by Gary Paulsen
He was only five years old and had never spent time on farms unless it had been when he was a baby, but he couldn’t remember any of it. This was the first time he had been with loose chickens, mean geese, big brown dogs, and cats with kittens. All new to him, brand-new—as were the smells burning his eyes and making his nose wrinkle—but Edy seemed to figure he would know what to do. So he moved to the nest-boxes and looked in the first one and there were two eggs. Considering that he had never really known where eggs came from, it was like finding a treasure. In the next nest, a chicken was sitting and she pecked at his hand when he reached in toward her. He moved on. Next nest, three eggs. And so he went down the row. There were chickens in four nests, but eight more were open, and he plucked eggs from each of them.
Fourteen eggs in all. Again, just like finding treasure. He moved outside where Edy was calling, “Here chick, chick, chick,” in a kind of song. As she called, she took handfuls of seeds from the bag and threw them out in a wave. Chickens came running from all over the barnyard to start scratching and pecking up the seeds.
“I got fourteen eggs,” he said, a little proud.
She nodded. “There should be a few more.”
“Some of the nests had chickens inside. I didn’t want to bother them. One of them pecked at me.”
Another nod. “That was Yvonne. She’s grumpy when she’s sitting to lay.”
He had to ask. “Why do they lay eggs?”
She looked at the boy for a long time as if she wasn’t sure if he was joking. “If the eggs are fertile, after they sit on them for a time and keep them warm, they hatch out into baby chickens—little chicks.”
Again he wanted to ask more questions—was it any egg they sat on to get a new chicken? What did the hens have to do to make the egg work that way? Why didn’t all eggs make chicks? But he realized that he was asking too many things and besides, Edy was moving as she talked. She put the bag back in the shed and moved to the pigpen, which was next to the barn, and again, he had to run to keep up.
There were two pigs in the pen. Edy handed him a pail hanging on a nail and said: “Go get a bucket of water from the trough by the chicken coop.”
He had never carried a bucket of water from a trough, but again Edy seemed to think he would know what to do and so he went to do it. He found a big wooden trough, but water is heavy and the pail was big and by the time he returned to the pigpen he had lost a third of the water—mostly down his front—so she sent him back for more. Then she poured the water over the pen rail and into the pigs’ trough. From another bag inside the barn door, she poured a thick grain mixture into the water in the trough, and the pigs dived in. They would hold their breath and keep their noses underwater while they snuffled up the slop. They seemed so happy, snorting and grunting bubbles, that the next new thing didn’t bother him. Much.
Pig poop smelled worse than chicken poop.
And once more, before he could ask a question—like why is pig poop worse—or say anything at all, Edy set off for the house. “Now we feed ourselves.”
He followed, nearly running, soaking wet and sloshing as he moved. When they got to the house, Edy turned and handed him a coarse towel and pointed to a wash pan on a stand by the door. Another bucket on the floor held clean well water and she poured some in the pan and pointed to a bar of soap next to it that felt like it was made of sand. “Wash up. I’ll have some stew on the table when you’re ready.”
He heard her slamming things around in the kitchen, as she got wood in the cookstove and fired it up, and moved the cast-iron pot over the hottest place. When his face and hands were dry—although his pants were still wet—he sat at the kitchen table. As his bottom settled on the chair, he slowly realized two things.
The whole day—the whole trip and arriving and helping with chores—was a complete blur. Like it had happened to some other person and he could only see it in pictures and even those were blurred. Add to that, he was so exhausted that he was literally dizzy with fatigue. He had trouble staying upright. Simply could not keep from sagging. He propped his elbows on the table, put his chin in his hands, and fell instantly fast asleep.
From then on, he remembered only snatches. Somebody—he first thought it was Edy, but she had a new smell, dark wood smoke and thick sweat—picked him up and carried him upstairs, took off his wet clothes, rolled him into a wonderfully soft bed under the quilt, tucked him in with a hand that felt like sandpaper. And then nothing but a dream about Chicago and his mother, which faded, faded, faded—gone.
He was not exactly certain which of the three things awakened him. There was sunlight coming through the window hitting him in the face, he badly needed to go to the bathroom, and the heavy sound of a man’s voice came from the kitchen through the stairway.
Then he heard Edy’s voice ask: “Should I go up there and wake him up?”
Man’s voice: “Think what he’s done, what he’s been through. Let him sleep for now.”
“He didn’t get any stew. He must be hungry.”
“He won’t starve.”
“Small boys need a lot of food.”
“He’s not that small.”
“Oh, you…”
“Oh, me…”
By this time, he was nearly peeing himself so he got up, put on his pants—which had dried while he slept—and his T-shirt. When he couldn’t find his shoes, he thought, Never you mind, and went down the stairs barefoot. His need for the bathroom had become urgent.
The kitchen was bathed in sunshine—the same as his room (and he thought of it that way, his room, as if he’d been living there forever)—and where the light hit the table it made a big circle, like a spotlight.
Sitting at the table in the light was a man he had never seen. He would find his whole name to be Sigurd although Edy and later the boy always called him Sig, and he looked … the boy wasn’t sure then how he looked. In the rare times when Edy had visited his mother in the city, she was always alone—Sig never came with her—so he’d never had a chance to meet him before.
He had seen a lot of men in the bars who worked in the war plant when he sang, but they somehow didn’t seem to belong where they were—they were always drunk or getting drunk and talking big and loud, whispering make-believe shallow lies, trying to get close to his mother—and they looked, in some way, out of place.
But when he first saw Sig, he thought Sig looked, no matter where he happened to be, like he was supposed to be there. He sat in the wooden kitchen chair at the wooden kitchen table like it was made exactly for him to sit there, and he held a steaming mug of coffee in hands that were nicked and scarred and looked like they were made of tough leather holding the cup like the mug had always been there. Always been held.
Gray hair, cut short in a bristle, and blue eyes that looked like they had electric power behind them.
“Got to pee?” He smiled at the boy, who was holding himself, trying not to wiggle.
“Bad,” the boy said.
“Go out in the yard and pee in the big lilac bush,” Edy said.
“Really?” He had never peed in a yard in a bush before and thought she was joking. They were both smiling. “Really? Not in a toilet?”
“For now”—she nodded—“the only toilet is the outhouse out back a ways, but I don’t think you’ll make it.”
Lots of talk, he thought, and the pee doesn’t care whether you talk or not. When you have to go, talking doesn’t work. Nothing matters when you really have to go.
Running out now, holding himself in a pinch as he ran, the ground sticky with something that squirted between his toes, mud, he thought, because it rained last night but he didn’t care, didn’t care about anything except getting to that bush, warm mud squishing up greasy between his toes and finally, finally the big lilac bush, better than any toilet, closer, like shelter, like a friend, and the sheer wonder of letting it go.
When he was finished, he turned and saw that Edy was waiting by the door holding a bucket of water and a rag.
“For your feet,” she said. “I didn’t have time to warn you. The geese come in the yard at night to be safe by the house and they say nothing goes like a goose…” She trailed off and he looked down at his feet.
His toes.
It had not been warm mud squeezing through his toes.
Goose poop.
His toes, both his feet, were covered with gray-green-white, slimy, stinking goose poop. He had run right through it on the way to the lilac bush and had to make his way back to where Edy waited with the bucket. The poop literally blanketed the ground, and though he tried to half-walk, tried to miss it, tried to almost air-walk, he didn’t succeed and gathered yet more goose poop on his feet and between his toes until at last he arrived at the step.
Edy handed him the bucket and rag. “Get it all, dig between the toes. When you’re done, come in for breakfast.”
It seemed to take forever but, at last, he set the pail aside and went back into the kitchen. Sig was still sitting there, sipping his coffee. He said nothing as the boy came in, but seemed on the edge of smiling. Not smart-aleck or teasing, but friendly, and the boy realized that both of them smiled most of the time. Or were on the close edge of smiling.
“Sit at the table.” Edy motioned to a plate laid next to a fork, knife, and spoon. From the stove, she stacked three small pancakes on a fork and slid them on his plate. “There’s raspberry-honey syrup in the jar; use your spoon to dip it on your cakes.” She used the same fork in another pan, scooping up three strips of meat that she slid next to his pancakes.
He didn’t think there was any way he would get all that food down, but he was wrong. He couldn’t seem to stop eating and, before long, had not only finished the cakes, but the meat as well and a glass of creamy milk with some of the raspberry syrup stirred in.
“When you’re done, wash your dishes and silverware at the sink.” Edy pointed with her chin to a double sink at the end of the cupboard shelf.
He wasn’t sure if it was allowed, but he was going to have to ask a question. “Do I have to go out to the barn trough to get water for washing up?” Bad mental image: him walking, spilling all the way, through goose poop, falling down, in the goose poop, covered with trough water and goose poop.
“Use that hand pump by the sink. We have water right in the house. Did you think we were animals?”
He had not noticed it before, but on the right edge of the sink was a small red hand pump. He had never washed his own dishes before either, and it took him some time, pumping the lever to get water running, to scrape off the syrup residue and clean the milk stain out of the glass and, when he had finished and sat at the table again, Sig got up. He took his own plate to the sink and cleaned it and, without turning, said to the boy: “Get your shoes on and a long-sleeve shirt, too.”
He knew then, knew a thing had happened, an important thing. Sig talked to the boy as he would talk to another man. Not a child. But a grown man. He did not say how to do this thing, how to put his shoes on or find a shirt; simply to do it. And Edy was the same. It’s as if the boy were a grown-up, or more, even more, he was a person who was part of something. Part of a family.
They were, suddenly, a family, and he had never been talked to that way, as a grown-up, as a real person and not just a kid who somebody had to watch and take care of or he would break something. A kid who would do something wrong. A kid who had to hide under a kitchen table until things were better.
Part II
THE RIVER
THE CANVAS CANOE
“We’ll take the river down to where it cuts those hills.” Sig was talking to Edy. “That’s where most of the mushrooms were. They were starting to sprout here and there. In another day, there should be a lot of them.”
The boy stood listening until Sig looked at him and said again: “Put your shoes on and get a long-sleeve shirt.”
“How long?” Edy asked.
“Not sure. Two, maybe three days.”
“And you think he’s ready for something like that?”
“If not yet, he will be. He must be tough, the way he was living in the city.”
He went out the door and the boy assumed he was supposed to follow Sig so he scrabble-tied his tennis shoes, found a shirt in his box-suitcase, and ran after him. On the porch, Sig stopped to pick up a roll of blankets and an old pack. He handed the boy the bedroll—which was nearly as big as him—and hooked the pack over one shoulder and was gone. It was all the boy could do to follow, the blankets’ size and weight making him swerve and jerk. Sig was soon so far enough ahead that when he went around the side of the barn, the boy lost him.
He was about halfway through the yard-driveway in front of the house when the geese saw him and hissed and started for him, but Rex jumped in the middle of them so he could get away and scramble-stumble around the corner of the barn and out of sight. He saw Sig moving down through the pasture behind the barn. He was headed for what the boy thought was a long pond, but which turned out to be a small river that slowly wound its way through willows and tall water weeds past the farm and into the forest.
He would find out, many years later, that the river was between two wilderness lakes that lay fifty or so miles apart as the crow flies—which is a straight line on a map. But the stream didn’t run straight and probably covered at least a hundred miles of travel to make the run. At the time, he wasn’t thinking of where it might go but was hard pressed just to catch up to Sig, and when at last he did, Sig was standing by what appeared to be an upside-down boat that had been pulled out of the water into the long grass next to the stream.
It was an eighteen-foot canoe, made of narrow strips of wood covered with a layer of canvas. The canvas was painted with a thick coating of green paint to keep out the water. Here and there, a patch of black tar had been slapped where a leak had been, and when Sig flipped the canoe over, the boy saw two paddles lying beneath it.
Sig slid the front end of the canoe into the water, took the bedroll from the boy, and set it in the middle of the canoe along with the pack he was carrying; then he pushed it out into the water so the front end was floating. The back part of the boat next to where he stood was still on the ground.
“Get in,” he said. “Pick up a paddle and kneel toward the front on the bottom—not on the crossbars.”
The boy thought, All right, here’s another new thing to stack on all the other new things that were happening to me. He still hesitated, thinking that perhaps Sig would say more, tell him more of what to do. He had never been in a canoe or any other kind of boat, so he had no real idea how to do any of it.
But Sig said nothing, just held the rear of the canoe. Waiting. So the boy thought—what he would come to think many times as life went on—it must be all right because …
Because Sig told him to do it.
If Sig thought the boy could do it, he must be able to accomplish it. So he climbed in, wiggled over the top of the bedroll and pack, picked up the paddle, and settled on the bottom of the canoe. There was a lunge, a sliding motion as he felt Sig get in the canoe and push away from land, and then the canoe was floating on the water.
He grabbed at the sides of the canoe because everything seemed to wobble a lot and he felt as if they were going to flip over. But he looked back quickly and saw Sig was kneeling, controlling the motion of the canoe, settling it out by moving his hips back and forth to provide counterbalance.
He stroked once with his paddle and the canoe fairly shot into the middle of the stream. The boy’s head snapped back and he grabbed again at the top edges of the sides.
“Paddle,” Sig said. “Kneel like I’m doing and paddle.”
Easy, the boy thought, for you to say. But he didn’t dare speak his thought out loud. He wasn’t sure why, but he was fairly certain it wouldn’t help if he started acting like he had in the bars when he had to sing and the men wouldn’t be quiet. They called him a wiseacre kid when he bratted back at them.
For what seemed like the longest time, he was
too busy to talk back like a brat. Just getting into a kneeling position seemed impossible without rolling the canoe over and falling into the water. And there was the paddle, which was taller than him by a good foot. When at last he was kneeling and tried to get the paddle over the side into the water, he dropped it completely and nearly fell in trying to catch it.
Still without talking, Sig caught it as it floated past him and handed it back to the boy. He grabbed it from Sig, but set it aside as he had other problems to deal with—starting with his knees. There was no pad on the bottom of the canoe, and he was kneeling on bare strips of wood full of sharp edges.
He’d also picked up a splinter in the web of his left hand grabbing at the side of the canoe. Kneeling, then half squatting in the bottom of the canoe, he chewed at the splinter with his teeth.
And, when Sig handed back the paddle he had dropped over the side, he had swung it around without thinking and caught himself a clout over his left ear with the hard wooden shaft. He could feel a lump forming.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been trying to kneel more carefully, chewing on his hand, resisting the urge to rub the lump on his head, feeling miserable—some minutes, he supposed—all the while Sig had been paddling down the stream until the boy suddenly noticed that the sun was no longer shining down on his back, but that they were in a green shade. At nearly that same moment he felt-heard in back of him a soft whisper: “See. Look. See.”
It was almost not words, more of a touch than a sound. A hush of words.
The boy rose up, looking over the front of the canoe, and found he was in a different world. It was so beautiful that even later it was hard to describe, like an impossibly beautiful painting that by some magic had been made alive, real. As with the road and driveway, the trees had leaned and grown so much they touched each other over the top of the stream and made a green tunnel. And even that, just the way it looked, was filled with beauty. But more, because of the water, the trees had not only touched at the top but had kept growing, so that they were intertwined, making a lovely thatch cover, a long, wonderful room with a living roof.
