Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

“There’s something alive in it!” Bony sort of shivered.

Swatty looked and I looked.

“Mush-rat’s house!” Swatty said right away, and it was. It was the kind the mush-rats make so that when a flood comes it will float and not sink, and there it was right out in the middle of the lake we were lost in.

Then all at once Swatty said: “Say!”

Gee, but he scared me!

“What, Swatty?” I asked.

“Say!” he said; “we’re floating away from that mush-rat house and it ain’t floating with us. I never heard of a mush-rat house out in the middle of a lake, with a current floating by, that didn’t float with the current!”

“Are you scared, Swatty?” I asked, for if he was scared I didn’t know what I would be.

“No, I ain’t scared,” he said, “but it ain’t right. It ain’t possible, that’s all! I bet this is a haunted lake. I bet there is a haunted house around here, or an ol’ witch, or something.”

“Come on, let’s get out of it, then. Let’s row!”

I said.

“You bet I’ll row!” Swatty said, and we did. We steered off to one side of the mush-rat’s house and rowed hard. We had a good double-ender skiff, rounded bottom and not flat bottom, and we made her hump! All of a sudden Swatty’s left oar came out of the oarlock and he nearly fell backwards into the bottom of the boat. He got up and slapped the oar back into the oarlock and we both rowed hard.

“We ain’t moving!”

Bony said that. He was hanging onto the sides of the skiff with both hands, looking scared and white, and you never heard anybody say anything the way he said that! It was like he had seen a ghost. Me and Swatty stopped rowing and looked. About twenty feet away from us was that old mush-rat house and we could see a little ripple of water on the upper side of it but it wasn’t moving and we weren’t floating away from it. There was the same kind of ripple against the bow of our boat.

We rowed again and we rowed hard and the skiff didn’t move! There we were, out in the middle of that haunted lake, or whatever it was, and no bottom that you could reach with an oar, and we couldn’t row up-stream and we didn’t float downstream. And over yonder was a mush-rat’s house just like we were. It sure looked like we were in a haunted lake and I didn’t blame Bony for being scared and crying. I was scared myself. It looked like we were in a haunted lake we could not row out of and that we might have to stay there forever.

“Well, garsh!” Swatty said, “we rowed up here, we ought to be good and able to row back where we come from.” So we swung the skiff around and rowed down-current. No good! We didn’t move at all. Or we just moved a foot or two.

It wasn’t like when you run up on a snag or a rock. It wasn’t stiff like that. We floated all right but we couldn’t go anywhere.

“Listen!” Swatty said.

Away off far we heard voices and splashing, sounding the way things sound when you hear them across water. Swatty shouted. “Hello!” he shouted, and his voice came back to him, “Lo-wo-wo!” in an echo, the way echoes do.

“All right!” he said. “Now we know where the Illinois hills are, anyway. That’s the way they echo back at you, so they must be over there. And I bet those men splashing in the water are after buffalo with pitchforks. So that’s where we want to row.” That was pretty fine, wasn’t it, when we couldn’t row at all? I told Swatty so. I said we’d better shout and have the men come and get us. Swatty said they’d just think it was kids shouting for fun; and I guess that’s what they did think, for we shouted and shouted, and when we quit we could still hear the men laughing and talking and splashing. So then Swatty sat down and put his head in his hands and thought. When we looked up he said:

“Do you believe in haunts and things?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

“I don’t know, either,” Swatty said. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but I know one thing: I ain’t going to believe in them until I have to. I ain’t going to believe this boat is ‘witched here until I know it ain’t stuck here some other way. I’m going to find out.”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, if we’re stuck we’re stuck on something under the water and that’s sure, and I’m going to skin off my clothes and find out.”

So he did. I wouldn’t have done it for a million dollars and I tried to make him not, but he did it. He took off his clothes and lowered himself over the side of the boat and said, garsh! how cold it was! So then he edged himself along, holding onto the side of the boat and all at once he swore.

“What?” me and Bony both asked at once.

“Bob wire!” he said, and he let go with one hand and felt down into the water. Then he took hold of the boat with both hands and felt along under the boat with his feet. “It’s a post,” he said. “It’s a bob-wire fence.”

So that was what it was. There was a bob-wire fence and we had rowed right on top of one of the posts and stuck there, on a nail or something, and the post was loose in the mud and gave when we rowed, so we couldn’t wrench loose by rowing. And that was why the mush-rat house did not float downstream; it was caught on another post. So all at once Swatty said:

“I know where we are; we’re in Shebberd’s lower cornfield!” And that was where we were. The water had come up and covered it up to the tops of the bob-wire fence posts.

Well, Swatty’s teeth were chattering but he wouldn’t get right into the boat. He made me and Bony row while he was out, and I guess with the boat lighter it floated off the post easier, for it did float off. So then Swatty got in and dressed and we rowed toward the voices and the splashing.

It was Judge Hannan all right. He was pitch-forking buffalo fish with the Shebberds. He had on rubber hip boots and he was hot and having a good time. We rowed in close to where he was and watched them pitchfork awhile and then Swatty backwatered the skiff up to where the judge was standing and said:

“Say, mister judge!”

The judge leaned his hand on the stem of the boat and said:

“Yes, my lad, what is it?”

“Are you the judge that gives diworces?”

“I’m the one that don’t give them unless I have to, son,” the judge laughed. “Looking for one? You don’t look as if you had reached that age and state yet.”

“It ain’t mine,” Swatty said. “It’s Bony’s folkses. They’re having a fight and they’re going to get a diworce and me and Georgie and Bony don’t want them to. So we rowed over to tell you not to give them one.”

The judge felt in his pocket and got out his spectacles and put them on and looked at us. He asked which was Bony and then he knew who Bony was and that he knew Bony’s folks. He said he did.

“And you don’t want any divorces in your family, hey?” he said. “Why not?”

Bony didn’t say anything, so Swatty started to tell about the bicycle, but before he got very far Bony just doubled over and put his head on his knees and began to beller like a real baby. So the judge stopped Swatty.

“Son,” he said to Swatty, “I guess you’ve mistooken the proper legal grounds for not giving divorces. The desire of a youth to learn to ride one of the condemned things when he is related to the separating parties only by neighborhood is not sufficient to sway the court. But you, son,” he said to Bony, “have got exactly the right idea. You’ve swayed this old, bald-headed court right down to the mud he’s standing in and, so help me John Joseph Rogers! if those two parents of yours get a divorce it will only be over my dead body! Hey, Sheb! can these kids go up to your house and get some buttermilk?”

So I said I didn’t like buttermilk and the judge said: “Caesar’s ghost! I didn’t mean get it for you; I meant get it for us!”

So we got it. So Bony’s folks didn’t get a divorce. Anyway, if they did they didn’t separate apart from each other and that was all me and Swatty cared for because Herb Schwartz wouldn’t be scared to marry Fan, and maybe we could hurry up the wedding and get the tricycle sooner.

IV. THE STUMP

Well, you never can tell how things are going to go in this world, I guess. I don’t mean that I spent all my time thinking how getting the tricycle with two seats would make Mamie Little think more of me than she thought of Toady Williams, because I didn’t. I had school and my chores and me and Swatty and Bony was building a capstan in our side yard, to pull up stumps and move houses if we wanted to, but once in a while I did think how I would ride up to Mamie Little’s front gate on the tricycle and say, “Say! wanta take a ride?”

It looked as if it wouldn’t be long before Herb and Fan got married, because they hadn’t fought for a long while and Fan was embroidering towels by day and by night. One reason it all looked good was that Miss Murphy, who was my teacher and had had Herb for a while, had gone away for a while and Miss Carter was substituting for her in our room. So Fan needn’t be jealous of Miss Murphy any more.

So I felt pretty good mostly but I was feeling pretty mean this day, because Swatty and Bony had been let out on time and Miss Carter had kept me in after school. I was feeling mean because they would be working on the capstan, and it was the day we thought we would get it finished and begin capstaning things with it, and I wouldn’t be home when they got it done. I wanted to be there when they started to use it. So that made me feel mean one way, and teacher made me feel meaner, another way.

I liked Miss Carter better than any teacher I ever had. So all I did was not know my geography-lesson, or my arithmetic-lesson or my grammar-lesson, or my history, and I missed in spelling. I guess maybe I read all right, because she didn’t say I didn’t, but maybe she forgot to talk about that because she was so busy saying my deportment was bad and it was certainly an outrage that my copy-book was so poorly kept. So she kept me in to study, and it was four o’clock pretty soon, and she put her papers in her desk and shut down the lid and came back to my seat. Everybody else had gone home. I was sort of scared. I thought she was going to say her patience was exhausted and then whale me with the rawhide she kept in the closet.

But she didn’t. She came back to where I was, and when she got to my seat she sat down in it beside me and I had to move over so she would have room. I guess I ought to have put my hands in my pockets, but of course I didn’t know what she was going to do, and the first thing she did was to put her left hand on top of my hand and hold it, like that, on top of my desk. So I tried to pull it away, but she held on. So then she put her arm – her right arm – along the desk back of me, and I felt mighty mean. A boy don’t like to be armed around that way, or his hand held like that.