But when I’d been there two weeks—long enough so that the other parts of my life were all but forgotten and I was content to stay there and play forever—a day came when there was a change in the routine.
Actually the day was much of the same. Up, worry about Ernie, help with milking, and get in trouble. In this case the trouble involved playing at being what Harris called “a red Indian.”
Definitions are important. I had often played Cowboys and Indians back in the cities where I lived, and played War a great deal in the Philippines, and had ironed out forms and disciplines for both games. In War you were always the hero and you always won and you always were generous with your foe—if he lived. In Cowboys and Indians you were always the cowboy and always won—usually with as much gunplay as possible—and often saved somebody in the winning.
Harris had not had other children to play with as much as I had and so he had to make up some of his own rules.
There were, for instance, no cowboys the way Harris played. This caused some difficulty because I had a revolving cylinder, silver-plated (chrome, really) six-shooter with me. I had not used it for War because it was the wrong kind of gun but it made me, clearly, king of the cowboys. It was hidden in my box beneath the bed, along with the pictures, and I suggested bringing it out but Harris was adamant.
“No. There ain’t no cowboys. Only red Indians. And don’t nobody win but the red Indians.”
This idea was new but I was willing to try it as long as I didn’t have to lose. What with Ernie and the pigpen I had been doing rather a lot of losing lately.
“What do we do?”
“We lurk,” Harris said, “and shoot the hell out of everything.”
I warped my imagination around and figured a way a red Indian could have come up with a silver-plated six-shooter—something to do with barter and some ponies—but Harris again shook his head.
“You never in your life saw no red Indian with a silver six-shooter.”
“Well what do we shoot with—our fingers?”
It was a lesson to me—to never, never underestimate Harris.
He took me around to the back of the granary. There had once been a chicken pen back there, years and years before. It had all fallen down and rotted away but willows had grown where the chicken yard had been. Fed by the chicken manure the willows had gone crazy and made a stand of perfectly straight limbs so thick it was almost impossible to get through them. They were every size from as thick as a little finger to one inch across.
Harris pulled a butcher knife out from beneath the granary. It was Clair’s favorite meat knife and only that morning she’d wondered where it had gone and I knew then that Harris had planned to play red Indians even yesterday. I was pretty sure that Clair wouldn’t want Harris to have the knife—or anything with sharp edges or a point, as far as that went—and said as much.
“There’s too blamed much of that in the world,” he said.
“Too much of what?”
“Rules. Every time you turn around there’s something you can’t have or something you can’t do. I’ll tell you what”—he looked at me and waved the butcher knife—“you never in your life saw no red Indian putting up with rules, did you?”
Which was perhaps true. But it was entirely possible that no red Indian had ever taken Clair’s butcher knife and hid it under a granary either, I thought, yet I didn’t say anything.
He waded into the willows and started whacking away. The thicker willows became bows and the thin ones became arrows. We worked for an hour or more peeling bark and using heavy sack-cord as string for the bows and stripping the bark from the thin ones to lighten them up for arrows.
We sharpened the arrows—each of us had six—and set out to do as Harris had stipulated: lurk and shoot everything.
Here Harris and I differed dramatically. I thought he meant, literally, things. I was content to shoot at dirt hunks, mounds of hay, clumps of horse droppings—and just pretend they were settlers or cowboys or cavalry.
Harris took it to the next highest plane of realism and went for living objects—cows, horses, and pigs.
I hesitated. Clearly this violated some rule or we—as I pointed out to Harris with what I thought to be impeccable logic—would have seen the grownups out shooting at the animals with bows and arrows.
“They won’t see us anyway,” Harris pointed out. “We’ll be lurking.”
He convinced me. Not directly, but I had started to consider the secondary benefits of this approach. The truth was I had two formidable enemies at the farm. One was Vivian, who had driven my testicles up somewhere around my tonsils and my head down between my shoulders. I still twinged when I thought of her. The second deadly adversary was, of course, Ernie.
It was all right to play red Indians and imagine enemies, I thought, but how much better to have real enemies to shoot at.
We lurked.
Harris led off and I followed, mentally awaiting my chance to get a shot in at Ernie or Vivian, who was out in the pasture in back of the barn.
Harris shot at the sows. I shot at the sows. The arrows bounced off their sides without hurting them, though they squealed and acted in other ways just like surprised cavalry.
Harris shot at a chicken. I shot at a chicken. We both missed—chickens being a much smaller cavalry than pigs—and undaunted we headed around the back side of the barn. I was watching to the rear, hoping for a shot at Ernie, and turned to the front just in time to see Harris take a quick shot.
There had been a small patch of
