To get to it, I went out the back door of my house, across the backyard, to the stone wall. Our house was at the bottom of a hill, and the yard that abutted ours was, say, six feet higher than ours. There were a number of footholds in the stone wall, and the age of which I am writing now, there was one that got me to the top of the wall in one climbing step, my belly on the top of the wall, and a certain amount of minor scrabbling with one suspended foot, a certain amount of wriggling, and I was on all fours in the next backyard. I straightened up slowly, and viewed the terrain. For the moment, I was safe, because this was our own stone wall I was standing on. From there on out it was no man’s land. There was, after a sortie across the backyard on the right, a driveway. There was, after an even longer expedition across the backyard directly ahead, a path that led from their back door along the side of the house to their front door and thence to the street. I didn’t know either of these families. All that meant was that they didn’t have kids my age, and consequently they didn’t exist.
The driveway to the right was safer, except that that backyard had a flower garden in it, and the lady of the house liked her flower garden. On the other hand, the driveway was a little ways away from the house. The path directly ahead was right next to its house, therefore right next to people. More than that, there was an unwritten law about cutting through lots. Short cuts were, basically, against The Law. By usage, anyone who objected to your cutting through a driveway was an old grouch, but people who objected to your strolling along their path had a good deal of sweet reason on their side.
The problem was solved one way or another, usually by one kid going one way, one the other, to halve the odds.
It now occurs to me as curious that we should have all this regard for law and order when what we were going to do next was illegal, both by unwritten law, possibly by statute law, and certainly in most vigorous terms by whoever owned the house that the path led by.
Because on that house’s front lawn was The Horse Chestnut Tree. We visited it for weeks in the Fall before it was time, tried to but could not resist pulling the early green burrs off the lower branches. The prickles on the burrs were not yet hard, but splitting the green burrs was mostly a matter of hitting them with stones on the curb, and splitting the nuts along with the burrs.
A little later on, the prickles on the burrs were harder, and sometimes there was a fingernail hold by which you could split the burrs open without hammering them. Then the horse chestnuts were white, or only partially marbled.
All this debris we left on the front lawn of this house.
Later still, one day there would be burrs on the ground. This was the day. The burrs were less green, the prickles pricked, enough to hurt, not enough to draw blood. You split the green burr and you saw the brown, marbled, wonderfully shaped nut, glossy but not shiny, made to rub your thumb over. On the other side, the dry woody button. The dullness of this irregular slightly rough patch was perfection. It made the smooth part smoother. All this wonder was cradled in the green burr lined with dead, soft white.
It is hopeless to try to describe perfection. I will try no longer. I will simply state that to me the noblest work of nature is a horse chestnut.
We wore knickerbockers then, and we filled our pockets with horse chestnuts, and when they were full, dumped them into our pants. There was a simple limit to the number of horse chestnuts a kid could want: As many as there were.
We did this collecting, in plain defiance of the law that stated you could not stand on anyone’s front yard unless you knew the people on whose front yard you were standing. When it was a stranger’s yard, the moment anyone in the house came to a window or door and hollered, you were in duty bound to go away. Until the person disappeared. If crept up on by such an enemy, you were obliged to listen to the jawing, but you were not compelled to allow yourself to be hit.
I guess now I know that the people who lived in the house either liked kids or knew that kids were one of the occupational hazards of owning a horse chestnut tree.
The only time they ever hollered, and then not until driven past endurance, was when we, a few days later, would case the tree and find there were no burrs on the ground, but some still on the tree.
We shook the branches, we climbed, but mostly we took sticks and threw them up in the tree to knock the chestnuts loose. We got hit on the head by falling sticks, chestnuts, and each other. They were getting rare now, and we stepped on each other’s hands and wrestled some.
All this time, we were sorting out. At that time, I betrayed a character trait which has served me in bad stead all my life. To this day I can walk into a store where they have something I have never bought before: “I should like to see a Sicilian nutmeg soother, if you please.” “Why certainly, sir, will you step over here?” There is a tray of Sicilian nutmeg soothers. I look and eventually say, “I think I would like that one in the second row, please.” It is a modest enough object. It doesn’t have rhinestones, or four-ply driving wheels, like some of the others. The clerk dimples with sheer joy and bridled cupidity. “Oh, you do have good taste, sir. That is our very best, made by Toynbee of Old Franistan Road.” All the rest cost three zlotys. This one goes for seventeen hundred cruzeiros.
The same with the chestnuts. The perfect chestnuts were so perfect, I had to get rid of the ones that had an interrupted marbling here, a pale spot there. Those that were squirrel- or worm-bitten were immediately out.
Now what did we do with them? Well, first, we just got them. Then we piled them in piles and were pleased that we had gotten more than, or better than, our friends. Then we carried them around in our pockets and showed them, and traded them, and polished them against the sides of our noses. We tried to eat them, but could not.
After several weeks of that, we started to use them. They could be made into pipes, the same as acorns, with straws for stems. That was for little kids. They could be pierced with the mumbly-peg blade of a scout knife, strung one at each end of a string, whirled around the head and caught on telephone wires. Unlike kites and handkerchief parachutes and model airplanes, this was intentional. This was the function of this arrangement. I mean, man, these were made to be caught on telephone wires.
But first, foremost, forever, and I pledge I will teach the kids on my block this very year, they were meant for the game of killers.
You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.
In any of these events, the next thing to do is to take the loan of a shoelace. The best kind is the kind that are in your sister’s high shoes, and the best way to get it is—well, you know how. If you can’t get a shoe lace, heavy brown twine, the kind without the splinters woven in, is okay. A knot in one end, the chestnut strung on, then everybody outside.
You have one. I have one. We choose, odds or evens with fingers. Whoever loses—let’s say it’s you, for literary ease; you hold up your string with the chestnut dangling. In my right hand I take the end of my string, in my left, the chestnut. I hold the chestnut almost, but not quite, directly above the left hand with string tight and bring it down in a whipping movement. The object, first, is for my chestnut to hit yours, the secondary object is to hit it and break it. This ordinarily does not happen the first time. Now you get a crack at mine.
There is a subsidiary object to this game: if you don’t break the other guy’s chestnut, but hit it a good one, the string will wrap itself around his fist and with any luck, his chestnut will crack him a good one on the knuckles. It is, however, entirely possible, nay, likely, that if you miss, your chestnut will do that to you.
&n
bsp; Sooner or later, a crack will show up in one or both chestnuts. Now an even more delicate frisson comes into play: it is possible that you, striking with a cracked chestnut, will bust yours while hitting at mine. There is a kind of marvelous irony about this that we recognized even then.
We called the chestnuts killers. You had a one-, two-, or forty-killer if you had broken that many chestnuts. However, if a one-killer broke a forty-killer, my memory is that the one-killer became a forty-one-killer, but I am not sure about this.
Other elements of the game were the size of the chestnut: a big one was heavier, obviously, which at first seemed an advantage. But consider: a heavy one hung there, like a dumb beast, and absorbed all punishment. A small one bounced away the moment it was hit. Conversely, when it was time to hit with the small one, you weren’t bringing a hell of a lot of weight to bear. It was a toss-up. I owned a small one once, and according to sworn testimony, it was a forty-killer. I liked small ones better.
Skill was of the essence. If you hit it from on top, so that it did not swing like a pendulum, but took the blow, it was odds-on you were going to crack it, but it was also odds-on that if you missed it, you were in for a pretty good knuckle, and you didn’t have much chance of getting his knuckle.
As the season went on, the nut itself shrank inside the shell, and the shell was easily cracked, and at the end of the season we were playing not with lovely glossy brown beauties, but with little, gnarled cheesy insides.
Of the folklore of the care and treatment of killers, there was no end. Roast them like mickies, soak them in Three-in-One oil, store them in the cellar, bury them in talcum powder—but one I remember best. My father, as I have said, was sick. Now we knew, as kids, if a man was very sick, he took very strong medicine. “Jeez, if it’s strong medicine for a man, think what it would do to a killer.” I took a pinch of this, a wet of that from the medicine chest and dumped it into a milk bottle. I soaked a couple of killers in it.
It was magic. That’s how I got my forty-killer. Would that it had been magic for my father.
Well, it’s getting on for Fall. I will show the kids about the horse chestnuts.
I keep thinking that they don’t know about any of these things, and maybe they don’t. But then, grownups when I was a kid didn’t know—did they?—any of the world I lived in.
Maybe my kids have got a whole world of their own, with different objects, and I am not admitted to their councils. I devoutly hope so.
My world, as a kid, was full of things that grownups didn’t care about. My fear now is that all of us grownups have become so childish that we don’t leave the kids much room to move around in, that we foolishly believe that we understand them so well because we share things with them.
This is not only folly, it is not fair. At somebody’s house one night, a harassed father who was trying to talk to grownups with his brood around, finally spoke a simple sentence of despair, “For Gossakes, go upstairs or downstairs!”
He was, I believe, asking for privacy. He was, I believe, entitled to it.
I think kids are, too.
Let them moon, let them babble, let them be scared.
I guess what I am saying is that people who don’t have nightmares don’t have dreams.
If you will excuse me, I have an appointment with myself to sit on the front steps and watch some grass growing.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Robert Paul Smith’s Lost & Found
Got to Stop Draggin’ that Little Red Wagon Around
How to Grow Up in One Piece
Translations from the English
*
When I Am Big (Lillian Hoban, illustrator)
Nothingatall, Nothingatall, Nothingatall (Allan E. Cober, illustrator)
Jack Mack (Erik Blegvad, illustrator)
How to Do Nothing with No One All Alone by Yourself (Elinor Goulding Smith, illustrator)
*
Where He Went: Three Novels
The Time and the Place
Because of My Love
The Journey
So It Doesn’t Whistle
*
The Tender Trap (with Max Shulman)
Copyright © 1957 by Robert Paul Smith
Copyright renewed 1985 by Joseph Smith and Daniel Smith
Reissued 2010
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Book design by Chris Welch
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Smith, Robert Paul.
“Where did you go?” “Out.” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” /
Robert Paul Smith ; drawings by James J. Spanfeller.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-33941-3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-393-63510-2 (e-book)
1. Smith, Robert Paul—Childhood and youth.
2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.
I. Spanfeller, James J., 1930– II. Title.
PS3537.M752Z46 2010
813'.54—dc22
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Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. Page 8