by Jack Kerouac
“Well, that’s the way you are, Ma,” some son would speak up softly. “What the heck—mothers are like that.”
And here she would wink both her eyes in a humorous awkward little gesture of delight, a characteristic of hers that made the others grin fondly, and they knew she was right and wonderful.
Then they saw her when she peered over glasses at the cards spread out before her teacup, consulting the fates, contemplating destiny, tracing the pathways of things in time and season. They saw her cook food and mend clothes and do the house-work, then they saw her sitting by the window and window-gazing, they saw her there in the house, sometimes grim and quiet and ruminant, at most times busy and serene, full of motherlike purpose, a most strong and reassuring woman setting the very world on its course for them, by day, by night, by the years—for she was their mother.
[5]
When Joe was thirteen years old, and Peter nine, and Charley five, they carried out an expedition that the family never forgot. The expedition was really Peter’s idea but it would never have panned out without Joe’s determination and striding generalship.
Peter’s best pal was Tommy Campbell, also nine years old at the time, who lived up the road on his father’s farm. Like almost every other kid in Galloway, Tommy could not make up his mind whether Friday night was more exciting than Saturday morning, or even whether Saturday night itself could contest the issue. On Friday night school was all over and in that throbbing darkness all one had to do was sit back and think of the whole weekend of freedom ahead. But the weekend could not properly begin till Saturday morning at eight sharp when, after a hurried breakfast of cereal with bananas and sugar and milk, the whole broad world of daylight and skies and trees and woods and fields and The River were just waiting to be had. However, just because the weekend began at eight o’clock sharp on Saturday morning did not mean that it could be quite so mysteriously enjoyable as the Friday night anticipation of that beginning. There was something about Friday night that none of them could deny. It was richer, more leisurely, they made plans, mapped routes and campaigns, sat back and stretched their legs, pondered, meditated on affairs to come, consulted with fellow chieftains, laughed tolerantly, moved about casually. There was no rush, no losing of one’s head, no sinking feeling of desperation that it was all slipping away in the hour-glass of day. Friday night was a time for lounging, far-seeing, statesmanlike convocations.
And then there was Saturday night which had a peculiar taste and tone of its own, compounded of funny-papers piled in inky-colored bundles in front of the candy store, the empty thrilling house after the folks go out for the night, and the midnight secrecies of staying up to read The Shadow undisturbed, or Star Western, or Argosy, or Operator 5, or Thrilling Adventures, or a glue-smelling, thick-bound, page-worn library book like The Last of the Mohicans. Saturday night was a great time in its own right.
While Tommy Campbell might have spent some time trying to sift one great time from another, it was incontestable that Sunday morning was bad. Sunday morning was a suffocating kind of time, when you ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, and then put on a necktie, and waited around while your mother and your sister took hours to get ready, and finally took you off to church. All the daylight and open skies and trees and woods and fields and The River were postponed for the day. You hated those woods and fields and that River on Sunday morning, not so much because you couldn’t have them but mostly because they didn’t care whether you had them or not. You went to church choking at the collar and suffocating and dying, and your mother’s perfume on her church clothes was enough to put an end to you for good—it went in your nose and down your throat and you choked on it. The smell of incense in the church, and the smell of three hundred other perfumed mothers and sisters, and the smell of the pews, and the smell of burning tallow—that was enough to smother the life out of you. Everything smelled like Sunday. It was all so far away from the soft, almost velvety overalls well-used and well-worn through so many adventurous, interesting, serious darknesses.
So Tommy Campbell decided to run away from home and make every day a Saturday. His little brother Harry, who, like Charley Martin, was five years old, approved mutely of the idea when Tom put it to him one Friday afternoon. So they started out from the house at once and had not gone two hundred yards when Harry sat down to rest, to think awhile and look back apprehensively at his father’s farmhouse where the road turned. He had never been so far away from home. His big brother knew what was “going through that head of his,” so he took him by an ear and led him along another two hundred yards. But by that time Harry’s ear was getting used to it and he kept balking back like a mule. Brother Tom grabbed a fistful of hair, which gave him a better grip, and plodded him along another two hundred yards.
When they came to a boathouse on the river at the city limits of Galloway, and Tom showed him the boat they were going to steal after dark, little Harry decided he wanted to come along after all, no need to drag him any more. They sat there and waited for the sun to go down; meanwhile Brother Tom foraged around the woods until he found a suitable number of clubs and rocks that he could use to break the padlock on the rowboat. They sat there looking at the rowboat bobbing up and down slowly in the water, and waited excitedly for the sun to go down.
When Peter Martin came drifting along the river’s edge with a stick, Tom told him where they were going. Peter sat a while with them and scaled flat rocks over the water till they bounced. Then he went home to supper. When the sun went down, Tom broke the padlock and he and his little brother went rowing up the river towards New Hampshire. When Peter finished his supper that night, he wished he had gone with the Campbell boys.
The next day Mr. Campbell and some policemen came to the Martin house and consulted with Peter’s father, and finally they called Peter into the front room.
“Listen, son,” said Mr. Campbell sadly, “my Tommy and my little Harry ain’t been in sight for twenty-four hours. You know they ran away from home, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mr. Campbell.”
“And you know which way they went, don’t you?”
Peter looked at his shoes. Then one of the policemen kneeled in front of Peter, and tweaked his jaw, and laughed, and said: “You tell us which way they went, because you see if you don’t, they might get lost and starve to death in the woods. They wouldn’t like you to let them starve in the woods. We’ve got a car outside and if you tell us which way they went we’ll let you ride with us … if you want.”
“That’s right, Petey,” said his father. “Tell your father where they went.”
Peter went out on the porch and pointed the wrong way, towards the hills. “They went that way, to the hills, they said they was going to the ocean and get a ship to China.” Peter had often thought of doing this himself and it seemed like a good lie.
The whole police force went searching through the hills all afternoon. Peter stayed in the barn with little Charley. At dusk, Joe came in with a rubber tube and began patching it up at the tool table. Peter told his big brother all about it, and Joe rubbed his jaw and sat down to think.
Finally he said, “Tell you what. We’ll go up the river first thing in the morning and warn them. We’ll start at five-thirty. Tonight we’ll sleep in the barn.”
Little Charley said he wanted to come along. Joe and Peter looked at him, wearily, and decided they might as well take him along or he might tell somebody.
“That’s the trouble with the whole bunch of you!” cried Joe, telling them off. “I dunno why I’m doing all this for you. I got other things to worry about, I got my own troubles. I can’t be spending all my time getting you kids out of jams!”
They had two bunks on the second floor of the barn, where they slept sometimes in the summertime. There was a ladder that led up a big hole in the floor big enough for lowering bales of hay, as had been the case in the old days when the Martin house was a farmhouse and the littered field in back was for growing crops. Now the barn was just an o
ld sagging shack of boards good enough to keep the car in, mixing up smells of gasoline with the old smell of cows dead and gone and manure all dried like tinder between cracks in the floor. But it was a good big barn with a tower on it that could be reached by climbing another ladder, where Joe and his buddies often went to play cards on rainy days. Joe himself had made the two bunks on the second floor with boards and put in old mattresses and horse blankets to sleep in. Joe’s bunk was the top bunk; Peter slept in the lower bunk with Charley that night.
It was May and they had to argue with their mother before she let them sleep up there so early in the year. She stayed in the barn five minutes talking up to them in the flickering darkness before she went across the yard back to the house. She knew something was up. They talked and told stories until the candle burned down, and then Joe said: “All right, guys, let’s get some shuteye now, we gotta hit the trail at five-thirty sharp.” And they all turned over on the crinkly mattresses, and closed their eyes, but it took them all an hour before they could sleep.
At dawn Joe heard the Campbell rooster crowing up the road and jumped out of the bunk to the floor. It was cold and foggy and still dark outside. He put on his boots and his heavy shirt and his leather vest, and fixed his pants inside the boots and laced them up, and woke up the boys who were sleeping together like two kittens in a basket. “Okay, you waddies, hit the deck! We got a lotta ground to cover today!” Then he busied himself around the barn getting his things together—his knife, his big work-gloves, his flashlight, his hand-ax—all the while singing his favorite song:
“O the hinges are of leather, and the windows have no glass,
And the board-roof lets the howling blizzard een—
And you kin hear the hongry coyote
As he sneaks up through the grass,
On my little old sod shanty on my claim—”
Peter and Charley were not so keen on the idea any more; it was so cold and damp and dark. They turned over like a team in the blankets, but Joe said: “Don’t you boys be gettin’ yourselves comfortable or I’ll haul you right out of that bunk!” Then Joe lit a candle and hunched down to hone his knife, and the two kids watched him with wonderful fascination and wished that they could do things the way Joe did them. This made them want to get up and be just like Joe, so they finally got up.
Peter went to the big hole in the side of the barn and looked out at the misty darkness over the river two hundred yards away. But then, on the other side of the barn, the east side, he looked through the window and saw the pink sky over the hills far away, and it certainly was beautiful, and it made him want to get going and find the Campbell boys somehow.
They sneaked into the kitchen and made bread-and-butter sandwiches with bananas and apples, and Joe told them how to wedge the lunch bags underneath their belts at the side. The whole house was silent and sleeping upstairs, they could hear their father snoring and the clocks ticking, they could smell the sleep coming from upstairs, the silence and the innocence, and the strange kind of funny ignorance of it. And when they sneaked around the kitchen on the creaky floor they had a feeling of secret excitement and gladness that clutched at their throats and made them want to yell and sing and wrestle, except that it would wake up everybody upstairs.
Joe led the way striding across the yard and across the field in back of the barn. Beauty, the old collie, came out of his doghouse yawning and followed them silently across the field. They went across the highway, over the ditch, across the high grass by the river, and then up along the riverbank in single file in the wet grass, Beauty following them silently, just as silently as he had joined them in the Martin yard … and still yawning.
They headed up the river as the sun came up brightly. They rested two miles up the river and ate some of the apples, and threw the cores in the water, and sat there chewing grassblades and thinking.
“From what I figure,” said Joe, poking a stick in the ground and drawing a line, “in that boat they can’t go fast, upstream, and they musta fooled around a lot, so we oughta ketch up to them this afternoon. And you know what? I’ll bet you a thousand dollars they won’t go no further than the Shrewsboro bridge”—he made a mark across the line—“because after that they’re in New Hampshire deep and they’ll be coming to some rapids up near that town up there. And they’ll get scared, because they’re just a coupla crazy brats like you!” He rubbed up the lines and threw the stick away.
They went on up the river another two miles, the dog leading the way now that he knew they were following the bank. At eleven o’clock he came trotting back with a dead crow hanging from his mouth and Joe took it and flung it in the river and pushed Beauty in the water so he would swim around and get clean again. Beauty came scrambling up the bank, dripping wet, and shook himself furiously, showering everybody. That was when little Charley made the first sound he had made all day long: he cackled and rolled in the grass, happily, for incomprehensible reasons of his own.
They moved on till noon when it got hot and dusty, even on the river trail, and little Charley said he was thirsty; so they went into a pine wood across a dirt road to look for a brook, and found one gurgling over some rocks under the pines. They drank the cold water and soaked their hair in it, and stayed there awhile resting in the shade, Charley falling asleep for a few minutes. Joe took his hand-ax and cut himself a big staff from the birch on the hill the other side of the brook.
They went back to the river trail and trudged along till three o’clock in the afternoon. Far up ahead the forested bends kept turning and losing themselves in the white hazy shimmer of the river so that it never seemed they were getting anyplace. But around three o’clock they came in sight of the Shrewsboro bridge. And sure enough, there up ahead, on the bank, sat Tommy Campbell and Harry Campbell, motionless, propped up in the high grass, communing sorrowful thoughts of their own and thinking how hungry they were.
Tommy Campbell was glad to see them. He jumped up and came running over, hurdling the ditches with a yell (“showing off as usual,” as Peter said) and laughing and trying out Joe’s hand-ax on some bushes. They broke open the lunches and all five of them ate everything up in two minutes and threw the banana peels in the water. Everybody was chattering except Joe, who was hunched at the rowboat pulled up on the sand.
They spent the rest of the sunny afternoon sitting in the high grass by the water. It was a beautiful, lazy afternoon, breezy and soft. Tommy Campbell just lay back and kept spitting silently through his teeth in the breeze that made the grass wave. The way he spat out over the grass was the calmest, laziest sight Peter had ever seen. Little Harry Campbell lay on his elbows looking fixedly at the ants on an anthill beneath his nose, and Charley just hunched up with his hands around his knees and watched his big brother Joe. Joe was inspecting the rowboat from stem to stern and not talking to anybody. Peter began to realize that Joe had come only on account of that boat. He kept inspecting it and looking underneath it and going out every now and then to row around on the water.
Suddenly it started to grow cloudy, and in several minutes, before they could talk about it, some rain began to fall in hard scattered drops. Joe rowed back quickly and pulled the boat up on the sand and yelled: “Okay, you guys, make for the bridge and pick up all the sticks and paper you see on the way. Come on, come on!”
They all ran for the bridge picking up sticks, and by the time they got underneath it the rain was coming down thunderously, and it was getting gray all around, and a powerful wind came sweeping down the river and turned the water dirty and dark. Joe was struggling along the shore dragging the rowboat over the shallow water. He was alone, and he was cursing, and as usual he was deep in lonely thought.
And then, suddenly, it was almost as dark as night and it was getting windy, cold, and damp. Little Harry Campbell began to cry, but he was “a crybaby anyway,” and Brother Tom told him so, though he felt sorry a moment later and sat him down roughly beside him. But Joe got a big fire going with the sticks and the lunchbags,
a crackling big inferno of a fire that made everybody feel good again, they all stood around it rubbing their hands and laughing, jabbering away. Everybody was waiting for Joe to say something, too, but he was just staring into the flames and thinking. When they looked up from the flames all they could see was blackness and black water and rain falling, and a few lights far away across the river.
The wind began to blow howling hard, and suddenly it shifted and all the rain slanted in underneath the bridge and spat smoking in the fire. The boys ran to the other side under the bridge and huddled up on the sand and watched their fire die down. Joe was cursing, trying to start a new fire with some old damp paper. Little Harry saw a rat scampering across the sand and started crying again, and even Peter and Tommy Campbell were ready to cry, but little Charley Martin just sat there watching his brother Joe, not saying a word. They looked around with frightened eyes at the great desolated woods and the dark river and the whole wilderness of rain around them. It seemed to all the boys that there was something they had betrayed, something that had to do with home, their parents, their brothers and sisters, even their things in drawers and boxes in closets and chests—and that this now was their dark punishment. They looked at each other and wondered what was going to be done now.
That was when the police cars found them. The men were driving over the bridge and had noticed the fire down on the sand and the shadowy boys hovering around it. Old man Campbell came hopping down the bank through the brush on his farmer’s legs and hugged his boys to him and cried. The cops were just behind him shaking their heads and glaring at the older Joe. Finally George Martin came, huffing and puffing through the bushes and yelling: “Great God a-Mighty! Here they are!”
“Thank the Lord we found you,” cried old man Campbell, hugging his boys, “or this would have been your last night on earth for sure! Your mothers are worried and waiting for you, boys! Let’s all go home and have some nice hot chocolate and cake!”