Georgia Boy

by Erskine Caldwell

“Me, Mr. Morris, you’re talking to?” Handsome said. Handsome could not walk fast. He always said his arches hurt him when he tried to walk fast. When he did have to hurry, he trotted.

  “Hurry up, Handsome,” Pa told him. “Stop complaining.”

  We got to the backyard and Pa studied the goats on the ridge plate for a while before saying anything. He liked the goats just about as much as I did, and that was why he wanted them in town where he could see them every day. When they stayed out in the country on the farm, we did not see them sometimes for as long as a week at a time, because we did not go out there every day.

  The goats had stopped walking back and forth on the roof and were looking down at us to see what we were up to.

  “Handsome,” Pa said, “go get the ladder and put it up against the porch roof.”

  Handsome got the ladder and stood it up the way Pa told him to.

  “Now, what to do, Mr. Morris?” Handsome asked.

  “Go up there and chase them down,” Pa said.

  Handsome looked up at the big billy goat. He backed away from the ladder.

  “I’m a little scared to go up there where that big billy goat is, Mr. Morris,” he said. “He’s got the meanest-looking set of horns I ever looked at in all my life. If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Morris, I just don’t feel like going up there. My arches has been hurting all day. I don’t feel good at all.”

  “Stop that talking back to me, Handsome,” Pa said, “and go on up there like I told you. There’s nothing wrong with your arches today, or any day.”

  Just then Ma came out, pinning the white starched collar on her dress that she wore when she dressed up for company. She came as far as the steps and stood looking down at Pa and me.

  “Now, Martha,” Pa said, talking fast, “don’t you worry yourself one bit. Handsome and me will have those goats down from there in a jiffy.”

  “You’d better get them down from there in a jiffy,” Ma said. “I’ve never been so mortified in all my life. All these women will be coming here to the circle meeting any minute now. What will people say if they see a lot of goats walking around on the roof of my house?”

  “Now, calm yourself, Martha,” Pa said. “Handsome is on his way up there now.”

  Handsome was still backing away from the ladder. Pa walked over to where he was and gave him a shove.

  “Hurry up and do like I told you,” Pa said, shoving him towards the ladder again.

  Handsome fidgeted a lot, killing all the time he could by hitching up his pants and buttoning his shirt, but he finally made a start towards the ladder. He climbed to the top and stepped to the porch roof. Then he started backing down again.

  “Handsome Brown,” Ma said, running out into the yard where we were, “if you come down that ladder before getting those goats off the roof, I’ll never give you another bite to eat as long as I live. You can just make up your mind to go off somewhere else and starve to death, if you don’t do what Mr. Morris told you.”

  “But, Mis’ Martha, my arches has started paining me again something awful.”

  “I’ve warned you, Handsome Brown,” Ma said, tapping her shoe on the ground, “and I mean exactly what I said.”

  “But, Mis’ Martha, I—”

  “I’ve warned you once and for all,” Ma said.

  Handsome looked up at the goats, then down at Ma again, and after that he climbed up on top of the kitchen roof. When he had got that far, he cut his eyes down at us to see if we were watching him.

  Just then Ma heard some of the women coming up the street. We could hear them talking almost a whole block away. Ma shook her finger at Handsome and ran inside to lock the front door so the women could not get into the house. She figured they would sit on the porch if she did that, because otherwise they might just walk on through the house and come out on the back porch and see what was going on.

  Pa and me sat down on the woodpile and watched Handsome. Handsome had gone as far as the top of the kitchen roof, and he was sprawled on the ridge plate hugging the shingles. He looked awfully small up there.

  “Don’t you dare let one of those goats get hurt, or fall off,” Pa shouted at him. “And take care that those little kids don’t get caught in a stampede and get shoved off to the ground. I’ll skin you alive if anything happens to those goats.”

  “I hear every word you say, Mr. Morris,” Handsome shouted down. “I declare, I never saw such a slippery place before. But I’m doing the best I can. Every time I move I’m scared I’m about to fall off on that hard ground. I’m scared to breathe, Mr. Morris.”

  He waited, killing time, to hear if Pa was going to say anything more. After a while, he found out that Pa was not going to answer him, and he inched himself along the ridge plate towards the main roof. When he got to the top of the pitch, he gave one more look down at the ground. He shut his eyes when he saw it and did not look down at us again.

  “Take care those goats don’t get hurt,” Pa shouted.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said, sounding far off. “I’m taking the best care I can.”

  He got to the edge of the main roof and climbed on it. From there to the top where the ridge plate was looked as far again as Handsome had already climbed. He inched his way up the sloping side until his fingers got a grip on the ridge plate. It was easy enough for him to climb the rest of the way to the top. When he got up there, he threw one leg across and sat astride the ridge plate, hugging it for all he was worth.

  The goats had gone down to the far end of the roof, getting out of Handsome’s way. In order to chase the goats down, he would have to slide himself along the ridge plate to where they were and make them turn around and come back to the kitchen roof, where they could jump to the porch and woodshed, and finally to the woodpile.

  Handsome had got halfway across when it looked as if the billy had taken it into his head to come back of his own accord. When the billy started, all the goats came, the big one in front, the medium-sized ones in the middle, and the little kids behind. Handsome saw them coming, especially the billy, because the billy lowered his head until his horns stuck up in the air like lightning-rods.

  “Wait a minute!” Handsome yelled at the big goat. “Wait there a minute, I said!”

  The goat kept on towards him. When he got four or five feet from Handsome, he stopped, chewed half a dozen strokes and looked Handsome in the eye.

  While Handsome and the billy goat were up there staring each other in the eye, Ma came running out into the yard to see if the goats had been chased off the roof.

  Just then the billy gave a lunge, and went flying at Handsome with his head tucked down and hooves flying out behind. Handsome saw the goat coming at him in time to duck, but the trouble was that there was not any place he could go except flatter on his stomach. Handsome dug into the shingles with his fingers and held on for all he was worth.

  “Look out, Handsome!” Pa yelled when he saw what was happening.

  Pa jumped to his feet and started waving his arms at the goat. None of that did any good, though, because the goat flew into Handsome headlong with all his might. For an instant it was hard to tell what was going to happen, because after the billy had butted Handsome, both of them sort of stopped short, like two boards coming together in mid-air.

  “Hold on, Handsome!” Pa yelled up there at him.

  The next thing we knew, Handsome was coming down the slope of the roof, backward, on the seat of his pants. He slid about halfway down, and then he started spinning around like a top. We had no more than seen that when he left the roof and was coming down into the yard. The first thing we thought of was where Handsome was going to land. The yard was hard and sandy, and there was not a thing there, such as the woodpile at the other end of the yard, to break his fall. But before we knew what had happened, he missed the yard completely and was out of sight. He had gone through the well cover like a bullet.

  “My heavenly day!” Ma screamed. “Handsome’s gone!”

  She tottere
d and fell in the yard in a dead faint Pa stooped to pick her up, but he dropped her after he had raised her part way off the ground, and ran to the well to see what had become of Handsome. Everything had taken place so suddenly that there was no time to think about it then. The boards covering the well had been bashed in as if a big two-hundred-pound rock had landed on them.

  Pa and I tore across the yard to the well. When we got there and looked down inside, we could not see a thing at first. It was pitch-black down there. Pa yelled at Handsome, and the echo bounced back like a rubber ball and blasted our ears.

  “Answer me, Handsome!” Pa shouted some more. “Answer me!”

  Ma got up and staggered across the yard to where we were. She had a hard time steadying herself, and she came reeling towards us like Mr. Andy Howard on Saturday night. She was still dizzy from her faint when she reached us.

  “Poor Handsome Brown,” Ma said, clutching at the well-stand to support herself. “Poor Handsome Brown. He was the best darkey we ever had. Poor Handsome Brown.”

  Pa was busy unwinding the windlass, because he wanted to get the rope and bucket down into the well as quick as he could.

  “Shut up, Martha!” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “don’t you see how busy I am trying to get this rope and bucket down in here?”

  “Poor innocent Handsome Brown,” Ma said, brushing some tears from her eyes and not paying any attention to Pa at all. “I wish I hadn’t scolded him so much while he was alive. He was the best darkey we ever had. Poor innocent Handsome Brown.”

  “Shut your mouth, Martha!” Pa shouted at her. “Can’t you see how busy I am at what I’m doing?”

  By that time Ma had got over her fainting spell, and she was able to stand up without holding onto anything. She leaned over the well-stand and looked down inside.

  “Are you down there, Handsome?” Pa shouted into the well.

  There was no answer for a while. We leaned over as far as we could and looked down. At first there was not a thing to be seen, but slowly two big, round, white balls started shining down in the bottom. They looked as if they were a mile away. Pretty soon they got brighter and then they looked like two cat eyes on a black night when you turn a flashlight on them.

  “Can you breathe all right, Handsome?” Pa shouted down at him.

  “I can breathe all right, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said, “but my arches pain me something terrible.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” Pa said. “There’s nothing wrong with your arches. Can you see all right?”

  “I can’t see a thing,” Handsome said. “I’ve done gone and got as blind as a bat. I can’t see nothing at all.”

  “That’s because you’re in the bottom of the well,” Pa told him. “Nobody could see down there.”

  “Is that where I am?” Handsome asked. “Lordy me, Mr. Morris, is that why there’s all this water around me? I thought when I come to that I was in the bad place. I sure thought I had been knocked all the way down to there. When is you going to get me out of here, Mr. Morris?”

  “Grab hold the bucket on the rope, and I’ll have you out of there in no time,” Pa told him.

  Handsome caught the bucket and shook the rope until Pa leaned over again.

  “Mr. Morris, please, sir?” Handsome asked.

  “What do you want now?”

  “When you get me out of here, you ain’t going to make me go back up on that roof again where them goats is, is you?”

  “No,” Pa told him, turning the windlass. “Them aggravating goats can stay on top of the house until they get hungry enough to come down of their own accord.”

  We had forgotten all about the goats, we had been so busy worrying about Handsome. Ma turned and looked up on the roof. She shook her fist at them, hard. All of them had crossed to the other end of the roof, the end near the kitchen, and they were standing up there looking down at us.

  The billy goat looked Ma straight in the eye, and he stopped chewing as he did it. Ma and the billy acted as if they were trying to see which could stare the other down first.

  Just then fifteen or twenty of the women who had come to the circle meeting stuck their heads around the corner of the house, and looked at us in the backyard. They had got together when they found the front door locked and decided to come around there and see what was going on. They had been able to see the goats on the roof when they came up the street, and they were curious to see what we were making so much racket about back there.

  “My sakes alive, Martha Stroup,” one of them said, “what’s going on here? Those goats up on top of your house is the funniest sight I ever saw!”

  Ma wheeled around and saw the women. She did not say a word, but her hands flew to her face, as though she were trying to hide it, and then she ran into the house through the back door. She slammed it shut and locked it behind her. Pretty soon the women went to the front door, but after they had knocked on it a long time, they gave up trying to get in, and all of them started down the street. They kept looking back over their shoulders at the goats on the roof and laughing loud enough to be heard all over our part of town.

  IV. My Old Man and the Grass Widow

  WHEN MY OLD MAN got up earlier than usual and left the house, he did not say where he was going, and Ma was so busy getting ready to do the washing she did not think to ask him.

  Usually when he went off like that, and Ma asked him where he was going, he would say he had to see somebody about something on the other side of town, or that he had a little job to attend to not far off. I don’t know what he would have said that morning if Ma hadn’t been too busy to ask him.

  Anyway, he had got up before anybody else and went straight to the kitchen and cooked his own breakfast. By the time I was up and dressed, he had finished hitching Ida to the cart. He climbed up on the seat and started driving out into the street.

  “Can’t I go, Pa?” I asked him. I ran down the street beside the cart, holding on to the sideboard and begging to go along. “Please let me go, Pa!” I said.

  “Not now, son,” he said, slapping Ida with the reins and whipping her into a trot. “If I need you later, I’ll send for you.”

  They clattered down the street and turned the corner out of sight.

  When I got back to the house, Ma was in the kitchen working over the cook-stove. I sat down and waited for something to eat, but I did not say anything about Pa. It made me feel sad to be left behind like that when Pa and Ida were going some place, and I didn’t feel like talking, even to Ma. I just sat at the table by the stove and waited.

  Ma ate in a hurry and went out into the yard to kindle the fire underneath the washpot.

  Early that afternoon one of the neighbors, Mrs. Singer, who lived on the corner below us, came walking into our backyard. I saw her before Ma did, because I had been sitting on the porch steps almost all day waiting for Pa to come back.

  Mrs. Singer went over to the bench where Ma was washing. She stood and didn’t say anything for a while. Then all at once she leaned over the tub and asked Ma if she knew where Pa was.

  “Most likely sleeping in the shade somewhere,” Ma said, not even straightening up from the scrub board. “Unless he’s too lazy to move out of the sun.”

  “I’m in dead earnest, Martha,” Mrs. Singer said, coming closer to Ma. “I really am.”

  Ma turned around and looked at me on the porch.

  “Run along into the house, William,” she said crossly.

  I went up on the porch as far as the kitchen door. I could hear there just as good.

  “Now, Martha,” Mrs. Singer said, leaning over and putting her hands on the edge of the tub. “I’m not a gossip, and I don’t want you to think I’m anything like one. But I thought you would want to hear the truth.”

  “What is it?” Ma asked.

  “Mr. Stroup is out at that Mrs. Weatherbee’s this very minute,” she said quickly. “And that’s not all, either. He’s been out there at her house all day long, too. Just him and her!”

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p; “How do you know?” Ma asked, straightened up.

  “I passed there and saw him with my own eyes, Martha,” Mrs. Singer said. “I decided right then and there that it was my duty to tell you.”

  Mrs. Weatherbee was a young grass widow who lived all alone just outside of town. She had been married for only two months when her husband left her one morning and never came back.

  “What is Morris Stroup doing out there at that place?” Ma said, raising her voice just as if she were blaming everything on Mrs. Singer.

  “That’s not for me to say, Martha,” she said, backing away from Ma. “But I considered it my Christian duty to warn you.”

  She left the yard and hurried out of sight around the corner of the house. Ma leaned over and sloshed the water in the tub until a lot of it splashed out. After a minute or two she turned around and started across the yard, drying her hands on her apron as she went.

  “William,” she said, calling me, “you go inside the house and stay there until I come back. I want to think you are obeying me, William. Do you hear me, William?”

  “I hear you, Ma,” I said, backing toward the door.

  She walked out of the yard in a hurry and went up the street. That was the direction to take to get to Mrs. Weatherbee’s house. She lived about three-fourths of a mile from where we did.

  I stood on the back porch out of sight until Ma crossed the street at the next corner, and then I ran around the house and cut across Mr. Joe Hammond’s vacant lot toward the creek. I knew a short cut to Mrs. Weatherbee’s house, because I had passed by it a lot of times going rabbit hunting with Handsome Brown. Handsome had always said it was a good idea to know short cuts to every place, because there was no telling when one would come in handy just when it was needed the most. I was glad I knew a short cut to Mrs. Weatherbee’s because Ma would have seen me if I had gone behind her.

  I ran all the way out there, keeping close to the willows along the creek just like Handsome and I had done every time we went out there looking for rabbits. Just before I got to Mrs. Weatherbee’s house I stopped and looked around for Pa. I couldn’t see him anywhere about Mrs. Weatherbee’s house. I couldn’t even see her.