Collected Stories, page 24
Chip off the Old Block
Sitting alone looking at the red eyes of the parlor heater, Chet thought how fast things happened. One day the flu hit. Two days after that his father left for Montana to get a load of whiskey to sell for medicine. The next night he got back in the midst of a blizzard with his hands and feet frozen, bringing a sick homesteader he had picked up on the road; and now this morning all of them, the homesteader, his father, his mother, his brother, Bruce, were loaded in a sled and hauled to the schoolhouse-hospital. It was scary how fast they all got it, even his father, who seldom got anything and was tougher than boiled owl. Everybody, he thought with some pride, but him. His mother’s words as she left were a solemn burden on his mind. “You’ll have to hold the fort, Chet. You’ll have to be the man of the house.” And his father, sweat on his face even in the cold, his frozen hands held tenderly in his lap, saying, “Better let the whiskey alone. Put it away somewhere till we get back.”
So he was holding the fort. He accepted the duty soberly. In the two hours since his family had left he had swept the floors, milked old Red and thrown down hay for her, brought in scuttles of lignite. And sitting now in the parlor, he knew he was scared. He heard the walls tick and the floors creak. Every thirty seconds he looked up from his book, and finally he yawned, stretched, laid the book down, and took a stroll through the whole house, cellar to upstairs, as if for exercise. But his eyes were sharp, and he stepped back a little as he threw open the doors of bedrooms and closets. He whistled a little between his teeth and looked at the calendar in the hall to see what day it was. November 4, 1918.
A knock on the back door sent him running. It was the young man named Vickers who had taken his family away. He was after beds and blankets for the schoolhouse. Chet helped him knock the beds down and load them on the sled. He would sleep on the couch in the parlor; it was warmer there, anyway; no cold floors to worry about.
In the kitchen, making a list of things he had taken, Vickers saw the keg, the sacked cases of bottles, the pile of whiskey-soaked straw sheaths from the bottles that had been broken on the trip. “Your dad doesn’t want to sell any of that, does he?” he said.
Chet thought briefly of his father’s injunction to put the stuff away. But gee, the old man had frozen his hands and feet and caught the flu getting it, and now when people came around asking … “Sure,” he said. “That’s what he bought it for, flu medicine.”
“What’ve you got?”
“Rye and bourbon,” Chet said. “There’s some Irish, but I think he brought that special for somebody.” He rummaged among the sacks. “Four dollars a bottle, I think it is,” he said, and looked at Vickers to see if that was too much. Vickers didn’t blink. “Or is it four-fifty?” Chet said.
Vickers’s face was expressionless. “Sure it isn’t five? I wouldn’t want to cheat you.” He took out his wallet, and under his eyes Chet retreated. “I’ll go look,” he said. “I think there’s a list.”
He stood in the front hall for a minute or two before he came back. “Four-fifty,” he said casually. “I thought probably it was.”
Vickers counted out twenty-seven dollars. “Give me six rye,” he said. With the sack in his hand he stood in the back door and looked at Chet and laughed. “What are you going to do with that extra three dollars?”
Chet felt his heart stop while he might have counted ten. His face began to burn. “What three dollars?”
“Never mind,” Vickers said. “I was just ragging you. Got all you need to eat here?”
“I got crocks of milk,” Chet said. He grinned at Vickers in relief, and Vickers grinned back. “There’s bread Ma baked the other day, and spuds. If I need any meat I can go shoot a rabbit.”
“Oh.” Vickers’s eyebrows went up. “You’re a hunter, he?”
“I shot rabbits all last fall for Mrs. Rieger,” Chet said. “She’s ’nemic and has to eat rabbits and prairie chickens and stuff. She lent me the shotgun and bought the shells.”
“Mmm,” Vickers said. “I guess you can take care of yourself. How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s old enough,” said Vickers. “That’s pretty old, in fact. Well, Mervin, if you need anything you call the school and I’ll see that you get it.”
“My name isn’t Mervin,” Chet said. “It’s Chet.”
“Okay,” Vickers said. “Don’t get careless with the fires.”
“What do you think I am?” Chet said in scorn. He raised his hand stiffly as Vickers went out. A little tongue of triumph licked up in him. That three bucks would look all right, all right. Next time he’d know better than to change the price, too. He took the bills out of his pocket and counted them. Twenty-seven dollars was a lot of dough. He’d show Ma and Pa whether he could hold the fort or not.
But holding the fort was tiresome. By two o’clock he was bored stiff, and the floors were creaking again in the silence. Then he remembered suddenly that he was the boss of the place. He could go or come as he pleased, as long as the cow was milked and the house kept warm. He thought of the two traps he had set in muskrat holes under the river bank. The blizzard and the flu had made him forget to see to them. And he might take Pa’s gun and do a little hunting.
“Well,” he said in the middle of the parlor rug, “I guess I will.”
For an hour and a half he prowled the river brush. Over on the path toward Heathcliff’s he shot a snowshoe rabbit, and the second of his traps yielded a stiffly frozen muskrat. The weight of his game was a solid satisfaction as he came up the dugway swinging the rabbit by its feet, the muskrat by its plated tail.
Coming up past the barn, he looked over towards Van Dam’s, then the other way, toward Chapman’s, half hoping that someone might be out, and see him. He whistled loudly, sang a little into the cold afternoon air, but the desertion of the whole street, the unbroken fields of snow where ordinarily there would have been dozens of sled tracks and fox-and-goose paths, let a chill in upon his pride. He came up the back steps soberly and opened the door.
The muskrat’s slippery tail slid out of his mitten and the frozen body thumped on the floor. Chet opened his mouth, shut it again, speechless with surprise and shock. Two men were in the kitchen. His eyes jumped from the one by the whiskey keg to the other, sitting at the table drinking whiskey from a cup. The one drinking he didn’t know. The other was Louis Treat, a halfbreed who hung out down at the stable and sometimes worked a little for the Half-Diamond Bar. All Chet knew about him was that he could braid horsehair ropes and sing a lot of dirty songs.
“Aha!” said Louis Treat. He smiled at Chet and made a rubbing motion with his hands. “We ’ave to stop to get warm. You ’ave been hunting?”
“Yuh,” Chet said automatically. He stood where he was, his eyes swinging between the two men. The man at the table raised his eyebrows at Louis Treat.
“Ees nice rabbit there,” Louis said. His bright black button eyes went over the boy. Chet lifted the rabbit and looked at the frozen beads of blood on the white fur. “Yuh,” he said. He was thinking about what his father always said. You could trust an Indian, if he was your friend, and you could trust a white man sometimes, if money wasn’t involved, and you could trust a Chink more than either, but you couldn’t trust a halfbreed.
Louis’s voice went on, caressingly. “You ’ave mushrat too, eh? You lak me to ’elp you peel thees mushrat?” His hand, dipping under the sheepskin and into his pants pocket, produced a long-bladed knife that jumped open with the pressure of his thumb on a button.
Chet dropped the rabbit and took off his mitts. “No thanks,” he said. “I can peel him.”
Shrugging, Louis put the knife away. He turned to thump the bung hard into the keg, and nodded at the other man, who rose. “Ees tam we go,” Louis said. “We ’ave been told to breeng thees wiskey to the ’ospital.”
“Who told you?” Chet’s insides grew tight, and his mind was setting like plaster of Paris. If Pa was here he’d scatter these thieves all the way to Chapman’s. But Pa wasn’t here. He watched Louis Treat. You could never trust a halfbreed.
“The doctor, O’Malley,” Louis said. Keeping his eye on Chet, he jerked his head at the other man. “ ’Ere, you tak’ the other end.”
His companion, pulling up his sheepskin collar, stooped and took hold of the keg. Chet, with no blood in his face and no breath in his lungs, hesitated a split second and then jumped. Around the table, in the dining-room door, he was out of their reach, and the shotgun was pointed straight at their chests. With his thumb he cocked both barrels, click, click.
Louis Treat swore. “Put down that gun!”
“No, sir!” Chet said. “I won’t put it down till you drop that keg and get out of here!”
The two men looked at each other. Louis set his end gently back on the chair, and the other did the same. “We ’ave been sent,” Louis said. “You do not understan’ w’at I mean.”
“I understand all right,” Chet said. “If Doctor O’Malley had wanted that, he’d’ve sent Mr. Vickers for it this morning.”
The second man ran his tongue over his teeth and spat on the floor. “Think he knows how to shoot that thing?”
Chet’s chest expanded. The gun trembled so that he braced it against the frame of the door. “I shot that rabbit, didn’t I?” he said.
The halfbreed’s teeth were bared in a bitter grin. “You are a fool,” he said.
“And you’re a thief!” Chet said. He covered the two carefully as they backed out, and when they were down the steps he slammed and bolted the door. Then he raced for the front hall, made sure that door was locked, and peeked out the front window. The two were walking side by side up the irrigation ditch toward town, pulling an empty box sled. Louis was talking furiously with his hands.
Slowly and carefully Chet uncocked the gun. Ordinarily he would have unloaded, but not now, not with thieves like those around. He put the gun above the mantel, looked in the door of the stove, threw in a half-scuttle of lignite, went to the window again to see if he could still see the two men. Then he looked at his hands. They were shaking. So were his knees. He sat down suddenly on the couch, unable to stand.
For days the only people he saw were those who came to buy whiskey. They generally sat awhile in the kitchen and talked about the flu and the war, but they weren’t much company. Once Miss Landis, his school-teacher, came apologetically and furtively with a two-quart fruit jar under her coat, and he charged her four dollars a quart for bulk rye out of the keg. His secret hoard of money mounted to eighty-five dollars, to a hundred and eight.
When there was none of that business (he had even forgotten by now that his father had told him not to meddle with it), he moped around the house, milked the cow, telephoned to the hospital to see how his folks were. One day his dad was pretty sick. Two days later he was better, but his mother had had a relapse because they were so short of beds they had had to put Brucie in with her. The milk crocks piled up in the cellarway, staying miraculously sweet, until he told the schoolhouse nurse over the phone about all the milk he had, and then Doctor O’Malley sent down old Gundar Moe to pick it up for the sick people.
Sometimes he stood on the porch on sunny, cold mornings and watched Lars Poulsen’s sled go out along the road on the way to the graveyard, and the thought that maybe Mom or Bruce or Pa might die and be buried out there on the knoll by the sandhills made him swallow and go back inside where he couldn’t see how deserted the street looked, and where he couldn’t see the sled and the steaming gray horses move out toward the south bend of the river. He resolved to be a son his parents could be proud of, and sat down at the piano determined to learn a piece letter-perfect. But the dry silence of the house weighed on him; before long he would be lying with his forehead on the keyboard, his finger picking on one monotonous note. That way he could concentrate on how different it sounded with his head down, and forget to be afraid.
And at night, when he lay on the couch and stared into the sleepy red eyes of the heater, he heard noises that walked the house, and there were crosses in the lamp chimneys when he lighted them, and he knew that someone would die.
On the fifth day he sat down at the dining-room table determined to write a book. In an old atlas he hunted up a promising locale. He found a tributary of the Amazon called the Tapajós, and firmly, his lips together in concentration, he wrote his title across the top of a school tablet: “The Curse of the Tapajós.” All that afternoon he wrote enthusiastically. He created a tall, handsome young explorer and a halfbreed guide very like Louis Treat. He plowed through steaming jungles, he wrestled pythons and other giant serpents which he spelled “boy constructors.” All this time he was looking for the Lost City of Gold. And when the snakes got too thick even for his taste, and when he was beginning to wonder himself why the explorer didn’t shoot the guide, who was constantly trying to poison the flour or stab his employer in his tent at midnight, he let the party come out on a broad pampa and see in the distance, crowning a golden hill, the lost city for which they searched. And then suddenly the explorer reeled and fell, mysteriously stricken, and the halfbreed guide, smiling with sinister satisfaction, disappeared quietly into the jungle. The curse of the Tapajós, which struck everyone who found that lost city, had struck again. But the young hero was not dead. …
Chet gnawed his pencil and stared across the room. It was going to be hard to figure out how his hero escaped. Maybe he was just stunned, not killed. Maybe a girl could find him there, and nurse him back to health. …
He rose, thinking, and wandered over to the window. A sled came across the irrigation ditch and pulled on over to Chance’s house. Out of it got Mr. Chance and Mrs. Chance and Ed and Harvey Chance. They were well, then. People were starting to come home cured. He rushed to the telephone and called the hospital. No, the nurse said, his family weren’t well yet; they wouldn’t be home for three or four days at least. But they were all better. How was he doing? Did he need anything?
No, Chet said, he didn’t need anything.
But at least he wasn’t the only person on the street any more. That night after milking he took a syrup pail of milk to the Chances. They were all weak, all smiling. Mrs. Chance cried every time she spoke, and they were awfully grateful for the milk. He promised them, over their protests, that he would bring them some every day, and chop wood and haul water for them until they got really strong. Mr. Chance, who had the nickname of Dictionary because he strung off such jaw-breaking words, told him he was a benefactor and a Samaritan, and called upon his own sons to witness this neighborly kindness and be edified and enlarged. Chet went home in the dark, wondering if it might not be a good idea, later in his book somewhere, to have his explorer find a bunch of people, or maybe just a beautiful and ragged girl, kept in durance vile by some tribe of pigmies or spider men or something, and have him rescue them and confound their captors.
On the afternoon of the eighth day Chet sat in the kitchen at Chance’s. His own house had got heavier and heavier to bear, and there wasn’t much to eat there but milk and potatoes, and both stores were closed because of the flu. So he went a good deal to Chance’s, doing their chores and talking about the hospital, and listening to Mr. Chance tell about the Death Ward where they put people who weren’t going to get well. The Death Ward was the eighth-grade room, his own room, and he and Ed Chance speculated on what it would be like to go back to that room where so many people had died—Mrs. Rieger, and old Gypsy Davy from Poverty Flat, and John Chapman, and a lot of people. Mrs. Chance sat by the stove and when anyone looked at her or spoke to her she shook her head and smiled and the tears ran down. She didn’t seem unhappy about anything; she just couldn’t help crying.
Mr. Chance said over and over that there were certainly going to be a multitude of familiar faces missing after this thing was over. The town would never be the same. He wouldn’t be surprised if the destitute and friendless were found in every home in town, adopted and cared for by friends. They might have to build an institution to house the derelict and the bereaved.
He pulled his sagging cheeks and said to Chet, “Mark my words, son, you are one of the fortunate. In that hospital I said to myself a dozen times, ‘Those poor Mason boys are going to lose their father.’ I lay there—myself in pain, mind you—and the first thing I’d hear some old and valued friend would be moved into the Death Ward. I thought your father was a goner when they moved him in.”
Chet’s throat was suddenly dry as dust. “Pa isn’t in there!”
“Ira,” said Mrs. Chance, and shook her head and smiled and wiped the tears away. “Now you’ve got the child all worked up.”
“He isn’t in there now,” said Mr. Chance. “By the grace of the Almighty”—he bent his head and his lips moved—“he came out again. He’s hard man to kill. Hands and feet frozen, double pneumonia, and still he came out.”
“Is he all right now?” Chet said.
“Convalescing,” Mr. Chance said. “Convalescing beautifully.” He raised a finger under Chet’s nose. “Some people are just hard to kill. But on the other hand, you take a person like that George Valet. I hesitate to say before the young what went on in that ward. Shameful, even though the man was sick.” His tongue ticked against his teeth, and his eyebrows raised at Chet. “They cleaned his bed six times a day,” he said, and pressed his lips together. “It makes a man wonder about God’s wisdom,” he said. “A man like that, his morals are as loose as his bowels.”
“Ira!” Mrs. Chance said.
“I would offer you a wager,” Mr. Chance said. “I wager that a man as loose and discombobulated as that doesn’t live through this epidemic.”
“I wouldn’t bet on a person’s life that way,” she said.
