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All I ever knew was that the next thing I knew I was slammed up against the side of the shed by the water and pushed against it like a big hand was pushing me, and I was fighting to get more out of the water, and then the shed sort of melted and went to pieces and I was holding onto a board and going down with the current between the trees of the Tow Head. Sometimes the board hit a tree, and sometimes it didn’t, but I thought I was all over with, anyway, and then right ahead of me I saw the water rushing and roaring up against something.
I didn’t know what it was, but it was a log raft the mill folks had put in behind the Tow Head so it wouldn’t get washed away. It was in the inside of the horseshoe, and all across the front of it was driftwood and trash and old boards and everything, and that was what the water was splashing against, and before I knew it I was slammed up against it – me and my board. And what I slammed up against was the bridge timber I had been on before, or one like it. If I had slammed up against where it was just bark and driftwood I would have clawed at it a while and then gone under, I guess; but I crawled onto the timber and just lay there and tried to get the water out of my nose. It looked like half a mile of driftwood was jammed in between me and the log raft – jammed in and pushed together the way a flood can jam it and push it.
Well, that timber wasn’t any place to be. The water rushed against it and over it, so I was getting ducked all the time, and I put out my hand and tried the drift stuff, but it didn’t seem like it would hold me up, but there was one board that was on top of the stuff, and I tried that. I slid over onto it and it seemed all right, so I edged along it, and when I got to the end of the board the drift stuff seemed firmer and I got on my stomach and edged out onto it. It was firm enough, but not very firm, but on my stomach that way I covered a good deal of it at a time, and I sort of wiggled along, and the more I wiggled the firmer it got. It had to, with all the river pushing it, and the driftwood back of it pushing too.
So it took me about an hour to get to the log raft, and when I got to the edge logs, that are chained together, I was all scratched and sore and I just sat down and cried, because I knew Swatty was dead.
And all at once he said, “Hello, Georgie!” and there he was, crawling along the logs toward me. He said he went under when the tree fell over, and that he went under all the driftwood and come up through a hole in the raft. Maybe he did. There were holes enough in the raft. But I didn’t get there that way.
Anyway, there he was, and that made me feel a lot better, and we crawled around the edge of the raft, because we wanted to get to the lower side.
Swatty said maybe we could push a log under the outside chain of logs and paddle to shore on it, but I wasn’t going to do it. Only I wanted to see him do it if he did it. So we got to the lower edge of the raft, where it stuck out below the Tow Head, and just then along came the ferryboat. She was back-paddling and going as slow as she could, and she looked like an excursion with all the porch lamps and the flambeaux. So me and Swatty hollered, but I guess they saw us before we hollered. Everybody came over on our side and that tipped the ferry over a little, and a lot of the men threw ropes at us and held out their pike poles, and me and Swatty grabbed them and they yanked us aboard. So then she whistled five times and waited and whistled five times again, and so on, because that was the signal they was to make if they found our bodies, and they had found them, but they were alive yet. So then Herb made the captain whistle long and steady without stopping, so maybe they’d know we were alive yet. But nobody knew it, because nobody thought we would be.
Well, the old ferry let out so much steam whistling she couldn’t go up-stream. I guess she couldn’t anyway. So they ran her into the shore just where she was and tied her to a big tree, and when we got to the road there was Mother and Father and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz in a livery rig, because they had followed the boat all the way down. And Fan was in the rig, too. So they all pawed me and Swatty over and saw how bad we was scratched and all, and said we was suffering from exhaustion, but we wasn’t. We was only played out.
So then Herbert said, “All right!” and started to go away, and Fan said, “Herbert!”
“What is it?” he said.
“I want you to ride up-town with us,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I’ll go back and help Captain Hewitt get the boat in shape. I guess I’ve done enough to show you I ‘ve some gump.”
“But I want you to come,” Fan says. “I want to talk to you.”
So he came. Him and Fan sat on the front seat and drove and talked, and I guess their talk was all right, because they fixed everything up. And that was where Miss Murphy got left. Just because she wanted to lick Swatty she lost her beau. That’s why I say I guess if teachers always knew how their lickings were going to turn out they wouldn’t lick us fellows so much. Not when the fellow is the brother of their beau, anyway.
II. MAMIE’S FATHER
I guess this is a good time to tell about Mamie Little, because now you know who me and Swatty and Bony are. Mamie Little was my girl, only she didn’t know it. Nobody knew it but me. It was a secret I had. That’s the way a fellow has a girl at first: she’s a secret and she don’t know she’s his girl. Sometimes she don’t never get to know it and the fellow has to get another girl. But while he “has” her the fellow knows it, and it makes him feel bashful and uncomfortable and frightened when she is near by and it is pretty bully.
The reason I picked out Mamie Little for my girl was because she had the nicest eyes and nicest hair of any girl I ever saw and the way she swished her dress when she walked. She lived across the street from my house and mostly played with my sister Lucy. So when I played with Lucy I could play with Mamie Little, too, and nobody would think it was because she was my girl. They would think I was just playing with my sister.
Mamie Little had been my girl a good while like that, with nobody knowing it but me, and I guessed that pretty soon it would be time for me to fight Swatty or somebody about her and have her for my real girl, if she didn’t mind; but just then Toady Williams came to town and he picked out Mamie Little to be his girl and didn’t care who knew it. And Mamie Little didn’t care who knew it.
Toady was a new kid in town, because his father had come to Riverbank to start a store. We never said Toady could be one of our crowd and we never wanted him to be, but he just joined on because he felt like it. That’s the kind of boy he was. He thought anybody would be tickled to death to have him be around with them. He wasn’t a fat boy, but he was a plump one, and his breeches always fit him so close they were like the skin on a horse; when he wrinkled they wrinkled. He wore shoes in summer. He looked all the time like company come to visit, and I guess that was one reason we didn’t care for him much.
The reason we called him Toady was because of his eyes. They popped out like a frog’s eyes, sort of like brown marbles, and the more he talked the more they popped out. When he talked he couldn’t do anything else but talk. Swatty could lie on his stomach and chew an apple and play mumblety-peg and kick a hole in the sod with one toe and talk, all at one time, but Toady couldn’t. He had to sit up straight and pop his eyes out. When he got started talking you could cut in and say, “Was your grandmother a monkey?” and he’d say, “Yes,” as if he hadn’t heard, and go right on talking. He wouldn’t fight, like me and Swatty, and sometimes Bony, would. If you thought it was time to have a fight with him and pitched into him he would bend down and turn his back and let you mailer him until you got through. But, mostly, he would talk somehow so you wouldn’t want to fight him. That’s no way for a boy to talk. It’s the way girls talk. Or preachers.
Toady didn’t get Mamie Little for his girl the right way. He never said she wasn’t his girl, he just said she was. The right way is that when the other fellows find out he has a girl they holler at him: “Mamie Little is Georgie’s girl! Mamie Little is Georgie’s girl!” And he has to get mad and fight them about it to prove it’s a lie, but after he has fought enough to prove she isn’t his girl, why, then she is his girl and he can have her for his girl and nobody hollers it at him. So then she is the one he chooses to kiss when they play “Post-Office” or “Copenhagen” at parties, and if he’s got anything to give her he gives it to her, like snail shells or a better slate pencil than she has, and such things. So it’s pretty nice, and you feel pretty good about it and are glad she’s your girl.
Well, a short while before Toady Williams came to our town they had an election to see whether the state was to be prohibition or not, and all the school children whose fathers were prohibition paraded; so Mamie Little paraded because her father had the prohibition newspaper in Riverbank, and I paraded because Mamie did and my father didn’t care whether there was prohibition or not. Swatty didn’t parade because his father was a German tailor, and when he felt like a glass of beer he wanted to have it, and every fall Swatty’s mother made grape wine out of wild grapes that me and Swatty got from the vines in the bottom across the Mississippi. When they had the election, prohibition was elected all over the state, but not in Riverbank; but we had to have it in Riverbank because the state elected it.
Of course I was prohibition, because I had paraded and because Mamie Little was, but Swatty was antiprohibition. I didn’t say a thing to make Swatty mad; all I said was: “Huh! You thought you was so smart, didn’t you? You thought prohibition was going to get licked, but it was you got licked. Next time you won’t be so smart. I guess you and your father feel pretty sick about it.”
“Don’t you say anything about my father!” Swatty said.
“I’ll say he was licked, because he was licked,” I said.
So Swatty pulled off his coat and I pulled off mine, and we had a good fight. He licked me because he always did; and when he was sitting on my ribs and had his knees on my arms so I couldn’t do anything, he asked me if I had had enough, and I said I had. Because I had had.
“I guess I showed you how much the prohibitions can lick the anti-prohibitions!” he said.
“Let me up,” I said.
“Are you prohibition?” he asked.
I said, “Yes, I am.”
“All right!” he said, and he put his hand on my nose and pushed. He pushed my nose right into my face. I never had anything hurt like that did. I yelled, it hurt so much. I told him to stop.
“All right,” he said, “if I stop what are you?”
I knew what he meant. He had already got me from being a Republican to being a Democrat that way once before. I wasn’t thinking of Mamie Little; I was thinking of my nose. So I said:
“I’m an anti-prohibition. Now let me up. You ‘ve busted my nose and some of my ribs, and I want to put some plantain on my eye before it swells up.”
We felt of my ribs and couldn’t find that any seemed busted, and my nose stopped hurting and came back into shape, so me and Swatty were better friends than we had ever been, because we were now both anti-prohibitions. We went around and made a lot of prohibitions into anti-prohibitions because Swatty showed me how to push a nose the way he pushed mine. But it didn’t do much good, I guess. The election was over and, anyway, there were always more anti-prohibitions in Riverbank than there were prohibitions.
It was almost right away after that that me and Swatty and Bony met Mamie Little and Lucy one Saturday afternoon. Lucy is my sister, and they were going down-town. Me and Swatty and Bony were sitting on the curb telling whoppers; or I guess Swatty and Bony were, I was just telling some things that had happened to me sometime that I’d forgot until I happened to think them up just then.
Swatty was telling how he went up to Derlingport and his uncle introduced him to the man that had the government job of making up new swear words, when Mamie and Lucy came along. I said:
“Where are you going?”
“Down-town,” Lucy said.
“Did Mother give you a nickel?” I asked, and I was sort of mad, because Mother owed me a nickel and hadn’t paid me, because she said she didn’t have one, and if she gave one to Lucy, why, all right for Mother!
“No, she didn’t give me a nickel, Mr. Smarty!” Lucy said. “If you want to know so much, we’re going down to Mr. Schwartz’s shop to see if he’ll let Mamie have a father.”
I guess that would sound pretty funny if you didn’t know what she meant. It was paper dolls.
Girls always play paper dolls, I guess; so Mamie and Lucy and all the girls played them; they got them out of the colored fashion plates in the magazines – brides and mothers and sons and daughters.
The trouble was that a good family has to have anyway one father in it, and the magazines didn’t have colored fashion plates of fathers. They didn’t have any fathers at all.
Some of the girls drew fathers on paper and painted them, but they looked pretty sick. I guess all the girls were jealous of Lucy because she was kind of Swatty’s girl, and Swatty sort of borrowed an old colored tailor fashion plate out of his father’s store and gave it to Lucy. So Lucy had the only real fathers that any of the girls had. She gave Mamie a couple of fathers out of the fashion plate, but they were the ones that had been standing partly behind other fathers and had mostly only one leg, or pieces cut out of their sides or something. They didn’t make Mamie real happy, I guess, so she thought she’d try to get some good fathers. They were going down to ask Mr. Schwartz for a fashion plate.
Swatty was frightened right away, because he hadn’t asked his father if he could have the old fashion plate but had just sort of borrowed it. So he said:
“What are you going to ask my father?”
“I’m going to tell him he gave you one for me,” Lucy said, “and I’m going to ask him if he’ll give me one for Mamie.”
So then Swatty was scared.
“No, don’t do it!” he said.
“I will, too, do it!” Lucy answered back. “I guess I know your father, and I guess my father buys clothes of him, and I guess we take milk of your mother, and I guess I will, too, ask him if I want to!”
Well, Swatty couldn’t answer back because he had Lucy for his secret girl like I had Mamie Little.
So I got up and stood in front of Lucy and pushed her a little, because she wasn’t my girl but only my sister, and I said:
“You will not do it. You go home!”
“You stop pushing me! I won’t go home.”
“Yes, you will, when I say so!” I said.
I was going to tell her that as soon as there were any more old fashion plates at Swatty’s father’s, Swatty would swi – would get one for Mamie, but Lucy got mad because I just took hold of her arm too hard between my thumb and finger. She said I pinched her, but I did not; I just sort of took hold of her that way. She ran back a way and stuck out her tongue at me.
“Now, just for that, Mr. Smarty,” she yelled, “I’m going to tell Mamie on you!”
“You just dare!” I started for her, but she skipped off.
“Mamie,” she shouted, “you’ll be mad when I tell you! Georgie Porgie is an anti-prohibition!” Mamie just stood and looked at me, because I’d said I’d always be a prohibition.
“Are you?” she asked.
If Swatty hadn’t been right there I would have changed back to a prohibition again and it would have been all right, but he was there and I wasn’t going to have him think I would change just on account of a girl. So I said:
“Uh, huh!”
“All right for you, Mr. Georgie! You needn’t ever speak to me again as long as you live!” she said.
I felt pretty cheap. I tried to say something, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I made a face at her and she made one at me, and then we were mad at each other and she went away. She went toward down-town, and Lucy skipped across the street and ran and went with her. And that was one reason Mamie was glad that Toady Williams had her for his girl when he came to town. She guessed I did not like it. And I didn’t.
Mr. Schwartz said Mamie could have the fashion plate as soon as he was through with it, which would be at the end of the season when he got a new one. Lucy let me know that, all right! I guess it was on account of Lucy he promised to let Mamie have the fashion plate, because he was awful fond of Lucy.
Anyway, Mamie was mighty pleased to know she was going to have a good father.
When she played paper dolls with Lucy I used to sort of go over where they were and maybe stand there to see if Mamie was mad at me still. About all she said was how glad she’d be when she had a good father. I guess I heard her say it a hundred times, but she never let on she knew I was there at all. Sometimes I’d sort of drop an apple or something so it would fall where she could reach it, but she never paid any attention. The most she would do would be to pick up a one-legged father and say:
“‘Where are you going, Mr. Reginald de Vere?’ ‘I’m going down-town to vote a while if you do not need me to take care of the baby.’ ‘Not at all, but I do hope you will show folks you are a prohibition. If I ever heard you were an anti-prohibition I would cut you up into mincemeat.’”
So then I most generally went away.
I got kind of sick of girls. I made up my mind they were no good anyway, and that I’d never have another one if I lived to be a million years old, and when I wrote notes to Mamie in school it wasn’t any use because she always tore them up without reading them. It made me feel awful to have her so mean. Because she wasn’t mean to Toady.
Well, it came to examination time and we began to be examined. Swatty and Bony and I didn’t have to be examined in arithmetic until Thursday afternoon and neither did Lucy or Mamie, so Swatty and Bony and I thought we might as well go fishing that morning. We got our poles and some bait and started, and we went down Third Street and when we came to the railway track we cut across through Burman’s lumber yard toward the river because that was the quickest way.
Burman’s sawmill was the biggest one in Riverbank then. I guess you know how big those sawmills were. Great big red buildings with gravel roofs where they sawed the logs that came down the river in rafts, and where they made shingles, and the row of sheds where they dried the lumber with steam, and another big one where the planers were. There were hundreds and hundreds of piles of lumber, each one as tall as a house, and all the ground was made of sawdust and rattlings, because it was filled ground.
There were railway sidings here, and there were flat cars and box cars being loaded.
Burman’s sawmill and lumber yards were just under the bluff. Once there had been a brickyard there, and the bluff was cut down steep where they had dug clay. Across the street there was still a brickyard, with hundreds and hundreds of cords of wood, ready to be used to burn brick, and with the kilns loosely roofed over. Back toward the town was a sash and door factory, a pretty big building, and then some houses, and then the stores began. About the fifth store on one side was Swatty’s father’s tailor shop. It was a building all by itself, and it was one story high and frame, and it had a false front above the first story, with Swatty’s father’s name on it, and there was one window on the street.
Well, Swatty and Bony and me went through the lumber yard to the place where Burman’s oil shed was.
The oil shed was right up against the bluff, almost at the railway, and it was up on stakes, so that it was safer. It was about as big as a kitchen, and was painted red and the floor and part of the and part of the stakes were soaked with oil, and the grass underneath was withered and oily because the oil had dripped and killed it.
Just as we got there we saw Slim Finnegan, who was in our class at school but ever so much older than we were, and he was under the oil shed smoking a corncob pipe. His coat was on the grass beside him, and just as we got there he jumped up and began slamming at the grass with his coat, for the grass was afire. Before we could guess what happened, the flames seemed to run up the stakes like live animals, and all at once the whole bottom of the floor of the oil shed was afire.
Slim Finnegan gave one look at it, and tucked his coat under his arm and ran. There were piles and piles of lumber right there and he jumped in among them, and I guess he hid. We didn’t see him any more.
Swatty ran for the sawmill. He shouted to the first man he saw before he was halfway to the sawmill, and the man hollered “Fire!” and ran for a hose wagon they had under a shed and began jerking it out, and Swatty ran on, shouting “Fire!”
It wasn’t a second before all the men began piling out of the sawmill and came running from the lumber yards, and the mill whistle began blowing as hard as it could. It almost made you deaf when you were that close. Right away the whole place seemed to fill up with men, and they all had axes or hooks or whatever they ought to have had.
The mill whistle kept blowing without stopping, and in a minute the whistle on the sash and door factory joined in, and then the regular fire whistle on the waterworks started up. The oil house was just one big red flame that went up in the air and turned into the blackest kind of smoke. We saw the men with the mill’s hose trying to throw water on the oil house, and every one was shouting at the tops of their voices. We saw men on top of the nearest lumber piles, but almost as soon as we saw them we saw them dodge away and climb down as quick as they could, and the next minute those lumber piles were afire on one side. They were red flames, and they climbed right up the sides of the piles and waved at the top.
Me and Swatty and Bony kept backing down the railway track as the fire got too hot for us. There were hundreds of people, but there were more than that in other parts of the neighborhood. Almost everybody in town came to the fire, because by this time dozens of lumber piles were afire, and the sawmill had set fire to the dry-sheds and the planer. You couldn’t see the bluff at all, because there was just one big wall of flame in front of it. Whole boards went sailing right up into the air, burning as they went, and the blue smoke that blew over the town was full of pine cinders and burning pieces of wood. There never was such a fire in Riverbank. The ground seemed to burn, too, and it did, because it was sawdust and rattlings.
The brickyard burned – everything that could burn – and the bluff of yellow clay, there and beside the sawmill, was burned red, like brick – and the flat cars and the box cars all burned. It was an awful fire! Wet lumber in the newest piles burned as if it was dry. The railway bridge and two other bridges burned. At noon it was like evening, because the smoke hid the sun.
Me and Swatty and Bony kept backing away as the fire came toward us. Sometimes we would turn, and run. We backed away as far as ten city blocks would be, I guess, before we were where we did not have to back away any more. We forgot all about school, and about fishing, and about everything. It was the kind of fire where nobody thinks of going home until it is all over.
It was about two o’clock when the people in front and the firemen in front of them gave a sort of roar, as if they were a lot of animals, and everybody crowded back. The firemen on top of the sash and door factory ran from one edge of the roof to the other, looking down. Two of them jumped off. They were killed, but the others got down the ladders, and the next minute the factory and its oil house were all afire at once – just sort of spouted fire from all the windows as if the fire had been all fixed to break out that way.
Before you could turn around and then look back, the sash and door factory was one big, hot flame, and then the houses began to go. First one and then another caught fire.
We got crowded back until we were in the street right opposite to Swatty’s father’s tailor shop, and Swatty’s father was on the front step of it shaking his hands in the air and shouting like a crazy man, but nobody paid any attention to him. He was a little man and he had gray hair, but he was mostly bald. He didn’t have a hat on and he looked pretty crazy standing there and shouting.
Well, we didn’t know until afterward what he was shouting about, but I know now, so I might as well tell it. There was a cellar under his shop and it was full of barrels of whiskey. When prohibition was elected the saloons thought they would have to stop for a while and that then they could go ahead again, so they hunted for some place to hide the whiskey they owned, where it would be safe for a while, and Mr. Schwartz’s cellar was one of the places they hid it in. What Swatty’s father was trying to shout was that if his shop caught fire all the whiskey in the cellar might explode and the people standing around might be killed and the whole town burn up. I don’t wonder he was sort of crazy about it. I guess Swatty felt sort of ashamed that his father was acting so crazy.
So then the house next to Swatty’s father’s shop caught fire, and the next minute the side of Swatty’s father’s shop began to smoke.
The policemen were sort of crowding us back all the time, but we would n’t go back much, and all at once Mamie Little started out of the crowd and began to run toward Swatty’s father’s shop. But when she was halfway there the fire marshal just caught her by the arm and gave her a sort of twist and slung her back, and then the policeman nearest us caught her and jammed her back against me and Swatty. She was crying all the time; she kept moaning, “My father! My father!”
So just then Swatty’s father ran out and grabbed the fire marshal by the arm and talked to him in German, because they were both German, and the fire marshal ran toward his firemen and shouted through his trumpet, and all the firemen up the street came running back, dragging all their hose and all shouting.
It was all wild and sort of crazy, and suddenly the fire marshal ran back to where the firemen were tugging at the heavy hose and shouting, and four firemen who were holding on to a nozzle pointed the stream into the air. It was worse than any rain you ever saw. It was just “whoosh!” and we were all soaked. So all the crowd hollered and screamed, and we all turned and ran, and all I knew was that I had hold of Mamie Little’s hand and was helping her run. I was awful sorry for her because she was crying and her father was going to burn.
So Swatty said: “What’s she crying for? Why don’t she shut up?”
He meant Mamie Little. So I said:
“She can cry if she wants to! I’d like to see you try to stop her! She’s crying because your father gave her his fashion plate and it’s going to be burned up, and if you say much I’ll lick you!”
So Swatty said: “If that’s all she’s crying for, come on. We’ll get her old fashion plate for her.” So I said to Mamie Little: “Stop being a baby and shut up, and we’ll get your old fashion plate for you.”
Swatty just cut in through the crowd, and me and Bony followed after him. He went up the side street, and we climbed over the fence into the yard of the corner house and cut across that yard and over another fence. That way we got to the back of Swatty’s father’s shop without any one stopping us. Bony kind of kept behind us.
It was mighty hot, because the house next door was all afire, but the firemen were keeping all their hose on the side of Swatty’s father’s shop, trying to keep it from burning. We crouched down and kept our backs to the fire so the heat wouldn’t shrivel us, and we got to the back door and it wasn’t locked. We went in. It was hot – like an oven – inside, and the noise of all the water on the side of the house was like thunder, only louder. The inside of the shop was like under a waterfall. You wouldn’t think anything so wet could burn, but it did. Before we were halfway to the front window the fire began to eat into the shop along the floor. The water on that side just turned to steam and dried as fast as it ran down.
Bony began to cry, but we hadn’t any time to stop. Swatty took him by the hand and jerked him along, and we got to the window and I grabbed the fashion plate. Then we couldn’t go back because the shop was mostly afire and we would have been burned up. So then Bony got real scared and ran to the front door and threw it open, and a stream from a hose caught him and sent him head over heels back into the shop where it was burning; he was knocked unconscious because his head hit a table leg.
So I didn’t know what to do. I guess I began to cry. I crouched down in the window because I couldn’t get out at the door on account of the stream of water that was coming in there a hundred miles a minute, and I couldn’t go back because the back of the shop was all afire now. But Swatty crawled on his hands and knees under the table where Bony was, where the fire was beginning to burn harder, and he grabbed Bony and yanked him along the floor back to the window. I guess I helped him jerk Bony onto the window shelf, but just then another stream of water busted the window in. The glass fell all around us and one piece cut Swatty on the hand, but he only said, “Jump! Jump!”
Maybe we would have jumped, but we didn’t. The firemen had got to the back of the building and had turned the hose in at the back window, and just when Swatty said, “Jump!” the stream of water hit us like a board. It took us as if we were pieces of paper and slammed us out of the broken window and halfway across the street, and threw us head over heels in the mud, and the fashion plate, with Mamie Little’s father, came flying with us.
So I crawled over to where the fashion plate was and took hold of it and began to drag it to where Mamie Little was. A policeman came and took me by the shoulder and lifted me up, but I couldn’t stand, and that was the first I knew my ankle was sprained. But Swatty got up himself and sassed the policeman that came to get him. He told him he had a right to go into his father’s own shop if he wanted to, and that if the policeman said much more he would go back again.
