Chapter XIII

Something had been bothering Tar for a long time. It got worse during the summer of his thirteenth year. His mother had not been very well for a long time but that summer she seemed to get better. Now Tar, rather than John, sold the papers, but that did not take much time. As his mother wasn’t very well and had other younger children to take her time she couldn’t pay much attention to Tar.

He and Jim Moore went off to the woods on afternoons. Sometimes they just lazied around and sometimes they went fishing or swimming. Up along the creek farmers were working in the fields. When they went swimming, in a place called “Mama Culver’s Hole,” other boys from town came. Young men sometimes came down across the fields to the creek. There was one young man who was subject to fits. His father was the town blacksmith who had carried the dead woman out of the woods. He went in swimming, just as the others did, but some one had to watch him. Once he had a fit in the water and had to be pulled out so he wouldn’t drown. Tar saw that, saw the man lying naked on the bank of the creek, saw the queer look in his eyes, the queer jerky movements of his legs, arms and body.

The man muttered words Tar couldn’t understand. It might have been like a bad dream you have sometimes at night. He only looked for a moment. Pretty soon the man got up and dressed. He walked slowly about in a field, his head hanging down, went to sit with his back against a tree. How pale he was.

When the older boys and young men came to the swimming hole Tar and Jim Moore lit out. Older boys in such a place like to take it out on the youngsters. They throw mud on small boys’ bodies after they come out from swimming and are partly dressed. When it hits you you have to go in and wash yourself off again. Sometimes they do it a dozen times.

Then they hide your clothes or dip them in the water and tie knots in the sleeve of your shirt. When you want to dress and go away you can’t.

A gentle lot--small-town boys--sometimes.

They take a shirt sleeve and dip it in the water. Then they tie a hard knot and pull as hard as they can and a boy has a hard time getting it untied. If he has to take his teeth to it the older boys in the water laugh and shout. There is a song about it full of words worse than you could hear in any livery stable. “Chaw beef” the older boys yell. Then they shout out the song. The whole place rings with it. It isn’t any fancy singing.

The thing that troubled Tar troubled Jim Moore, too. Sometimes when they were alone together, in the woods away up the creek beyond the regular swimming hole, they went in together. Then they came out and lay naked on the bank of the creek on the grass in the sun. It felt good.

Then they began to talk about things they had heard, at school, among the young men at the swimming hole.

“Suppose you ever got a chance with a girl, what then?” Maybe little girls going home together from school, no boys about, talk the same way. “Oh, I won’t get any such chance. I’d be afraid, I guess, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess you get over being afraid. Let’s go.”

You can talk and think about a lot of things and then, when you come home where your mother and sister are, it doesn’t seem to count much against you. If you had a chance and did something it might be different.

Sometimes when Tar and Jim were lying like that, on the creek bank, one of them touched the other’s body. It was a queer feeling. When it happened they both sprang up and began to run about. Some young trees grew by the creek bank up that way and they climbed the trees. The trees were small, smooth and slender and the boys pretended they were monkeys or some other kind of wild young animals. They kept on doing it for a long time, both acting rather crazy.

Once when they were doing it a man came along and they had to run and hide in some bushes. They were in a close place and had to lie close together. After the man passed they went at once to get their clothes, both feeling strange.

Strange about what? Well, how are you going to tell? All boys are that way sometimes.

There was a boy Jim and Tar both knew, who had the nerve to do anything. Once he was with a girl and they went into a barn. The girl’s mother saw them go in and followed. The girl got a whipping. Neither Tar nor Jim thought anything really happened but the boy said it did. He bragged about it. “It isn’t the first time.”

Such talk. Tar and Jim thought the boy lied. “He wouldn’t have the nerve, do you think?”

They talked about such things more than they wanted to. They couldn’t help it. When they had talked a lot they both felt uncomfortable. Well, how are you going to find out anything? When men are talking you listen all you can. If the men see you hanging around they tell you to get out.

Tar saw things, taking papers to houses in the evening. There was a man used to come with a horse and buggy and wait in a certain place in a dark street and after a while he was joined by a woman. The woman was married and so was the man. Before the woman came the man had put on the side curtains of his buggy. They drove away together.

Tar knew who they were and after a time the man knew he knew. One day he met Tar on the street. The man stopped. He bought a paper. Then he stood looking at Tar with his hands thrust into his pockets. The man owned a large farm, several miles from town, and his wife and children lived out there but he was in town nearly all the time. He was a buyer of farm products, shipping them off to nearby cities. The woman Tar had seen get into the buggy was the wife of a merchant.

The man put a five dollar bill into Tar’s hand. “I guess you know enough to keep your mouth shut,” he said. That was all. After he said it the man turned and went away. Tar had never had so much money, had never before had any money he did not expect to account for. It was an easy way to get it. When any of the Moorehead children made any money they gave it to their mother. She never asked anything of the sort. It just seemed the natural thing to do.

Tar bought himself a quarter’s worth of candy, he bought a package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. He and Jim Moore would try smoking them sometime when they were off in the woods. Then he bought a swell necktie that cost fifty cents.

That was all right. He had a little more than four dollars in his pocket. He had got the change in silver dollars. Ernest Wright, who kept a small hotel in town, was always standing in front of his hotel with a pile of silver dollars in his hands, playing with them. At the fair, in the fall, when there were a lot of fakers from out of town come for the fair, they set up little booths for gambling. You could get a cane by throwing a ring over it or a gold watch or a revolver by picking out the right number on a wheel. There were lots of such places. One year Dick Moorehead, being out of work, got a job in one of them.

At all such places little piles of silver dollars were stacked about up where every one could see them. Dick Moorehead said a farmer or a hired man had about as much chance to win any of the money as a snowball had in hell.

It was nice, though, to see the silver dollars piled up, nice to see Ernest Wright jingling silver dollars in his hands as he stood on the sidewalk before his hotel.

Nice for Tar to have four big silver dollars he did not feel he had to account for. They had just come down into his hand, out of the sky, as it were. The candy he could eat, the cigarettes he and Jim Moore would try smoking some day soon. The new necktie would be a little difficult. Where would he tell the others at home he had got it? Most boys of his age in town never got any fifty-cent neckties. Dick didn’t get but about two new ones a year--when there was a G.A.R. convention or something. Tar might say he had found it and found the four silver dollars, too. Then he could give the money to his mother and forget it. It was fine to feel the heavy silver dollars in his pocket but he had got them in a strange way. Silver is much better to have than bills. It feels like more.

When a man is married you see him with his wife and you do not think anything, but a man like that, waiting in a buggy in a side street, and then a woman coming along, trying to act as though she is going to call on some neighbor--it being night and supper over and her husband gone back to his store. Then the woman looking around and getting, quick, into the buggy. They driving off with the curtains drawn, that way.

Plenty Madame Bovaries in American small towns--what!

Tar wanted to tell Jim Moore but did not dare. There was a kind of agreement between himself and the man from whom he had taken the five dollars.

The woman knew he knew as well as the man. He had come out of an alleyway, barefooted, making no sound, with a bundle of papers under his arm, had popped right out on them.

Maybe he did it purposely.

The woman’s husband took a morning paper at his store and had an afternoon paper delivered at his house. It was a funny feeling to go into his store afterwards and see him there, talking to some man, knowing nothing, Tar, just a kid, knowing such a lot.

Well, what did he know?

The trouble is that such things set a boy thinking. You want to see a lot and when you see something it stirs you up and makes you almost wish you hadn’t. The woman, when Tar took the paper to her house, never let on. She had a nerve all right.

Why did they go sneaking out that way? A boy knows, but does not know. If Tar could only have talked it over with John or Jim Moore it would have been a relief. You can’t talk about such things to some one in your own family. You have to go outside.

Tar saw other things. Win Connell, who worked in Cary’s drug store, married Mrs. Grey, after her first husband died. She was taller than he was. They took a house and furnished it with her first husband’s furniture. One evening, when it was raining and dark, only about seven o’clock, Tar went along back of their house on his paper route and they had forgotten to close the window blinds. They didn’t have a thing on, either of them, and he was chasing her around. You would never think grown people could act like that.

Tar was in the alleyway, just as he was that time he saw the people in the buggy. By cutting through alleyways you save time delivering papers when a train is late. There he stood, holding his papers under his coat so they wouldn’t get wet. And there were the two grown people, acting like that.

There was a kind of living room and a stairway going upstairs and then some other rooms on the ground floor, without any lights in them.

What Tar saw first was the woman running like that, without any clothes on, across the room and her husband after her. It made Tar laugh. They were like monkeys. The woman ran upstairs and he after her. Then down she came again. They dodged into the dark rooms and then out again. He caught her sometimes but she must have been slippery. She got away, every time. They kept it up and kept it up. Such a crazy thing to see. There was a couch in the room Tar was looking into, and once she got behind it and he was in front. He put his hands on the top of the couch and sprang clear over. You wouldn’t have thought a drug clerk could do it.

Then he chased her into one of the dark rooms. Tar waited and waited but they did not come out.

A fellow like Win Connell had to work, after supper, at the store. He would get dressed and go down there. People coming in to get prescriptions put up, to buy a cigar maybe. Win standing back of the counter smiling. “Is there anything else? Certainly, if it is not satisfactory bring it back. We aim to please.”

Tar going away out of his way, being later than ever to supper, to go past Cary’s drug store and look in, to see Win in there, just like any other man, doing what he did all the time every day. And less than an hour ago....

Win wasn’t so very old but he was already bald-headed.

* * * * *

The world of older people opening out gradually to a boy going around with his papers. Some older ones seemed to have a lot of dignity. Others hadn’t. Boys, Tar’s own age, had secret vices. Some of the boys at the swimming hole did things, said things. When men get older they grow sentimental about the old swimming hole. They remember only the pleasant things that happened. There is a trick of the mind that makes you forget the unpleasant. It’s just as well. If you could see life clear and straight maybe you could not live.

A boy goes around town filled with curiosity. He knows where the vicious dogs are, what people speak kindly to him. There are soreheads everywhere. You can’t get a thing out of them. If the paper is an hour late they growl and fuss at you. What the deuce? You do not run the railroad. If the train is late it isn’t your fault.

That Win Connell doing that. Tar laughed about it sometimes at night in bed. How many other people cutting up all kinds of capers behind the blinds of houses? In some houses men and women were always quarreling. Tar came along the street and opening a gate went into a yard. He was going to put the paper under the back door. Some wanted it put there. As he went around the house, the sound of quarreling inside. “I didn’t either. You’re a liar. I’ll knock your damn head off. Try it once.” The low growling voice of a man, the sharp cutting voice of an angry woman.

Tar tapped on the back door. It might be his collection night. Both the man and woman came to the door. They both thought it might be some neighbor and that they had been caught quarreling. “Well, it’s only a boy.” When they saw it was only Tar a look of relief on the two faces. The man paid Tar with a growl. “You’ve been late twice this week. I want my paper to be here when I get home.”

The door was slammed and Tar hung about for a moment. Would they start quarreling again? They did. Maybe they liked it.

At night streets of houses with closed blinds. Men coming out at the front door to go uptown. They went into saloons, into the drug stores, into the barber shop or the cigar store. There they sat bragging, sometimes, sometimes just being quiet. Dick Moorehead did not quarrel with his wife, but just the same he was one thing at home and another when he was out in the evening among men. Tar had slid in among groups of men when his father was holding forth. He slid out pretty fast. Dick had to sing pretty low at home. Tar wondered why. It wasn’t because Mary Moorehead scolded him.

In nearly every house he visited, either the man or woman ruled the roost. Downtown, among the other men, a man was always trying to create the impression he was boss. “I said to my old woman--look here, I said--you do so and so. You bet she did it.”

Did it, eh? In most of the houses Tar visited, it was as at the Moorehead house--the women were the strong ones. Sometimes they ruled by bitter words, sometimes by tears, sometimes by silence. Silence was Mary Moorehead’s way.