Delbert Bumpus, the runt of the litter, came to school about three days a month. It was three times too often. Whenever he showed up, there would be a lot of yelling, and they’d throw him out. Delbert never played with anybody and he hardly ever talked; but he spat a lot. Since he lived with the goats and rabbits and chickens, he didn’t smell exactly like the rest of us, either—and we weren’t any bargain.
One time, Miss Parsons, our gym teacher, made the mistake of putting Delbert in a volleyball game. I guess they never played volleyball in Kentucky, because at first he didn’t seem to understand what was going on. But when he got the hang of it, everything changed. He stood there, watching them knock the ball back and forth, for maybe five minutes, and then somebody hit one toward him. He left the ground about three feet and gave the ball an overhand shot that sent it screaming over the net; it caught Schwartz just below the left eye and knocked him flat. Bumpus’ side cheered.
Miss Parsons said, “No, Delbert, you mustn’t hit it that hard.”
Bumpus spat on the gym floor and glared at her for a minute, and then growled, “What the goddamn hell is this game ’spose ta be about?”
While Schwartz crawled around on the floor, crying, Miss Parsons—who taught Sunday school at the Baptist church—tried again.
“You mustn’t use those bad words, Delbert. Now, let’s begin the game again, shall we?”
Miss Parsons believed in law and order. Schwartz, who had been removed to the nurse’s office, trailing blood, had been replaced by Roger Beanblossom, who, at the age of seven, was already six feet tall. Beanblossom, famous for his serve, sliced a whistler right at Bumpus, who stopped scratching just in time to slam the ball back over the net. This time, he got Jack Morton in the pit of his stomach, knocking the wind out of him like a deflated beach ball. He slumped to the floor, the color of Cream of Wheat.
“No, Delbert.” Miss Parsons was back in the fray. “Here, I’ll show you.”
She tapped the ball delicately into the air, to show how the game was played. Bumpus, watching this exhibition, came out with a line that soon became legend at Warren G. Harding School.
“Who the hell wants to play a goddamn silly girl’s game lahk that?”
Miss Parsons, now beet red and faced with a question many of us had privately asked, since volleyball was a hated game among the males of the school, could do only one thing. “Delbert Bumpus, you go to the office this instant!”
Picking his nose, Delbert slouched toward the door and muttered, with classic simplicity: “Screw you.”
And he left. It was lucky that Miss Parsons didn’t know what he meant by that, or there would have been real trouble. He was kicked out of school for only a week.
Then there was the time Miss Shields opened up the day by reading us a chapter of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Miss Shields was tall and thin and wore rimless glasses. She was a very kind lady, who believed that all children were basically good.
“Boys and girls,” she began, after setting the book down, “are there any questions?”
Bumpus, who had never asked a question, spoke up. He had a very deep voice for a kid; already it sounded a lot like old Emil’s, rich and phlegmy.
“Yeah.” That was all he said.
“Oh, you have a question, Delbert?” asked Miss Shields, obviously pleased. She felt at long last she was reaching him.
“Yeah.” He was a kid of few words.
“Well, what is your question, Delbert?”
“Was this guy Raggedy Andy a bohunk?”
“What was that?” Miss Shields was caught off guard.
“Mah Uncle Cletus knew a bohunk onc’t named Andy.”
Miss Shields, who did not know Delbert Bumpus the way the class did, gamely replied: “Well, no, Delbert, Raggedy Andy was not of Bohemian extraction. He was a doll.”
“Well, ah’ll be goddamned,” he snorted.
“What was that, Delbert?” Miss Shields felt the class slipping from her grasp.
“You mean a doll that walked aroun’? Shee-it!”
“Delbert, you mustn’t use words like that in class. Yes, Raggedy Andy was a doll who walked around, and so was Raggedy Ann.”
Delbert snorted again in disbelief and, as he sat down, said in a loud voice, “Ah nevah did heah such a crock a hog drippin’s.”
“Delbert,” said Miss Shields with an ashen face, “report to the office this instant!” We waited for him to say what he usually said when he left the room, but I guess he liked Miss Shields. He just stalked out and went home.
The only time Delbert ever said anything to me directly was one day when I made the mistake of throwing him out at first base. He looked at me real hard for a long time and then said: “Doan’ worry, piss-ant, ah’ll git yew someday.”
Little did I dream at the time what form his revenge would take.
Delbert was the only Bumpus kid in my grade, but they infested Warren G. Harding like termites in an outhouse. There was Ima Jean, short and muscular, who was in the sixth grade, when she showed up, but spent most of her time hanging around the poolroom. There was a lanky, blue-jowled customer they called Jamie, who ran the still and was the only one who ever wore shoes. He and his brother Ace, who wore a brown fedora and blue work shirts, sat on the front steps at home on the Fourth of July, sucking at a jug and pretending to light sticks of dynamite with their cigars when little old ladies walked by. There were also several red-faced girls who spent most of their time dumping dishwater out of windows. Babies of various sizes and sexes crawled about the back yard, fraternizing indiscriminately with the livestock. They all wore limp, battleship-gray T-shirts and nothing else. They cried day and night.
We thought that was all of them—until one day a truck stopped in front of the house and out stepped a girl who made Daisy Mae look like Little Orphan Annie. My father was sprinkling the lawn at the time; he wound up watering the windows. Ace and Emil came running out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. The girl carried a cardboard suitcase—in which she must have kept all her underwear, if she owned any—and wore her blonde hair piled high on her head; it gleamed in the midday sun. Her short muslin dress strained and bulged. The truck roared off. Ace rushed out to greet her, bellowing over his shoulder as he ran:
“MAH GAWD! HEY, MAW, IT’S CASSIE! SHE’S HOME FROM THE REFORMATORY!”
Emil grabbed her suitcase and Cassie, the ripest 16-year-old ever to descend on northern Indiana, kissed her father in a way that clouded up windows for blocks around.
“Mah Gawd, Cassie, yew sure filled out!” he boomed, slapping her none too paternally on the backside. Maw Bumpus, drying her hands on her apron, yelled from the porch:
“YEW GIT IN HERE, CASSIE, AN’ LEAVE YORE PAW ALONE. LEASTWAYS TILL WE’VE ET.”
After that, my father stepped up his spyglass work considerably, since they had no window shades and Cassie liked to dress very casually around the house. She also liked to lie in the swing on the front porch and suck jawbreakers when the weather was hot.
On Saturday nights, even before Cassie arrived, a roaring fleet of old cars would park around the Bumpus house and a mob of slope-browed, slack-jawed friends and relatives would crowd into the place. All night, paneless windows needlessly flung wide, a thunderous square dance would shake the crockery for blocks around. Hawking and spitting and swilling applejack, they yelled and sweated and thumped up and down, while old Emil sat in a corner and sawed on his fiddle. On those nights, hardly anyone dared leave their homes. These parties always ended one way—with a sudden crash, a prolonged scuffle and then:
“EF’N YEW LAY ANOTHA FINGA ON MAH WOMAN, AH’LL SLICE YEW UP LIKE HOG BACON!”
“YEW AN’ WHO ELSE, YEW SONOVABITCH!?”
Followed by screams, crashing bottles, running feet; then a distant wail of sirens. A tremendous roaring of ancient motors, a cloud of gravel and they were all gone, leaving a trail of blood and sweat behind them.
Then there were the dogs. They had at least 745 dogs. Now, our
neighborhood had always had dogs—walking-around, ordinary dogs, with names like Zero and Ralph. Once in a while, one of them would knock over a garbage can, but they were dogs that knew their place. The Bumpus hounds, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be dogs at all, or maybe they were such total dogs that no one knew how to handle them. They were the most uninhibited animals you ever saw in your life. They had absolutely no sense of privacy. They did everything in the bright sunlight, and I mean everything. They were just a great churning mass of tails and tongues and flea-bitten bodies. You could almost see the smell. On a warm day, a sort of bluish-greenish-yellowish haze hung over the Bumpus house, and even the haze had fleas.
Every day, one of the Bumpus women would swing down from the back door to feed them. She strode amid the slavering pack, carrying a greasy dishpan full of obscene table scraps and chicken gizzards.
“COME AN’ GIT YO’ VITTLES!”
The mob would charge, rolling over her in a tidal wave of heaving flanks, bloodshot eyes and mangy fur. Snarling and squealing, they stormed over the littered back yard, a heaving ball of yapping curs. The Bumpus woman, fastidiously shifting her wad of tobacco from one side of her mouth to the other, would then kick her way through the pack and back into the house.
They dug holes continuously—under the porch, in the back yard, in the middle of our scrawny lawn and under the car. Five of them took up residence beneath our garage. They slept there in shifts 24 hours a day. Every time the old man would drive the Olds in, we’d hear under the floor: “ROWFF OUFFF ROWWFF!” and they’d run in mad circles around the garage.
“Shoo! Beat it! Lemme alone!” my father would shout, as he hopped up and down amid the hounds, fighting his way toward the kitchen door. We’d see the eyes of the Bumpus family peering out, waiting for him to make a wrong move. They were a real hillbilly family when it came to their dogs. You could say anything you wanted about anybody in the family, but you didn’t dare insult one of their dogs. You didn’t say anything against Old Blue or Big Red. All the dogs—with the exception of those 17 named Luke—were named either Big Red or Old Blue.
Half a dozen times a week, my old man would come sprinting up the back steps just a stride ahead of the leader of the pack—a wiry, scarred battler named, of course, Big Red—baying the way Kentucky hounds always do when they’ve got a bear up a tree. Every time this would happen, there would be another wave of juicy guffaws and wheezy backslapping from the Bumpus mob. This really burned the old man up. After a hard day at the office and the Olds’ acting up again, fighting off Big Red to get into the kitchen really got him. He’d sit at the kitchen table, his face sweaty, gulping down a bottle of Atlas Praeger. Finally, after catching his breath, he’d say, “Goddamn it, did you see what those lousy hounds did to the hedge?”
My mother, who had long since given up caring, always shrugged her shoulders and continued stoically scouring her pots.
When there was a full moon, the Bumpus hounds, feeling some ancient canine urge, would treat the neighborhood to a nightlong serenade.
“OwwwwwOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. WOWOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo. Yap yap yaoooOOOOOOoooooooooo.”
One after the other, they would take solos; then, after a blessed moment of silence, a full chorus, 15 or 20 strong, would howl to the inconstant moon:
“Yipe yipe yaaWOOOOOOOOooooooooo. Ow Ow OWOOOOOOO. OOOOOOOooooooWOWOOO WOW! WOW! WOWOOOooooooo.”
All over the neighborhood, in darkened bedrooms, hairs rose on reddened necks, children whimpered in fear. The Bumpus hounds bayed on, interspersed with Gene Autry—“MEXICALI ROSE, KEEP SMILIN’, AH’LL COME BACK TO YEW … ”—and the running commentary of the Bumpuses themselves: “HOICK-PATOOEY.”
Months went by. We were in a state of siege. Only after you’ve lived next to a family like the Bumpuses can you understand how anyone could carry on a lifelong feud with his neighbors. My mother and father were just standard-type people. The old man would flip his cork once in a while when the furnace went on the fritz; he’d threaten to blow out his brains when the White Sox traded away the only ballplayer they had. But he never got mad enough to throw rocks at people—not until that fantastic day when the rumbling volcano of his temper, roused from dormancy by the arrival of the Bumpuses, finally erupted.
Every three of four months—roughly three times a year—we would make a major food investment. I suppose rich families don’t even think about this kind of thing, but ordinary families in those days spent their lives eating canned corn, meat loaf, peanut-butter sandwiches, oatmeal, red cabbage and peas. In such a home, the great meals that came along every few months stuck out like icebergs in the Caribbean. Buying a turkey was a state occasion. The entire family would go to the market to inspect all the turkeys; they’d discuss the relative merits of each, press the breastbones down, wiggle the legs, until finally they’d take a vote and decide on this particular 12-pounder, which is borne home with honor and prepared for the big day, like a virgin for the sacrifice. It’s a ritual almost as cherished and time-honored as the moment when the tribe hunkers around the ceremonial campfire to devour it.
For weeks afterward, the theological debates continue:
“That was a very good turkey. Very good.”
“It was almost as good as the turkey we had in Thirty-three.”
“But it wasn’t quite as tender as the one we had in Twenty-nine. Actually, this year’s was a little dry.”
These feast days are always associated with major holidays: turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas, roast chicken for birthdays and, in our house, Easter always meant ham. My father was totally ape over ham. The week before Easter, usually on Friday night, he’d say, “I’ll tell you what let’s do. What do you say we all pile in the car, drive down to the A.&P. and pick out a great big ham for Easter?”
He said it almost nonchalantly, but his eyes would be lit with a wild and ravenous light. It was no small thing he was suggesting, since “a great big ham” meant about half his pay check in those days.
My mother almost always would come back with, “Well, gee, I don’t know. Can we afford it this year? We can always get a nice little pot roast.”
“Ah, come on! What the hell. You only live once. What do you say?” And she would always relent.
Quivering slightly, he would throw on his coat and rush to the door. He could already see the ham half eaten, rich and red, weeks of magnificent pickings. Nothing goes with Atlas Praeger like cold ham after a session at the bowling alley.
We’d race to the A.&P. All the hams would be laid out, wrapped in white paper, some marked Armour Star, others Swift; not to mention Hormel. There were always great arguments as to which was really best. These were not dinky little canned hams but weighty monsters smoked darkly and tied with greasy, twisted twine.
The old man would go up and down the case, poking, peering, hefting, sniffing, occasionally punching, until, eventually, the ham was isolated from the common herd. Somehow, it looked a little different from the rest. It was our ham.
We would leave the market with at least four giant bags of groceries, our fare for the week: loaves of Wonder Bread, Campbell’s tomato soup, Ann Page pork and beans, eggs, a two-pound jar of grape jelly, fig bars, oatmeal, Cream of Wheat—real people food—and the ham. The ham.
When we got the ham home, my mother immediately stripped off the white paper and the string in the middle of our chipped white-enamel kitchen table. There it lay, exuding heavenly perfumes—proud, arrogant, regal. It had a dark, smoked, leathery skin, which my mother carefully peeled off with her sharpened bread knife. Then the old man, the only one who could lift the ham without straining a gut, placed it in the big dark-blue oval pot that was used only for hams. My mother then covered the ham with water, pushed it onto the big burner and turned up the gas until it boiled. It just sat there on the stove and bubbled away for maybe two hours, filling the house with a smell that was so luscious, so powerful as to have erotic overtones. The old man paced back and forth, occasionally lifting the lid
and prodding the ham with a fork, inhaling deeply. The ham frenzy was upon him.
After about an hour, the whole neighborhood knew what we were having for Easter. Finally, the next phase began. Grunting and straining, my mother poured off the water into another pot. It would later form the base of a magnificent pea soup so pungent as to bring tears to the eyes. She then sprinkled a thick layer of brown sugar, dotted with butter, over the ham. She stuck cloves in it in a crisscross design, then added several slices of Del Monte pineapple, thick and juicy, and topped it off with a maraschino cherry in the center of each slice. She then sprinkled more brown sugar over the lot, a few teaspoons of molasses, the juice from the pineapple can, a little salt, a little pepper, and it was shoved into the oven. Almost instantly, the brown sugar melted over the mighty ham and mingled with the ham juice in the pan.
By this time, the old man, humming nervously to himself, had checked his carving set several times, to make sure the knife was honed, the fork tines sharp—while in the oven, the ham baked on and on, until late Saturday night, when my mother finally turned off the gas, leaving the oven unopened and the ham inside. She said, as she always did, “Never eat a baked ham right after it’s baked. Let it sit in the oven for twelve hours at least.”
All night long, I would lie in my bed and smell the ham. The next day was Easter: Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies and all that. But the ham and only the ham was what really counted—not only for itself but because it always put my father in a great mood. We would play catch tomorrow; he would drink beer and tell stories. For once, the Bumpuses would be forgotten. Who the hell cares about a bunch of hillbillies, when there’s baked him on the table? I lay in my bed, awake, the dark, indescribable aroma of ham coiling sinuously into my bedroom from the kitchen. In the next room, my father snored lustily, resting up for the great feast.
A Christmas Story Page 9