Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  Recess didn’t go a bit good for me. Before we left home, Mother had taken us into the front room and said, “I am not going to have you children grow up to be rowdies and ruffians just because we live on a farm. Ralph, if you get into a fight in this new school, I shall give you a hard thrashing when you come home. The Bible says that if your enemy smites you on one cheek, you are to turn the other. I want you to follow that teaching absolutely. And Grace, I want you to promise me on your word of honor that you will tell me if he ever raises a hand against any other child at school.”

  She must have heard about Freddie Sprague. He was in the second grade, but he was bigger and fatter than I. We hadn’t been out to recess a minute when Freddie put a stick on my shoulder and then knocked it off. “Wanta fight?” he said.

  Grace was standing right behind him, and hollered, “If you do, I’ll tell Mother.”

  I knew she would, too, so I said, “No, my mother won’t let me.”

  I don’t know why the Bible picked out cheeks, but that’s right where Freddie hit me. I wanted to hit him back, but I didn’t dare to. Mother could spank pretty hard if I did something right after she’d told me not to. I just let my hands stay down and turned my face around. Freddie hit that side, too. And he hit it hard.

  When I started to cry, somebody sang out, “Molly, Molly.” Then all the boys, and even some of the girls, started yelling it.

  Grace came over and wiped my face with my handkerchief. “Don’t cry,” she said. “Mother will be proud of you.” Then Miss Wheeler rang the bell for us to come in, and said Freddie should be ashamed for hitting me. Every time she wasn’t looking the rest of the morning, he kept making faces at me.

  Noon was worse than recess. Grace had brought a rubber ball to school with her. She knew how to play jackstones with it, but the other girls didn’t. As soon as we got out at noon, she divided our lunch and went off with the other girls to hunt for the right-sized stones. Mother had baked us each a cup custard. I laid my two sandwiches and piece of cake on top of my cup and went to look for a place to eat it. When I was halfway out to the carriage shed, Freddie came running with another stick to put on my shoulder. I spilled my sandwiches and cake trying to get away, and he knocked the cup out of my hands, yelling, “Fight, Molly!” All the other boys laughed at me. Some of them yelled, “Hit the little sissy, Freddie, make him fight.” I had to run away to the far corner of the yard.

  All the other youngsters either rode to school or drove in old buggies. There was an open shed where they backed the buggies in at one end and tied the horses at the other. Willie Aldivote rode a funny-looking grayish-white donkey with big yellow splotches. After they had eaten their lunches, the other boys got the donkey out and started to ride him. They would hold him by the ears until some boy got on, then they’d let him loose and tickle him with a switch. He would buck like sixty. Sometimes the boys stayed on and sometimes they fell off.

  I had come back to the corner of the shed where I could watch. When Freddie saw me, he hollered, “Let’s put Molly on him,” and they did.

  I wasn’t very much afraid. I hadn’t fallen off the cowboy’s horse, and thought I could cut the mustard. Anyway, I was willing to take the chance. Mother hadn’t said I couldn’t ride a donkey, and I wanted to show the boys I wasn’t a sissy. My ride lasted about half of the donkey’s first buck jump. He kicked his heels up, and I pitched off between his ears. I landed right on my face in the gravel. I skinned my nose and bit my tongue. I couldn’t help crying a little, but I didn’t make any noise.

  Mother nearly went frantic when we got home from school. My Buster Brown suit was pretty well messed up from the bloody nose I got when I fell off the donkey, and Freddie had given me a good working over after school. I guess it hadn’t helped my looks very much. Grace was so busy telling Mother about my being a good boy and not fighting that, until after I was all cleaned up, she forgot to give her the note Miss Wheeler had sent.

  Mother’s eyes got all full of tears when she was washing my face and putting court plaster on my nose. She told me that she was proud of me for being a little gentleman, and that she would see to it that those ruffians didn’t attack me again. Grace hadn’t seen me try to ride the donkey, and I thought it would be best not to mention it to Mother.

  Father came in from digging post holes just after Grace had remembered about the note. Mother was madder than ever and read it aloud to him. The teacher said that Grace had adjusted herself very nicely with the other girls and she was sure I would soon make my adjustment, but she would suggest that I wear overalls to school like the other boys.

  Mother tossed the note down on the table and slapped it with her hand. Her lips were pinched together and she said, “The fact that I am going to bring my children up on a farm isn’t going to prevent me from bringing them up to be ladies and gentlemen. Ralph wearing overalls to school! The very idea! I shall see that teacher the first thing in the morning.”

  Father shut his eyes and scratched the back of his head. Then he said, “There might be some reason in what she says, Mame. And, you know, there have been some gentlemen in overalls.” Mother’s lips pinched tighter than ever, and she never said a word.

  Father and Mother sat up in the kitchen till after I went to sleep. I don’t know what they talked about, but the part that was about me must have ended in a compromise. Mother didn’t go to see the teacher, and I didn’t wear overalls to school.

  My time at school wasn’t happy. Freddie Sprague made it miserable, and I got so I was scared to death of the yellow-spotted donkey. Freddie thought it was a lot of fun to grab me by the back of my pants and jerk hard enough to pull off a couple of buttons. Then I’d have to hold them up with one hand until I could get to Grace for a safety-pinning. Mother always made them so I had to unbutton them when the other boys didn’t have to, and some of the older ones were always yelling, “Come, Molly, let Mama unbutton you.” Or they’d run me down and lug me for another nose dive off the donkey.

  One raw, windy afternoon when we were at recess, Willie Aldivote made an I-betcha that he could hold his breath longer than any of the rest of us. Nobody won because I turned blue and fell over after half a minute. It didn’t help me a bit at school, but it really worked fine at home.

  Though it wasn’t nearly so cold in Colorado as it had been in New England, the high altitude bothered my heart a little, and I felt the cold more than the others. Once or twice I got so cold on the way home from school that I turned good and blue. When I did, Mother would doctor me with brandy and sugar. I tried for it often, because I liked it, but she would only give it to me if I was really blue to the ears.

  I found that if I stayed outside long enough to get good and cold, then held my breath for half a minute just before I staggered through the kitchen door, it would get me a spoonful of brandy. Mother never guessed, but after I had worked it half a dozen times, Father caught on and I became what our old minister used to call a teetotaler.

  Father tried to make up to me a little for the trouble I was having at school. He picked Saturdays to go to Denver for loads of lime and secondhand bricks to build a foundation under the house. I always went with him, and each time we had a picnic of custard pie and milk. Then, on the way home, he let me drive Bill and Nig.

  One evening after school, when Father and I were working on the foundation, Fred Aultland drove into our yard. He and Father talked for a while about the house and building the foundation, then Fred said, “Charlie, you seem to be pretty handy with the tools. You know, my father used to run cattle all through this section when I was a kid. He kept eight or ten cowhands all the time, and sometimes there’d be as many as a couple of dozen. The old bunkhouse hasn’t been used for ten years or more. I been thinking about tearing it down, but all I can get out of it is firewood. I’ll make a deal with you. If you want to buy me a ton of coal and haul it out from Denver, I’ll take it in trade for the bunkhouse.”

  It was fun moving the bunkhouse. We did it one Saturday. It was
bigger than our whole house, and I couldn’t see how in the world we could move it without tearing it all to pieces, but Fred and Father figured it out. Fred and his two hired men helped us, and it was easy as pie. Father shaped the ends of four double-length fence posts so they’d fit into the hubs of the wagon wheels. Then he bored holes through the ends of them and put axle grease on the shaped part. As the men pried up one corner of the bunkhouse I’d lay cribbing sticks under, the way Father showed me. We just kept going around and around it; they lifting a little and I putting in another stick or two, till it was high enough to run the shaped ends of the posts under it and into the hubs of the wheels. When the stay pins were driven, it made the whole bunkhouse into a great big, eight-wheeled wagon. Of course, we couldn’t turn any sharp corners, but we didn’t need to. We just hitched on four horses and hauled it down across the prairie.

  At our house we took it off the same way we had put it on. Father was fussy about making it land L-shaped to the back of our house, with the corners just touching.

  Although I was having a lot more fun at home, things were getting worse and worse at school. The Friday after we moved the bunkhouse, it got so bad I couldn’t stand it any longer. We had just finished eating our lunches that noon when Freddie Sprague started picking on me. He yanked at my pants so hard that all but one of the buttons flew off, and I had to use both hands to hold them up. Then he got dirty and yelled to the other kids, “Let’s pull Molly’s pants off so he won’t have to squat like a girl.” They did, and right where all the girls could see, too.

  I didn’t care whether Mother would be ashamed of me or not. I couldn’t be a gentleman with my pants off, and I didn’t want to be one anyway. I plowed into Freddie with both fists. I had a big advantage, because he didn’t expect it. His nose started bleeding before mine did, and that made me sure I could lick him. He tried to quit after a few minutes, but the older boys wouldn’t let him out of the ring. I had been dreaming about that day for a month, and kept hitting him as fast as I could make my arms go.

  I heard the girls’ voices around the ring and looked right up into Grace’s face. She was jumping up and down and yelling, “Hit him! Hit him! Hit him hard!” I did my best, and Freddie put both arms up over his face. Once when the boys were pulling him back onto his feet, I glanced up toward the schoolhouse. Miss Wheeler was peeking out the corner of the window, but she didn’t ring the bell till it was all over and Grace had pinned my pants back on.

  Rudolph Haas lived way over south of the schoolhouse, but that night he drove Grace and me clear to our house in his buggy. Just before we got in, Miss Wheeler came and said for Grace to tell Mother that she thought I had made my adjustment now.

  Maybe she thought so, but Mother didn’t. She started to cry as soon as she saw me—my eye had turned kind of greenish-black. She even cried while she was paddling me. It was a good, hard spanking with one of Father’s slippers, but I didn’t mind it at all; it was worth two spankings to lick Freddie. I don’t remember all the things she said to me, but they were plenty. Then she told Grace to call Father. He sent me for the milk as soon as he came into the house.

  The next day was Saturday, and I worked with Father all day. He was cutting the bunkhouse in two, so we could move one of the pieces around and build it into a new kitchen. Along in the middle of the forenoon, I was holding a window sash while he took off the frame. He had his back to me, and we hadn’t been talking at all. All at once he said, “I hear you had a fight yesterday.”

  I had been expecting it. I didn’t look up, and he didn’t turn around. I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you lick him?”

  Yes, sir.

  “Good.” That was all. He never mentioned it again.

  4

  My Character-House

  WHILE WE were doing our lessons that night, Mother said, “Didn’t Fred Aultland offer to lend you horses until ours were well again?”

  It was a few minutes before Father answered. “Yes, Mame, he did, but . . . what is that one you quote about being neither a borrower nor a lender? Fred’s a fine fellow, but I don’t want to start borrowing from the neighbors, and then, too, he’ll need all his horses at plowing time when I’ll have to have three.”

  Mother said, “I just don’t see how we can take out fifty dollars for another horse, and more to buy harness for it, until we have something to sell.” Father didn’t say anything except that he’d talk to Mr. Cash.

  Mr. Cash was an old horse trader-peddler, who used to come by our place every couple of weeks. He had an old covered wagon filled with everything from safety pins to rolls of secondhand barbed wire, and he usually had three or four old horses tied to the tail gate.

  He came by the next Sunday, and Father haggled with him for over an hour. I was out by the wagon when they finally made the deal. Father had looked the different horses over from teeth to hoofs. He had both hands in the hip pockets of his overalls and was looking at an old bay mare on the off side. “How much for Grandma?” he asked.

  Mr. Cash said he had paid twenty-five dollars for her, but in the end he let Father have her for seventeen-fifty, and threw in a collar, and hames with chain traces. When we were leading her to the barn, I noticed that she dragged one fore hoof. Father said it was because she had been foundered. Because she walked so slow, Mother named her Nancy Hanks, after a famous race horse.

  Mother let me wear my overalls and blue shirt to school Monday morning. Grace fiddled along all the way, hunting for some certain kind of cactus. We got in just after the bell rang. Freddie’s eye was blacker than mine and his lips were still puffed. I had wanted to get there early enough to see if I could lick him again before school began, but I had to wait for morning recess.

  Everybody knew Freddie and I were going to fight again at recess time. We made faces at each other every time Miss Wheeler had her back to the class. What I didn’t know was that Freddie had a deal with Johnnie Alder to help him lick me.

  Johnnie was in the fifth grade, and nearly as big as Willie Aldivote. As soon as we got out near the carriage shed, Freddie and Johnnie both jumped on me. I was sure I was done for until Willie sailed in, too.

  I always liked Willie Aldivote best of the boys. He was the second biggest in school; he was twelve, and was in the sixth grade in number work. He was the one who had the yellow-spotted donkey, and he could ride like everything. He had never been mean to me.

  Willie told Johnnie, “If you’re going to help Freddie, I’ll help Molly,” and the fight was on. It was really two fights for a little while. Then, when Johnnie was good and licked, Willie kept Freddie from holding me by the hair with one hand while he punched me with the other.

  After that I had better luck, and before the bell rang for the end of recess, Freddie had both arms up over his face again. Then he did something that I ought to have loved him for. He said, “There ain’t meat enough on him to hit, that’s why I can’t lick him. He’s just a sackful of old spikes, and I hurt my own hands worse’n I hurt him every time I punch.”

  At noon I ate my lunch with all the rest of the fellows, sitting right between Willie Aldivote and Rudolph Haas. After we finished eating, Willie said, “Come on, Rudy, let’s teach Spikes how to really ride that jackass.” Nobody will ever write a poem that will sound as good to me as that did. I knew I wasn’t going to be Molly any more, and I’d have tried to ride a rhinoceros if they’d said so.

  They got straps off one of the harnesses and a piece of good, stout cord. After they’d buckled the straps real tight around the donkey, Rudy held him by the ears while Willie put me on and tied my feet together with the cord. He ran it snug between them, under the donkey’s belly. Willie told me not to be scared, to squeeze tight with my knees and watch the donkey’s head so I could lean way back when he put it down to kick. I grabbed hold of the straps with both hands, and Rudy let him go.

  For what seemed an hour, but was probably ten seconds, things were happening too fast for me to keep up with them. I tried to watch hi
s head and lean back every time it went down, but it was bobbing so fast I lost the beat. My head snapped back and forth as though it were tied on with rubber, and I bit my tongue. My head rang so I couldn’t even hear Grace yelling—she had come running to pick up the pieces when I got killed—but I was still on top when he stopped, and I’d had fun. After school, Willie let me ride behind him on the donkey as far as our corner, and Grace was so proud of me that she promised not to tell Mother.

  Three or four days after we got Nancy Hanks, Grace and I came home from school through our west field, so I could show her where Bill and Nig had fallen off the trestle. There were twelve or thirteen long crossties in the bottom of the gulch, and I told Grace that Father had said for me to drag them home as soon as we got another horse. I had been riding Willie’s donkey every day, and thought I’d be able to handle any horse.

  I guess I’d made up too many stories before. Grace didn’t believe me, and told Mother about it the minute we got home. I should have admitted to Mother right then that it was only a story, but I was sure she’d spank me if I did. The more I thought about hauling those ties with Nancy, the more I wanted to do it. And, since I was going to get a spanking anyway, I thought I might just as well have the fun of trying. So I swore up and down that Father did tell me. He had gone to Denver after another load of bricks, and I was sure I could have a crosstie home before he got back. Then he would probably be proud enough of me so that I wouldn’t get spanked at all.

  Mother had to help me put the collar and hames on Nancy, because they were heavy and the collar didn’t have any buckle at the top. You had to put it over her head upside-down, and then turn it around. I never heard Father criticize Mother, and that was the only time I ever heard her criticize him. She put her hands on her hips and buttoned her mouth up tight, then she said, “I don’t know what in the world this ranching has done to your father! Insisting that you wear overalls to school and be permitted to behave yourself like a guttersnipe! And now! Hmfff! Sending a little eight-year-old boy off to haul logs with a new, untried horse!”