Butler Ellis Parker
The Jack-Knife Man
VI. “BOOGE”
NO, siree, Buddy!” said Peter, shaking his head, “my jack-knife is one thing you can’t have to play with. There’s two things a man oughtn’t to trust to anybody; one’s his jack-knife and one’s his soul. He ought to keep both of them nice and sharp and clean. If I been letting my soul get dull and rusty and all nicked up, it’s no sign I’m going to let my jack-knife get that way. What I got to do is to polish up my soul, and I guess there ain’t no better place to do it than down here where there ain’t nobody to bother me whilst I do it. You hain’t no idee what a soul is, but you will have some day, maybe. I ain’t right sure I know that, myself.”
The shanty-boat was moored in Rapp’s slough, and had been there three days. The cold weather, which continued unabated, had sealed the boat in by spreading a sheet of ice over the surface of the slough, but Peter did not like the way the river was behaving. Between the new-formed ice and the shore a narrow strip of water appeared faster than the cold could freeze it and the ice that covered the slough cracked now and then in long, irregular lines, all telling that the river was rising, and rising rapidly. This meant that the cold snap was merely local and that up the river unseasonably warm weather had brought rains or a great thaw. There was no great danger of a long period of high water so late in the season, for cold waves were sure to freeze the North soon, but the present high water was not only apt to be inconvenient but actually dangerous for the shanty-boat. A rise of another foot would cover the lowland, and if the weather turned warm Buddy and Peter would be cut off from the hill farms by two miles of water-covered “bottom,” to wade across which in Peter’s thin shoes would be most unpleasant.
The danger was that the wind which now blew steadily toward the Iowa side and down stream, might force the huge weight of floating ice into the head of the slough, pushing and pressing it against the newly formed slough ice and crumbling it – cracked and loosened at the edges as it was – and thus pile the whole mass irresistibly against the little shanty-boat. In such an event the boat would either be overwhelmed by one of those great ice hills that pile up when the river ice meets an obstruction or, borne before the tons of pressure, be carried out of the slough with the moving ice and forced down the river for many miles, perhaps, before Peter could work the boat into clear water and find shelter behind some point. The water reached the height of the bank of the slough the third day, and Peter made every possible preparation to save the boat should the ice begin to move. There was not much he could do. He unshipped his small mast and drove a spike in its butt, to use as a pike pole, stowed his skiff in a safe place between two large trees on the shore, and saw to the hitch that held the boat, that he might cast off promptly if the strain became too great.
Peter did not blame himself for the position in which the untimely rise had placed him. The slough should have been a safe place. Once let the ice firmly seal the slough – any slough – and all the weight of all the floating ice of the whole river could not disturb the boat. When the ice moved out of the river in the spring it would pile up in a mountain at the head of the island formed by the slough, choking the entrance, and not until the slough ice softened and rotted and honeycombed and at last dissolved in the sun, could anything move the shanty-boat. A big rise in November is rare indeed.
“But I want your jack-knife, Uncle Peter,” said the boy insistently. “I want to whittle.”
“And I wouldn’t give two cents for a boy that didn’t want to whittle,” said Peter. “A jack-knife is one of the things I’ve got to get you when I go up town, and I’ll put it right down now.”
From his clock shelf – still lacking its alarm-clock – he took a slip of paper and a pencil stub. It was his list of goods to be bought, and it was growing daily.
Coffee
Rubber boots for B
Lard
Sweter for B. red one
Bibel
Sope
Hymn Book
Stokings for B
A. B. C. blocks for B
60 thread. 80 too
Under this he added “Jack-knife for B.” and replaced the list and pencil. He shook his head as he did so. He had forty cents in his pocket, and the small pile of wooden spoons that represented his trading capital had not increased. Getting settled for the winter had taken most of his time, and while his jack-knife was busy each evening its work was explained by the toys with which Buddy had littered the floor. These were crudely whittled and grotesque animals – a horse, a cow, two pigs and a cat much larger than the cow, all of clean white maplewood – the beginnings of a complete farm-yard. Of them all Buddy preferred the “funny cat,” and a funny cat it was.
Peter had his own ideas on the question of when a small boy should go to bed, but Buddy had other ideas, and Peter was not sorry to have the boy playing about the cabin long after normal bed-time. When, on the night of the funeral, it became a matter of plain decency for Buddy to retire, and he wouldn’t, Peter had compromised by agreeing to whittle a cat if Buddy would go to bed like a little soldier as soon as the cat was completed. The result was a very hasty cat. Peter made it with twenty quick motions of his jack-knife – which was putting up a job on Buddy – but Buddy was satisfied. The cat had no ears. It might have been a rabbit or a bear, if Peter had chosen to call it so. It was a most impressionistic cat. But Buddy loved it.
“Ho! ho!” he laughed, throwing his legs in the air, as was his way when he was much amused. “That’s a funny cat, Uncle Peter. Make another funny cat.”
“You get to bed, young Buddy!” said Peter. “I said I’d make you a cat, and you say that’s a cat, and you said you’d go to bed, so to bed you go.”
And to bed Buddy went, with the cat in one hand. Next to Peter himself Buddy loved the cat more than anything in the world. He loved to look at the cat. It was the sort of cat that left something to the imagination. That may be why he liked it. Children are happiest with the simplest toys.
In Peter’s list of prospective purchases the “Bibel” had been put down because Peter, watching Buddy’s curly head as it lay beside the cat on the pillow of the bunk, had suddenly perceived that a child is a tremendous responsibility. Buddy’s hair did it. He noticed that Buddy’s hair, which had been almost white, had, in the few days Peter had had him in charge, turned to a dirty gray. He had not minded Buddy’s dirty face and hands – they were normal to a boy – but the soiled tow hair shamed Peter. Even a mother like Buddy’s had kept that hair as it should be, and Peter was shocked to think he was already letting the boy deteriorate. If this continued Buddy would soon be no better than himself – a shiftless (as per Mrs. Potter), careless, no-account scrub of a boy, and it made Peter wince. He thought too much of the freckled face, and the little tow-head to have that happen.
It made him down-hearted for a minute, but Peter was never despondent long. If the cold chilled his bones it suggested a trip to New Orleans or Cuba, and he instantly forgot the cold in building one detail of the trip on another, until he had circumnavigated the globe and decided he would go to neither one nor the other, but to Patagonia or Peru.
If that was the way Buddy’s hair looked after a few days under the old Peter, then Peter must turn over so many new leaves he would be in the second volume. He would be a tramp no more. He would have money and a home and be a respected citizen, with a black silk watch fob, and go to church – and that suggested the “Bibel.” With “sope” and the Scripture on his list Peter felt less guilty.
The “hymn book” was a sequential thought. Bibles and hymn books go hand in hand. Peter meant to start Buddy right, and he was going to begin with himself. He meant, now, to be a good man, and a prosperous one – perhaps a millionaire. His idea was a little vague, including a shadowy Prince Albert coat and a silk hat, but he thought a Bible and a hymn book, at least, ought to be in the stock of a man that was going to be what Peter meant to be. The A. B. C. blocks on the list were to be the cornerstone of Buddy’s education, and on them Peter visioned a gilded structure of college and other vague things of culture. Peter’s plans were always dreamlike, and all the more beautiful for that reason. He was forever about to trap some elusive chinchilla on some unattainable Amazon.
“Make a funny cat, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy when he was convinced he could not coax the jack-knife from Peter.
“Oh, no!” said Peter. “You’ve got one funny cat. I guess one funny cat like that is enough in one family. Uncle Peter has to keep his eye out to watch if the ice is going to move this morning. He can’t make cats.”
“Make a funny dog,” said Buddy promptly. “Well, Buddy, if I make you a funny dog,” said Peter, “will you be a good boy and play with it and let Uncle Peter get some stove wood aboard the boat?”
“Yes, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy. He had the smile of a cherub and the splendid mendacity of youth. He would promise anything. Only the most unreasonable expect a boy to keep such promises, but it does the heart good to hear them.
Peter took a thin slice of maplewood from his pile, and seated himself on his bunk. He held the wood at arm’s length until he saw a dog in it, and Buddy leaned against his knee.
“Now, this is going to be a real funny dog,” said Peter, as his keen blade sliced through the wood as easily as a yacht’s prow cuts the water. “S’pose we put his head up like that, hey, like he was laughing at the moon?” Two deft turns of the blade. “And we’ll have this funny dog a-sitting on his hind legs, hey?” Four swift turns of the knife.
“That’s a funny dog!” laughed Buddy. “Give me the funny dog.”
“Now, don’t you be so impatient,” said Peter. “This is going to be a real funny dog, if you wait a minute. There, now, he’s scratching that ear with this paw, and he’s ready to shake hands with this one, and” – two or three quick turns of the knife – “there he is, cocking his eye up at you, like he was tickled to death to see you had your face washed this morning without howling no more than you did.”
“Ho, ho!” laughed Buddy; “that’s a funny dog! Now make a funny rabbit, Uncle Peter.”
“No, siree, Buddy!” said Peter sternly.
“You promised to be good if I made a dog, so you just sit down and be it. When a body makes a promise, he’d always ought to keep it, if it ain’t too inconvenient. So you stay right here and don’t touch the stove or anything, whilst I get in some wood. That’s my duty, and when a man has a duty to do he ought to do it, unless something he’d rather do turns up meanwhile.”
Peter took his shot-gun. There was always a chance of a shot at a rabbit. He crossed the plank to the shore, but there was not much burnable driftwood along the slough. What there was had been frozen in the ice, and Peter pushed his way up to where the slough made a sharp turn. In such places abundant driftwood was thrown against the willows at high water, and Peter set his gun against a log and filled his arms. He was stooping for a last stick when a cotton-tail darted from under the tangled pile and zig-zagged into the willow thicket.
Peter dropped his wood and grasped his gun and ran after the rabbit, but his foot turned on a slimy log and he went down. He had a bad fall.
For a man just beginning a career of superhuman goodness Peter swore quite freely as he sat on the log and hugged his ankle, grinning with pain. It relieved his mind, and the rubbing he gave his ankle relieved the pain, and he felt better all through when he put his foot to the ground and tried it. He limped a little, but he grinned, too, for he knew Buddy would be amused to see Uncle Peter limping “like Buddy.” Buddy could see something funny in anything.
Peter limped back to his driftwood, but as he pushed through the leafless willows he dropped his gun and hobbled hastily toward the shanty-boat. Forced by the weight of river ice pressing in at the head of the slough, the slough ice was “going out,” and it was going out rapidly. Already, as far as Peter could see down the slough, the surface was covered with hurrying river ice, borne along by wind and current.
In his concern for the shanty-boat and Buddy, Peter forgot his ankle. He knew well the power of the ice, and he fought his way along the shore through the willow thickets, fearing at each glimpse to see the shanty-boat crushed against some great water-elm and heaped high with ice, and fearing still more to see nothing of it whatever. Once let the shanty-boat find the mouth of the slough and pass out into the broad Mississippi and, he well knew, he might have a long fight to overtake it. The boat might travel for days jammed in the floating ice, before he could reach it, or it might be crushed against some point or in some cove. What would then be Buddy’s fate? What, indeed, might not be the boy’s fate already, if he had been frightened by the grinding of the ice against the boat, by the snapping of the shore cable or by the motion of the boat, and had attempted to reach the shore? Peter beat the willow saplings aside with his arms as he tried to make haste, jumping into them and thrusting them aside like a swimmer.
In places the water had overflowed the feet of the willows, and through this Peter splashed unheeding. Once, in trying to keep outside the willow fringe, he would have slipped into the slough had he not saved himself by clinging to the bushes, and he was wet to the waist. Here and there the bank lay a foot or two higher, and there were no willows, but a tangle of dead grapevines impeded him. In other places the shore dipped and the water stood as deep as Peter’s knees, and he crashed through the thin ice into icy water. He did not dare venture back from the shore lest he pass the shanty-boat, stranded against some tree.
Cold as the air was the sweat ran from Peter’s face, and he panted for breath. To pass leisurely along the bank of such a slough is strenuous work, but to fight along it as Peter was fighting, is real man’s work, and Peter – thin, delicate as he looked – was all iron and leather. For a mile and a half he worked his way, until he reached a great sycamore, known to all the duck hunters as the “Big Tree.” Below the Big Tree the slough widened into a broad expanse of water known as Big Tree Lake. Peter stopped short. In the middle of the lake, knee-deep in water and holding fast to a worn imitation-leather valise from which the water was dripping, stood a man. The shanty-boat, thrown out of the main current, had been pushed into shallow water, where it had grounded unharmed, and it was for the shanty-boat the man with the valise was making, swearing heartily each time he took a new step in the icy water. Peter yelled and the man turned, and looked back. At the first glimpse of the face Peter picked up a stout slab of driftwood.
The man wore the ragged remnant of a felt hat on a mass of iron-gray hair that hung over his beady eyes, and all his face but his eyes and a round red nubbin of a nose was hidden by a mat of brown beard. When he saw Peter he scowled and splashed recklessly toward the boat, swearing as he went.
The western side of the lake was overgrown with wild rice, a favorite feeding spot for the migrating ducks. Indeed, the entire lake was apt to disappear during very low water, leaving only sun-baked mud with the slough running along the eastern margin. Through the shallow ice-topped water Peter splashed after the tramp, breaking the ice as he went. Until he was well out in the lake the ice had not been broken, and Peter could not understand this. It was as if the tramp had jumped a hundred yards from the shore. But Peter did not give it much thought. He had something more important to think of.
The tramp had reached the shanty-boat and had clambered aboard, and with the pike pole Peter had left lying on the roof, was trying frantically to pole the boat off the bar into deeper water. A boat adrift is any one’s boat, if he can keep it, and once the boat swung clear of the bar into deeper water the tramp could laugh at Peter. He rammed the pike-pole into the sand-bar and threw his weight upon it, straining and jumping up and down while Peter splashed toward him.
But the boat would not budge. The pike-pole found no grip in the soft sand of the bar, and Peter came nearer, holding up one arm to protect his head. He expected the tramp to strike him down with the heavy pike-pole, and he was ready to make a fight for it, but as Peter’s hand touched the deck the tramp put down a hand to help him aboard.
“All right, pardner,” he said in a voice so gruff it seemed to come from great depths, “I’ll give you half the vessel. I’ve been dyin’ for company since I come aboard. It’s lonely on this yacht.”
Peter grinned a grin he had when he was angry, that made his face wrinkle like a wolf’s.
“This is my boat,” he said briefly, and threw open the door. Buddy sat on the floor as Peter had left him, playing with the “funny” dog. As Peter entered he looked up.
“My funny dog ain’t got no tail, Uncle Peter,” he said.
“Yes, he has, Buddy,” said Peter, with a great sigh of relief. “He’s got a tail, but you can’t see it because he’s sitting on it.”
But Buddy was looking past Peter at the tramp. The man, his thumbs in the torn armholes of his coat, his head on one side, one leg raised in the air, was making faces at Buddy. As Peter turned, the tramp put the toe of his boot through the handle of his valise and raised it, tossing it in the air with his foot.
Buddy laughed with glee.
“That’s a funny man, Uncle Peter,” he said. “Who’s him?”
The tramp stepped aside and put his wet valise on the floor. Then he took off his hat and laid it across his breast and bowed low to Buddy.
“Yer royal highness,” he said gravely. “I am knowed from near to far as The No-Less-Talented-Stranger-Who-Came-Out Of-the-East-and-Got-His-Permanent-Set-back-In-the-Booze. Can you say that?”
Buddy laughed.
“Booge,” he said. “That’s a funny name.”
Peter stood with one hand on the door and the tramp’s dripping valise in the other, but it was evident Booge did not mean to accept Peter’s attitude as an invitation to depart. He went inside and seated himself on the edge of the bunk and pulled off first one wet boot, and then the other. He paid no attention to Peter whatever but from time to time he screwed up his hairy face and winked at the boy.
“My name’s Buddy,” said Buddy. “Buddy?” queried Booge. “That’s a bully name for a little feller. First the Bud, an’ then the Flower, an’ then the Apple green an’ sour.”
Peter had never seen a tramp just like Booge. He had seen tramps as dirty, and as ragged, and as hairy, but he had never seen one that little boys did not fear, and it was plain that Buddy was captivated by Booge’s good-nature. But a tramp was a tramp, no matter how captivating, and a tramp was no companion for a boy who was to grow up to be a bank president, or goodness knows what, of respectability. He hardened his heart.
Booge continued to Buddy: “You didn’t know I was a teacher, did you? Oh, yes, indeed! I’m an educated feller, and I figured to teach you, but it seems some folks want you to grow up just as ignorant as possible. Oh, yes!”
Peter hesitated. At any rate there was no need of making the fellow walk through the ice-covered lake again.
“What can you teach him?” he asked.
“Well, there’s soprano,” rumbled Booge. “I can teach him soprano. That’s a good thing for a young feller to know. Soprano or alto, just as you say – or bass. I can teach bass if the board is good. How is the board on board?”
Peter ignored the question. He was trying to guess what sort of strange creature this was.
“Well, if it’s as good as you say,” said Booge, “I’ll teach him all three. That’s liberal. I’ll give you a sample of my singin’.”
“You don’t need to,” said Peter. “When I want any singing, I’ll do my own.”
“Well, since you urge it that way,” said Booge, “I can’t refuse,” and tapping his bare foot on the floor he sang. He found, somewhere in his head, a high, squeaky falsetto. It seemed to dwell in his nose. He sang: —
Go wash the little baby, the baby, the baby;
Go wash the little baby, and give it toast and tea;
Go wash the little baby, the baby, the baby,
Go wash the little baby, and bring it back to me.
He let the last word drone out long and thin, and as it droned he made faces at Buddy, screwing up his eyes, wriggling his nose, and waggling his chin.
“Sing it again, Booge!” cried Buddy enthusiastically. “Sing it again.”
The tramp arose and bowed gravely, first to Buddy and then to the frowning Peter.
“That’s enough of that,” said Peter.
“Sing it again, Booge!” commanded Buddy, and the tramp standing with his hand inside his coat, sang, in his deepest bass: —
Don’t swear before the baby, the baby, the baby,
Don’t swear before the baby, or cheat or steal or lie,
Don’t swear before the baby, the baby, the baby,
Don’t swear before the baby, but give it apple pie.
“Now, laugh! shouted Buddy.
“Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” said Booge, exactly as it is printed.
“I want your face to laugh!” ordered Buddy.
Booge screwed up his thin face, and Buddy looked and was satisfied. Booge was satisfied, too. He knew Buddy was boss of the boat, now, and he knew he stood well with Buddy.
