Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

“At least you’re honest,” he said, rubbing his chin with the pipestem. “Not that I admire it—your wanting to be rich, I mean. How do you figure to get rich?”

  “Somehow. I dunno. But some way’ll work itself out. I won’t steal it, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about you stealing it. You ain’t got die makings of a good thief. You like to tell everybody your business too much. A thief keeps to himself. He don’t gab. But he don’t have any fun, either, because when he starts to spend what he stole and brag about it somebody ketches him at it. The lawyers get all the money, and he winds up breaking rocks in the jailhouse. What do you want to be rich for?” He threw that one at me hard.

  “I don’t rightly know. But there’s a lot of things I want that take a lot of money.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well travel, for one thing. I want to see all the things I’ve read about and you’ve told me about. I want to go hunting in Africa and India. I want to buy cars and guns and good clothes and houses. I want to send my young’uns, if I have any, to college, and I want to grow old without having to worry about it. That all takes money.”

  “That it does, that it does,” the Old Man said. “But there’s other ways of being rich without worrying so much about money. If you ever do get rich, and I ain’t saying you will or you won’t, but if you ever do you might find yourself worrying so hard about keeping the money that you wouldn’t have time to do all these things. You know any real rich people?”

  “Not first-hand, but I seen some. Them fellers that come in with the yachts from time to time.”

  “Willies-off-the-pickle-boat,” the Old Man spat scornfully. “Drunk from noon on and working on their third marriage. Worried the whole time about Wall Street, even when they’re out in their yatch-its all gussied up in brass buttons and captain’s caps. They couldn’t navigate a garbage scow from the pilot’s dock to the quarantine station.” That was about one mile over clear water.

  “Well, how about those cotton people that own the big plantation? They’re rich.”

  “Yep, they’re rich, all right. I was raised with one of ‘em. Used to hunt and fish with him when we were young’uns and he was still poor. He was crazier over fish poles and shotguns than you are. I bet he hasn’t baited a hook or fired a shotgun in forty year—ever since he started getting rich. He don’t even live on his plantation. Hasn’t got the time. Seen him the other day in town and stopped for a talk. I asked when we were going to shoot some of those big turkeys on his place. His face lit up for a minute, and then dropped all the way to the sidewalk. ‘I’d sure like to go again, Ned,’ he said, ‘but I never seem to get the time. You remember once, when we...’ And then he looked at his watch. ‘Oh hell, I got a directors’ meeting,’ says he, and rushes off like there was hounds after him. I never will know what he was about to remember. You know any more rich people?”

  “No,” I said. I was beginning to feel depressed.

  “That’s where you’re dead wrong,” he said quietly. “You know two rich people. You and me. We’re both rich, right now. Richer than them Willies-off-the-pickle-boat. Richer than any of them cotton people. Stinkin’, filthy rich you are, and so am I.”

  “What’s rich, then?”

  “Rich,” the Old Man said dreamily, “is not baying after what you can’t have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whisky to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven’t got.”

  “It still takes money,” I said doggedly. “It takes some money.”

  “Well, hell’s bells,” the Old Man said cheerfully, “anybody with the right number of arms and legs can make a little money. You take Tom and Pete. They fish some when the pogies are running, and manufacture a little moonshine in the winter. They trap a bit, and hunt a lot. They drink up most of the moonshine they make, but they take in a mite of money from fish and hides and guiding the sports from time to time. They live off a shotgun. They always got a smokehouse full of venison—most of it illegal, it’s true—and other people’s hogs that got lost. But their women tend the pea patch and the collards pretty good, and hominy don’t cost much. They got a yard full of hounds and plenty of time to run ‘em. I’d say they were pretty rich, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so, if you look at it that way. But they won’t never get to Africa or have a big car.”

  “For that matter, they won’t ever get out of Brunswick County,” replied the Old Man. “But the point is, they don’t want to go to Africa, because they ain’t got the right guns to shoot lions. They don’t want a big car, because you couldn’t take it into a deep swamp to tend the still. They got everything in the world they crave, including a set of cast-iron innards and the ability to sleep standing up. Many a rich city man would trade his millions for a house-broke belly that would let him eat a mess of fat pork and collards, chase it off with corn likker, and then lay down with the hounds and sleep ten hours in the yard. You know what I would of like to been, if I had been born in a different time?”

  “No sir. What?”

  “A kind of early-day Tom or Pete. One of them mountain men, they were called, about the time of Lewis and Clark and later Kit Carson and Jim Bridger and all those hairy old goats. The men that opened up the country west of the Mississippi. There’s a lot of literature on the subject. Man, they were a rough lot of cobs. They thought they were lucky if they got back out of the Crow country with their hair on. They trapped virgin beaver streams and crossed mountains no white man ever crossed and charted rivers no white man ever seen. They were the advance people for traders like Fremont and Sublette and all those fellers, and they carved a trail through the Black-foot country that left many a bone to bleach, but they wound up in Oregon and California.

  “They were all rich men—not in their beaver plews, because they largely lost their profits gambling or pitching a big drunk when they come back to the outskirts of civilization—but rich because they were self-sufficient. They looked down on the traders and the soft city settlers that come later with the covered wagons, because the mountain men were a breed of he-coons apart. You interested in all this?”

  I just nodded. The Old Man went on, dreamylike, and I could pretty near see it, the way he talked.

  “Mountain men,” the Old Man continued, in front of the blue-dancing fire, “were probably the most self-sufficient, uncurried boar hogs that ever lived. Most of them took to the small-bore, long-barreled rifle, with a cap lock instead of flint, after Dan Boone made the Kentucky long rifle a legend.

  “Them fellers took everything the Injuns had to offer and improved the score considerable. They could throw a hatchet or a knife as well as any Injun or better. They rode bareback, Injun-fashion, with just a braided-hair loop around the pony’s lower jaw to steer him by. They wore buckskins and long hair, and by the time they’d spent a winter in a buffalo-hide lodge, tanning skins and smoking themselves over a slow fire, you couldn’t of told one from an Injun, either by sight or by smell.

  “Some of them took squaws, if they were on good terms with the local tribes—Crows or Blackfeet proper or Shoshones or whatever—and the little, fat brown gal cooked their meat and sewed moccasins and chawed the buckskin to soften it for new clothes and scraped the beaver and the buffalo hides and slept ‘em warm in the cold nights, even if the ladies were a little bit louse-infected. There was no disgrace attached to being a squaw man—that come later with the civilized back-easters, who wore linsey-woolsey and hickory shirts instead of buckskin. But some of the wilder mountain boys thought a feller who’d tie himself to a squaw and a half-breed family was going a little soft and sissy.

  “These lone men were out in the West and Northwest for the spoken purpose of trapping beaver, but the beaver and the buffalo were just an excuse for roving free and unhampered by all the things they didn’t like about law and or
der and rules and regulations. These fellers liked to get up on a bright morning in a place no other white man had ever seen, and look out to watch a million buffalo black on the plain as far as the eye could see, and to spin down a stream in a bullboat and take a prime beaver plew out of every trap.

  “They lived off a steady diet of meat, when the shooting was good, and they never ate much fresh meat except buffalo hump, tongue, ribs, and what they called boudin—intestine stuffed full of chopped meat. The rest went to the wolves or got jerked into thin, dry strips, if there was a squaw handy. She’d pound a few dried berries into the pemmican and they lived off that all winter, that and a few carcasses shot during the cold and hung up in a tree to freeze. When they were off on the prowl they didn’t need much provisioning. Buffalo chips made a fire to warm up the jerky, and if the jerky run out they could make it somehow on roots or prairie dogs or bear or mountain goat or whatever come under the gun sights, including horses and Injun dogs. If there weren’t any roots or berries or prairie dogs they could make it for a spell on buckskin. Many a man ate up his last pair of spare moccasins.

  “Where a man stood or rode or built a fire was home. He paid no taxes, saw no white people, obeyed no laws, spent no money. If his gun bust, he whittled a bow from wood or horn and strung it with a thong clipped off his hunting shirt; he chipped some flint and tipped his arrows. He only had two real enemies—Injuns and weather. Injuns could lift his hair, and weather could starve him first and freeze him second. But he never got lost, because a man that don’t care much where he is ain’t lost. He’s exploring.

  “They were a hairy, dirty, lice-ridden, mean, cantankerous, antisocial, and in some cases murderous lot of hopeless cases for civilization. When they come to the trading posts they spent their beaver money on watered-down trade whisky and foofaraw for their squaws, if any.

  “They gambled and they fought with knives and cheerfully killed each other when the pannikins passed from hand to hand, and a man kicked his heels, let out a war whoop, and allowed he was a stud bear and could lick any other two-or four-footed animule that ever walked, crawled, or flew through the air. But when they got back on the plains and in the hills they owned all the space and sky and wood and water, and they were the freest, least dependent critters that God made recently. In that respect they were all rich.”

  The Old Man paused and looked at the sea. The ebb had started and the moon was riding high. In its light you could see the wet brown stain on the sand where the water had receded.

  “I kind of got carried away,” the Old Man said, a little sheepishly. “I would have probably made a terrible mountain man, and the first fat Kiowa that come along would have had my hair for a trophy. But it’s nice to think about what it must have been like, especially if you never will see it again. That’s where books come in handy. A man can be rich retroactively, if he can stand off the Armada with Drake and fight the Injuns with Jim Bridger. The water’s going out. Let’s try the fish again.”

  We walked down to the water’s edge into the chill sea up to our thighs and cast. Each of us had simultaneous strikes. From the way the rods bent, we both had tied into good ones. We walked backward, reeling in, as the angry blues fought on the other end. The Old Man turned his head and asked, acidly, “You still want to be rich when you grow up?”

  “That I do,” I said stubbornly. “At least if I’m rich I can hire somebody to tote the fish and clean ‘em afterward.”

  We toiled backward up the beach, and as usual the Old Man’s fish was bigger than mine. I guess he might have made a pretty fair mountain man at that.

  7—Stories Grow Taller in the Fresh Air

  “A liar,” the Old Man declared one day when I had stretched the truth a touch on some matter involving nonattendance at school, “is a person I cannot abide. He is like a suck-egg dog. You can’t trust him out of your sight.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, having been caught out handily.

  “However,” the Old Man said, gnawing at his mustaches, “there are certain exceptions to the rule.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, looking hopeful.

  “Now I wouldn’t give a nickel for a truthful hunter or fisherman,” the Old Man continued. “A hunter who ain’t a liar, a fisherman who won’t toy with the truth is generally the kind of man who will do you one in the eye on a cattle trade, fore-close a mortgage on a widder, and sneak stamps out of the petty-cash box. He will steal a horse and possibly kick his dogs. He will also have a small, tight, mean mouth and carry his money in a snap purse.”

  He fired up the pipe and shot one at me fast. “How much did that big puppy drum you caught the other day weigh?”

  “Thirty-five pounds,” I said.

  The Old Man positively glowed with triumph. He cackled. “I weighed it behind your back,” he said. “It weighed thirty-two pounds. You see, you’re an automatic sporting liar, which I think is commendable. If it had been me, I’d of said forty pounds. But you’re young yet and don’t know the difference between a cheese-paring fib and a good, strong, hairy-chested falsehood. If you got to tell one tell a good one. I ever tell you about Elwood and Corbett and the doe deer?”

  Elwood and Corbett were two brothers who lived near the Green Swamp and like many another, including my friends Tom and Pete, were known to make and sell a little white lightning, and thought that game laws were an invasion of civil liberties in Onslow County. They had a smokehouse that was full of meat the year round, and very little of it had ever seen an abattoir. There was a limit of two deer a year, and once I asked Elwood how many deer he’d shot so far (this being before Christmas). He scratched his head, and replied, “Well, I bought a box of shells in October. That’s twenty-five, and I got two left. That means I must of shot twenty-three deer. No, dammit, I forgot. I had to shoot one deer twice!”

  The Old Man went on. “I was hunting with the boys one day close to Waccamaw, and I was waiting on a deer-stand when I heard a gun go off. There wasn’t any mistaking it, it was Elwood’s; he was the only man around that had a single-shot .32 rifle. When I heard the crack I moseyed over, about half a mile, to help him skin and gut the deer. As I came close I heard voices, and there is this game warden talking to Elwood.

  “‘You shot this here doe deer, Elwood,’ the warden said.

  “‘What doe deer?’ Elwood replies.

  “‘This here doe deer here. The one you just drug into the bushes and was fixin’ to cover up with bresh when I come by.’

  “‘I never shot no doe deer.’

  “‘You must of shot her,’ the warden says. ‘Her neck’s broke with a bullet and they’s a .32 shell a-lyin’ over there by that stand. The deer’s here and the cartridge is here and you’re here and you’re the only feller around with a .32 rifle that always breaks deer’s necks arunnin’. I say you shot this here doe deer, Elwood.’

  “Elwood put another bullet in the rifle and hauled back the hammer. It made a nasty click. ‘Warden,’ he said, ‘anybody that’d say I shot a doe deer is a suck-egg dog, and I’d shoot any suck-egg dog I ever seen in the woods.’

  “The warden looked at Elwood and then he looked at the gun and then he looked at the dead doe. He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. ‘I reckon you didn’t shoot that there doe after all,’ he said. ‘But hit’s a nice day, ain’t it?’

  “You know those cold gray eyes of Elwood’s. He looked the warden straight in the face a long time before he answered. Finally he spoke. ‘Hit mought be,’ he said. ‘Good day, Warden.’

  “‘Good day, Elwood,’ the warden said, and disappeared into the trees.

  “Elwood got out his knife and started to gut the deer.

  “Now that,” the Old Man said to me, “is what I would call a very special he, and one I don’t approve of, because Elwood was wrong in the first place and he was backing up his lie with force. That’s what starts all these wars you read about. A feller’ll tell a lie and get caught at it, and then he’s got to shoot his way out of it unless the other feller falls f
or the bluff. There’s a little moral in that, too. There ain’t any use bluffin’ unless you’re prepared to shoot your way out of it, and I am convinced that Elwood would of shot that warden. Those are hot-tempered boys down that way.”

  The Old Man got out a plug of tobacco and whittled a little clump of shavings into his hand. He stuffed them carefully into his pipe, after knocking out the dottle, and fired up the infernal machine.

  “There’s a lot to be said for some kinds of truth-stretching,” he remarked vaguely. “A lot of mischief-making goes on from telling the pure-T truth that could be avoided either by keeping your mouth shut, giving an evasive answer, or telling a teensy little white one. This here kind of lying is called diplomacy, and is practiced the world round by diplomats and statesmen. At home it’s a little simpler. I mean, if your ma asks me if you cut school the other day—which you did—I would merely say, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen too much of him lately.’ This would save you some trouble at home. But if I go running to your ma blabbering that you been cutting school, without her even asking me, then I am a meddlesome old man, but still I am technically telling the truth and should be had up for being noble beyond the call of duty. You see the difference?”

  “As far as I’m concerned I see it,” I said. “It’s the difference between a week’s lost allowance and a swat on the tail.”

  “It wouldn’t be a lick amiss,” the Old Man said.

  “I know where you got that phrase,” I said, sort of cocky. “You got it out of Tom Sawyer, when Aunt Polly whipped Tom when he really wasn’t guilty.”

  The Old Man looked at me in amazement. He shook his head. “I cannot really believe that education is beginning to sink in, but there are signs—there are signs. Where was I? “

  “Different kinds of storytelling,” I said.

  “Well now,” the Old Man said, “we come to the sporting liar. He ain’t really a liar. He is kind of an artist, like a painter. The difference between a photographer and a painter is that the photographer uses a machine that captures a subject exactly as it is. If the subject has got a wart on his nose the camera records the wart. But a painter only makes an impression—his impression—of what the subject seems like to him. If a man is painting a woman he loves or if he is painting for money and the woman has a wart on her nose or too many chins there is no law which forces the painter to leave the wart or dutifully record the chins. He can exercise a little artistic license because paint’s cheap, as cheap as talk.”