he was hiding something, but I didn't know that this soon so I nodded. "Hi."

"We heard your folks was puke drunks, is that right ?"

"Harris!" Glennis was walking on the other side of me and her voice snapped. "That's not polite, to talk that way."

"Well you can just blow it out your butt, you old cow. You ain't no grown-up to tell me what to do. How the hell am I supposed to know things if I don't go ahead and ask them?"

Glennis was a strapping girl, and she reached across my back and slapped Harris on the side of the head so hard his teeth rattled.

"You watch your tongue with all that swearing— I'll tell the folks and Pa will take a board to you/'

But Harris ignored her—I would find later that getting hit hard by Glennis was a regular part of his life—and asked again, "Well, are they?"

I nodded. "They drink too much."

"Do they see stuff?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean like old man Knutson in town. He's always drunk and pees his pants and he's all the time talking about seeing Jesus in a peach tree." He snorted. "Heck, there ain't a peach tree closer than a thousand miles to here—how can he see Jesus, even if Jesus was dumb enough to stand up in a peach tree? But like that—do your folks see things?"

I shook my head. "They just fight and then they puke."

"Hell, that's nothing. I puke all the time. Once I got the mad croup and I puked green for three, four days. Just as green as grass ..."

We had been walking all this time and had reached the porch. The house was old and needed paint but was clean and looked somehow well cared for, comfortable. There were antlers nailed to the wall under

the porch roof and an old shotgun rested in them and rubber boots were lined up near the door.

Glennis opened the door. "Straight in, then up the stairs."

I moved through the door into a small hallway with stairs at the end, and I climbed them to an unfinished upper floor that had been divided into two large rooms by a wooden wall. Outside it was beginning to become evening and dark, and inside it was hard to see anything at all. There didn't seem to be any electricity.

"I sleep out here," Glennis said, waving a hand at the room at the head of the stairs. "You're in with Harris

She opened the door and I carried the box through into the second room. There was a dormer window to let in some light but it was still dim and seemed raw. The rafters were exposed two-by-fours and the boards of the roof showed, as did the points of the nails that held the shingles. The floor was rough wood, nailed with framing nails.

The dormer window was in the middle and on either side there was a small iron bunk. On each bunk there was a mattress and pillow and quilt done in patchwork colors that didn't seem to make any sense or pattern, one color next to another.

"Yours is on the left." Harris motioned with his chin. "I'm on the right for now."

'Tor now?"

"I go back and forth . . ."

"You switch bunks?"

"Only when I need to."

"Need to?"

He studied me, his hands still behind his back, then he shook his head. "You don't know sheep crap from apple butter, do you? It's my guts. Kids' guts are like sheep guts. If a sheep sleeps on one side too long, all the guts squoosh over and stay there and it can't get up without it falls over. I always sleep facing the window in case there's a fire and so when I feel my guts get to squooshing over I switch bunks and sleep on my other side. See?"

I put my box on the left bunk and sat. "I guess so. Just tell me when we change ..."

The mattress rustled when I sat on it and I poked it with my hand. "It makes a funny sound."

"It's dried corn shucks. These are from last year and getting old so's they don't sink anymore. You ought to hear it when they're new—it's so loud you can't sleep."

There was the sound of an engine and I watched out the window as the deputy backed the car out of the yard and drove off down the driveway. In spite of having done this many times I felt suddenly lost, alone, and leaned forward to watch the car leaving.

"Here."

Harris had moved closer to me and was holding something out in his hand. I turned from the window and looked closely—it seemed to be a green, somewhat slimy ball with legs and eyes. "What is it?"

"It's a frog."

He put it in my hand and I could feel that it was still alive. The legs moved. "What happened to it?"

"I shoved a straw up its butt and blew it up."

"Why?"

"So's it can't dive. You put 'em in the stock tank over by the barn and they float around on the top of the water and can't get down." He smiled. "Later I'll show you how to do it. You got to watch you don't blow too hard or they'll pop on you. I did it once and it took half an hour to get the frog guts out of my hair."

I put the frog on the sill of the dormer window where it rolled gently, its little front legs waving, and the deputy's taillights disappeared down the driveway.

"Doesn't matter—the grown-ups have been coughing for fifteen minutes. Get your butt out of there or Louie will get all the pancakes."

"Louie?" Harris had turned back to his bunk and in one motion jumped into his bib overalls, hooked the suspenders. As previously the bibs were his only clothing. "Who's Louie?"

"He's just Louie. He's an old bugger who lives here and works. You would have met him last night 'cept he took the tractor to town to the beer hall. He came in during the night."

I remembered the night before now. I'd been given a plate of food because they'd already eaten supper and I picked at it in the hissing light of an overhead Coleman lantern without thinking or saying much while Glennis and Clair messed over the sink and stove. Then it was dark and we'd gone to bed. I'd tossed a bit but finally went to sleep, and I now recalled being slightly awakened by the sound of a loud motor coming down the driveway while I slept. A flare of lights passed the window and then nothing.

Harris came to my bed and jerked the covers back. "Get up."

With that he disappeared out the door and I heard his feet slapping down the stairs.

I tried to close my eyes and go back to sleep. It was black-dark outside the window and everything

13

in me wanted, needed sleep. But another pang was there as well—hunger. I hadn't eaten much the night before. And then there was the curiosity as to who/ what Louie was, and I rolled out and put my feet on the floor. It only took a moment to shuck into my jeans and pull a tee shirt on, lace up my tennis shoes, and head downstairs rubbing one hand on the wall to guide my way. But by the time I came out into the kitchen the table in the dining area was set and everybody was getting ready to eat.

As with the previous night the only light was from a Coleman lantern hanging by a wire from the ceiling. It sighed and burbled away, throwing a flat white glare on the table.

Glennis and Clair were at the wood-burning cookstove, turning pancakes. Knute and Harris were sitting at the table. Knute was drinking coffee from a mug, wrapping the cup in a hand that could have provided shade, staring at the table with a glazed early morning look on his face. Harris sat straight up, a fork in one hand, his eyes riveted on an empty spot on the table, his body half shaking.