Glennis was too far away to smack him, sitting on the grass watching the horses, but she turned and threw a clump of dirt at him. “Watch your tongue.”
He easily dodged and smiled, and I lay back on the grass at the edge of the field and watched small clouds moving across the sky overhead. A noise off to the side caught my attention and I rolled up to see Clair feeding Buzzer a scrap of meat from the stew pan.
She held it up pinched between her thumb and index finger and Buzzer delicately, with great care, used one needle-point claw in his huge foot to pull it from her fingers and place it into his mouth, the way he had done the mice.
“What kind of cat is he?” I asked.
Knute smiled but said nothing.
“We found a picture in a magazine looks just like him,” Harris said. “What was that, Ma? What kind of cat was it?”
“He’s a lynx,” Clair said. “A big old puppy baby lynx...” Her voice got soft and you could see she wanted to pet Buzzer but she didn’t touch him, and when she didn’t feed him more, he walked away and began hunting the edge of the field looking for more mice.
In a little time Knute shredded his cigarette and put the leftover tobacco back in the sack and stood. The horses watched him, waiting, and he hooked them back up to the mower and sat in the seat and dinner was over.
Harris took the sack of mice and moved to the back of the mower and I followed and the afternoon went that way.
I got seven more mice for myself, Harris about forty, Buzzer six of his own and my other fourteen—he never did fill up. We ate again—Glennis and Clair brought out cake and milk and coffee and meat sandwiches—and then it was evening and we rode the horses back to the barn in time to help with milking. This time Harris took half the time on the separator, which was just as well because I was so tired I could hardly walk.
I vaguely remember eating another huge meal in the evening—watching Louie swallow what seemed like a whole chicken, bones and all—with heaping mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and pie covered with whipped fresh cream for dessert. But I was so tired everything was fuzzy and things seemed to blur together.
After supper—what I would have called dinner and what seemed like the tenth meal of the day but was really only the sixth—everybody went into the dining/sitting room and sat in chairs while a clock on the wall ticked, and I went face down on the table and started to sleep. I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open.
“Poor dear,” Clair said. “He’s a little tuckered...”
I felt somebody lift me, smelled Knute’s tobacco, and I was carried upstairs and laid on my bed, fully clothed. I kicked out of my shoes and pants, and the events swirled in my head as I lay back in the dark.
I’d been kicked in the testicles, slammed in the head, worked at the separator until my arms seemed about to fall off, narrowly averted disaster with a manic rooster, wrestled commie jap pigs in a sea of pig crap, ridden horses as big as dinosaurs, had a losing relationship with a lynx, eaten eighteen or twenty meals, and helped to capture mice for God-knows-what purposes.
And I’d been there one day.
I tried to open my eyes. (I’d heard Harris come in the room as I flopped back and I needed to know the answer, was dying to know the answer: why did Louie want the mice?) But it was impossible. My eyes didn’t open, a wave of exhaustion roared over me like a soft train and I was gone.
6
Wherein I learn some more physics,
involving parabolic trajectories,
and see the worth of literature
A daily routine evolved in the first week that was to carry me through my entire summer with Harris and the Larsons: up while it was still thick dark, watch Louie feed and try to compete and get a little food, out to help with milking—searching carefully for Ernie on the way—eat again when milking was done, and then get in trouble.
It wasn’t that we tried to get in trouble. Indeed, Harris and I did not think in terms of trouble at all. It’s just that many of the things we wanted to do—well, perhaps all the things we wanted to do—seemed to cause difficulties in some way that we had not expected.
A good example of this theory is the problem that happened because of the Tarzan of the Apes comic book.
Part of my treasures, along with the “dourty peectures,” was a goodly supply of comic books. Some of them were not so good. There were, for instance, two Captain Marvel comics that I didn’t like. But among the better ones—Superman, some good Donald Ducks, and a couple of really good Real War comics—there was my favorite, a Tarzan of the Apes bonus edition with a story about Tarzan in the lost land of dinosaurs, where he trains a triceratops to ride by hitting it on the side of the snout with a stick.
Harris shared my enthusiasm for the comics. This interest would diminish slightly when he came to see the “dourty peectures,” but by the end of the first week he hadn’t seen them yet and had seen the comics, including the Tarzan of the Apes. His reading wasn’t up to my level but it was good enough and the pictures gave him enough information to fill in the gaps.
“That guy was something,” he said, closing the comic book. We were sitting in the open granary door. I was watching closely for Ernie, whom I hadn’t seen for over fifteen minutes—usually a very bad situation. I now personally had been attacked by Ernie several times, the worst inside the outhouse. It faced the river, away from
