Butler Ellis Parker
Swatty: A Story of Real Boys
“Now, what?” he said, cross. “Here’s Higgins, the skiff man, and he says you hired a skiff and didn’t bring it back. What’s the meaning of all this? And are you putting on this malaria on this account? Explain, young man!”
So I sat up and I said, “Bony took it.”
“Come, now, explain!” my father said.
“Well, we was up the river,” I said, “and me and Swatty and Bony got out of the skiff and – and we went ashore. So – so – then me and Swatty, we run down the railroad track a little way and – and when we looked back Bony was going to get into the skiff, and we hollered for him to wait for us, but he wouldn’t. He got into it and rowed away.”
“And left you there?”
“Yes, sir.”
I guess he didn’t believe it. I guess he thought I was just trying to put it onto Bony, to get out of it myself. He forgot I’d got religion, I guess. So he snapped his fingers the way he does when he’s mad.
“Get out of that bed and get into your clothes and make haste about it!” he said, and I said, “Yes, sir!” and I got out of bed right away. I dressed quick.
Mother cried because it was wrong to make a sick boy dress and go over to Bony’s house out of a sweat and I’d catch pneumonia; but I had to go. So nobody said anything on the way over, except Mr. Higgins tried to talk about what nice weather we were having, but Father wouldn’t talk. I didn’t like to go, because – well, I thought all Bony’s folks would be crying because he was drowned when we got there; but of course if you think about it, they wouldn’t know. So when we got to their house they weren’t crying, but Mr. Booth – he was Bony’s father – just come to the door in his socks and said, “Well, what is it now?” because I was there, and he knew something was the matter or I wouldn’t be there with my father. So Father said, “Did your son come home?”
“Yes, he come home,” Mr. Booth said, “but he ain’t well, and Ma put him to bed.”
I was glad he wasn’t drowned, anyway. Unless he’d told about the dead man, and then maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he had been drowned. So Father and Mr. Higgins told about the skiff, and Mr. Booth sent Bony’s ma to up ask Bony. Pretty soon she came down.
“He’s pretty sick,” she said. “He’s complaining of pains in his arms and back and he’s shaking like he had the ague; but I hope not, because his temp’ature ain’t high. I guess maybe he caught a chill. And he tied the skiff under the creek bridge. He left the oars in it. But he shall never again play with those two boys! Never again! The idea of them running off and leaving my poor child to row home all alone!”
Well, that was a lie, but I wasn’t sore at Bony because he’s a coward and it was better for him to tell a lie like that than to blab about the dead man. Anyway, a fellow has to tell some lies until he gets religion. After that it’s different.
“So you’ve been lying to me again!” Father said to me, but I didn’t say anything. Saying it was a lie didn’t make it a lie, and all he could do was lick me, anyway. But he didn’t lick me, because he thought maybe I did have malaria because I’d got religion. I guess that was what he thought. So Mr. Higgins said, “Never mind, I’ll get the skiff, but it will be about a dollar.” So Father paid him and said he would take it out of my allowance; but he hardly ever paid me my allowance, anyway, so that was all right. He just gave me an allowance so he could say he wouldn’t pay it to me, I guess. Anyway, we went home.
Well, I stayed awake for hours, thinking about the murder and what we had better do about it, but maybe it was only a few minutes, and the next morning Swatty came over before I was out of bed. He waited for me in the side yard until I come down.
“Well,” he said, “have you thought of anything to do?”
I hadn’t thought of anything except maybe I’d better go to the minister and tell him all about it. So Swatty said if I did that he would knock my head off, and I knew he would, if he could.
“Well, have you thought of anything, then?” I asked him.
So he told me he had sat up all night thinking about it. He said he had paced the floor with his hands behind him and his brow knotted in thought throughout the still hours of the night until cockcrow. I thought he was lying, but I didn’t tell him so. I told him I went to sleep, and I told him about Bony and Mr. Higgins. I told him about the rifle we had left on the rocks. He said that complicated matters, but we would have to make the best of it.
Then he showed me the braided horsehair bridle he had in his pocket that his uncle had brought back from Texas, and the wooden tobacco pipe he had in the other pocket. He said we might have gone to Texas, only somebody in Texas might recognize the bridle and know it was the one his uncle had had, and then know him and connect him up with the murder in the shanty boat, so we would go to Montana or maybe New Mexico. He was n’t sure which we would go to, but that it would be better to start right away.
Well, I didn’t like to leave home and never come back until I was a big man with a beard, and the murder was forgotten about, but it seemed the only thing to do. I talked and Swatty talked, and it seemed the only way we could keep from being hung, because “murder will out,” as it says in our reader. I only had twenty-five cents that I hadn’t paid Mr. Higgins for the skiff, and Swatty only had fourteen cents. We knew that was n’t nearly enough money. We didn’t know what Bony had, but afterward we found he only had a dime. But Swatty said we could get work to do in some of the places we would get to, and we could steal green com and roast it – only he would have to steal it, because it wouldn’t be right for me.
We thought the best thing to do would be to start out of our back gate and go due west, and keep going west until we came to Montana or New Mexico, or wherever we got to, only we had to get the rifle first, because if we left it, it would be evidence against us, and anyway we might kill some game with it. We had it all fixed up how we would do, and just then Bony came over the back fence, and we told it all over again. We didn’t think he would go with us, but he said he would.
So we talked it all over, and it wasn’t like any other time we had ever talked anything over. Most times we just talked about running away but we didn’t mean it, but this time it was a mighty serious thing and we meant it. Other times when we talked we were afraid to run away, but this time we were afraid not to. It was almost noon when we got ready to go, and just as we were going Mother saw us and called us back. She asked me if we were going to the woods, and we were, so I said we were, and she said we oughtn’t to go without lunch, so she made us sandwiches, and we were glad to have them. I said “Good-bye, Mother,” and she said “Good-bye, son,” and she didn’t know that maybe it was the last time she’d ever say it to me, but I knew it because maybe she would grow old and die before I ever came back.
Well, we started off. We didn’t talk much – even Swatty didn’t. We went past his barn, and he went in to say good-bye to his dog, but we didn’t dare take him along, because somebody might know us by him, so he whined and cried when we went away. We didn’t say anything much until we got to the city limits and then Swatty said, “Well, anyway, now the town police can’t touch us, because we are out of town, and they can’t touch anybody out of town”, and Bony began to cry.
But he didn’t cry loud – he just sort of sniggered to himself and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I guess maybe I cried, too, but not very loud, either.
If it hadn’t been for being hung I would have gone back, and I would have told the minister all about killing the man, because I kept thinking about Mamie Little and that some other boy would play with her and grow up and marry her, and maybe I’d never see her again, even if he didn’t marry her. Swatty was the only one that didn’t cry a little. He didn’t have to, because he let on to be mad at us for being mushies, and he swore instead. He swore at me and Bony, and I could have kept from crying, too, if I could have swore, but I couldn’t because I gave it up when I got religion.
After we got beyond the houses that are beyond the city limits we went across the vacant lots and across the old fair grounds and down over the hill. We got down to the river road and climbed over the fence and got under the bob-wire fence on the other side of the road and went through the cornfield. We forgot about our footprints.
When we got to the edge of the cornfield Bony wouldn’t go any farther. He was scared to go any nearer the dead man. Swatty and me crawled under the wires and went across the railroad track, and before we were across them we dodged back into the cut alongside the track, and Swatty dropped flat in the weeds. So I dropped flat, too. The reason was that there were eight or ten men on the front deck of the shanty house, and I don’t know how many more inside.
They had found the man we had murdered.
We just lay there and held our breath. I couldn’t think of anything, I was so scared again. I just remembered how “murder will out,” and how a murderer will always come back to where he murdered anybody, and that there we were, and that as soon as they saw us they’d know we were the murderers, because we had come back. I don’t know what Swatty was doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I guess as soon as I was able I-started to try to dig a hole in the railroad embankment with my finger nails, to crawl into and hide, because that was what I was doing when I heard the men come up the other side of the embankment.
They were coming up from the shanty boat, and one of the men was saying, “Steady now! Keep that door level, can’t you?” So I couldn’t dig any more. My fingers wouldn’t work. My arms and legs felt as if they were full of cold ice water, and I couldn’t lift up my hands to put my hat on tighter, which I wanted to do because I could feel my hair lifting up and lifting my hat up. I didn’t think about being hung or anything, but just how awful it would be if the men let the door tip and rolled the murdered man down on top of us. I guess I ought to have thought of how innocent I was, but I didn’t. I didn’t even think of being religious. I just felt my backbone creep and my hair lift up and my arms and legs get colder and colder.
We heard the men carrying the dead man away. I couldn’t move, and I guess I would never have dared to move again if it hadn’t been for Swatty. As soon as we couldn’t hear the men any more Swatty lifted his head and crawled up the embankment and looked. I wouldn’t have done it for a million billion quadrillion dollars. He looked, and when he saw they weren’t thinking of us, but were all looking at the dead man on the door and going away from us down the railroad track he scrabbled up the rest of the embankment and scrabbled across the track and down the other side. He was back right away, with the target rifle, and then he told me to get up and get away from there, but I couldn’t get up. So he kicked me two or three times hard, and when he kicked me on my hip bone I got mad and forgot to be so scared and got up. We ran through the cornfield and got Bony, and all three of us got across the road and ran up the hillside into the woods as hard as we could run.
I don’t know how many miles we ran. We ran until we had to fall down because our legs wouldn’t work any more. We sat in the bushes awhile and rested, and then we went on, but we walked mostly. We only ran once in a while. We came to a road we didn’t know, but it went sort of west; and we went on down that road a long way and that night we slept in a haystack – not because it was cold but to be hid. The next morning we went on again, and before noon we were mighty hungry. Bony was hungriest, and he cried a lot, and I cried a little, but Swatty was willing to fight us whenever we wanted to stop and rest too long, because it wasn’t safe yet. We were a long way from Arizona or Montana or wherever we were going, and it was just about the time the sheriff and everybody would start out to find us if they thought we were the murderers. We just plugged along and felt mean and tired, and I thought about Mother and Mamie Little a lot. I felt so bad I almost didn’t care if they did catch me and hang me. That’s the way Bony felt, too, but Swatty kept us going.
Swatty went up to a house about supper time and asked for some bread and butter, and he got it and brought part of it to us. Then he made us go on, because he said we ought to get as far from that house as we could after we’d been seen there. So we went until I was ready to die, and we found a hayrick in a field and we were just going to hide in it when three men on horseback and some in a buggy – two more – came up the road and saw us and shouted at us.
Well, we knew it was all up. The men started to climb over the fence, and we walked toward them because we knew we couldn’t get away, and it was just as well to be hung as to be shot trying to run away. I guess it was the most awful feeling I ever had in my life.
When we got up to them one of the men was Swatty’s father and another was my minister. As soon as Swatty got there his father took him by the collar of his coat, and shook him and hit him on the side of the head and told him what he thought of him for running away and making so much trouble; but when he let go of him Swatty just dropped down on the grass and shut his eyes, because he was so played out that all he had to be was shook, and he went unconscious. So Bony started to cry and the minister said, “Shame!” and then Swatty’s father got red in the face, and dropped on his knees beside Swatty and picked him up and kissed him. He cried. It was the first time I ever saw a man cry.
So then I guessed I’d confess the whole thing to my minister, and I did. The other men were all trying to get Swatty to open his eyes and my minister listened to me. He listened to all of it – all about the murder and all. Then he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, “You poor boy! And you thought I was hunting you down?” And I said, “How long will it be before they hang us?” And he said, “George, I hope you will never be hung, because that man wasn’t murdered. He was a suicide, and he wrote a letter about it before he went to do it.” So I started to say how glad I was and, when I come to, I was at a farmhouse and my minister was trying to get me to drink some milk.
So after while we went home. Father wasn’t there, because he was out with some other folks hunting for us, but Mother and Fan and a lot of people were, and my minister told them all about it, and the women all cried to think of us three all alone with a murder on our minds and our legs tired, I guess, and not much to eat. But I was so tired I didn’t care. I was so tired I didn’t care who was there. I was so tired I was n’t even glad I wasn’t a murderer. Then somebody came out from behind the women where she had been, where they wouldn’t notice her much, and she didn’t look at me or anybody. She just said:
“Well, I guess I’ll go home now.”
“Why, Mamie Little, have you been waiting up all this while?” my mother said. “You should be in bed, child.”
So she didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at her. She just went home. But then I knew I was glad I wasn’t a murderer. Because I knew that Mamie Little wouldn’t have thought I’d got religion very good if all I’d got let me go around murdering men in shanty boats. And I didn’t want Mamie Little to think that about me, because – well, I didn’t know why, I just thought it.
X. SLIM FINNEGAN
Well, I guess the nearest Swatty ever came to having a lot of money was the time Mr. Murphy got it and Swatty didn’t. It was a thousand and five hundred dollars, and if Swatty didn’t get it Mamie Little ought to have had it; and if Mamie Little didn’t get it I ought to have had it; but we didn’t any of us get it, because Mr. Murphy got it.
I told you about the time Mamie Little got mad at me because I had been prohibition and changed over to anti-prohibition because Swatty could lick me, and about how her father had the prohibition newspaper. Well, he kept publishing in his newspaper that the saloons ought to be closed; so one day somebody blew up Mr. Little’s house with dynamite – only it was gunpowder. But they called it dynamite. They called the men that blew up the house the dynamiters. They blew up two other houses, too, and that was why Mr. Murphy was in town. He was a detective. He came and worked in the sawmill, and nobody knew he was a detective until he got the money me or Swatty or Mamie Little ought to have had.
Me and Swatty and Bony was sitting on the empty manure bin back of our barn, smoking cornsilk cigarettes, and that reminded us of the time we were up the river smoking driftwood grapevine cigarettes, when we saw Slim Finnegan steal the gunpowder, and we got to talking about it.
“Well, if anybody ever finds out Slim Finnegan stole it he won’t stab me!” Swatty said; “because he wouldn’t think I told on him, because I ain’t prohibition and I never was; and I guess Slim and everybody knows it.”
So that made me and Bony feel pretty scared, because everybody knew Slim Finnegan was a stabber. He’d just as soon stab you as not. I don’t remember whether he ever had stabbed anybody; but I guess he had, because everybody said so. Anyway, he was always showing us the knife he stabbed fellers with when he wanted to stab them, and he said he’d stab any of us for two cents. The knife had a staghorn handle and a six-inch blade, with a curve in it and a spring in the back that, when you pressed it, snapped the blade open all ready to stab with.
Once, when he met me when I was alone, he grabbed me by the neck and backed me against a fence post, and pulled out the knife and opened it. I bellered and said: “Aw, lemme alone, Slim! I never done nothin’ to you!” And he said he knew mighty well I hadn’t and that I’d better not try to, because he was a stabber, and if I did anything he didn’t like he’d cut my heart out and leave it sticking to the fence post with the knife in it, to show fellers not to monkey with Slim Finnegan. So I said I’d never, never do anything he didn’t want me to, and please to let me go. So he said, well, he guessed he’d stab me, anyway, while he had me; and he put the point of his knife against my stomach and leaned up against me, so that all he had to do was lean a little harder against the handle of the knife and I’d be stabbed.
I thought I was going to be killed, sure. I held my breath, and my bones felt like water; and just then he laughed at me and bumped my head against the post three times and threw me down on the grass and went away.
That was before me and Swatty and Bony saw him set the lumber yard afire too. After we saw him set the lumber yard afire we were all more scared of him than ever; even Swatty was scared of him, and said so. When we saw him set the lumber yard afire Slim was in our class at school; but he was twice as big as anybody in our room, because he only went to school when he wanted to and he didn’t want to very often; and after the fire he quit going to school. I guess he went bumming for a while.
The first I knew about Slim Finnegan was when I was a little bit of a kid and not big enough to ride belly buster or knee gut on a sled or slide down the big hills. I had a high sled and rode on it sitting down, and rode from the sidewalk into the gutter, and things like that. So my father got me a new sled on my birthday, a clipper sled with half-round irons, and it was painted red and was named Dexter. I took it out on the hill where the big kids were sliding and tried to ride belly buster on it, which is lying flat on your stomach and steering with both feet, like knee gut is lying on one knee and steering with the other foot, but the runners on my sled were so slick that when I put the sled down it slid away before I could get onto it.
So I was trying that when Slim Finnegan came up. I hadn’t ever seen him before, but he acted nice and said the way I was trying to get onto the sled wasn’t the right way and he would show me how. So he took my sled and ran away and belly busted onto it. He went down the hill like a flash. I watched him until I couldn’t tell which was Slim and which was some other feller, away down the hill, and then I couldn’t tell any one from any other, and I waited for him to come back. One feller came up the hill, and then another and dozens came up, but Slim didn’t come back with my sled; and after a while I began to blubber the way kids do, and a girl I didn’t know took me by the arm and led me home, saying, “Don’t cry, Georgie! Don’t cry, Georgie!” all the way.
So the girl told my mother somebody had stolen my sled, and that was the first I knew it was stolen. When my father came home he asked me what the boy was like that took my sled and I told him, and he went out and after a long time he came back and he had my sled. It was all painted over with fresh drab paint except where my father had scraped the paint off to show that it was my sled. He said: “That drunken Finnegan’s dirty son stole it!” So that was the first I knew of Slim Finnegan.
When I got old enough to play away from the house I mighty soon knew that Slim Finnegan was the feller that would sneak up on us little kids when we were playing marbles and grab up our marbles and steal them and, if we said anything, twist our arms behind us until we yelled. He was the one that would sit in the long grass out in the field when we played ball and, if the ball came near him, grab it up and put it in his pocket and laugh at us. He was the one that, if he came on us when we were fishing, would throw our worm can in the Slough and take the fish we had caught, and then swear at us. He was a sneak and a thief and a tough, and his father was a tough and a drunkard; and it wasn’t safe to send your washing to Mrs. Finnegan because sometimes she got drunk and didn’t do it for a week, and sometimes it didn’t all come back.
Well, Swatty said that Slim Finnegan wouldn’t stab him, because he was anti-prohibition and Slim was too; so Bony thought maybe he’d better turn anti-prohibition, and he did. And I hoped Slim knew I had turned, but I was afraid he didn’t.
Well, one day that spring – but pretty late – me and Swatty and Bony went down to the levee and hired a skiff from Higgins like we always did; and we rowed across the Mississippi to the Illinois shore above the old ferry landing. I guess maybe we were after turtle eggs; so when we saw the shore was all mud Swatty said:
“Let’s row up to the head of the Slough and row down the Slough.”
“What for?” I asked him.
“Oh, just for cod!” he says. So we did.
We rowed up to the place where the Slough branches off from the river, and there was a good deal of water in the Slough yet, so we rowed down the Slough until we came almost to the ferry road, and then we thought we would stop and get some grapevine driftwood to smoke, and we did. We rowed to the shore of the Slough and got out and found plenty of driftwood where it had lodged against the bushes and tree roots, and we lit up and smoked and sat awhile just doing that.
Then Swatty said: “Come on! Let’s go over to that sand by the powder house and see if there are any turtle eggs there yet.”
That was a good place for turtle eggs, because the sand was hotter there sooner than anywhere else. It was a sort of cleared place without many trees or bushes, all soft sand and not very far from the ferry road. So we walked along down the Slough and pretty soon we came to a skiff pulled up on the shore. I was nearest, so I jumped into it; but Swatty didn’t. He said:
“Garsh! You’d better get out of that skiff. Some feller has just left that skiff there, because his footprints on the bow seat ain’t dry yet. If he came back and seen us playing in his skiff he’d like as not give us good and plenty!”
And that was right, because when a feller rows over from town or anywhere he don’t like kids to fool with his skiff; because if the skiff got away how could he get back to town? So if they catch you in their skiffs they bat you a good one. So I got out of the skiff and Swatty went on ahead, and me and Bony followed; and we come to the sandy place by the powder house.
A powder house is a little square shack about as big as a closet, covered with sheet iron and painted red for danger. This was the only one on the Illinois side, but there were two more on the Iowa side, up the river from town a good ways; and the reason they were so far from town was because the wholesale grocers sold powder, but the city didn’t allow them to keep any inside the city limits. When they sold some they sent over to get it. The powder houses were painted with big letters to say Danger! and that nobody must shoot at them or build a fire near them, or they might explode. So that was why this one was in the middle of the sandy place sand can’t burn like grass does.
So we come through the bushes to where we could see the powder house and we all stopped short right there, for there was Slim Finnegan coming out of the powder house with a bag over his shoulder, with what anybody could tell was an iron powder keg in it. As soon as we saw him he saw us and we dodged back into the bushes and ran. We ran pretty far, and then we stopped and listened and didn’t hear anything; so we hid down behind a log and waited. We knew that if Slim Finnegan found us he’d stab us or something. Anyway, we thought he would. Me and Bony did. I guess Swatty did too.
After we had waited what seemed like a couple of hours – but I guess it was about half a minute – Swatty put his head up above the log and looked, and didn’t see anything. Then he got up and went round the log and started to go back to the powder house. Bony didn’t say anything, because he was too scared, but I yelled, “Swatty! Swatty!” in a whisper, because I wanted him to come back; but he just turned and motioned us to be still, and he went on. He walked as careful as he could. Pretty soon he came back and dropped down behind the log again.
“It’s Slim Finnegan, all right,” he said – only he said “orl right,” like he always does; “and he’s stealing a keg of powder” – only he said it sort of like “kerg of powder.”
“What’d you see, Swatty?” I whispered.
“I seen him shift the bag from one shoulder to the other,” Swatty said, “and I could see the ridges on the keg, all right! If we wanted to we could tell the police and they’d put him in jail.”
“Aw, don’t, Swatty!” I said. “If you do that he’ll wait until he gets out and then he’ll stab all of us. Aw, don’t tell the police, Swatty!”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” Swatty said. “I ain’t made up my mind yet what I’ll do. I ain’t afraid of his old stabbin’ knife, I tell you that! He can’t scare me! There ain’t any Slim Finnegan that ever lived could scare me. If he pulled his old frog stabber on me I’d – ”
He stopped short and I saw him put out one hand and grab the log, and his face looked like a dead man’s, and then I looked up from the callus I was fixing on my foot and I saw Slim Finnegan too. He was standing right in front of us with a pistol in his hand and the pistol was pointed right at us. He had a mean-looking face, sort of foxy and sort of sneery, and now it had a sort of grin on it, and it was ugly. It was the kind of grin he had when he twisted a little kid’s arm and made him scream. He was just like he always was, sort of muddy-haired and yellowfaced and slouchy in the shoulders, and tobacco juice in the corners of his mouth. He looked just the way he always looked when he was going to have some fun hurting somebody.
I felt pretty sick, I felt hot in the stomach, as if a bullet had already made a hot hole there. I sort of twitched in different places as each place got to thinking it was the place the bullet was going to hit. I don’t know what Bony did; I had all I wanted to do without thinking of anybody else. All of a sudden Slim opened his dirty mouth and swore at us the worst anybody ever heard.
“Get up out of there, you” – something – “rats!” he said in the meanest voice he had. “Get up!”
So we got up.
“You get along there, now!” he ordered, swearing some more; and he waved us where to go.
We didn’t say a word, not even Swatty. We just went; and instead of thinking I felt the bullet coming into my stomach I thought I felt it coming into the joints of my back. I put my hand behind me to sort of help stop it if it came. That way he sent us through the brush to the sandy place. He walked us toward the powder house, and then, all at once, he shouted at us to throw down our grapevine cigarettes. He asked us if we wanted to blow him to hell. So we threw them down.
Then he came up to me and hit me on the side of the head and knocked me down in the sand, and threw Bony on top of me, and slapped Swatty so he staggered; but Swatty didn’t fall. He swore back at Slim, and Slim slapped him again and knocked him down. For a million dollars I would n’t have sworn back at a stabber that had a pistol; but that’s how Swatty is. Anyway, he was the only one of us that could swear good enough to make it worth while swearing back.
Well, Slim had left the door of the powder house open and when he had us all knocked down he came over and kicked at us, and I was the one he kicked. He swore all the time, a steady stream, and it was the thoroughest swearing I ever heard. It sounded like business. Then he jerked Swatty up and slung him toward the powder house and slung him inside, and then he took me and Bony and slung us the same way. He slung us all into the powder house.
“I’ll teach you to go blattin’ about me when you see me!” he said. “Dirty little rats! I’ll learn you a lesson! You ‘ll never come your sneakin’ spy in’ on me again! You’ll have enough when I get through with you this time. You want to know what I’m goin’ to do with you?”
Well, we did sort of want to know, but we didn’t say so.
