“How are you going to get on the granary roof?” I asked but he was gone again, a dust cloud coming up in back of him as he ran into the granary and disappeared.
He reappeared almost instantly at the small window in the peak of the granary roof. It opened inward and he pushed it over and wriggled until he was half in and half out, then he turned, reached up, and grabbed the peak of the roof and pulled himself up.
“Give me the rope.”
I whipped the rope sideways several times and finally managed to get it close enough for him to grab it.
“Way it works is I’m going to swing from here over to the loft door on the barn and just whip inside and drop in the hay.”
On the front of the barn there was a large opening for putting hay inside to store for the winter. The door opening was seven or so feet wide and the big door was tied open to ventilate the loft. Inside there was an old pile of hay left from winter.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I called up.
“You bet. And as soon as I do her you can try it.”
I had pretty much made up my mind that there was nothing on earth that would get me to “try her”—Harris looked like he was a mile away, sitting up there straddling the peak of the granary—though I was completely willing to help Harris.
He stood, wobbling on the peak, his bare feet holding at the hip and ridge, and held the rope. I eyed the swing it would take to make the barn loft, and while there was still some doubt I nodded up at him to give him confidence. And in truth I thought he might make it.
Yet there were several mistakes that had already been made that would alter Harris’s destiny. Wind, humidity, rotation of the earth, stretch of old rope, and springiness of an elm tree limb—all had been ignored in the computations. But worse, far worse—I had laid my board/weapon down and we had both forgotten Ernie completely.
“What did he always say?” Harris yelled down to me.
“Who?”
“Tarzan, you dope. Isn’t he always saying something when he does this?”
“He has a yell.”
“How does it go?”
I did a Tarzan yell, or a version of it. “Like that.”
“When he swings?”
“That’s what it says in the comic books.”
“Well, then. Here goes.”
He started a Tarzan yell and without any hesitation whatsoever jumped off the granary roof into space hanging on to a rotten piece of hemp rope.
We would argue later over many aspects of the Tarzan Leap, as it came to be known. How far it went, how far off the aim really was, how much Harris meant, and how much (I thought all of it) was accident. One of the main points of contention involved the yell.
Harris claimed it was a valid and authentic Tarzan yell, made as he swung down from the roof. I maintained that it became a scream of terror the moment his feet left the granary and that, coupled with Ernie’s enthusiasm, was the reason for my own sudden involvement.
In retrospect there was no one point that it fell apart but many smaller disasters that fed the big one.
Ernie had been hiding under the combine. I was standing a few feet off the line of swing with my back to the combine, not twelve feet from the lurking Ernie.
As Harris began his swing, Ernie saw his chance—saw that I had put my board down and was concentrating on Harris.
Just as Harris stepped off the roof Ernie hit me in the back of the head and drove me forward nearly into Harris’s path. Rope stretch and poor aim did the rest. Harris veered enough to hit me head on, Ernie still riding me and spurring me. I grabbed at Harris—I would have grabbed at anything to get away from Ernie—and hung on as the momentum of Harris’s swing carried me, and the clinging Ernie, along for the ride to the barn loft.
Or what should have been the barn loft. Here again miscalculation intervened. Harris’s original swing was off, slightly, to the left. My weight and drag brought it more to the left—as did Ernie’s raking and clawing—so that all of us were well off the expected flight path for the loft; were, indeed, aimed perfectly for the pigpens.
The rope almost held us. That we agreed on. And it would have held Harris alone just fine. But the weight was more than doubled with me hanging on to him.
We swung in an arc—Harris, Ernie, and me—back off the ground, directly over the pigpens and the bynow panicking sows.
Where the rope broke.
We hit in a plume of mud and pig dung—I had the foresight from past experience to close my eyes and mouth this time—propelled by the swing and gravity, with a force that knocked the wind out of me and for an instant even seemed to stun Ernie.
Our surprise arrival did not stun the pigs. They ran over us like stampeding cattle, then back over us, then over us again, and seemed to be thinking of making it a regular part of their exercise when I heard:
“Come here, you gooner!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harris—never one to waste an opportunity—hit one of the sows on the side of the snout and swing up into the saddle and I thought, as I went down in a new wave of tromping pig feet, that he looked almost exactly like Tarzan riding a triceratops—if Tarzan had worn bib overalls and been covered with pig slop, of course.
7
In which I am exposed to the city,
and the lure of the silver screen,
and orange pop
Summer days fed into summer nights full of fireflies and the smell of lilacs around the house and back into days where the farmyard became a whole way of life. Any
