and the value of clothing
Here’s the problem—it’s too slow. Hell, we can ride Bob and Bill and go faster.”
I could have pointed out that since the loft and shotgun incidents there had been absolutely no way we could get close enough to Bob or Bill to touch them, let alone ride them. But it had not been long since lightning had hit Harris’s business, so arguing with him about things seemed too harsh; Harris still walked with his legs apart a bit.
Besides, I agreed with him.
We had pulled two old bicycles from the junk heap and worked almost three days loosening the chains, oiling them, fixing tubes and pumping tires, twisting and aligning handlebars, and greasing bearings—all just to ride up and back on the quarter-mile driveway.
Initially I had in mind a fantasy involving getting a bike fixed and then pedaling the four miles to Elaine’s farm. I had seen her once since the night she’d learned about my brain being late getting into the light, at another Saturday night dance. And while I apparently still loved her with all my heart—or so it felt, judging by my breathing and pulse—she only smiled, again not unkindly, but otherwise ignored me completely.
Love is persistent, however, at least in the imagination, and my brain—light enfeebled as it may have been—would not stop thinking of her golden hair, blue eyes, even smile, and soft voice.
So the fantasies ran. I would fix a bike, I would pedal to her farm—though I had no idea where it was—and coming out to the mailbox she would see me pedaling by and stop and talk to me and find out that my brain was all right and smile at me the other way and we would kiss and we would marry and we would...
All this until we actually got the bikes working and pedaled the length of the driveway and back, grinding along, the wheels so out of line they wobbled, the tires bulging at the sides. After one loop I thought less of love and more of the possible terminal effects of trying to pedal four miles, and that had brought us to Harris’s trenchant remark, which he now repeated.
“Too slow. We need something to get these gooners moving. We need some kind of motor...” He stood with his hands in the pockets of his bibs, studying the yard, and I think had actually scanned it twice when he saw the washing machine.
His eyes stopped moving and I saw him start chewing his bottom lip. It was a habit I’d come to know as an indication that we would soon be in trouble—or more trouble than normal—but one that I also had come to view with some excitement.
The washing machine was by the house. There was no electricity yet in that country and some families still used hand washboards. But Knute and Clair had some years earlier purchased an old gas-engine washer.
It looked like a regular wringer washer except that underneath it had a one-cylinder gas motor with a tiny gas tank and a foot kick-starter that stuck out to the side.
I had seen Clair and Glennis use the washer. It ran with a put-n-put-n-put that became a one-speed drone, controlled by a governor that cranked the washer and wringer assembly with a V-belt off a pulley on the motor.
Harris wandered near the washer and studied it more closely, keeping well clear of the kitchen window where Clair and Glennis were working.
“She’ll do her,” he said, nodding.
“Do what?”
“Pull that bicycle.”
“The washing machine?”
“The motor, you dope. It’s only held on there by four bolts. We’ll take her off and bolt her on a bike and rig up a belt and off we go.”
Off you go, I thought, remembering the horse and shotgun, but I said nothing about it. I was also thinking of one salient fact that perhaps Harris had overlooked.
“The motor,” I pointed out in a slightly superior air, “is attached to your mother’s washing machine.”
“I know that,” he said, looking at me as if I’d gone insane. “We’ll just have to wait until they go to town.”
It was then that I realized the complexity of Harris’s plans. He didn’t just do things as they came along, willy-nilly—often he schemed for days, worked on them. Like the time he tried to shoot a banty chicken out of an old stovepipe with compressed air. It took hours of hand-pumping air into an inner tube inside a stovepipe until it was ready to burst, then getting the pipe situated and catching a chicken and jamming her down into the stovepipe (I suggested Ernie but we couldn’t find him). And even when the results didn’t warrant the effort—he had feathers blown two inches into his nostrils when the stovepipe burst—he was optimistic about the outcome. (“Fastest that chicken ever flew—she had to be doing two hundred when she hit my face.”)
And the plan he set into effect now was such a long-term effort.
From an old swatting machine he found a V-belt pulley wheel about a foot and a half across and used a hacksaw to cut the four center spokes out of it, leaving a four-inch piece on each spoke.
He then pulled the back wheel off the better of the two bicycles and spent hours wiring and friction-taping the pulley to the spokes.
By this time I was bored and looking for other things to do. I sneaked up into the granary, as I often did, and looked at Louie’s diorama and was surprised to find that he had added to it.
There was a new farm, with little trees and a house, and with a start I realized it was our farm. He’d done a model of the Larson place: a miniature copy of the house made of paper and cardboard with trees around it and a model of the barn. There were figures for Clair and Glennis—the two of them standing by the house—and one of Knute working on a
