So I watched closely for him and never went out in the yard without a board, which I was holding now.
“He never seems to touch the ground...”
“What?”
“Tarzan,” Harris repeated. “He don’t never touch the ground. He just swings in them trees on them vines unless he’s riding one of them big gooners...”
“Triceratops.”
“...Whatever. He still ain’t touching the ground, is he?”
I thought about it. “No, I guess not.”
“Might ought to be a good way to live, just swinging around. Hmmmm.”
And herein lay the one shining ability of Harris—he believed everything was real. When he went for the pigs they weren’t pigs, they really were commie japs, whatever that was in his mind.
When he read a Tarzan comic it wasn’t just a made-up story. It was real. He thought in real terms, in a real world, in real time. The only instance I saw this vary was when I found out why Louie wanted the mice.
The day after we’d mowed and gathered mice I’d asked Harris why Louie needed mice.
“For coats,” he’d said. “Little coats.”
“Coats?”
“It’s better to show you. Come on.”
He had led me to the granary. The downstairs of the building was arranged in wooden bins full of oats and barley and some wheat. Upstairs there was a rough wooden floor and a crude ladder on the side wall leading up through a hole. Harris moved up the ladder like a monkey and I followed, still trying to imagine what he could be leading me to.
Upstairs there was a big cleared area and in the middle of this a large wooden table—ten by ten feet, easily—was set on thick wooden legs.
“See?” Harris said. “Here’s why Louie needs the mice...”
The table was covered with small carved figures. At first I couldn’t understand. There were men and horses and little cabins and small trees and teams of horses pulling sleighs full of logs.
“It’s a winter logging camp,” Harris said. “Louie is always carving on it.”
“Wow...” It was incredible. There were dozens, hundreds of little men working at different aspects of logging, cutting down little trees with axes and small two-man saws, building little cabins, riding little sleighs, sitting in little outhouses. And every horse had gray fur and many of the men were wearing gray fur coats. “He skins the mice to make coats and horsehair,” I said, “for this?”
“Yup. Pretty slick, ain’t it?” He had shaken his head. “It’s all just little carvings. I think he does it because he’s got brain worms. Got ’em when he worked up in the Oak Leaf swamp digging drainage ditches when he was young. That’s why he does ’em—of course, they ain’t real. It’s all in his head.”
It was the only thing Harris didn’t think of as real and I was fascinated by Louie’s dream world. I had gone up there several times since and looked at the table and still hadn’t seen everything and, indeed, was thinking of climbing up there again now to look at it once more but I noticed that Harris was studying the barnyard with new interest.
I hadn’t been there long but I knew when he had that look—it seemed the corner of his right eye went up slightly and it gave him an almost evil gremlin appearance—it meant he had a new idea. Sometimes they were good ideas, oftentimes they were bad ideas, but they were never, never boring ideas and always worth interest.
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m wondering,” he said, “what Tarzan would have done had he lived on a farm.”
“I don’t think he...”
“Do you’s’pose he would have had to touch the ground?”
“I don’t see how he would have...”
“Or do you’s’pose he would have been able to swing all through the barnyard without touching the dirt?”
He stood and left me and went around to the back of the granary and chicken coop and in moments returned lugging what seemed to be half a mile of thick hemp rope.
“I’ve been looking,” he said, dumping the rope at my feet. “And it seems to me that a man could make it from the granary to the loft of the barn without touching the ground, then from the loft back over to that hayrack. We just tie the rope to that elm limb there and over there to the oak limb. Look, see there? If we get to the hayrack, there’s even a place where we can swing out over the river, if we have enough rope for it.”
I was looking at the rope. It seemed ancient, so old there was mold and mildew growing on it. “I don’t know...”
“Come on, there’s nothing to know about it. I’ll just shinny up that elm and you throw me the rope and we’ll do her.”
He was gone in an instant and halfway up the tree before I could say that I thought the rope would fall apart.
“Up here—throw me the rope.” He had crotch-ridden out on the tree limb and was beckoning down to me. He seemed a mile up and I had to throw the rope several times before he caught it. In a minute he had it tied to the limb with what appeared to be eight or nine knots and had dropped the end to the ground and climbed back down.
I tested the rope gingerly at first, then hanging on it with my full weight, and finally bouncing. It held but had spring to it, a little stretch.
“Here, hold it like this and when I get on the
