Houseboat Girl

by Lois Lenski

  “How many motors you got?” asked Dan.

  “Two outboard motors, one in and one out,” said Uncle Seth. “I figure I’ve got three chances, with two motors just alike. If one breaks down, I put the other one on. If the second one breaks down, I can take the necessary part off the first one. I always carry extra spark plugs. I won’t go on the river, even fishing, without extra spark plugs and sheer pins.”

  A cat appeared sniffing at Uncle Seth’s fishing nets. Uncle Seth threw it a fish head. Patsy recognized it as the one she had seen at the houseboat.

  “Is that your ten-dollar cat, Uncle Seth?” she asked.

  “No,” said the lamplighter. “He’s a six-dollar cat now. That fellow came back and paid me four dollars of what he owes me. As soon as he pays the other six, it’ll be just a plain tomcat.”

  The children laughed.

  “Which way do you go?” asked Patsy. “Up river or down?”

  “It all depends on the wind,” said Uncle Seth. “The river is like the hallways of a house, with a breeze blowin’ through and none at all up on the banks. You can catch more wind on the river than anywhere else. When it’s thirty-five or forty miles an hour on land, it’s too rough to be on the river. If the wind is comin’ down river, I go up first. There’s rough water on a downstream wind. If the wind is up river, I go down first and get rough water down there in an upstream wind.”

  “You sure do know the river, Uncle Seth!” said Dan.

  “Not any better than Daddy does,” said Patsy. “Daddy knows all about winds, too.”

  The lamplighter laughed. “Sure your daddy knows. He’s been a river rat all his life.”

  “Do you go out every day, Uncle Seth?” asked Dan.

  “Every fourth day,” said the man. “The kerosene lamps will burn for five days. That gives me an extra day in case of a storm. I keep up with the radio on weather. When windy weather is predicted, I go out a day ahead. This throws an extra trip on me in a month, but it’s better than risking my life in a storm.”

  “Gee!” said Dan. “You sure are a brave man, Uncle Seth. I’m gonna be a lamplighter like you when I get big.”

  “Fine!” said Uncle Seth. “The main thing is to keep the lights burning and clean. A lamplighter’s got to be dependable. If a light goes out, it means some fool that’s never been in a boat before might get drownded!”

  “Bet you use lots of gas, don’t you?” said Patsy.

  “It takes twenty gallons a week for just my boats,” said Uncle Seth, “and one quart of oil to every four gallons of gas.” He climbed in his boat ready to go.

  “Gee! I sure wish I could go with you,” said Dan.

  “Me, too,” said Patsy.

  “Can’t take you out on my regular run,” said the lamplighter. He picked up a lantern from the floor of his boat. “This lamp’s broken and got to be replaced. I’m takin’ the new one over to Island No. 27 light. Guess you can go along with me over there and back.” He lifted a new lamp in the boat.

  The children climbed in and soon they were chugging down the chute. At the ferry landing they saw children playing on the dock and in the water.

  “Look, Dan, they’re in swimming,” said Patsy. “It’s not too cold for them. Mama always says it’s too cold for us.”

  “There goes the ferryboat over to Ashport,” said Dan.

  The ride around the south end of Fork-a-Deer Island did not take long. Uncle Seth climbed up the white ladder on the tripod, mounted the lantern and secured it, then opened the globe and lighted it. The children watched him and waited, then he climbed back down. Soon the boat was rounding the island again and going back up the chute.

  “I’ll let you out at the ferry landing,” said Uncle Seth.

  “O. K.,” said Dan.

  “Thank you for the ride, Uncle Seth!” the children called as they climbed out, and he started back to his own dock.

  They waved good-bye and watched him go. Then they looked at the children playing in the river. An old boat was tied to a piling a little way out, and a small boy about five years old was playing in it. He had two sticks and was pretending to row. The other children were wading near the bank and splashing water on each other. The river bank was a sea of wet slimy mud. One boy picked up handfuls of mud and threw them at the other children. Suddenly he slipped and fell. When he picked himself up, he was covered with mud from head to foot. The others laughed and laughed.

  Patsy and Dan stood at one side and stared.

  “Who are they?” asked Dan.

  “I don’t know,” said Patsy. “I never saw them before. They don’t go to school on our bus. Maybe they’re visiting somebody around here.”

  “Let’s go home,” said Dan.

  Patsy looked up the ferry road. “Oh dear,” she said, “why did we let Uncle Seth put us out here? Now we got to go past Andy Dillard’s fish house and I’m scared. He might come out and…”

  “I’m not scared,” said Dan bravely. “He won’t dare hurt us. I’ll tell the boss man if he does.”

  In front of Andy Dillard’s fish house, several cars were parked.

  “Look at all the cars,” said Patsy. “He’s takin’ all of Daddy’s fish customers.”

  “We’ll run by fast,” said Dan, “then he won’t even see us.”

  None of the children in the water had spoken to the Foster children. As they started to go, a loud scream rang out, so they turned back. A girl on the bank was pointing out to the old boat by the piling. Out there Patsy and Dan saw a small head just above water. They ran closer. Now all the larger children were pointing and screaming, “He can’t swim! He can’t swim!”

  Patsy looked and saw the little head go under. Then she saw it come up again. The next minute she was in the river with her clothes on. Her action was automatic. She was so used to jumping in, she did so without thinking. She swam as fast as she could to the old boat and got there just as the boy started going down for the third time. She dove under and grabbed his arm. She pulled him up, and steadying herself by holding to the boat with her left hand, placed the boy’s limp arm around her neck. She had been rescued so many times herself, she knew just what to do. Then she swam back to the dock, dragging the boy along with her.

  One of the strange children, a boy bigger than Dan, helped her lift the boy up on the dock. Patsy climbed up after him.

  “Quick!” she said. “We’ve got to pump the water out of him.”

  She turned the boy over the way Stub Henderson had turned her over long ago at Mayfield Creek. She began pumping him up and down to expel the water from his lungs.

  “Here! Let me do that!” a man’s voice said.

  It was Uncle Seth. He continued the artificial respiration and soon the boy stopped choking and could breathe again. The color came back to his face. The lamplighter had heard the commotion and, crashing through the bushes, had come as quickly as he could. The strange children, including the big boy, stood there like dummies.

  “He’s freezing—poor kid!” said Uncle Seth.

  He took the half-drowned boy in his arms and hurried up the road to the place where the cars were waiting for the ferry to come back from Tennessee. The people, sensing disaster, crowded around Seth Parker in front of Andy Dillard’s fish house. Patsy and Dan followed, but when Patsy saw Andy Dillard come out the door, she turned to Dan and said, “Let’s run!”

  Uncle Seth called, her back.

  “I’m cold,” said Patsy, looking down at her dripping clothes. “I’m going home.”

  “Wait a minute,” called Uncle Seth.

  But Patsy and Dan did not wait. Looking back as they ran, they saw a woman come screaming out of the house to meet the people carrying the boy. They saw Seth Parker talking to Andy Dillard and they saw Andy Dillard pointing and shaking his arm in their direction.

  “Look! He’s coming! He’s after us!” cried Dan.

  “He can’t catch us,” said Patsy, breathless.

  They ran up the road to the store and panted pell-mell
down the river bank. The houseboat had moved out and lower down, beyond a wide stretch of wet mud. They flew across the planks laid in the mud and over the stage plank without stopping. They came face to face with Mama.

  She stared at Patsy in her wet clothes. After one glance she began to scold.

  “You fell in again? Accidentally or on purpose?” cried Mama. “I thought I told you it was too cold to go in the water today. Milly came back long ago with the grasshoppers. Where have you been?”

  Patsy began to cry, so Dan answered briefly, “Down to see Uncle Seth. Then we went over to the ferry landing.”

  Patsy began to shiver and shake with the cold.

  “Take those wet clothes off at once!” scolded Mama. “If you keep on fallin’ in, Patsy, I tell you that old river’s goin’ to claim you one of these days. I always said you was my unluckiest one. If you could only get a little sense…”

  Patsy was too tired to answer. She threw off her wet clothes and put on dry T-shirt and jeans. She was still shivering, so she jumped under the bed covers in the lower bunk. She fell asleep almost at once. After a while she was roused by the sound of men’s voices. Dan crept in from the kitchen and whispered, “That mean old Andy Dillard’s out there. He’s come to run Daddy off the river bank. We’d better scram!”

  Patsy and Dan tiptoed through the kitchen to the back porch. The stern of the houseboat was swinging out in deep water. It was too far out for them to try to jump from the guard to the land, and there was no plank. Besides, if they jumped, they would land in the sea of oozy mud.

  “Here’s the johnboat,” said Dan, untying it.

  “Let’s go up the chute,” said Patsy.

  Patsy took the oars and they made good headway. Just before they rounded the bend, they heard Daddy calling. They looked back. He was on the back porch and beside him stood two other men and Mama. The children recognized Seth Parker and Andy Dillard.

  “We got away just in time,” said Dan.

  “I know they saw us,” said Patsy. “They’ll come after us sure. I’ll row as fast as I can and we’ll find a place to hide.”

  When Patsy’s arms got tired, Dan took the oars for a while. The chute up river was new to them, as Daddy always went down the chute to set his lines near the river itself. It looked like unexplored wilderness on both sides, with willows and brush coming down to the water. They saw no houses, no docks or landings on the banks and they wondered if no one lived there. They almost expected to see lions and tigers peeping through the bushes and monkeys hanging from the trees.

  They were looking for a cove to hide in, when they came to an uprooted tree. A great mass of shaggy roots was upended. In the tangle of branches they saw a red johnboat floating.

  “Look! There’s a boat!” said Dan.

  Patsy stood up. “It’s a good one, too. There’s hardly any water in it, so it doesn’t leak much. Let’s get it.”

  “It belonged to some man up river,” said Dan. “I don’t think he wants it or he’d a come after it.”

  Both children knew well the unwritten law of the river: Finders are Keepers. The river was looked upon as a storehouse of treasures. Anything might come floating down—planks, timbers, furniture, chests or boxes, ropes, baskets, boats. All river people were entitled to whatever they could salvage of the many strange things that the river deposited in their pathway.

  “It’ll be our boat,” said Dan.

  “Just yours and mine,” said Patsy. “We won’t let anybody else use it.”

  In the excitement over their find and in the hard work of freeing the red boat from the tangle of tree branches, the children forgot about Andy Dillard and the necessity of hiding from him. They pushed and shoved until they got the boat clear and out in the chute, where they tied it by a rope to their own johnboat.

  They took an empty pail and bailed the water

  out. They looked at each other and grinned.

  “It’s a peach!” said Dan.

  “It’s ours!” said Patsy.

  Then they heard the sound of a motor and there was Milly in Daddy’s other johnboat. She yelled to them to tie on behind and they did. They tried to tell her about the red boat but she could not hear. In a few minutes they were back at the houseboat.

  “Us kids found a boat,” said Dan, jumping up on deck as they came alongside.

  Patsy added, “Whoever finds anything in the river gets to keep it. So it’s ours—Dan’s and mine!”

  “That’s O. K.,” said Daddy. “It’s your boat.”

  Then Patsy gasped, for she saw that the two men were still there. She could not run now. She could not hide. She had to face them. She had to listen to what they were saying.

  “All those big kids stood on the bank and yelled—those that didn’t run away,” said Seth Barker. “They was all cowards but her. I saw it all with my own eyes.”

  “What’s her name?” asked Andy Dillard.

  “Patsy,” said Seth Barker.

  Daddy and Mama stood back and said nothing.

  “How old are you, Patsy?” asked Andy Dillard.

  He wasn’t cross at all. He spoke in a quiet, friendly voice.

  “Nine, going on ten,” said Patsy without looking up.

  “Well—I don’t know what I can do…” began Andy Dillard awkwardly. “She’s a mighty fine girl.” He turned to Daddy and shook hands. He kept pumping Daddy’s arm up and down. “A girl to be proud of! A girl to be proud of!” He shook Mama’s hand, too, and Patsy saw tears in Mama’s eyes.

  “We’re sure glad you came by,” Patsy heard Mama say. “Bring your wife along next time, I’d like to meet her.”

  Patsy could not believe her ears. Was Mama crazy or what—talking to Andy Dillard like that! Didn’t she know he was Daddy’s worst enemy?

  It was Dan who was the brave one, Dan who insisted on a show-down. He marched up to Andy Dillard, shook his fist in his face and said, “You’d just better not try to run my daddy off the river bank,” he said,” ’cause we’re stayin’ right here whether you like it or not.”

  Then Andy Dillard shook Dan’s hand, too. He laughed and said, “I reckon there’s plenty of fish in the river for your daddy and for me, too. And when I run out, I’ll send my customers over to your dad.”

  He turned to Patsy and patted her on the back. “I’d like to give you a gold medal, Patsy,” he said, “but I can’t.”

  “What for?” asked Patsy.

  “For pullin’ that bad boy Bobby Dillard out of the river.”

  Patsy shrugged her shoulders.

  “Oh, that!” she said. “That was nothin’!”

  CHAPTER X

  A Trip to Town

  PATSY DIPPED HER NET in the fish box and brought up a large catfish.

  “This here’s a girl fish!” she said. “It’s got lipstick on just like Milly! Look how red its mouth is.”

  The customer laughed, but Milly frowned as she cleaned the fish, weighed it and took the man’s money. Milly sometimes waited on customers when Daddy was busy. After the man left, she tried to catch Patsy, but soon gave up. Nobody could run round the guards as fast as she.

  Mama called Patsy and handed her the broom.

  “Start sweepin’,” she said. “This porch is just a catchall. Everybody dumps everything here—shoes, boots, nets, fishing gear, boxes, boards, baskets, ropes, strings, clothes, wire, rubber tires, chicken feed and goodness knows what else. When they don’t know where to put it, they dump it here.” She picked up an armful and went indoors.

  Patsy began to sweep lazily. It was fun to sweep for she never had to use a dustpan. She just swept all the refuse into the river so she would never see it again.

  “There!” she cried, after one vicious swoop. “That’s for you, Mister River. Take it away—you can have it.”

  Old newspapers, a cardboard carton and several rags went floating, then a roll of wire and some banana peelings. Blackie was sleeping in the sun, with Tom the cat curled up between his paws. Patsy swept carefully around
them. She swept on and on, dreaming. The Fosters were going to town that afternoon and she was trying to make up her mind what to get. Swish! went her broom. Then she looked in dismay. There were her shoes floating in the river, one like a boat and the other upside down. Quickly she dropped her broom, fell flat on the deck and stretched out her long arms, but she could not reach them. She ran and got a fish pole and tried to reach them with that. But the current was a lively one, and already the river was taking them away from her.

  Patsy jumped up and said to herself, “Well, I’ll just give them to some little old girl down river!” She went on sweeping.

  “You know what,” Patsy called to Mama inside, “at the Harrises’ store they’re selling watermelons for fifteen cents.”

  Mama was not interested in watermelons. Mama was talking to Milly.

  “There’s one job I hate,” Mama said. “I’ve got to wash their heads every Saturday. Good thing it rained yesterday—I’ve got a whole tubful of nice clean rainwater. Come here, Bunny.”

  “Dan has two nickels in a big glass jar with a screw top,” said Patsy. “It’s up on the shelf over his bed.”

  No reply from Mama.

  “I’m savin’ my money,” said Dan.

  “He’s savin’ it to spend it, Mama,” Patsy went on.

  No reply from Mama.

  “If Dan had another nickel, he could buy a watermelon for all of us to eat!” said Patsy.

  This time Mama heard.

  “I told you you can’t buy a watermelon,” she said. “I told you it would give us all the thirty-day chills. Eatin’ watermelon so late in the season always gives people the chills.”

  On the back porch, Mama started the head washing. Milly was done already and had hers up in pin curls. Bunny sat on a box, leaning over, her eyes covered with a washcloth. Mama rubbed the little girl’s head vigorously, soaping it well. Bunny did not cry or fuss.