by Ralph Moody
I wasn’t much better at opening clams than I was at digging them. Every one I picked up was as stubborn as a mule. The first one kept his shells pinched so tight that it took me five minutes to wiggle my knife between them, and when I tried to pry the top shell off the blade snapped. “Not that way!” Al told me. “You’ve got to cut the muscle before you can flip the shell off.”
I’d never known clams had muscles until Al opened one and showed me, and even after that I wasn’t much good at opening them. But it was just as well. When I got one open I could hardly make myself swallow it.
Some of the boys made their whole lunch on clams, and then we rested and swam for about an hour before we went back to pick up more blocks. By quarter of four, when the tide turned, we had all four rafts stacked nearly three feet high with blocks, and only enough room at the front and back for a couple of boys. As soon as the tide began running upriver in good shape we gathered our boards, and one of the boys who could handle the hatchet real well cut them into paddles. With a boy kneeling at each corner, they edged the loaded rafts out into the current and paddled away up the river toward Foster’s Beach.
Allie and I didn’t go on the rafts, but put on our clothes and went to his house for the old running gear from his brother’s wagon. The wheel hubs and turn plate had to be greased, and a couple of the tires that were loose had to be wedged tight. By the time we had it ready and pulled down to the beach the rafts were coming around the last bend in the river. We were barely undressed again before the first one turned in for a landing.
We were so anxious to see if my idea would work that we didn’t wait for the last raft to get in before we tried it. We tossed part of the blocks off the first raft in, separated one timber from the others, and backed the running gear astraddle of it. As the wheels left the ground we pushed the axles along until the timber floated evenly, then chained the bolsters to it, leaving the front chain just loose enough that the wheels would turn. By the time we had half a dozen pull-ropes tied to the running gear the last raft was in, so I had part of the boys weight down the back end of the timber while the rest of us pulled on the ropes. When the wheels touched bottom the big timber hung evenly from the axles, and came up out of the water with a rush as we ran up the beach, howling like wild Indians.
Everything worked fine till we reached the upper edge of the beach, where it curved down steeply like the rim of a saucer. Then both ends of the timber dragged, and the front dug into the gravel like a plow. We were trying to drag it along when a voice from above us called, “For glory’s sake, why don’t you fetch it up slonchways? You’ll never in this livin’ world pull it up at all, at all, by main strength and awkwardness.”
When we looked up Cop Watson was standing at the rim of the beach, twirling his night stick in a cartwheel and watching us. “Get it back in the water where ’twill float,” he told us, “and drift it to that far corner, yonder where the eel grass commences. Then you can come up in a widenin’ curve, and ’twill fetch you over the rim at the end o’ the roadway.”
Cop Watson not only told us how to get the timber up to the roadway, but he helped us. As soon as we’d pushed it back into the water and floated it into place, he came down and picked up the end of the wagon pole. He told us he was only going to do the steering for us, but he pulled harder than any four of us put together. It didn’t take us a minute to get up onto the roadway.
We were all a little winded when we reached the roadway, and while we were resting Cop Watson said, “And now I’ve a notion I’ll be havin’ a fight to deal with when you go to divvyin’ it up.”
“No, sir,” I told him. “We had our deal all made before we started: I get half for having the idea, and everybody else gets share and share alike.”
“A half?” he said, and looked at me out of one corner of his eye.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But it was my idea, and none of us would have got any if I hadn’t thought of it, and one of these timbers must be worth. . . .”
I stopped because I could see that Cop Watson wasn’t listening to me. He stood for a minute, looking at the ground and rubbing his mustache across his cheeks with the back of a hand. Then he looked up, nodded his head, and said, “’tis fair enough; fair enough, lads. ’tis ever the man what gets the idea and sets it to goin’ that gets the gravy, not them what works with their hands. Now you take old John D. Like as not he never done a day’s work with his hands in all the livin’ world. And look where he’s at now. How many o’ them timbers did you salvage?”
“Nineteen,” I told him.
He pointed his finger at each one of us as he counted, and asked, “Would you be tellin’ me how you’re goin’ to divvy nineteen into half, and a half into sixteens?”
“Well,” I told him, “we got enough paving blocks to make a pile bigger than all the timbers put together. Some of the boys might want to take blocks instead of a timber; the blocks won’t have to be sawed to make fire wood, and the timbers will.”
“True. True,” he said. “And how many blocks do you call the equal of a beam?”
“We haven’t thought about that yet,” I told him. “How many would you think was fair?”
Cop Watson went over to the pile of blocks we’d tossed up over the rim, bounced one of them in his hand a few times, and said, “Well now, there’s two ways o’ lookin’ at it: the work, and what comes out of it. Them that takes block’ll have no sawin’ to do, and that’s half o’ the job, so them that takes beams ought to get the double out of it when it’s in shape for burnin’.” He ran a little finger inside the circle of his ear, and looked back and forth between the block in his hand and the big timber hanging from the axles of the running gear. “How about callin’ it a hunderd even?” he asked. “How many of yous would take a hunderd blocks in the place of a timber?”
The boys divided exactly even. The laziest eight said they’d take blocks, and the other eight said nothing.
With the division all worked out, we decided that we’d take one load to our house and then a load to some other boy’s house, alternately, and they’d draw straws to find out in what order we’d take them: the longest straw first and the shortest last. That was the fairest way we could do it, because we had no idea of how many we could haul that afternoon. Nobody could work on Sunday, and any that didn’t get hauled before Monday were pretty apt to be swiped. It was Cop Watson who figured out the scheme that made it possible for us to haul every last block and timber before the nine o’clock curfew sounded.
Once a timber was up on the roadway there was no sense in seventeen of us going to deliver it; four or five could trot and pull the load. So I picked the biggest four, and told the others to watch that our rafts didn’t drift away as the tide rose, and that they might lug all the blocks up to the roadway, where they’d be handy for loading.
We took the first timber to our house, wheeling it to one edge of the back lawn, and it unloaded as easily as it had loaded. All I had to do was to put down blocks and have the boys pry up one end at a time, while I pulled the bolt and drew the chain out from under.
I don’t believe we were gone from the beach more than fifteen minutes, and when we got back Cop Watson was showing the boys how to make a wagon body with some pieces of driftwood board, some bent nails, and the hatchet. “There’s no sense at all, at all, in squanderin’ daylight,” he told me as we came trotting up with the empty running gear. “Them dry blocks don’t weigh next to nothin’, and with a body on that contraption you can be haulin’ a load o’ blocks atop and a beam beneath.”
Once we knew how to get the beams from the river to the roadway it wasn’t a very tough job. It didn’t take over five minutes to hook on and snake one up, and with the driftwood box to hold them, seventeen of us could toss on a hundred blocks in almost nothing flat. Whoever was going to get the timber or the blocks went along to show us where to unload, and by making two deliveries at one trip we saved nearly half our time.
When we delivered the third load at our ho
use, half the kids in the neighborhood were there to watch us, and Mother came out to tell us what a fine job we’d done. When I told her we’d just started and that we still had eight more timbers to bring home, she said, “Gracious sakes! You boys must be bone-tired and nearly starved to death. After one or two more loads you must stop for supper and some rest.”
“We can’t,” I told her. “If we do we’ll never be finished by curfew time, and anything we don’t haul tonight will probably be swiped by Monday.”
“Oh, you mustn’t work right through without eating,” she told me, but she didn’t say right out and out that I’d have to stop for supper, so I just told her we’d be back in a little while, and we trotted away.
Our next deliveries were nearly down to Salem Street, so it was almost six o’clock before we got back to our house with a load. I didn’t want to give Mother too much of a chance to come out and tell me I’d have to stop for supper, so we just dropped the timber, tipped the body up to spill the blocks, and started back out of the yard. We’d only gone as far as the kitchen steps when Grace opened the door and said, “Don’t be in such a rush! You wait right where you are till I get down there!”
Grace didn’t often try to boss me around when I was with other boys, and I think I might have told her to mind her own business, but she closed the door too soon, so all I could do was wait. But we didn’t have to wait long. In another minute she opened the door and came down the steps with the bean pot in her hands. It must have been straight out of the oven, because she was carrying it with pot-holder mittens. Mother was right behind her with a big pan of gingerbread, wrapped in a towel, and a box of plates and cups and knives and forks. “Now just hold on a minute,” she told me as she set them on the block box. “Gracie will be right here with a loaf of brown-bread and a pail of cocoa. She’s going along to see that you boys get some supper into you. You can eat it right down there at the river, and she’ll bring the dishes home when you’re through. Now do be careful, and don’t strain yourselves with those great pieces of lumber.”
I think the sliding at the clay pit must have done something to Grace. She didn’t try to be a bit grown-up that evening, but rode down to the beach on the old wagon, and laughed and joked with the boys all the time she was dishing up our supper. Half a dozen of the boys told me I didn’t know how lucky I was to have a sister like her, and, of course, I didn’t mention the way she usually tried to boss me around. As soon as we’d eaten they made me take the next load right back to our house, and I think it was mainly so the bigger boys could go along and ride Grace back on the wagon.
With every trip we made the tide rose higher and the pull up the beach was easier. After supper nobody doubted that we’d get the job finished before curfew time, so we didn’t bother with turns any longer, but went wherever we could deliver a timber and a load of blocks right in the same neighborhood. It was half-past-eight when we pulled away from Foster’s Beach with the last timber and the last paving block. That was the eleventh timber we took to our house, and we must have taken more than a thousand blocks along with them. After it was unloaded I helped Allie pull the running gear back to its place behind Dion’s barn, and I was running up our back steps just as the curfew bell rang.
23
Every Little Bit Helps
WE’D had to hurry so much in bringing the wood home Saturday night that we didn’t have time to be very neat about it. We just pulled the running gear onto any part of our back lawn where there was room for the wheels, dropped the timber and dumped off the load of paving blocks. When I took Mother out to see it in daylight Sunday morning she said, “My! My! Did you ever see anything like it in your life! Why, those big sticks will keep us in firewood for a couple of years, and I don’t know how we’ll ever use up all the kindling those paving blocks will make. I don’t see how in the world you boys managed to do it.”
“It wasn’t hard,” I told her. “No matter how big a piece of wood is, it doesn’t weigh anything when it’s in water, and the wagon wheels made it easy to bring them home. I didn’t plan that we’d use all the blocks ourselves. If Philip and I split them into kindling I’ll bet we’d find lots of people who would be glad to buy it for twenty-five cents a cart load. That’s a good bargain, because they’d have to pay twice that much for kindling at the store.”
“Why, that’s a splendid idea,” Mother said. “In that way you and Philip would have a little business of your own, and you could put your profits away toward buying the school clothing you children will need next fall. But, good heavens! From the way you’re growing you’ll need some new clothes before summer gets here. Are you sure you’re not making a pig of yourself at the store, Son?”
“No, ma’am, I’m not,” I told her. “I never eat more than two pieces of candy in any one day, and I only eat cheese and crackers when Mr. Haushalter gives them to me.”
“Mmmmm, hmmmm, but right now we’ll have to think some about clearing up this yard,” Mother said. “I wouldn’t be able to hang out laundry with these big sticks scattered all around the way they are, and what’s more they’ll soon kill all the grass that’s under them. Do you think they could be piled up neatly, over there in one corner?”
“Well,” I told her, “if I can get all the boys over here we could lie on our backs and roll them over that way, but we could never pile them up; it would take a derrick to lift one. But if we had a good two-handled saw, Philip and I could cut them into pieces right where they are. Then they wouldn’t be too heavy to pile up.”
“Hmmmm, together with your job at the store that would take the rest of the summer,” Mother said, “and long before that our lawn would be completely ruined. I wonder if Uncle Frank could give you any help with them.”
I’d been so busy for the past few days that I hadn’t even thought about Uncle Frank. But when Mother mentioned his name I wanted to show him the job I’d done more than I wanted anything else in the world. Of course, I knew he couldn’t lift one of those timbers any more than I could. And even if he were strong enough, he couldn’t do it on Sunday, but I said, “I’ll run right over and get him now.”
“No, no,” Mother said quickly, “not now. Maybe after church, and after we’ve had our dinner, you might go over and talk to him about it. I’m not at all sure he’ll be able to help us, but we must find some way of moving them, for I simply must have this space for hanging out laundry, and we can’t ruin Mr. Perkins’ nice lawn.”
All through Sunday School and church I tried to figure out some way of moving those timbers and piling them up, and as soon as we’d finished dinner I ran over to Uncle Frank’s house. I knew that if I tried to tell him anything about the wood it might sound like bragging, so I just told him we needed some help at our house as soon as he could come over.
“Shall I bring my tools?” he asked. “You know, I won’t be able to do any work outside on Sunday, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I know it. But this isn’t a job anybody could do with tools. It’s one Philip and I can’t do by ourselves, and Mother wondered if you could help us with it.”
“Don’t you think you’d better tell me what the job is, so I’ll know what I might need?” Uncle Frank asked.
“Well, you’d need a derrick more than anything else,” I told him, “but I can’t explain the job to you. I could show you better when we get over there. Do you think you’d be able to come now?”
All the way over to our house I kept talking about something else, so Uncle Frank wouldn’t have a chance to ask me any more questions. Then, when we turned down the driveway at the side of the fire station and he saw our back yard, he shouted, “For the love of Pete! Did a tidal wave strike you?”
“No, sir,” I told him, “but a flood tide struck the river, and I guess you know the Wellington Bridge caught fire and the firemen tore out two big sections of it. Well, this is just some of the pieces I picked up and brought home.”
“You what?” he said, as if he’d caught me lying to him.
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“Well, I didn’t pick them up all alone,” I told him. “Some of the other boys helped me, and I helped them, and we divided fifty-fifty. This was my share. But what I need to know is how to pile the big timbers up. Mother says we’ll have to put them in a nice neat pile, over there in the corner, but Philip and I couldn’t budge one of them.”
“How in the name of Moses did you ever get them home?” he asked.
“That was easy enough,” I told him. “We just chained wagon wheels on top of them while they were floating in the water at Foster’s Beach. There was nothing to wheeling them home.”
“Anybody might know you were Charlie Moody’s boy,” he said, “and it looks to me as if you folks were going to get along all right . . . if enough bridges burn down. But that isn’t getting these joists piled, is it, and I’ll be jiggered if I can tell you how to do it without sawing them up. Ten men couldn’t lift one of them.”
On warm Sunday afternoons the firemen sometimes used to bring their chairs out and sit in the sun to read the paper. The lieutenant and the other regular fireman at our station came out while Uncle Frank and I were talking about the timbers. The lieutenant stood his chair down, then came over and said to Uncle Frank, “Wasn’t that quite a job those kids did yesterday? Bill and I were standing by to give ’em a hand with the unloading, but they didn’t seem to need it.”
“Don’t know yet how they ever did it,” Uncle Frank told him, “but they’ll sure need plenty of help to get them moved from where they dropped them. He says he wants to pile them up over in that corner.”