Houseboat Girl

  CHAPTER VII

  O’Donald Bend

  THE NEXT MORNING PATSY heard the cat meowing at the houseboat window. Daddy let him in and he came over to Patsy’s bed and got in with her. Patsy dozed off again. Then the oven door in the kitchen banged. Daddy must be taking biscuits out of the oven. Tom the cat heard it, too, and ran out to eat breakfast with Daddy. He lifted his paw and said meow. Daddy said, “I can’t hear you.” Tom scratched his claws on Daddy’s pants leg and Daddy fed him pieces of bacon.

  Patsy dressed and went out. She was the first one of the children up.

  “How you like it here, honey?” asked Daddy. He got up to go to the fish barge. “Pretty nice, eh? You like it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Patsy sleepily. She picked up a biscuit and a piece of bacon and followed him out on the porch. She took a look around and soon came in again.

  “Where’s our house?” she asked Mama. “There’s none here.”

  “We don’t need a house,” said Mama. “We’ve got the biggest houseboat on the river.”

  “There’s no town here,” said Patsy.

  “There’s a country store,” said Mama, “and lots of cotton farmers livin’ up the river road. The school bus goes along here and picks up all the kids and takes them into Luxora to school. Luxora’s a right nice little town about eight miles away.”

  Patsy had not thought about school for a long time. Now she remembered Miss Norton in River City. She thought of her birthday party when she had turned nine. Mama had sent a note to Miss Norton and she said yes, she could have one. Mama took a nice cake, boxes of ice cream, muffins and trinkets from the dime store. The children in Patsy’s class played games and had a good time. Patsy got many presents. All that seemed a long time ago.

  “When does school start?” she asked suddenly.

  “The last week of August, probably,” said Mama.

  “Well, we can’t stay here very long then,” said Patsy. “We’ll just have to turn around and start right back up that old river again.”

  “We’re not going back to Illinois,” said Mama quietly.

  “Why not?” asked Patsy.

  “It’s too hard to push a big houseboat up river,” said Mama.

  “But we got to go back!” cried Patsy. “We live there. We’ve got our house there. I go to school there and I like my teacher.”

  Mama decided she might as well let Patsy know.

  “We sold the house,” she said. “We had to sell it to pay Daddy’s debts.”

  Patsy’s heart sank. “It’s not ours any more?”

  “No,” said Mama cheerfully. “So we can’t go back. That shelling up there was too hard on Daddy’s back. He wanted a change.”

  “How will he make money?” asked Patsy.

  “Selling fish,” said Mama.

  “Selling fish?” said Patsy. “Smelly old things.

  “There ought to be good sale for fish in a place like this,” said Mama. “All the cotton pickers will come and buy.”

  Dan and Bunny were outside wading and splashing in the water, at the river’s edge. Milly was helping Daddy get his fishing gear out. Patsy came out on the porch and slumped down on the leather couch.

  Below a bank of cottonwoods and willows, the houseboat was securely tied. The chute at O’Donald’s Bend was as wide as a small river. Island No. 27, also called Fork-a-Deer Island, on the other side, was densely wooded. Birds were singing in the trees. The sun came out bright and hot.

  “Well, here we are, honey!” Daddy called to Patsy from the fish barge. “How you like this place? Want to stay here a while, little river rat?”

  To be called a river rat always gave Patsy a little stab of pain. But when Daddy said it lovingly, it was different. He was not teasing her or calling names. He was loving her and using her pet name. But this time she sulked and did not answer.

  “What’s the matter, honey? Cat got your tongue?”

  Still Patsy did not answer.

  “I thought you was a river pal of mine,” said Daddy. “Gonna help me set my trotlines this evenin’?”

  “No, I’m NOT!” cried Patsy. She got up and flounced indoors, banging the screen door behind her.

  Daddy looked after her, scratching his head. “Now, what’s eatin’ her, I wonder?”

  He came in and passed by her where she lay on her bed, with her face turned to the wall. He changed his clothes and went up the river bank to catch a ride to town. He wanted to get his Arkansas fishing license the first thing.

  Mama called from the kitchen, “Go take care of your chickens, Patsy. Move the coop up on the bank. If there are any eggs, bring them in.”

  Patsy got up. “But if we’re not stayin’ here…” she began.

  “We are stayin’ here,” said Mama, “for a while anyway, to see if the fishing’s any good. So make up your mind to that.”

  Reluctantly Patsy went out and called Dan. They took the chicken coop up on the bank and set it on an old sawed-off stump. Patsy opened the door and turned the hens out.

  “They’ll all run off in the woods and you’ll never see them again,” somebody said.

  Patsy looked around and saw a strange girl staring at her. She was about ten, tall and thin and pale, and she had a mass of tangled blond hair. Patsy stared back and did not speak. She sent Dan to get a hammer and some nails. When he returned, she nailed two nest boxes onto a tree near the coop. She pulled long grass and filled the nests.

  “They’ll lay all over the woods,” said the strange girl. “They’ll never go in them boxes.”

  “What do you know about it?” asked Patsy.

  “You’ll never see your chickens again,” insisted the girl. “People will steal ’em, snakes and weasels and possums will eat ’em.”

  “Look!” said Patsy, pointing to the hens. “Are they runnin’ off?”

  The four hens stood watching, as if ready to lay their eggs.

  “They been moved around so much, that’s all they know—their nests,” said Patsy. “Want to know what their names are?”

  The girl’s mouth opened in astonishment. “They got names?”

  “This one’s Shoo-Fly, and that one is Mrs. Cackle,” said Patsy. “And there’s Jenny Brown and here’s Fluffy Tail.”

  The girl could not think of a thing to say. Two of the hens jumped into the nests.

  “The varmints will get all their eggs,” said the girl.

  Patsy did not argue. She told Dan to go get a rope. She acted as if the strange girl were not there at all. Dan shinnied up the tree and tied the two ends of the rope to a horizontal branch. It made a nice rope swing. Patsy sat in it and swung back and forth. Then she picked up a chicken, tucked its head under its wing and perched it on the rope swing.

  “I got to go pack Mama some wood in,” she told the chicken. “You stay right here till I get back. Come on, Dan, let’s get lots of wood. Mama wants to do a big washing.”

  They hurried away and began to pick up dead branches of trees. Dan brought a hatchet and they chopped them. They made a pile halfway up the river bank. All this time the strange girl stood watching them.

  “I wish she’d go away,” Patsy said to Dan.

  “I don’t like her,” said Dan. “Do you?”

  “No,” said Patsy. “She thinks she knows it all.”

  They went over to the rope swing. The hen was still perched on the rope, its head still under its wing, the way she had left it. Patsy lifted the hen and put it in one of the nests.

  “Jeepers!” exclaimed the girl. “How do you do that?”

  Patsy tossed her head. “It’s all in knowin’ how!” She and Dan went back to the houseboat.

  After a while the girl went away. But when Mama sent the children to the store to buy some groceries, they saw her again in the road. This time there were other children with her, an older boy in ragged overalls and two little girls with very dirty faces. They stared at the newcomers.

  Patsy turned to Dan. “I don’t like this place, do you?
” she asked.

  “No,” said Dan, “I just hate it. I hope we’ll go down river tomorrow.”

  When they came out of the store with their bags of groceries, Patsy dropped one. The strange girl ran and picked it up. It had bananas in it.

  “I’ll tote it for you,” the girl said in an eager voice.

  She followed them down the river bank, leaving her brother and little sisters behind. She stopped at the stage plank, uncertain what to do. Patsy and Dan walked round the guard to put their groceries in the kitchen, then they came back. The girl handed Patsy the bag of bananas.

  “My name’s Joella Harris,” she said, trying to be friendly. “What’s yours?”

  “Patsy Foster,” said Patsy, “and he’s Dan Foster.”

  “You live here?” asked the girl.

  “Sure, why not?” said Patsy, on the defensive. She turned quickly and went inside.

  Mama, who had been listening by the door, said, “Give that girl a banana.”

  “Oh, Mama, not a banana!” cried Patsy. “I don’t even know her!”

  “She helped you bring the groceries, didn’t she?” said Mama.

  “Yes…but…”

  “Give her a banana,” said Mama sternly.

  Patsy went out and crossed the stage plank, where the girl was waiting. Grudgingly she held out a banana, a precious banana that she herself liked so much. “Here!” she said.

  The girl turned away and refused to take it.

  “All right, then!” snapped Patsy. “If you don’t want it, I’ll…” Quickly she stripped the banana and began to gobble it down in large bites.

  “I can have all the bananas I want,” said the girl. “I don’t want any of yours.”

  “O. K. then,” said Patsy.

  But Joella did not go away. She still stood there.

  “Where you folks goin’, anyhow?” she asked, filled with curiosity.

  “Down the river just any place we feel like,” said Patsy. “We don’t have to stay in one place the way you do. Our house floats. It doesn’t set on posts in the ground like the houses round here.”

  “It looks almost like a house,” said Joella.

  Patsy frowned. “I wish it was a house,” she said.

  “You don’t like livin’ in a houseboat?” asked Joella.

  “Oh sure,” said Patsy. “Course I like it. I got to.”

  “But you’d rather live in a real house,” said Joella.

  “No, sir!” cried Patsy, fiercely. “Most people are not half as lucky as we are. They can’t take their houses with them when they go places. We’re regular snails! We take our house right along wherever we go.” She looked at the strange girl and began to brag a little. “You got to stay in one place all the time. I feel sorry for you. You can’t keep goin’ the way we do. Why, we can even go all the ways to New Orleans if we want to.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Joella.

  “Why, don’t you know?” asked Patsy. “Don’t you study geography? I can find it on our river maps. It’s in Louisiana, just above where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Oh,” said Joella. “You goin’ there?”

  “No,” said Patsy. “We’re stayin’ here…I think.”

  “I’m glad,” said Joella softly.

  After Mrs. Foster put the houseboat in order, she decided to hunt up her old friend, Edie Barker, the lamplighter’s wife. Milly went along as far as the store, found some girls her own age there and went off with them to one of their houses. Mrs. Foster asked the man at the store where to find the Barkers. He pointed up the dirt road toward Ashport Ferry Landing.

  “They got a houseboat settin’ right next to a cotton field,” the man said. “You can’t miss it.”

  Mrs. Foster and Patsy started up the road, with Dan and Bunny coming behind. A car caught up with them, passing in a whirl of dust to go to the ferry. The cotton beside the road was in bloom now. Patsy picked a blossom and put it in her hair. Passing several tumbledown farm buildings, they soon saw a houseboat on the left ahead. It was perched high on the bank, resting on heavy posts. Patsy did not need to be told why the houses in Illinois and Kentucky and Arkansas along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers always stood on posts. That was because of high water every year.

  There stood Mrs. Barker on the little back porch with a broom in her hand.

  “Well, if it’s not Liz Foster!” she cried. “Seth told me he seen you folks comin’ down river and said you’d hunt us up.”

  The next minute they were all inside, and the two women were in each other’s arms, and the children were trying to remember Aunt Edie. The Barkers’ houseboat was much smaller than the Fosters’. It had three rooms, kitchen, bedroom and living room. It was tiny and cozy, and held a lot of furniture, including a TV set and a sewing machine. Aunt Edie was a plump good-natured woman of fifty, with hair already turning gray.

  “We’re always stoppin’ along the river, huntin’ folks up,” said Mrs. Foster. “Usually we find ’em, but sometimes it’s a hard job. We were afraid you folks had gone off again by this time.”

  “Law me!” exclaimed Mrs. Barker. “We been all over the map the last few years. We used to be at Ashport and got sick of it, so we went to Fort Pillow. Then we came back and lived in a tent at the head of this chute—you found us there, remember? Then we went to Louisiana for about a year. That state’s plumb full of houseboats, but it’s so wet, it gives you rheumatism.”

  “Seth is like Abe,” said Mrs. Foster. “He’s as crazy as Abe is—been all over and come back again like us.”

  “Seems like Seth is never satisfied,” said Mrs. Barker. “In the woods it was too lonesome. Seth likes to talk and there was no one but me. Then he tried Louisiana ’cause he was born and raised there…”

  “How long you been here?” asked Mrs. Foster.

  “About eight months,” said Mrs. Barker. “We just got this houseboat last winter. Seth paid five hundred dollars for it.”

  “It’s nice and cozy,” said Mrs. Foster, “for just you two. Wouldn’t be big enough for a family of kids like mine.”

  Mrs. Barker asked the children how old they were and passed around cookies. Then they went out to play and the two women talked alone.

  “How you makin’ out, really, Edie?”

  “Purty good,” said Mrs. Barker. “Seth gets a hundred and eighty-six dollars a month as lamplighter, but he has to furnish his own boats and motors and his own gas and oil. That doesn’t leave too much for us. So I figgered if we stayed here in Arkansas this fall, I could help out by pickin’ cotton in my spare time. One woman told me she makes sixty dollars a month at it. Of course I’m gettin’ old and can’t pick very fast, but…”

  “I just won’t pick that stuff,” said Mrs. Foster. “I tried it for two weeks once, but didn’t like it.”

  “Well, I thought I’d do it,” said Mrs. Barker. “They’re always needin’ pickers, and you can go at your own speed. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll introduce you to Mr. George, the boss man.”

  Mrs. Foster laughed. “If I’d go to pickin’ cotton, we’d be broke in two days’ time. No, I’ll let Big Abe catch fish and sell ’em and I’ll take in the money.”

  “Is he aimin’ to fish?” asked Mrs. Barker. “Here, at O’Donald Bend?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Foster. “We got a good place down under the river bank, below the store there. Abe’ll put a sign out.”

  “Andy Dillard won’t like that!” said Mrs. Barker.

  “Who’s Andy Dillard?”

  Patsy came in just in time to hear what Mrs. Barker said.

  “Andy’s got a fish house down below us here, at the ferry landing. He sells to folks goin’ back and forth to Tennessee on the ferry, and to the cotton pickers, too.”

  “Is there a store down there?” asked Mrs. Foster.

  “It used to be a store and we ran it for a while,” said Mrs. Barker. “I did it, Seth didn’t help much. I sold soft drinks, peanuts, chewing gum and candy, mayb
e a few cakes and pies, but no beer. We’re Christians and don’t believe in it. I did that for a while, but didn’t make out very well, so I quit.”

  “So it’s a fish house now?” asked Mrs. Foster.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Barker, “and Andy Dillard acts like he owns the whole Mississippi River. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

  Mrs. Foster called the smaller children and they came running.

  “Look, Mama,” cried Patsy, pointing down the river bank. “Aunt Edie’s got a whole yard full of chickens and a garden and a line for clothes down there. And look at her pretty flowers!” The window boxes on the houseboat were filled with red geraniums. “Aren’t they purty?”

  “They sure are,” said Mrs. Foster. “I never was one to mess with flowers myself.”

  “They’re no work,” said Aunt Edie. “You just stick ’em in the ground and they grow.”

  “Not for me they don’t,” said Mrs. Foster. “They fold up and die.”

  A cat came up and rubbed against Mrs. Barker’s leg. “Go away, Ten-Spot!” she said.

  “What’s the cat’s name?” asked Patsy.

  “Ten-Spot.” Mrs. Barker laughed. “That’s our ten-dollar cat!”

  Mrs. Foster and the children stared. The cat did not have long hair, and it was not a Siamese, in fact it looked very common and ordinary. Its color was a mixture of yellow, white, gray and black.

  “You don’t mean to tell me you was a big enough fool to pay ten dollars for that…that skinny old alley cat!” exclaimed Mrs. Foster. “It looks like something somebody threw out in the dark!”

  Mrs. Barker laughed.

  “It’s a ten-dollar cat all right,” she said, “but we didn’t buy it. A man borrowed ten dollars from Seth and left this cat, so he calls it his ten-dollar cat—Ten-Spot for short!”

  “But if it’s a nice cat,” said Patsy, “it’d be worth ten dollars, wouldn’t it?”

  The women laughed.

  “That’s the kind you can’t give away,” said Mrs. Foster.

  “I’ve tried a dozen times,” said Mrs. Barker, “but it always comes back. It seems to feel at home here.”

  The children said good-bye to Aunt Edie and Mrs. Foster invited her to come for a visit. They started off, but Aunt Edie called them back.