Little Britches (15 page)

There must have been some terrible battles up the ditch those next few nights. Father would leave the house just after I went to bed, and wouldn't get home till nearly daylight. He had another big lump on his cheekbone that turned black and blue, and Fred Aultland and Jerry Alder and Carl Henry looked all beat up when I saw them. Jerry had his right arm in a sling.

Saturday night there was a meeting at our house. Men came from all the ranches west of us—halfway to the mountains. They must have started getting there just after I went to sleep, but I woke up when the first buggy came into our yard. It was Mr. Wright. I knew his voice when Father went to help him unhitch his team, and I knew there was going to be some kind of meeting, because the first thing Mr. Wright said was, "Ain't any of the rest of the fellas got here yet, Charlie?" And besides that, Mother had put Hal out to sleep with Philip and me.

Grace didn't get up till the third team came. Then she tiptoed into my room and we peeked out under the curtain together. The men all stood around the barn and talked till Carl Henry came—he was the last one—then they went into the house. Grace and I knew we shouldn't have done it, and that we'd get a good spanking if we got caught, but we crept out the bunkhouse door and crawled around to the kitchen window. It was open, so we had to hunker up against the side of the house and keep real quiet.

At first, everybody was trying to talk at once, and someone said the only way they could ever keep water coming down the ditch in dry spells was to put men with high-powered rifles up on the hills, and shoot hell out of any so-and-so that went tampering with a ditch box. Then somebody else said that wouldn't do any good because the sheriff would get out a posse and throw them all in the hoosegow. They talked, and talked, and talked. Some of them even shouted, but I didn't hear Father's voice till Fred Aultland said, "Charlie, you must have done some thinking about this, but I haven't heard you say anything."

Everybody got real still then, and Father talked so low we couldn't much more than hear him. He said, "Well, it seems to me that courts are usually the best places to settle disputes if men can't get together peaceably, but in this instance both sides are afraid of what the court's ruling might be. We've been able to fight enough water down through the ditch at night to save our crops for the moment, but that won't do in the long run, because, sooner or later, somebody's going to be killed. When that happens, the matter will be settled in court whether we like it or not. It would be my idea that we ought to sit down and try to work out our differences with the men we've been fighting."

The men didn't seem to like that at all, and started shouting and talking all at once again. Some of them even swore—with Mother right in the other room. Mr. Corcoran called the men up near the head of the ditch some awful names, and said you might as well argue with a jackass as any one of them. At last Mr. Wright had to pound on the table and shout, "For God's sake, shut up and give Charlie a chance to tell us what his idea is, anyway."

Father didn't start to talk again till everybody was quiet, then he said, "Those fellows up there are holding the trump cards and they know it. I'm not too sure I wouldn't take pretty near my full measure of water if I were in their places and saw my crops drying up. I don't think they want a court fight, or a fist fight, or a gun fight any more than we do, but I don't think they're going to give up the hand without winning the odd trick. I wouldn't do it, and I don't think any of you fellows would. I'm inclined to think we'd be better off to have the assurance of a reasonable part of our share in dry time, than to take the chance of not getting any and losing all our late crops."

Father stopped talking as if he expected them to say he was wrong, but nobody spoke till Mr. Wright said, "Go on."

Then Father said, "I believe that if we approached them right with an agreement that we'd settle for 80 per cent of our proportion, based on ditch-head level, we might come to terms with them."

Jerry Alder and two or three of the younger fellows thought it would be better to keep on fighting the water down the ditch at night, but Mr. Wright, and Fred, and Carl, and even Mr. Corcoran thought Father's idea was best. It was right then that Mother pushed up the window in the front room, and Grace and I got scared, so we had to crawl back to the bunkhouse. In about half an hour all the men came out and started hitching up their horses. Mr. Wright was the last one to drive away, and before he went, he called to Father, "You'll be at my house, then, at ten o'clock tomorrow morning?"

Father called back, "I'll be there," and went into the house and closed the door.

There weren't any more fights over water that year, and when Willie Aldivote came up to the pasture to visit me a few days later, he seemed to think Father was quite a hero. I was proud because he said Father could fight like hell for a sick man, and that everybody thought he did a smart job getting the men up the ditch to agree about the water.

ABOUT the only fun I had the rest of that summer was the two times Fred Aultland put up his hay. Father and I worked for him two weeks both times, and each time we got a check for fifty dollars. The more I herded Mrs. Corcoran's cows, the more I didn't like it. As the pasture dried up, the cows made more trouble about trying to get into the alfalfa fields, and as they got skinnier and skinnier Mrs. Corcoran kept blaming me and saying it was because I brought them in too early, or because I didn't graze them where the grass was best. Fred Aultland said it was because I didn't let them get into the neighbors' crops enough to suit her.

Just before school opened she gave me fits because I brought them back to the corral one night at five minutes before six. When she pinned the thirty-five cents into my shirt pocket, she told me that I hadn't earned half of it, and she was only giving it to me because we were so poor. We weren't poor, and I told her so, and yanked the pin out and threw the money right down by her feet. After that she wasn't so mean, and picked it up and passed it to me after I got on Fanny.

I was mad all the way home. When I got there Mother was feeding the hens and turkeys out beside the barn. After I'd pulled the bridle off Fanny so she could go and roll, Mother asked me what the matter was. I remembered what Father had told me about forgetting what Mrs. Corcoran said and not telling anybody, so I told Mother I was mad because I didn't think I was getting paid enough for herding the cows. She put her arm around me and pulled me up against her. Then she patted me on the head, and said, "Son, if you amount to as much as I think you're going to, some day you'll kick on a
dollar
and thirty-five cents a day." I did tell Father about it that night when we were milking, though. And from then on I never herded Mrs. Corcoran's cows.

School started about the first of October. Muriel was old enough to go that year, but she wasn't strong enough to walk the mile and a half, so Father let us drive Fanny. It wasn't a bit the way starting school had been when we first came there. All the kids knew we had a horse now, and that I had ridden up to the mountains to get Two Dog, and that I had made Mrs. Corcoran pay me thirty-five cents a day for herding her cows. They knew, too, about Father fighting to get the irrigating water and about his fixing Fred Aultland's stacker so as to make the hay fall where they wanted it. Everybody called me Spikes, and Freddie Sprague gave me half an apple at morning recess.

Mr. Lake was the chairman of the school board. They said he always came for the opening day, and he always rode his old white mule. He was a little man—quite a lot older than Father—and he had big joints at the knuckles of his hands. All morning he sat up on the little platform by Miss Wheeler's desk and watched everything we did. While he was watching us, he kept pulling his fingers, one at a time, until he made the knuckle pop. Just when you didn't expect it he would point at somebody and ask him to bound California, or what body of water the Mississippi River emptied into, or something else. He got me on the worst one. He pointed his finger right at me and said, "You! Little tow-headed fella! Go to the board and write me: 'Pare a pear with a pair of scissors.'"

The only two kinds I knew about were
pear
and
pair
, and I got all mixed up on whether there were two
s
's or two
z
's in
scissors
. He banged his hand down on the desk and told Miss Wheeler she wasn't a very good teacher, or I'd know better than that. Then he told her to put me back in the first grade in spelling till he came again. I was pretty much ashamed of myself, because we liked Miss Wheeler and I didn't want to get her in a mess with her boss, but Grace got mad. She jumped right out of her seat and told him that it wasn't Miss Wheeler's fault, because we were new there—and that I never could spell
cat
without a
k
, anyway. All the good it did was that he made her stand with her face in a corner till noontime. He said that would "learn her not to sass her elders."

Everybody was talking about old Mr. Lake while we were eating our lunches, and Willie Aldivote dared me to sneak out in the afternoon and put a burdock burr under his saddle. I pretty near lost my nerve, but the more I looked at him, the madder I got, so halfway between recess time and four o'clock I put up two fingers, and Miss Wheeler nodded at me.

Mr. Lake had a two-cinch saddle, and I only had to loosen the back one a little bit so I could get the burr well up under the middle. From then till school let out, I was so nervous 1 could hardly think at all, but he didn't make me answer any more questions, so I don't think he noticed me.

As soon as Miss Wheeler tapped the school's-out bell we all grabbed our caps and coats and ran for the carriage shed. The old white mule was tied away over at the east end of the shed, so the boys made a big piece of work about getting their harness down and getting the straps straightened out. All the girls knew about the burr, too, and they stood around twittering and giggling and trying to look as if they didn't see Mr. Lake when he came out and put the bridle on his mule.

Just as soon as he put his foot in the stirrup the old mule went crazy. Mr. Lake let go of the reins and sat kerplunk down against the board fence, and the mule bucked so hard he'd have made a bronco look like a carriage horse. After he had the saddle slewed way over on the side of his belly, he shot right out through the turnstile gate and raced off up the road. As he went through the gate he smashed the turnstile all to pieces and ripped the saddle off. Maybe Miss Wheeler wasn't a very good teacher, but Mr. Lake was. I learned at least a dozen new words from what he said about that old white mule. I was still shaking from being nervous, but Rudolph Haas was as cool as watercress. He went over and helped Mr. Lake get up and asked him if he couldn't drive him home in his buggy.

Of course, Grace had to tell Mother all about Mr. Lake coming to school. While we were eating supper she told about my not being able to spell "Pare a pear with a pair of scissors," and about her being able to bound California, but she didn't mention having to stand with her face in the corner or my putting the burr under Mr. Lake's saddle. The next I heard of it was three or four nights later when we were out milking. Our Holstein cow's tieup was nearest to the barn door, then came the brindle, so that Father's back was toward her when we were milking. Everything was quiet in the barn, except for the music milk makes when it goes singing down into the buckets, and I was thinking about Two Dog, when Father said, "It's a dangerous thing to put a cockle burr under an old man's saddle. Mr. Lake might have been badly hurt."

I just said, "Yes, sir," and Father never mentioned it again.

I didn't have any more trouble at school for nearly a month —except for my glasses and the cellar door. I don't know why we had a cellar door, because there wasn't any cellar, but we did have one. It was one of those bulkhead doors that slant like a lean-to roof. Some of us were sliding down it one day, when I ran a big, long splinter into my behind. It broke off inside the skin and there was nearly an inch of it in there. Willie Aldivote tried to get it out with the little blade of his jackknife, but he couldn't, so he called Grace. She tried to get hold of it with her fingernails, but she didn't have any more luck than Willie. Then Miss Wheeler picked at it with a needle, and finally she sent Grace and Muriel to take me home.

I think Mother always did kind of like operations. She put a clean sheet over the kitchen table, dropped scissors, darning needles, and Father's whisker tweezers into a basin of boiling water, and rolled up her sleeves. It looked as though she were really going to do a big job, and I wasn't very happy when I shinned up on the table.

It seemed as if Mother were trying to dig clear to China. First she tried tweezers, and then she tried darning needles, but the splinter was so rotten that all she could do was nibble away at the end of it. The more she dug, the more I bled, and the louder I yelled. Grace stood by with a strip of torn sheet to mop off the blood. Every few minutes she'd mop away my tears with the same rag, and tell me that the worst would be over soon. I peeked over my shoulder once or twice, and Mother's mouth was clamped up tight. It was a long operation. I must have been on the table half an hour, but it seemed like a month. At last Mother put both hands on her hips, and said, "Well, we'll just have to let Nature take her course. It will fester in a day or two and come right out by itself."