Pride

by William Wharton

  My shoes have sharkskin tips so the more you wear them, the more they’re supposed to shine, but I wear holes right through the sharkskin as if it was nothing. Even so, I have to shine the rest of the shoe.

  I go upstairs and gather the shoes. I line them up on the cellar floor. The floor of our cellar is always a little bit wet, even with the furnace going in the winter. Dad says the floor sweats.

  I open the shoebox. I peek over at Cannibal; he’s still asleep. I take out some Griffin’s shoe polish and the Vaseline. I take out the shoe brush and the cloth for spreading polish. I’ve tried some others but I like Griffin’s best. I like the song they sing on the radio, too. I sing it to myself, keeping half an eye on Cannibal while I work on the shoes.

  The sun shines east

  The sun shines west.

  But Griffins polish

  Shines the best.

  Some folks are not particular

  How they look around the feet.

  If they wore shoes upon their head

  They’d make sure they looked neat.

  So keep your shoes shined

  With Griffin’s all the time.

  Griffin’s time is the time to shine.

  When you hear that familiar chime:

  Ding-dong-dong-ding.

  It’s time to shine.

  Everybody get set—

  It’s time to shine.

  I decide to tell Laurel. I show her Cannibal behind the furnace; this is before Mom gets home from shopping. Laurel wants to keep Cannibal as much as I do but she’s sure Mom and Dad won’t let me. She wants to hold Cannibal but I tell her he’s still too sick. Actually, I’m afraid he might eat off one of her fingers. Laurel’s a very nice person even though she’s only six. She’s my best friend.

  That night at dinner, before we finish dessert, when Dad is starting his coffee and Mom is coming in from the kitchen with her tea, I decide it’s the time. Usually if we want, now, we can get up from the table and go out to play.

  “Mom, Dad, I have something to ask.”

  I look over at Laurel. She’s playing with her fruit cocktail, fishing out the cherries. She saves them for me. Dad looks at me over his cup, eyes gray, tired; he blows so the steam flashes out from his face the way I thought that devil was going to come out of my mouth.

  “O.K., Dickie, what is it this time? Have they thrown you out of the choir now?”

  He smiles and I know he’s kidding. He looks over at Mom. She’s watching me. Mom’s better than Dad at knowing when something’s wrong. She always knows.

  “I have an alley cat in the cellar. Actually it’s only an alley kitten. It’s the smallest kitten I’ve ever seen.”

  Dad takes a sip of his coffee. Mom puts the back of her hand against her mouth. I’m trying not to talk too fast. When I’m excited about something I talk so fast nobody can understand me.

  I start by telling how I found the kittens in Mr. Harding’s garage, the day I didn’t say mass. I tell how they’ve all disappeared except for one. I don’t tell about how I think Cannibal ate his brothers and sisters. I don’t even tell them his name is Cannibal.

  I tell about how this kitten was dying and still trying to fight me off, standing in the corner with his paws up and his mouth open. I tell how I took him home and tried to feed him and now I have him behind the furnace to keep warm.

  I stop and look at both their faces and try not to cry. Nobody says anything. Dad takes another sip of his coffee. Mom pours more tea in her cup.

  “You’re probably covered with fleas, Dickie. If we have to shave your head and sprinkle you with flea powder you won’t be so happy about that.”

  She says it but she isn’t mad. She’s even smiling at me and I don’t quite understand. Dad puts his cup down, wipes his mouth with a paper napkin.

  “O.K., let’s go see this tiger cat of yours. He could already be dead. From what you say, I don’t know how you can keep him alive.”

  We go downstairs into the cellar. I go first with Dad behind me, then Laurel and Mom. I reach carefully behind the furnace and Cannibal is asleep but he’s still alive. I slide out the cloth with him on it before he knows too much what’s happening.

  I still haven’t told about stealing the milk and hamburger. I’m feeling once they see Cannibal it will be easier. When I get him out from behind the furnace, he rolls onto his stomach, looks at all of us, then rears up into his bear-lion position ready to fight our whole crowd. He looks even tinier than I remember. He’s rocking back and forth the way he did before and I’m afraid he’s going to fall over. Dad gets down squatting beside me.

  “My goodness, Dickie, I think you’ve got yourself a miniature tiger or a lion here, all right.”

  He puts out his finger and Cannibal strikes out at it with his pointy teeth. Dad just lets him bite and pulls him out of the paint rag by his teeth and holds him in his other hand. Dad’s hands are so hard with calluses, cuts and bruises, he doesn’t seem to even notice a little kitten biting him.

  “You’re a fierce little fellow, aren’t you there? Dickie, this is the smallest living cat I’ve ever seen. He must be some kind of runt in that litter.”

  “He’s the only one who stayed alive, Dad, even if he is a runt. I’ve never met anybody who wants to stay alive so much. I think he might have some kind of little devil in him.”

  “Does he or it have a name yet?”

  “Cannibal.”

  He looks at me quickly, smiles, looks up at Mom.

  Dad runs his other finger over Cannibal’s head while Cannibal holds with his little teeth on to Dad’s finger desperately, feebly; rocking his head back and forth, sinking his teeth deeper into that hard flesh. I turn around to look at Mom. She’s standing with her arm around Laurel in our dark cellar and only one bare light bulb up in the rafters.

  “Can I keep him, Mom, please? I’ll do anything you say.”

  She’s looking at the top of the Argyrol bottle and the lid to the mayonnaise jar beside the paint cloth; I forgot all about them.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I took some milk and even some little pinches of hamburger. He was starving to death and you weren’t home to ask.”

  I’m lying with the second part. The devil in me made me do that. But I’m wanting so much for her to let me keep Cannibal, not to get excited and start saying no before she can think too much about it. She stoops down beside Dad. She touches the back of Cannibal lightly as if she’s afraid fleas will climb up her arm.

  “Why, Dick, this cat doesn’t have a tail. It doesn’t look like a cat at all.”

  “Dearest, I’m not even sure it is a cat. Have you ever seen anything so tiny? And look at this color. I’ve never seen a cat this color, have you?”

  And that’s the way it happened. That’s the way I got to keep Cannibal. Mom insisted I buy flea powder and rub it into the fur. Dad said I could get some cat food and he’d take it out of my “salary” when we started building porches again. He turned to Mom.

  “This is one of the things we can afford now I’m back working with J.I. But, Dickie, I have to tell you, I don’t think this tiny thing can live very long. Be prepared for him to die.”

  The rule is Cannibal must stay in the cellar and under no circumstances come upstairs. When he makes messes I’m to clean them up. The first time Mom smells cat in the cellar, out Cannibal goes with the other alley cats in the alley. Dad says he’ll make a sandbox; he tells me where there’s some sand at a construction site on the other side of Long Lane.

  I’m so happy I can keep him I have a hard time remembering all the things I’m supposed to do and not do. Dad passes Cannibal into Laurel’s hand and works his finger out of Cannibal’s mouth. Cannibal looks up into Laurel’s eyes and I’m afraid he’s going to spring for her jugular vein. But he sits quietly there, crouching, ready to spring. If he springs he’ll only fall off onto the cellar floor. I guess he has that figured out already because he doesn’t do anything, only keeps his eyes open, shifting from side to side and hissing if one
of us makes any kind of fast move.

  Dad and Mom go back upstairs. Laurel and I stay down with Cannibal. I know we’ll have great times playing with him. I only hope Dad isn’t right and that Cannibal will live. I know if there’s anything I can do to keep him alive, I will.

  PART 2

  Sture Modig was born in 1896 to Swedish immigrant parents on a 320-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. His parents had worked fifteen years as domestics and saved $2,000, with which they’d bought their farmland. The land cost $20,000. They took a $10,000 first mortgage and an $8,000 second.

  They soon had a team of horses, three brood sows, and forty milking cows. They were living in a waterless, toiletless frame house when Sture was born. Sture’s father had first built the barn for his animals while he lived with his bride in a combination hut-tent. Then he built the house so they could have children before it was too late.

  Sture’s parents had married in their mid-thirties after the long thrifty years in service. Sture was born when his mother was forty. She almost died in childbirth, so he was an only child.

  Sture was the sole luxury in his parents’ lives, and from the beginning it was apparent he was truly an exceptional person.

  Sture Modig was one of those few people who live up to their names. Modig in Swedish means “brave,” and if there is one word to describe Sture both as child and man it’s “brave”; he did not seem subject to the normal fears with which all of us are assailed. He was also “brave” in the German sense of the word, brav, that is: well-behaved, willing.

  Sture walked unaided at nine months and seemed to have an unnatural ability for converting sound into language. He was speaking words at eighteen months and could converse clearly at two years. Soon, he could also imitate, and seem to converse with, most of the animals around which he lived.

  At four, he could settle a frisky calf or cow using only sounds he made with his mouth. He spoke with the barn cats and the farmhouse dog; with the pigs. He could imitate the sounds and call to him most birds, including domestic chickens and ducks.

  Sture liked helping his parents. By five he was helping with household tasks such as dusting, sweeping, straightening; hauling water from the well. He was so small he carried the water in a quart milk pail. He’d go the fifty yards to the well four times as often as his mother, but in the end he’d fill the large water container in the kitchen.

  At first, his mother allowed Sture to help only to keep the child busy, but soon realized his value. He was a consistent, quiet worker and his “play” seemed to be what everyone else would consider drudgery.

  Already, at that young age, Sture wanted to be of some good. It might be claimed this was because his parents were older and they doted on him, spoiled him in some way, expected too much of him; but it became more apparent with time this was not the case.

  Sture was somehow unique in our world. His failing might have been that he didn’t know how to express love. He admired, respected his parents, but he was never overtly affectionate. This could come from the traditional Scandinavian impassiveness: neither of his parents easily expressed their feelings, either.

  It could also come from their years of servitude. They transferred their servile allegiance to their animals and even more so to Sture. He grew up feeling a guilt for the service, the love, the admiration he received, the joy they took in him. He reciprocated, in a sense, defended himself, by serving them, devotedly, to the best of his ability. It was a battle of goodness, of kindness, but there wasn’t really much of natural spontaneous love.

  Sture learned to milk a cow before he was seven. His small hands could just get around an extended teat but his strength, his will, and his communion with animals more than made up for this minor deficiency. The cows seemed to give him the milk. Sture could get more milk from a cow than his father or mother. At first, Sture’s father let him work around the barn with the animals only to give him something to do, but he, too, became increasingly dependent upon him.

  Nothing was too hard, too dirty, too monotonous for Sture. He mucked out the pigpens with a miniature shovel, singing. He broke up bales of hay and carried fodder down from the granary in the largest armfuls he could manage. And, all the time, he talked to the animals, seemed to keep up a running conversation with them.

  By the time he was seven, both his parents were worried about Sture. He was too good; in some strange way he made them feel guilty. He was so happy all the time, so helpful, so willing. It wasn’t natural. He wasn’t in any way like a normal seven-year-old. But there was no one else to talk with about this problem; their farm was isolated and the nearest communities were French-speaking.

  Mr. and Mrs. Modig spoke only English with Sture. They wanted him to be a real American, to have the advantages of a native born. However, they spoke Swedish between themselves. They thought of it as their private language.

  Meanwhile, Sture learned to speak both Swedish and English; he spoke Swedish to his parents the way he spoke cow to the cows or dog to the dogs.

  Even more amazing, his English was less accented than that of his parents. As a very young boy, he was already learning to read English on his own from the pictures in the catalogues his father tore up to be used in the outhouse. He learned how to read by himself because reading was not high on the scale of sensible skills in the eyes of his parents.

  Sture didn’t go to school until he was eight years old. By that time, he was doing about half the chores around the house: wood hauling, chopping, water carrying, sweeping, scrubbing floors. He was the first out of bed every day, starting a fire in the kitchen range or the pot-bellied stove in the sitting room. After this, he’d go out to the barn and join his father in the milking and other animal chores.

  At calving time he’d often sneak away in the night to check that everything was all right. Twice he saved the lives of valuable milking cows in birthing by “knowing” something was wrong even before his father was aware of it. The animals confided in him and he could “read” their every movement as well as interpret their sounds.

  His parents were glad when it came time for Sture to go off for school. They were concerned about his “unnaturalness.” At the same time, they were sorry to lose him, not to have his cheerful smile, his singing, talking to the animals, and especially his continual helping hand. The day he dressed for school the first time, wearing his only pair of shoes, his father spoke to him.

  “Sture, I know you’ll be a good boy at school.”

  Sture nodded his head and smiled. It never occurred to him to be anything else, he could probably not even conceive of an alternative, but he listened.

  Among other things, Sture was a good listener. He listened to everything and everybody. He listened to the grasses blowing, the insects buzzing. He could lie in a field and listen to the different sounds and tell without looking whether there were gnats, fleas, beetles, crickets, ants, or grasshoppers chewing the grass beside him, flies, wasps, or bees buzzing around his head.

  He listened to anyone as if he really wanted to hear what was said. When he listened, one knew he not only heard the words said but understood their meaning and the feelings behind them. One felt Sture also heard a person’s voice as a thing separate, a personal music, not even heard by the speaker, but heard by Sture when he listened.

  Sture’s dad continued: “I know you can already read better than your mother or I, but don’t ‘stick out’ in the class. Everything is so easy for you the other children might be jealous and treat you mean. You understand?”

  Of course Sture understood; he also understood all the things his father was not saying, all his father’s fears and his pride.

  “Father, I shall be good. I want to know everything. I know I will be happy in school and I want everybody else happy, too.”

  So Sture went off. As soon as he was over the first hill, out of sight from the house, he took off his shoes and shirt. He wrapped them carefully and started to run. It was five miles to the school and Sture ran the entire way. Sture l
iked to run; it made him feel close to the other animals. Because there was so much to be done on the farm, he never had enough time to run, but now was his chance for running: to and from school every day. He’d taken off his shirt and shoes so he wouldn’t scuff his shoes or soil his shirt.

  Before he reached school, Sture put on his shirt and shoes. He went inside and sat in a chair with the other young children and listened. It was a one-room schoolhouse and some of the students in front were as old as seventeen or eighteen.

  The teacher was a local girl who had gone to the high school in Manawa. She was nineteen and not especially intelligent or well trained, but she was kind. She was teaching until the man she wanted to marry could find his own piece of land to farm.

  At first, she did not notice the new little tow-headed boy in back. She was busy trying to manage some of the older children. She gave Sture a primer to look at because there were pictures. She also gave Sture and the two other children about his age each a piece of paper and a pencil.

  “See if you can draw a picture from this book. Can you make your drawings pretty as these?”

  She smiled. Sture smiled his disarming smile back at her. At first he did not know what she meant “to draw a picture.” He knew what it was to “draw water,” or for a horse to “draw” a cart or to “draw” a breath, or how to “draw” the small bow he’d made. He knew his father talked about the chimney “drawing” but he didn’t know about “drawing a picture.”

  He read through the simple primer several times and looked around to see the other young pupils working with their pencils and looking back and forth at the pictures in the book. Then he knew. Drawing was like making the sound of a cow by listening to the cow, only on paper, with a pencil.

  Sture proceeded to make almost perfect drawings, one after another, of the pictures. Sture thought this was a wonderful idea. School was going to be even more fun than he thought. His drawings were actually superior to those in the book because most of the stories in the primer were about animals and so were the illustrations. Sture “drew” upon his constant observations of the animals to “draw” his pictures. The other little children soon saw what he was doing and stopped to watch. It was like magic the way Sture drew. He drew without hesitation as if there were some kind of invisible image already on the paper that he was tracing, copying.