Summer of the Monkeys

by Wilson Rawls

  “Aw, Jay Berry,” Daisy said, taking the stopper from the bottle, “castor oil isn’t hard to take. If you just close your eyes and swallow, you can’t even taste it.”

  “I can taste the darn stuff,” I said. “I can taste it even before I take it.”

  Holding the bottle about a foot above the glass, Daisy started pouring. The very sight of that slick, slimy-looking stuff gurgling down into the glass was more than my poor old sick stomach could bear. I jumped out of bed, flew to a window, and threw up all over the place.

  As I was crawling back into bed, Daisy giggled and said, “Jay Berry, I’m a much better nurse than you think I am. I knew that I’d have trouble getting you to take castor oil, so I did the next best thing. I just let you see some of it. I figured if you saw some of it that would be enough to get you to rid yourself of that old sour mash. It sure worked, didn’t it? I bet you’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” I said, “but if you really want to do something for me, go and bring me about a gallon of good cool water.”

  Daisy giggled and said, “Aw, Jay Berry, you couldn’t drink a gallon of water, could you?”

  “You just think I couldn’t,” I said. “I believe that I could drink ten gallons.”

  “Well,” Daisy said, “if you think that you can drink that much water, there’s no use in bringing it in a glass. I’ll just bring the water bucket.”

  That’s what she did, and stood there watching while I drank three dippers of water.

  “Boy,” Daisy said, “if you and Rowdy keep drinking water like that, we’ll be lucky if we have any left around here.”

  “How is Rowdy getting along?” I asked.

  Daisy frowned and said, “I don’t know how he’s getting along. He won’t let me get close to him.”

  Surprised at this, I said, “Won’t let you get close to him? What’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “He went out to the barn lot and dug him a deep hole down in that damp ground under the watering trough. About every ten minutes he crawls out of his hole, rears up on the trough, and drinks water. Every time I go out there to see about him, he growls and shows his teeth. I can’t get close to him.”

  “Did you have that nurse’s uniform on when you went out to see about him?” I asked.

  “Jay Berry,” Daisy said, “a nurse always has her uniform on when she’s doing her work. You should know that much.”

  I laughed and laughed even if it did hurt my old head.

  “Daisy,” I said, “Rowdy is no fool. He knows what that uniform means as much as I do. He’s sick and he doesn’t want you messing with him.”

  “I don’t care,” Daisy said. “I’m going out there one more time and if he growls at me, I’m going to take a bucket and fill that hole full of water with him in it.”

  “You’d better not,” I said. “He’s liable to chase you up a tree.”

  Sure enough, it wasn’t long until I heard a big racket out in the barn lot. Rowdy was barking and whimpering, and Daisy was yelling and scolding.

  Pretty soon everything quieted down and I knew that Old Rowdy had been overpowered and was getting the Red Cross treatment. I felt sorry for my old dog, but there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it. I just pulled the covers up over my head and went to sleep.

  Papa was right when he said that in a day or two I’d be as good as new. On the morning of the second day, I crawled out of bed feeling almost like my old self again. Oh, I was still a little nervous and a bit wobbly on my feet, but otherwise I felt pretty good.

  As I walked into the kitchen, the family was just sitting down to the breakfast table. Papa and Daisy started whooping and clapping their hands like they hadn’t seen me for ten years.

  I knew they were kidding me so I grinned, sat down, and helped myself to a double portion of everything on the table.

  Eyeing my loaded plate, Papa smiled and said, “When a fellow starts eating like that, he sure isn’t sick.”

  “Oh, I feel pretty good now, Papa,” I said.

  Right away Mama started laying the law down to me about my drinking. She told me that if I ever did anything like that again I could just pack my clothes and leave, and I could take that drunken old hound dog with me when I left.

  Daisy giggled and said, “Mama, if Jay Berry does leave home, he won’t have to do much packing. Those monkeys got away with about everything he owns. Why, they even got away with his britches this time.”

  I wanted to argue with Mama and Daisy but I realized that I didn’t have a leg to stand on. So I just sat there, mad all over, hating monkeys, and more determined than ever to catch every last one of them if it took me until Gabriel blew his horn.

  Mama said, “I guess I’ll have to stop my work and make you another pair of britches.”

  Papa laughed and said, “It looks like I’m going to be minus another pair of my overalls.”

  Overalls in our family really got a good wearing out. Mama made mine from the backs of the ones that Papa wore. Papa wore out the front and I wore out the back.

  “Jay Berry,” Daisy said, “Old Rowdy’s in pretty good shape now. I finally got him to drink some warm milk and I gave him a good cold bath in the watering trough.”

  As soon as I had eaten my breakfast, I went out to the barn lot and sure enough there was Rowdy just lying on the ground and looking as if he didn’t have a friend left in the world.

  I walked over and patted my old dog on his head, and said, “I know how you feel, boy. In fact, I don’t see how you made it with Daisy messing with you.”

  Rowdy was so sad he wouldn’t even wag his tail.

  “Come on, boy,” I coaxed, “I’m going to the store to have another talk with Grandpa about those monkeys, and he might give you a meat rind.” That was all it took to get him to come with me.

  On my way to the store, I stopped to watch a sight that all but left me breathless. To my right, from far up on a hillside, there was a loud gobbling and a beating of heavy wings. Then up out of that green blanket and into the sky rose a flock of wild turkeys. I blinked my eyes at the burst of fiery bronze as they winged their way through the bright rays of the morning sun. Rowdy and I watched until they faded from sight in the thick timber of the river bottoms.

  “Boy, Rowdy,” I said, “wasn’t that something to see? You just wait until I get that gun. We’ll have an old gobbler on our kitchen table for breakfast, dinner, and supper every day until I’m old and gray-headed.”

  A little farther along, just as Rowdy and I rounded a bend in the road, I stopped and stared in wonderment at the sight directly ahead. Here and there on the long sloping hillside, milky white splotches stood out like spilt buckets of milk in the deep green. The Ozarks’ most beautiful flowers, the dogwoods, were in full bloom. Mixed in with the green and white, the deep glare of redbuds gleamed like railroad flares in the dewy morning.

  As I stood there drinking in all of that beauty, I said, “Rowdy, Daisy says that the Old Man of the Mountains is taking care of everything in the hills. If he is, he must have worked a long time painting that picture.”

  I had been so busy looking at all of that Ozark beauty I had forgotten about the monkeys. When I did think about them, I said, “Holy smokes, Rowdy, we better stop this gawking around and get on to the store. Grandpa will think that we’re never coming.”

  To make up for lost time, I started off in a dog trot.

  Grandpa wasn’t in his store when Rowdy and I arrived, but I knew that he was around somewhere because the door was wide open. Then I heard a loud banging coming from the barn. I walked over and found him putting a new spoke in one of his buckboard wheels.

  As Rowdy and I walked up, Grandpa smiled and said, “Hi!”

  “Hi, Grandpa!” I said.

  With a sly look on his friendly old face, Grandpa looked all around, and then, leaning over close to me, he whispered, “I’ve got a jug hid there in the corn crib. Would you care for a little drink?�
��

  I knew that Grandpa was kidding me, so I grinned and said, “Aw, Grandpa, you know I’m not a drinking man.”

  Grandpa said, “Well, I didn’t think you were, but your papa told me that you and Rowdy got on a pretty good tooter.”

  “I guess we did, Grandpa,” I said, “but it wasn’t our fault. That Jimbo monkey got us drunk. It seems like every time we get close to those monkeys they make fools of us. Why, they even stole my britches this time and I never will live that down.”

  Grandpa exploded in laughter. He laughed and he laughed. He laughed so hard that great big tears boiled out of his eyes and ran all over his face.

  I even laughed a little myself, but I wasn’t laughing about losing my britches. I was laughing at Grandpa.

  Rowdy thought that because Grandpa and I were laughing we were happy and so he got happy, too. He wiggled and twisted all over the place.

  Grandpa finally got over his laughing spell and reached for his old red handkerchief. He took off his glasses, wiped them, and then blew his nose.

  “Now that we’ve had a good laugh,” he said, “I think it’s time we started thinking about catching those monkeys. We can’t let them get away with stealing a fellow’s britches.”

  “Grandpa,” I said, “I haven’t done anything but think about those monkeys and my thinker is just about wore out. I don’t know what to do now. I’ve tried everything from a to z, and I haven’t caught one yet.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’ve tried everything yet,” Grandpa said. “There’s a lot of space between a and z. Now, here’s what you do. You go on home and be ready about daybreak in the morning. I’ll come by in my buckboard and we’ll make a trip into town.”

  I was really surprised to hear that we were going to town because I didn’t get to go to town but about once in ever so long.

  “What are we going to town for, Grandpa?” I asked.

  “We’re going to find out how to catch those monkeys,” Grandpa said. “That’s what we’re going for.”

  “Grandpa,” I asked, all interested, “do you know someone in town that knows how to catch monkeys?”

  “No,” Grandpa said, shaking his head, “I don’t believe I know of any monkey catchers in town, but I think there’s a place where we can find out something.”

  “What kind of a place is that, Grandpa?” I asked.

  “The library!” Grandpa said.

  I thought a second and said, “Oh, I know now. That’s the place you were telling me about where they have all of those books; thousands and thousands of books.”

  “That’s the place,” Grandpa said. “I don’t care what kind of a problem a man has, he can always find the answer to it in a library. Somewhere, in one of those books, we’ll find the answer to our monkey-catching problem.”

  “Boy, Grandpa,” I said, “we should have thought about this library a long time ago. It sure would have saved a lot of wear and tear on Rowdy and me.”

  Grandpa looked at me, then he looked at Rowdy. Smiling, he said, “I can’t see any wear and tear anywhere. You both look like you’re in pretty good shape to me.”

  Rowdy had seen Grandpa looking at him and he figured that this was as good a time as any to let his wants be known. His old tail started thumping the ground, then he opened his mouth and let out a bawl that scared the chickens out of the barn.

  Grandpa said, “What was that all about, boy?”

  Rowdy whined, turned, and bounded for the store. On reaching the porch, he stopped, looked back at us, and bawled again.

  Frowning and looking surprised, Grandpa said, “What’s gotten into him?”

  I couldn’t help chuckling a little, for I knew what Rowdy was trying to tell Grandpa.

  “Aw, Grandpa,” I said, “don’t pay any attention to him. He just wants a meat rind.”

  Watching Rowdy bouncing up and down on the porch, Grandpa said, “He seems to know where the meat rinds are, all right. Maybe we’d better get him one before he has a nervous breakdown.”

  Rowdy wound up with a big fat meat rind and I got my usual sack of candy. I thanked Grandpa and told him that he wouldn’t have to wait for me in the morning, that I would be ready and waiting.

  eleven

  My promise to Grandpa about being ready and waiting for our trip to town got sidetracked during the night. I was sound asleep the next morning when Papa opened the door to my room.

  “You’d better get up,” Papa said. “Your grandpa is here and he’s waiting for you.”

  “Grandpa’s already here?” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “What time is it anyway?”

  “It’s just breaking daylight,” Papa said. “You’d better hurry now. Your grandpa is raring to go.”

  I flew out of bed and jumped into my clothes. As I stepped into the kitchen, I saw to my surprise that everyone in the family was up. Mama was fixing breakfast and Daisy was setting the table. Papa and Grandpa were drinking coffee.

  “Boy,” I said, as I poured water into the wash pan, “this early in the morning and everybody stirring around.”

  Looking at Grandpa, Mama said, “Papa, this is the silliest thing I ever heard of, an old codger like you, going to town to read monkey books.”

  Grandpa snorted and said, “I can’t see anything silly about it. We don’t know anything about catching monkeys. Maybe in the library, we can learn from a book something about how to catch them. It’s worth a try anyway.”

  Daisy said, “Grandpa, have you ever been in a library?”

  Grandpa squirmed a little and said, “No, I haven’t, but I understand that anyone can go to a library, and there’s always a first time for everything.”

  It was twelve miles from where we lived in the hills to the little town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and it would take a good part of the day to get there. As soon as breakfast was over, Grandpa looked at me and said, “We’d better be on our way. I have a lot of things to do in town.”

  Mama, Papa, and Daisy followed us out to Grandpa’s buckboard. Rowdy was sitting in the spring seat, looking at us, whimpering and whining. His old tail was wagging so fast that I just knew it was going to come unscrewed from his body.

  Grandpa chuckled and said, “Would you look at that? He knows that we’re going somewhere and he’s bound and determined to go with us.”

  “Rowdy,” I said, in a hard voice, “you get down out of that buckboard. You can’t go to town with us. What’s the matter with you anyway?”

  Rowdy dropped his old head and wouldn’t even look at me. His tail was the first part of him to die. Very slowly, it stopped wiggling. To make things worse, he squirmed his rear end around until his tail was hanging over the back of the spring seat. It just hung there all limp and lifeless, and looked like a dead grapevine.

  Rowdy’s sympathy-getting act melted Grandpa’s heart. He glanced at Rowdy and then turned to me and said, “I don’t see why Rowdy couldn’t go to town with us. Lots of people take their dogs to town.”

  “Oh, Grandpa,” I said, “if we took him to town with us, there’s no telling what might happen.”

  Grandpa said, “I don’t see how Rowdy could get into any trouble in town. We’re going to stay at the wagon yard, and you could tie him under the buckboard. He’d be all right.”

  “Grandpa,” I said, “I’d like to take Rowdy to town with us. I don’t like to go anywhere without him, but I’m afraid I might lose him in that big town. If that happened, I’d just die.”

  Rowdy knew that we were talking about him. With a low moan, he lay down on the spring seat and closed his eyes. He must have been holding his breath because I couldn’t see one speck of life anywhere in his body. His dying act really stirred everybody up.

  “All right,” I said, throwing up my hands. “I give up. He can go with us but I don’t like it—I don’t like it at all. I just hope that everything comes out all right.”

  Grandpa climbed into the buckboard, gathered up the check lines, and said, “We’d better be on our way. We have wasted
a good hour as it is.”

  Mama came over to me and started laying down the ten thousand laws that all mamas have for their going-away boys: things like being a good boy, minding Grandpa, washing my face, combing my hair, and saying my prayers when I went to bed.

  I just stood there and waited until Mama ran out of breath, then I said, “Mama, I can’t understand you sometimes. Every time you send me to the store—I don’t care if it’s for two or three little old things—you always write them down on a piece of paper, but if I’m going away for a day or two, you tell me ten thousand things to do and you never write anything down. Why, Mama, I couldn’t remember all of those things if I had ten heads.”

  Mama smiled and said, “I don’t expect you to do everything I ask you to do, but if you do just a few of them I’ll be satisfied.”

  Daisy giggled and said, “Jay Berry, you sure would look funny running around with ten heads. Boy, wouldn’t you be something to see.”

  Everyone, but me, was still laughing at Daisy’s remarks when Grandpa said, “Get up” to the mares.

  Just as we were leaving, Daisy yelled, “Jay Berry, you’d better not forget my ribbon. If you do, you’d better not come home.”

  I didn’t even look back at her.

  The road we followed stayed at the edge of the foot-hills for a short distance, and then it made a right turn and ran down into the river bottoms. We had no more than entered the bottoms when things began to happen. Rabbits, squirrels, ground hogs, and quail began darting across the road. Once, a mama deer with a spotted baby leaped across the road and disappeared in a thick cane brake.

  Rowdy was on needles and pins. Every time something would zip across the road, his ears would stand straight up. He would fidget around on the spring seat, whimper, and whine. He wanted to chase something so bad, he could hardly stand it.

  I understood Rowdy’s feelings. I loved him up a little, and said, “I know how you feel, boy, but just let on like you don’t see a thing. We don’t have time to stop and let you do any hunting.”