Butler Ellis Parker
The Jack-Knife Man
XVI. JAIL UNCLES
THE county jail stood back of the courthouse, on Maple Street, and was a three-story brick building, flush with the sidewalk, with barred windows. To the right was the stone-yard where, when the sheriff was having good trade, you could hear the slow tapping of hammers on limestone as the victims of the law pounded rock, breaking the large stones into road metal. As a factory the prisoners did not seem to care whether they reached a normal output of cracked rock or not.
Seated on a folded gunny-sack laid upon a smooth stone in this yard, Booge was receiving justice at the hands of the law. He pulled a rough piece of limestone toward him, turned it over eight or ten times to find the point of least resistance, settled the stone snugly into the limestone chips, and – yawned. Eight or ten minutes later, feeling chilly and cramped in the arms, he raised his hammer and let it fall on the rock, and – yawned! The other prisoners – there were five in all – worked at the same breathless pace.
The stone-yard was protected from the vulgar gaze of the outer slaves of business and labor by a tall board fence, notable as the only fence of any size in Riverbank that never bore circus posters on its outer surface. Several times within the memory of man there had been “jail deliveries” from the stone-yard. In each case the delivery had been effected in the same manner. The escaping prisoner climbed over the fence and went away. One such renegade, recaptured, told why he had fled. “I won’t stay in no hotel,” he said, “where they’ve got cockroaches in the soup. If this here sheriff don’t brace up, there won’t none of us patronize his durn hotel next winter.”
Peter, enveloped in his blanket serape, pulled the knob of the door-bell of the jail and waited. He heard the bell gradually cease jangling, and presently he heard feet in the corridor, and the door opened.
“Well, what do you want?” asked the sheriff’s wife. “If you want Ed, he ain’t here. You’ll have to come back.”
“I’ve come to give myself up,” said Peter. “My name’s Peter Lane.”
“Well, it don’t make any difference what your name is,” said Mrs. Stevens flatly. “You can’t give yourself up to me, and that’s all there is to it. Every time the weather turns cold a lot of you fellows come around and give yourselves up, and I’m sick and tired of it. I won’t take another one of you unless you ‘re arrested in a proper manner. Half the time Ed can’t collect the board money. If you want to get in here you go down to the calaboose and get arrested in the right way.”
“But I’m sort of looked for here,” said Peter. “Joe Venby knows I’m coming here, and if Ed was here – ”
“Oh, if Ed was here, he’d feed you for nothing, I dare say!” said Mrs. Stevens. “He’s the easiest creature I ever see. If it wasn’t for me he’d lose money on this jail right along.”
“Can’t I come in and wait for Ed?” asked Peter. “I ought to stay here when I’m wanted. I don’t want Ed or Joe to think I’d play a trick on them.”
“You can’t come in!” said Mrs. Stevens. “The last man that come and gave himself up to me stole a shell box off my what-not, and I won’t have that happen again. You can come back after a while.”
“Can’t you let me wait in the stone-yard?” asked Peter.
“See here!” said the sheriff’s wife. “I’m busy getting a meal, and I’ve no time to stand talking. Ed locked them boarders in the yard when he went away, and he took the key. If you want to get into that stone-yard, you’ll have to climb over the fence, and that’s all there is to it. I have no time to fritter away talking.”
She slammed the door in Peter’s face, and Peter turned away. The fence was high but Peter was agile, and he scrambled up and managed to throw one leg over, and thus reached the top.
“Come on in,” Booge’s gruff voice greeted him, and Peter looked down to see the tramp immediately below him.
“They got Buddy,” said Peter, as he dropped to the ground inside the fence.
“Did, hey?” said Booge, stretching his arms. “I was sort of in hopes you’d kill that old kazoozer, if you had to. I don’t like him. He’s the feller that married me and Lize, and I ain’t ever forgive him. One Merdin was enough in a town. I was all of that name the world ought to have had in it – ”
“Merdin?” said Peter. “Is that your name?”
“Why, sure, it is. Didn’t I ever tell you?” asked Booge. “No, I guess I didn’t. Come to think of it, it wasn’t important what you called me, and Buddy sort of clung to ‘Booge.’ Where is the little feller?”
“Your name’s Merdin? And your wife was Lize Merdin?” repeated Peter, staring at the tramp. “Is that so?”
“Cross my heart. If you want me to, I’ll sing it for you.”
“Booge,” said Peter soberly, “she’s dead. Your wife is dead.”
The tramp was serious now. “Lize is dead?” he asked. “Honest, Peter?”
“She’s dead,” Peter repeated. “She died in my boat. She come there one awful stormy night, and she died there. She was run out of Derlingport, and she died, and I buried her.”
Booge put down his stone-hammer and for a full minute stared at the chapped and soiled hands on his knees. Then he shook his head.
“Ain’t that peculiar? Ain’t that odd?” he said. “Lize dead, and she died in your boat, and – why!” he cried suddenly, “Buddy ‘s my boy, ain’t he?”
“Yes,” said Peter, “he’s your boy.”
“Ain’t that queer! Ain’t that strange!” Booge repeated, shaking his bushy head. “Ain’t that odd? And Buddy was my boy all the time! And he’s a nice little feller, too, ain’t he? He’s a real nice little feller. Ain’t that odd!”
He still shook his head as he picked up the hammer. He struck the rock before him several listless blows.
“I wonder if Lize told you what become of Susie?” he asked.
“I know what become of her,” said Peter. “Briggles got her, too. She’s with a – with a lady in town here.” He could not bring himself to tell the imprisoned man what the lady was in reality.
“That’s fine,” said Booge, laughing mirthlessly. “I knowed all along I’d bring up my family first-class. All we needed to make our home a regular ‘God-bless-er’ was for me to get far enough away, and for some one to get the kids away from Lize. Do you know, Peter, I feel sort of sorry for Lize, too. That’s funny, ain’t it?”
“Not if she was your wife, it ain’t,” said Peter.
“Yes, it is,” Booge insisted. “A man don’t feel sorry for a wife like that. Generally he’s glad when she’s gone, but I sort of feel like Lize didn’t have a fair show.. She was real bright. If I hadn’t married her, she’d probably have worked her way over to Chicago and got in a chorus, or blackmailed some rich feller, but I was a handicap to her right along. She couldn’t be out-and-out whole-souled bad when she was a married lady. She’d just get started, and begin whooping things, when she’d remember she was a wife and a mother and all that, and she’d lose her nerve. She never got real bad, and she never got real good. I guess I stood in her way too much.”
“You mean you wasn’t one thing or the other?” asked Peter.
“Yep! That’s why I went away, when I did go,” said Booge. “I seen Lize wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t happy, so I went. The sight of me just made her miserable. She’d come in after being away a week or so, and she’d moan out how wicked she was, and how good I was, and that she was going to reform for my sake, and she’d be unhappy for a month – all regrets and sorrow and punishing herself – and then I’d take my turn and get on a spree, and when I come back, she’d be gone. Then she’d come back and go through the whole thing once more. It was real torture for her. She never fig-gered that my kind of bad was as bad as her kind of bad. I never gave her no help to stay straight, either. I guess what I’d ought to have done was to whack her over the head with an ax handle when she come back, or give her a black eye, but I didn’t have no real stamina. I was a fool that way.”
“I don’t see why you married her,” said simple Peter.
“Well, I was a fool that way, too,” said Booge. “She seemed so young and all, to be throwed out by her mother and father, so I just married her because nobody else offered to, as you might say, to give her baby some sort of a dad when it come. It didn’t get much of a sort of a dad, either, when it got me.
“Then you ain’t Susie’s pa?” asked Peter.
“Lord, no!”
“And Buddy?”
“Oh, yes! And ain’t he a nice little feller? Seems like he’s got all Lize’s and my good in him, don’t it, and none of our bad? And to think I was there with him all the time, and you didn’t even like me to be uncle to him! I wonder – Peter, if you ever see him again, just tell him his dad’s dead, will you, Peter?”.
“If you want I should, Booge,” said Peter reluctantly.
“Yes! And tell him some sort of story about his poor but honest parents. Tell him I was a traveling man and got killed in a wreck. Tell him I had a fine voice to sing with, or some little thing like that, so he can remember it. A little kid likes to remember things like that when he grows up and misses the folks he ought to have.”
“I’ll tell him you were always kind to him, for so you was – in my boat,” said Peter.
“I’ll tell him that when he was a little fellow you used to sing him to sleep.”
“Yes, something like that,” said Booge, and went on breaking rock. Suddenly he looked up. “I wonder if it would do any good for me to give you a paper saying you are to have all my rights in him? I don’t know that I’ve got any, but I’d sort of like to have you have Buddy.”
They talked of this for some time, and it was agreed that when Booge had served his term and was released he was to sign such a paper before a notary and leave it with George Rapp, and they were still discussing the possibility of such a paper being of any value when the door of the jail opened and the sheriff came into the stone-yard.
“Hello, Peter!” he said. “My wife tells me you want to see me. What’s the trouble?”
Peter explained.
“Well, I’m sorry I’ve got to turn you out,” said the sheriff regretfully. “I’ve got the jail so full you mightn’t be comfortable anyway, and I’ve taken in about all I can afford to take on speculation. I’d like to keep you, but I don’t see how I can do it, Peter. I don’t make enough feeding you fellows to take any risk on not getting paid. I guess you’ll have to get out.”
“But I’m guilty, Ed,” said Peter. “I guess I am, anyway.”
“Can’t help it!” said the sheriff firmly. “I don’t know nothing about that. If you want to come to jail, you’ve got to be served with papers in the regular way. The city don’t O. K. my bills hit-or-miss no more. I guess you’ll have to get out. I can’t run the risk of keeping you on your own say-so.”
“If you say so, Ed,” said Peter. “If anything comes up, you’ll know I’ve tried to get into jail, anyway. What should you say I ought to do?”
“What you ought to do,” said the sheriff, “is to go home and wait until somebody comes and arrests you in proper shape.”
“I’ll do so, if you say so, Ed,” said Peter. “I’m living in George Rapp’s house-boat, down at Big Tree Lake, and if you want me, I’ll be there. I’ll wait ‘til you come.”
He shook Booge’s hand and the sheriff unlocked the gate of the stone-yard, and Peter passed out into the cold world.
XVII. FUNNY CATS
PETER avoided the main street, for he was aware he was a curious sight in his blanket serape, and it was too comfortable to throw away, and, in addition, would be his only bed clothing when he reached his boat. He hurried along Oak Street as less frequented than the main street, for he had almost the entire length of the town to pass through. As it was growing late he was anxious to strike the bluff road in time to catch a ride with some homeward-bound farmer. His bag of provisions was still at the farmer’s on the hillside; the shanty-boat awaited him, and he must take up his life where it had been interrupted. For the present he was powerless to aid either Susie or Buddy.
Peter had a long walk before him if he did not catch a ride, and he started briskly, but in front of the Baptist Church he paused. A bulletin board stood before the door calling attention to a sale to be held in the Sunday-school room, and the heading of the announcement caught his eye. “All For The Children,” it said. It seemed that there were poor children in the town – children with insufficient clothes, children with no shoes, children without underwear, and a sale was to be held for them; candy, cakes, fancy work, toys and all the usual Christmas-time church sale articles were enumerated. Peter read the bulletin, and passed on.
He was successful in catching a ride, and found his sack of provisions at the farmer’s and carried it to the boat on his back. The boat was as he had left it, and little damage had been done during his absence. The river had fallen and his temporary mooring rope – too taut to permit the strain – had snapped, but the shanty-boat had grounded and was safe locked in the ice until spring. Inside the cabin not a thing had been touched. The shavings still lay on the floor where they had fallen while he was making Buddy’s last toy, and the toys themselves were under the bunk just as he had left them. Peter felt a pang of loneliness as he gathered them up and placed them on his table with the new stockings and the A. B. C. blocks. He put the new “Bibel” on the clock-shelf.
The toys made quite an array, and Peter looked at them one by one, thinking of the child. There were more than a dozen of them – all sorts of animals – and they still bore the marks of Buddy’s fingers. It was quite dark by the time Peter had stowed away his provisions, and he lighted the lamp, with a newly formed resolution in his mind. He dropped the A. B. C. blocks into the depths of his gunny-sack and, looking at each for the last time, let the crudely carved animals follow, one by one. He held the funny cat in his hand quite a while, hesitatingly, and then set it on the clock-shelf beside the Bible, but almost immediately he took it down again and dropped it among its fellows in the sack. The Bible, too, he took from the shelf and put in the sack, and, last of all, he added the few bits of clothing Buddy had left in his flight. He tied the neck of the sack firmly with seine twine and set it under the table. All his mementos of Buddy were in that sack, and Peter, with a sigh, chose a clean piece of maple wood, seated himself on the edge of the bunk, and began whittling a kitchen spoon. Once more he was alone; once more he was a hermit; once more he was a mere jack-knife man, and Buddy was but a memory.
Peter tried to put even the memory out of his mind, but that was not as easy as putting toys in a gunny-sack. If he tried to think of painting the boat, he had to think of George Rapp, and then he could think of nothing but the hasty parting in Rapp’s barn and how the soft kinks of Buddy’s hair snuggled under the rough blanket hood. If he tried to think of wooden spoons he thought of funny cats. And if he tried to think of nothing he caught Booge’s nonsense rhymes running through his head and saw Buddy clinging eagerly to Booge’s knee and begging, “Sing it again, Booge, sing it again.”
“Thunder!” he exclaimed at last, “I wisht I had that clock to take apart.”
He put the unfinished spoon aside and, choosing another piece of maple wood, began whittling a funny cat, singing, “Go tell the little baby, the baby, the baby,” as he worked. It was late when his eyelids drooped and he wrapped himself in his blanket. Three more cats had been added to the animals in the gunny-sack.
“Some little kid like Buddy’ll like them,” he thought with satisfaction, and dropped asleep.
Early the next morning he tramped across the “bottom” to the farmer’s.
“You said you was going to town to-day,” Peter said, “and I thought maybe you’d leave this sack at the Baptist Church for me, if it ain’t too much out of your way. It’s some old truck I won’t have any use for, and I took notice they were having a sale there today. You don’t need to say anything. Just hand it in.”
Before the farmer could ask him in to have breakfast Peter had disappeared toward the wood-yard, and when, later, he started for town he could hear Peter’s saw.
At the Baptist Church the farmer left the sack. A dozen or more women were busily arranging for the sale, and one of them took the sack, holding it well out from her skirt.
“For our sale? How nice!” she cried in the excited tone women acquire when a number of them are working together in a church. “Who are we to thank for it?”
“Oh, I guess there ain’t no thanks necessary,” said the farmer. “I guess you won’t find it much. I just brought it along because I promised I would. It’s from a shanty-boatman down my way – Lane ‘s his name – Peter Lane.”
“Oh,” said the woman, her voice losing much of its enthusiasm. “Yes, I know who he is. He’s the jack-knife man. Tell him Mrs. Vandyne thanks him; it is very kind of him to think of us.”
“All right! Gedap!”
Mrs. Vandyne carried the sack into the Sunday school room and snipped the twine with her scissors, which hung from her belt on a pink ribbon. She was a charming little woman, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and she was the more excited this afternoon because she had been able to bring her friend and visitor, Mrs. Montgomery, and Mrs. Montgomery was making a real impression. Mrs. Montgomery was from New York, and just how wealthy and socially important she was at home every one knew, and yet she mingled with the ladies quite as if she was one of them. And not only that, but she had ideas. Her manner of arranging the apron table, as she had once arranged one for the Actors’ Fair, was enough to show she was no common person. Already her ideas had quite changed the old cut and dried arrangements. At her request ladies were constantly running out to buy rolls of crêpe paper and other inexpensive decorative accessories, and the dull gray room was blossoming into a fairy garden.
“And when you come to-night, I want each of you to wear a huge bow of crêpe paper on your hair, and – what have you there, Jane?”
Mrs. Montgomery, although beyond her fortieth year, had the fresh and youthfully bright face of a girl of eighteen. She was one of those splendidly large women who retain a vivid interest in life and all its details, and Mrs. Vandyne, who was smaller and lesser in every way, was her Riverbank counterpart.
“Nothing much,” Mrs. Vandyne answered, dipping her hand into the sack. “But it was kind of the man to send what he could. Wooden spoons, I suppose. Well, will you look at this, Anna?”
It was one of the “funny cats.” Mrs. Vandyne held it up, that all the ladies might see.
“How perfectly ridiculous!” exclaimed Mrs. Wilcox. “What do you suppose it was meant to be? Do you suppose it is a bear?”
“Or an otter, or something?” asked Mrs. Ferguson. “Oh, I know! It’s a squirrel. Did you ever see anything so – so ridiculous!”
The ladies, all except Mrs. Montgomery, laughed gleefully at the funny cat Buddy had hugged and loved.
“We might get a dime for it, anyway, Alice,” said one. “Are there any more? They will help fill the toy table. Do you think they would spoil the toy table, Mrs. Montgomery?”
The New Yorker had taken the cat in her hand, and Mrs. Vandyne was standing one after another of Peter’s toys on the table.
“Spoil it!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery enthusiastically. “I have not seen anything so naïve since I was in Russia. It is like the Russian peasant toys, but different, too. It has a character of its own. Oh, how charming!”
She had seized another of the funny animals.
“But what is it?” asked Mrs. Wilcox.
“Mercy! I don’t know what it is,” laughed Mrs. Montgomery. “What does that matter? You can call it a cat – it looks something like a cat – yes! I’m sure it is a cat. Or a squirrel. That doesn’t matter. Can’t you see that no one but a master impressionist could have done them? Just see how he has done it all with a dozen quick turns of his – his – ”
“Jack-knife,” Mrs. Vandyne supplied. “Do you think they are worth anything, Alice?”
“Worth anything?” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “My dear, they are worth anything you want to ask for them. Really, they are little masterpieces. Can’t you see how refreshing they are, after all the painted and prim toys we see in the shops? Just look at this funny frog, or whatever it is.”
The ladies all laughed.
“You see,” said Mrs. Montgomery, “you can’t help laughing at it. The man that made it has humor, and he has art and – and untrammeled vision, and really the most wonderful technique.”
Peter Lane and the technique of a jack-knife!
The ladies of the Baptist Aid Society were too surprised to gasp. The enthusiasm of Mrs. Montgomery took their breath away, and Mrs. Montgomery was not loth to speak still more, with a discoverer’s natural pride in her discovery. She examined one toy after another, and her enthusiasm grew, and infected the other women. They, too, began to see the charm of Peter’s handiwork and to glimpse what Mrs. Montgomery had seen clearly: that the toys were the result of a frank, humorous, boyish imagination combined with a man’s masterly sureness of touch. Here was no jig-saw, paper-patterned, conventional German or French slopshop toy, daubed over with ill-smelling paint. She tried to tell the ladies this, and being in New York the president of several important art and literary and musical societies, she succeeded.
“We must ask twenty-five cents apiece for them,” said Mrs. Ferguson.
“Oh! twenty-five cents! A dollar at least,” said Mrs. Montgomery. “The work of an artist. Don’t you see it is not the intrinsic value but the art the people will pay for?”
“But do you think Riverbank will pay a dollar for art?” asked Mrs. Vandyne.
Mrs. Montgomery glanced over the toys. “I will pay a dollar apiece for all of them, and be glad to get them,” she said. “I feel – I feel as if this alone made my trip to Riverbank worth while. You have no idea what it will mean to go home and take with me anything so new and unconventional. I shall be famous, I assure you, as the discoverer of – ”
“His name is Peter Lane,” said Mrs. Vandyne. “He is one of the shanty-boatmen that live on the river. A little, mildly-blue-eyed man; a sort of hermit. They call him the Jack-knife Man, because he whittles wooden spoons and peddles them.”
“Oh, he will be a success!” cried Mrs. Montgomery. “Even his name is delicious. Peter Lane! Isn’t it old-fashioned and charming? Peter Lane, the Jack-knife Man! How many of these toys may I have, Anna?”
“I want one!” said Mrs. Wilcox promptly, and before the ladies were through, Mrs. Montgomery had to insist that she be permitted to claim two of the toys by her right as discoverer.
Later, as they went homeward for supper, Mrs. Vandyne gave a happy little laugh.
“That was splendid, Alice,” she said. “To think you were able to make them pay a dollar apiece for those awful toys!”
“Awful!” exclaimed Mrs. Montgomery. “My dear, I meant every word I said. You will see! Your Peter Lane is going to make me famous yet!”
That evening, while Peter sat in his shanty-boat, lonely and thinking of Buddy as he whittled a spoon, Mrs. Montgomery stood, tall and imposing and sweet-faced, behind the toy table on which all of Buddy’s toys stood with “Sold” tags strung on them, and told about Peter Lane, the Jack-knife Man.
“I’m very sorry,” she said time after time, “but they are all sold. We do not know yet whether we can persuade the Jack-knife Man to make duplicates, but we will take your order subject to his whim, if you wish. We cannot promise anything definite. Artists are so notably irresponsible.”
But there was one voice which, had Peter been able to hear it, would have set him making jack-knife toys on the instant. While the ladies of the Baptist Church were exclaiming over the toys in the Sunday school room a small boy with freckles and white, kinky hair, was leaning on the knee of a harsh-faced woman in a white farm house three miles up the river-road.
“Auntie Potter,” he said longingly, “I wish Uncle Peter would come and make me a funny cat.”
“If he don’t,” said Mrs. Potter with great vigor, “he’s a wuthless scamp.”
