Harris and me.
There was a figure for me.
A strange feeling came over me, seeing the figure. I somehow had never belonged—always felt like a visitor. And though we were related I never thought of myself as part of the family in some way; I considered myself more an observer than an outsider, a friend who watches.
The figure made my role different, carved it in time. I wasn’t just a visiting second cousin. I was somebody, a part of this place, this family. I belonged.
I picked up the figure that represented me and looked more closely at it. It was wearing a mouse-hair coat and had a smile and white teeth inside the little smile. It couldn’t have looked less like me but at the same time made me think more of myself, my life, than anything ever had before and I was crying when I set it down, crying to myself thinking that I felt like I was home.
“What’s wrong?” Harris was working on the bicycle when I came back down and he saw my red eyes.
“Dust. I was up in the granary.”
“Did you find ’em?”
“What... Oh, no.” Harris was still suffering from the purloined pictures and his sore business and believed that Louie had hidden the pictures somewhere in the granary. Harris felt he had proprietary rights and was hoping to find the pictures and steal them back. “I didn’t see them.”
“He’s probably got ’em under something. Did you look under things?”
“No...”
“Well, it don’t matter. Here, look at this—ain’t this a beauty?”
He pointed to the bike with the pulley wired/taped onto the rear wheel. He had reaffixed the wheel to the rear and held it up to spin it to show that it rotated freely.
I nodded dubiously. It seemed more like a rotating bandage than anything else, and I couldn’t see how it would possibly work, but I didn’t have Harris’s enthusiasm and optimism, couldn’t see the big picture as well as he did.
He had also manufactured a crude wooden platform, which was bolted above the pedals and rusty chain guard with two U-bolts.
“For the motor.”
I nodded again but in truth I didn’t think there would ever be a chance to try it. Knute and the rest didn’t go to town that often. Usually somebody stayed home. But I was wrong again. The next day Knute fired up the truck and took Clair and Glennis to town and Louie took the team six miles to a neighbor’s to get the horses shod.
Harris watched the grain wagon trundling off down the driveway with Louie sitting up in the high seat.
He had a crescent wrench hidden behind his back and as soon as Louie was well clear of the house he went for the washing machine.
I grabbed his suspenders and stopped him. “Just so you know—I’m not taking the blame this time.”
“They won’t even know we done it.”
“You’ve done it.”
“Yeah. They won’t even know. We’ll hook her in and make a few runs and put the motor back on the washing machine.”
“Just the same. No matter what, I’m not taking the blame.”
He nodded. “Sure. But you’ll see, there won’t be no problem...”
Of all the understatements Harris made that summer, it was perhaps the greatest.
At no time during the ensuing disaster did I think the contraption would really work. I helped him unbolt the four bolts that held the motor to the washing machine and helped him carry it to the bike and put it on the platform.
He had an old auger bit-and-brace and a long V-belt from the granary, one of the spares for the binder. It took him just a few minutes to remove the back wheel of the bike and loop the belt through and put the wheel back on, fit the belt into the taped pulley, and then connect it to the drive pulley on the motor.
He adjusted the motor into position, marked the holes, and then augered four holes through the wooden platform and bolted the motor in place with the belt tight.
“There,” he said. “She ought to fly.”
Or blow up, I thought. “How are you going to start it?” The kick starter was up against the frame.
“I’ll push the bike until she fires, then jump on. You be running in back of me and climb on when I get on.”
“I’m not riding that thing.”
He studied me. “You chicken.”
“I’m still not riding it.”
He frowned. “All right. We need a timer so’s we can check our speed. You run get the alarm clock from the folks’ bedroom.”
I did as he told me. It was a brass clock with two bells on top and a hammer that went back and forth to ring them.
“Take the other bike to the end of the driveway and when I start the engine and you hear me let her rip, you check the clock and then when I get to the end of the driveway you check her again and we’ll be able to figure out how fast I went.”
I was skeptical. My personal feelings were that he would never get the contraption out of the yard, let alone to the end of the driveway. But Harris had surprised me before—almost continuously—and so I took the other bike and dutifully pedaled to the end of the driveway and waited.
And waited.
I checked the clock numerous times as I heard Harris trying to start the motor back in the yard.
Put-n-put-n-put...
And it would die. I found later that the motor died because Harris had already unhooked the governor and it was getting too much gas and was choking out. I also decided still later that it was probably God trying to save Harris from himself. But even divine intervention didn’t work, and in truth Harris was so determined probably nothing could have saved him. Or, as Harris put it later, speaking of
