“Damn,” he said. “He’s a perfect size for Mrs. Packard and her trout dinners. But he’s pretty big for Littless and me.”
I better go upstream and find a shallow and try to get a couple of small ones, he thought. Damn, didn’t he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don’t know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It’s the time when there’s no give at all and then they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.
This is a strange creek, he thought. It’s funny when you have to hunt for small ones.
He found his pole where he had thrown it. The hook was bent and he straightened it. Then he picked up the heavy fish and started up the stream.
There’s one shallow, pebbly part just after she comes out of the upper swamp, he thought. I can get a couple of small ones there. Littless might not like this big one. If she gets homesick I’ll have to take her back. I wonder what those old boys are doing now? I don’t think that goddam Evans kid knows about this place. That son of a bitch. I don’t think anybody fished in here but Indians. You should have been an Indian, he thought. It would have saved you a lot of trouble.
He made his way up the creek, keeping back from the stream but once stepping onto a piece of bank where the stream flowed underground. A big trout broke out in a violence that made a slashing wake in the water. He was a trout so big that it hardly seemed he could turn in the stream.
“When did you come up?” Nick said when the fish had gone under the bank again further upstream. “Boy, what a trout.”
At the pebbly shallow stretch he caught two small trout. They were beautiful fish, too, firm and hard and he gutted the three fish and tossed the guts into the stream, then washed the trout carefully in the cold water and then wrapped them in a small faded sugar sack from his pocket.
It’s a good thing that girl likes fish, he thought. I wish we could have picked some berries. I know where I can always get some, though. He started back up the hill slope toward their camp. The sun was down behind the hill and the weather was good. He looked out across the swamp and up in the sky, above where the arm of the lake would be, he saw a fish hawk flying.
He came up to the lean-to very quietly and his sister did not hear him. She was lying on her side, reading. Seeing her, he spoke softly not to startle her. “What did you do, you monkey?”
She turned and looked at him and smiled and shook her head.
“I cut it off,” she said.
“How?”
“With a scissors. How did you think?”
“How did you see to do it?”
“I just held it out and cut it. It’s easy. Do I look like a boy?”
“Like a wild boy of Borneo.”
“I couldn’t cut it like a Sunday-school boy. Does it look too wild?”
“No.”
“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?”
“No.”
“I wish it would.”
“You’re crazy, Littless.”
“Maybe I am. Do I look like an idiot boy?”
“A little.”
“You can make it neater. You can see to cut it with a comb.”
“I’ll have to make it a little better but not much. Are you hungry, idiot brother?”
“Can’t I just be an un-idiot brother?”
“I don’t want to trade you for a brother.”
“You have to now, Nickie, don’t you see? It was something we had to do. I should have asked you but I knew it was something we had to do so I did it for a surprise.”
“I like it,” Nick said. “The hell with everything. I like it very much.”
“Thank you, Nickie, so much. I was laying trying to rest like you said. But all I could do was imagine things to do for you. I was going to get you a chewing tobacco can full of knockout drops from some big saloon in some place like Sheboygan.”
“Who did you get them from?”
Nick was sitting down now and his sister sat on his lap and held her arms around his neck and rubbed her cropped head against his cheek.
“I got them from the Queen of the Whores,” she said. “And you know the name of the saloon?”
“No.”
“The Royal Ten Dollar Gold Piece Inn and Emporium.”
“What did you do there?”
“I was a whore’s assistant.”
“What’s a whore’s assistant do?”
“Oh, she carries the whore’s train when she walks and opens her carriage door and shows her to the right room. It’s like a lady in waiting I guess.”
“What’s she say to the whore?”
“She’ll say anything that comes into her mind as long as it’s polite.”
“Like what, brother?”
“Like, ‘Well ma’am, it must be pretty tiring on a hot day like today to be just a bird in a gilded cage.’ Things like that.”
“What’s the whore say?”
“She says, ‘Yes, indeedy. It sure is sweetness.’ Because this whore I was whore’s assistant to is of humble origin.”
“What kind of origin are you?”
“I’m the sister or the brother of a morbid writer and I’m delicately brought up. This makes me intensely desirable to the main whore and to all of her circle.”
“Did you get the knockout drops?”
“Of course. She said, ‘Hon, take these little old drops.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said! ‘Give my regards to your morbid brother and ask him to stop by the Emporium anytime he is at Sheboygan.’”
“Get off my lap,” Nick said.
“That’s just the way they talk in the Emporium,” Littless said.
“I have to get supper. Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’ll get supper.”
“No,” Nick said. “You keep on talking.”
“Don’t you think we’re going to have fun, Nickie?”
“We’re having fun now.”
“Do you want me to tell you about the other thing I did for you?”
“You mean before you decided to do something practical and cut off your hair?”
“This was practical enough. Wait till you hear it. Can I kiss you while you’re making supper?”
“Wait a while and I’ll tell you. What was it you were going to do?”
“Well, I guess I was ruined morally last night when I stole the whiskey. Do you think you can be ruined morally by just one thing like that?”
“No. Anyway the bottle was open.”
“Yes. But I took the empty pint bottle and the quart bottle with the whiskey in it out to the kitchen and I poured the pint bottle full and some spilled on my hand and I licked it off and I thought that probably ruined me morally.”
“How’d it taste?”
“Awfully strong and funny and a little sick-making.”
“That wouldn’t ruin you morally.”
“Well, I’m glad because if I was ruined morally how could I exercise a good influence on you?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “What was it you were going to do?”
He had his fire made and the skillet resting on it and he was laying strips of bacon in the skillet. His sister was watching and she had her hands folded across her knees and he watched her unclasp her hands and put one arm down and lean on it and put her legs out straight. She was practicing being a boy.
“I’ve got to learn to put my hands right.”
“Keep them away from your head.” “I know. It would be easy if there was some boy my own age to copy.”
“Copy me.”
“That would be natural, wouldn’t it? You won’t laugh, though?”
“Maybe.”
“Gee, I hope I won’t start to be a girl while we’re on the trip.”
“Don’t worry.”
“We have the same shoulders and the same kind of legs.”
“What was t
he other thing you were going to do?”
Nick was cooking the trout now. The bacon was curled brown on a fresh-cut chip of wood from the piece of fallen timber they were using for the fire and they both smelled the trout cooking in the bacon fat. Nick basted them and then turned them and basted them again. It was getting dark and he had rigged a piece of canvas behind the little fire so that it would not be seen.
“What were you going to do?” he asked again. Littless leaned forward and spat toward the fire.
“How was that?”
“You missed the skillet anyway.”
“Oh, it’s pretty bad. I got it out of the Bible. I was going to take three spikes, one for each of them, and drive them into the temples of those two and that boy while they slept.”
“What were you going to drive them in with?”
“A muffled hammer.”
“How do you muffle a hammer?”
“I’d muffle it all right.”
“That nail thing’s pretty rough to try.”
“Well, that girl did it in the Bible and since I’ve seen armed men drunk and asleep and circulated among them at night and stolen their whiskey why shouldn’t I go the whole way, especially if I learned it in the Bible?”
“They didn’t have a muffled hammer in the Bible.”
“I guess I mixed it up with muffled oars.”
“Maybe. And we don’t want to kill anybody. That’s why you came along.”
“I know. But crime comes easy for you and me, Nickie. We’re different from the others. Then I thought if I was ruined morally I might as well be useful.”
“You’re crazy, Littless,” he said. “Listen, does tea keep you awake?”
“I don’t know. I never had it at night. Only peppermint tea.”
“I’ll make it very weak and put canned cream in it.”
“I don’t need it, Nickie, if we’re short.”
“It will just give the milk a little taste.”
They were eating now. Nick had cut them each two slices of rye bread and he soaked one slice for each in the bacon fat in the skillet. They ate that and the trout that were crisp outside and cooked well and very tender inside. Then they put the trout skeletons in the fire and ate the bacon made in a sandwich with the other piece of bread, and then Littless drank the weak tea with the condensed milk in it and Nick tapped two slivers of wood into the holes he had punched in the can.
“Did you have enough?”
“Plenty. The trout was wonderful and the bacon, too. Weren’t we lucky they had rye bread?”
“Eat an apple,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have something good tomorrow. Maybe I should have made a bigger supper, Littless.”
“No. I had plenty.”
“You’re sure you’re not hungry?”
“No. I’m full. I’ve got some chocolate if you’d like some.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“From my savior.”
“Where?”
“My savior. Where I save everything.”
“Oh.”
“This is fresh. Some is the hard kind from the kitchen. We can start on that and save the other for sometime special. Look, my savior’s got a drawstring like a tobacco pouch. We can use it for nuggets and things like that. Do you think we’ll get out west, Nickie, on this trip?”
“I haven’t got it figured yet.”
“I’d like to get my savior packed full of nuggets worth sixteen dollars an ounce.”
Nick cleaned up the skillet and put the pack in at the head of the leanto. One blanket was spread over the browse bed and he put the other one on it and tucked it under on Littless’s side. He cleaned out the two-quart tin pail he’d made tea in and filled it with cold water from the spring. When he came back from the spring his sister was in the bed asleep, her head on the pillow she had made by rolling her blue jeans around her moccasins. He kissed her but she did not wake and he put on his old Mackinaw coat and felt in the packsack until he found the pint bottle of whiskey.
He opened it and smelled it and it smelled very good. He dipped a half a cup of water out of the small pail he had brought from the spring and poured a little of the whiskey in it. Then he sat and sipped this very slowly, letting it stay under his tongue before he brought it slowly back over his tongue and swallowed it.
He watched the small coals of the fire brighten with the light evening breeze and he tasted the whiskey and cold water and looked at the coals and thought. Then he finished the cup, dipped up some cold water and drank it and went to bed. The rifle was under his left leg and his head was on the good hard pillow his moccasins and the rolled trousers made and he pulled his side of the blanket tight around him and said his prayers and went to sleep.
In the night he was cold and he spread his Mackinaw coat over his sister and rolled his back over closer to her so that there was more of his side of the blanket under him. He felt for the gun and tucked it under his leg again. The air was cold and sharp to breathe and he smelled the cut hemlock and balsam boughs. He had not realized how tired he was until the cold had waked him. Now he lay comfortable again feeling the warmth of his sister’s body against his back and he thought, I must take good care of her and keep her happy and get her back safely. He listened to her breathing and to the quiet of the night and then he was asleep again.
It was just light enough to see the far hills beyond the swamp when he woke. He lay quietly and stretched the stiffness from his body. Then he sat up and pulled on his khaki trousers and put on his moccasins. He watched his sister sleeping with the collar of the warm Mackinaw coat under her chin and her high cheekbones and brown freckled skin light rose under the brown, her chopped-off hair showing the beautiful line of her head and emphasizing her straight nose and her close-set ears. He wished he could draw her face and he watched the way her long lashes lay on her cheeks.
She looks like a small wild animal, he thought, and she sleeps like one. How would you say her head looks, he thought. I guess the nearest is that it looks as though someone had cut her hair off on a wooden block with an ax. It has a sort of a carved look. He loved his sister very much and she loved him too much. But, he thought, I guess those things straighten out. At least I hope so.
There’s no sense waking anyone up, he thought. She must have been really tired if I’m as tired as I am. If we are all right here we are doing just what we should do: staying out of sight until things quiet down and that down-state man pulls out. I’ve got to feed her better, though. It’s a shame I couldn’t have outfitted really good.
We’ve got a lot of things, though. The pack was heavy enough. But what we want to get today is berries. I better get a partridge or a couple if I can. We can get good mushrooms, too. We’ll have to be careful about the bacon but we won’t need it with the shortening. Maybe I fed her too light last night. She’s used to lots of milk, too, and sweet things. Don’t worry about it. We’ll feed good. It’s a good thing she likes trout. They were really good. Don’t worry about her. She’ll eat wonderfully. But, Nick, boy, you certainly didn’t feed her too much yesterday. Better to let her sleep than to wake her up now. There’s plenty for you to do.
He started to get some things out of the pack very carefully and his sister smiled in her sleep. The brown skin came taut over her cheekbones when she smiled and the undercolor showed. She did not wake and he started to prepare to make breakfast and get the fire ready. There was plenty of wood cut and he built a very small fire and made tea while he waited to start breakfast. He drank his tea straight and ate three dried apricots and he tried to read in Lorna Doone. But he had read it and it did not have magic any more and he knew it was a loss on this trip.
Late in the afternoon, when they had made camp, he had put some prunes in a tin pail to soak and he put them on the fire now to stew. In the pack he found the prepared buckwheat flour and he put it out with an enameled saucepan and a tin cup to mix the flour with water to make a batter. He had the tin of vegetable shortening and he cut a piece off the top of a
n empty flour sack and wrapped it around a cut stick and tied it tight with a piece of fish line. Littless had brought four old flour sacks and he was proud of her.
He mixed the batter and put the skillet on the fire, greasing it with the shortening which he spread with the cloth on the stick. First it made the skillet shine darkly, then it sizzled and spat and he greased again and poured the batter smoothly and watched it bubble and then start to firm around the edges. He watched the rising and the forming of the texture and the gray color of the cake. He loosened it from the pan with a fresh clean chip and flipped it and caught it, the beautiful browned side up, the other sizzling. He could feel its weight but see it growing in buoyancy in the skillet.
“Good morning,” his sister said. “Did I sleep awfully late?”
“No, devil.”
She stood up with her shirt hanging down over her brown legs.
“You’ve done everything.”
“No. I just started the cakes.”
“Doesn’t that one smell wonderful? I’ll go to the spring and wash and come and help.”
“Don’t wash in the spring.”
“I’m not white man,” she said. She was gone behind the lean-to.
“Where did you leave the soap?” she asked.
“It’s by the spring. There’s an empty lard bucket. Bring the butter, will you. It’s in the spring.”
“I’ll be right back.”
There was a half a pound of butter and she brought it wrapped in the oiled paper in the empty lard bucket.
They ate the buckwheat cakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup out of a tin Log Cabin can. The top of the chimney unscrewed and the syrup poured from the chimney. They were both very hungry and the cakes were delicious with the butter melting on them and running down into the cut places with the syrup. They ate the prunes out of the tin cups and drank the juice. Then they drank tea from the same cups.
“Prunes taste like a celebration,” Littless said. “Think of that. How did you sleep, Nickie?”
“Good.”
“Thank you for putting the Mackinaw on me. Wasn’t it a lovely night, though?”
“Yes. Did you sleep all night?”
“I’m still asleep. Nickie, can we stay here always?”
“I don’t think so. You’d grow up and have to get married.”