Georgia Boy

by Erskine Caldwell

  Ben started down the steps. He reached the bottom one when my old man jumped up and called him.

  “Ben,” he said anxiously, catching up with him, “how much salary does the office pay?”

  “Salary?”

  “Sure,” Pa said. “How much salary do I get for being the investigator of waifs and strays?”

  “Well,” Ben said slowly, “it’s not exactly a salary.”

  “What is it then? What do you call it?”

  “It’s fees, Morris.”

  “Fees?”

  “Sure, Morris. That’s the way most of the best political jobs pay. They pay fees.”

  “How much fee do I get?” Pa asked him.

  “Twenty-five cents for every dog you catch and lock up.”

  My old man didn’t say anything right away. He stood and looked down the street in the darkness. Ben edged towards the street.

  “I reckon I am a little disappointed,” Pa said, “because I’d sort of halfway expected to get paid a salary every Saturday night.”

  “But the thing about fees, Morris, is that there’s no limit to how much money you can earn for yourself. When you get paid a salary, you know you’ll never get more than a certain amount. But when you get paid in fees, there ain’t no limit to your earnings.”

  “That’s right!” my old man said, brightening up. “I just hadn’t thought about it that way.”

  “Well,” Ben said, starting down the street, “I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

  “Good night, Ben,” Pa called after him. “I appreciate you giving me the chance to accept the job.”

  We went up the steps to the porch. Ma had left and gone inside to bed.

  “Let’s get a good night’s sleep, son,” he said to me, “Tomorrow’s going to be a big busy day. We’ll need all the rest we can get. Come on.”

  We went inside and undressed and got in bed. My old man tossed and turned for a long time, and I could hear him talking to himself about all the dogs in town he knew by name when I dropped off to sleep.

  The next morning as soon as breakfast was over, Pa got his hat and we went downtown to look for Ben Simons. We did not waste any time on the way down the street, but my old man did tell me to remember about Sparky, the coon hound he saw sleeping on Mr. Frank Bean’s front porch.

  We finally found Ben Simons in the barber shop getting a shave. He had lather all over his face when we first went in, and he couldn’t say anything for a while. As soon as he could sit up, though, he waved his hand at Pa and me.

  “Good morning, Morris,” he said. “All set to start to work?”

  “I’m itching to get started, Ben,” Pa told him.

  “I’ll be through here in a minute,” Ben said.

  After he had got out of the chair and put on his hat he told Pa to go out and round up all the dogs running loose on the streets and lock them up in the big cell-room at the jail.

  “Is that all there is to it?” Pa asked.

  “It’s just as simple as that,” Ben told him.

  We started off towards the other side of town, walking slow and keeping our eyes open for dogs. Most of them must have been sleeping at that time of the morning, because we didn’t see a single one in the streets. After about half an hour, my old man reached in his pocket and took out a dime.

  “Here, son,” he said, handing it to me, “run down to the butcher shop and get a dime’s worth of the biggest piece of meat you can buy for the money. It don’t have to be fresh—it just has to be big.”

  I ran down the street and got a good-sized piece of meat and brought it back to where I had left my old man sitting in the shade of an umbrella tree. He had dropped off to sleep, but he jumped up wide-awake when I shook him and showed him the meat.

  “That’ll make them take notice!” he said, sniffing at it “Come on, son!”

  We went down another street with my old man swinging the chunk of meat back and forth. It was no time at all before we looked back and saw somebody’s speckled bird dog trailing behind us and sniffing the meat.

  “That’s all that was needed, son,” my old man said. “There’s nothing like having a good piece of meat at a time like this.”

  He whistled at the bird dog, and the dog pricked up his ears and trotted a little faster. Pretty soon somebody else’s dog got wind of the meat, and he began trotting along behind us. By the time we had reached the railroad crossing, there were seven dogs trailing us. Pa was feeling good about it, and he told me to run ahead to the jail and open the cell-room door. When he got there, he led the dogs inside, and then slipped out with the chunk of meat before they could grab it.

  “If we’d got just one more that trip, we’d have made us two dollars,” he said. “That’s a lot of money to make by just walking up one street and down another one. I’m beginning to see why it is that a political office gets such a hold on a man. I wouldn’t want to swap jobs with anybody else in the world now. Being a politician is about the best way to earn a living that I ever heard about.”

  We went up another street with the chunk of meat, and before we’d gone a block somebody’s spaniel came running out from under a house and trotted along behind us. On the way back to the jail I counted five dogs following us. We made a special trip past Mr. Frank Bean’s house just to give Sparky a chance to smell the meat and come along with us. After we had locked them all up with the others, my old man sat down and began figuring with a matchstick in the sand.

  “That’s a little over three dollars, son,” he said, throwing the matchstick away. “That’s a heap of money to earn in just so little time. Tomorrow if we earn as much, we’ll have six dollars. By Saturday night, we’ll have eighteen or twenty dollars. That’s more money than I thought I’d ever see again in my life. Come on! Let’s go home and eat dinner. It’s noon already.

  We went home and sat down at the table, but Ma didn’t say a word, and my old man didn’t dare. We finished eating and went outside to sit in the shade of the chinaberry tree.

  After about an hour I saw Ben Simons coming up the street in a hurry. My old man was asleep, but I woke him up because I thought Ben had something important to see him about. Ben saw us under the chinaberry tree, and he hurried across the yard.

  “Morris,” he said blowing hard and all out of breath, “where in the world did you get all them dogs you locked up in the jail?”

  “Oh, them,” my old man said, raising himself on his elbow. “Why, I just rounded them up like I’m supposed to do. It’s my job to lock up all the waifs and strays I find loose in the streets. It just happened that these strays were not cows, or horses, or some other kind of animal.”

  “But you locked up Mayor Foot’s prize setter, Morris!” he said excitedly. “Besides that, Mrs. Josie Hendricks said her spaniel was missing, and I found him in the jail with all the others. Mr. Bean’s best coon hound was in there with them, too. Every last one of those dogs belongs to somebody, and besides that, the owners paid two dollars dog tax on them. You just can’t lock up folks’ dogs that they’ve paid their taxes on!”

  “They was running loose on the streets,” Pa said. “I went out and made a couple trips looking things over, and I just happened to run across a lot of dogs that acted like they didn’t have no homes. It was my duty to lock them up like I done.”

  “How’d you get them to go in the jail?”

  “Well, I sort of led them in, Ben. Dogs always have had a way of following me. I told you that last night.”

  “You didn’t bait them?”

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly,” my old man said. “I did have a little piece of meat, though, come to think of it.”

  “I thought so,” Ben said, taking off his hat and wiping his face with his handkerchief. “I knew something was peculiar.”

  Nobody said anything for a long time. After a while, Ben put his hat back on his head and looked down at my old man.

  “I think maybe I can handle the dog situation from now on, Morris,” he said. “Being do
g-catcher will probably take up too much of your time.”

  “But how about the three dollars in fees that I earned?” Pa asked. “I earned them fees, didn’t I?”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Ben said. “I don’t think the town council will want to pay out the money now, Mayor Foot would probably fire me for letting you lock up his prize-winning bird dog if we presented a bill for fees. One of the first things I learned about politics was that it never was good politics for one politician to step on another politician’s toes. I reckon it’ll be better if we’ll just let matters stand as they are. I can’t afford to lose my job on account of you, Morris.”

  My old man nodded his head and lay back again with his head resting on the trunk of the chinaberry tree.

  “I guess you’re right about it, Ben,” he said. “It looks like being a politician is a full-time job, and I wouldn’t want to be saddled with any job that took up all my time, anyway.”

  XII. The Night My Old Man Came Home

  THE DOGS BARKED at a little before midnight, and Ma got up to look out the window. It was a snowy night about two weeks before Christmas. The wind had died down a little since supper, but not enough to keep it from whistling around the eaves every once in a while. It was just the kind of white winter night when it felt good to be in bed with plenty of covers to keep warm.

  The light was burning in the hall, because we always kept one light on all night. Ma did not turn on the light in the room right away. She could see better what was going on outside when the room was dark.

  She did not say a word for quite a while. The dogs growled some, and then started in barking again. They were kept chained at the side of the house all night; if they had been allowed to run loose, they would have chewed up a lot of people who came out that way after dark. It was a good thing for my old man, too; they would have chewed him up as quick as they would have somebody they had never smelt before.

  “That’s him, all right,” Ma said, tapping the windowsill with the door key. She was no more mad than usual, but that was enough. When she tapped the woodwork with things like the door key, it was the only sign anybody needed to know how she was feeling.

  Presently there was a rumble that sounded like a two-horse wagon crossing a plank bridge. Then a jar shook the house like somebody had taken a sledge hammer and knocked most of the foundation from under it.

  That was my old man trying out the front steps and porch in the dark to see if they would hold his weight. He was always afraid somebody was going to set a trap for him when he came home, something like loosening the boards on the porch in such a way that he would fall through and have to lie there until Ma could reach him with the broom or something.

  “He’s going to come home like this just once too many some of these times,” Ma said. “I’m getting sick and tired of it.”

  “I want to get up and see him,” I said. “Please, Ma, let me.”

  “You stay right where you are, William, and pull those covers up over your head,” Ma said, tapping some more on the sill with the door key. “When he gets in here, he’s not going to be any fit sight for you to look at.”

  I got up on my knees and elbows and pulled the covers over my head. When I thought Ma had stopped looking that way, I pulled the covers back just enough so I could see out.

  The front door banged open, almost breaking the glass in the top part. My old man never did act like he cared anything about the glass in the door, or about the furniture, or about anything else in the house. He came home once and picked Ma’s sewing machine to pieces, and Ma had a dickens of a time saving up enough to get it fixed.

  I never knew my old man could make so much racket. It sounded like he was out in the hall jumping up and down to see if he could stomp the floor clear through the ground. All the pictures on the wall shook, and some of them turned cockeyed. Even the big one of Grandma Tucker turned sidewise.

  Ma turned the light on and went to the fireplace to kindle the fire. There were lots of embers in the ashes that glowed red when she fanned them with a newspaper and laid some kindling over them. As soon as the kindling began to blaze, she put on two or three chunks of wood and sat down on the hearth with her back to the fire to wait for my old man to come into the room.

  He was banging around out in the hall all that time, sounding like he was trying to kick all the chairs down to the far end next to the kitchen. In the middle of it he stopped and said something to somebody he had with him.

  Ma got up in a hurry and put her bathrobe on. She looked in the mirror a time or two and straightened her hair. It was a big surprise for him to bring somebody home with him like that.

  “You cover up your head and go to sleep like I told you, William,” Ma said.

  “I want to see him,” I begged her.

  “Don’t argue with me, William,” she said, patting her bare foot on the floor. “Go and do like I told you once already.”

  I pulled the covers up, but slipped them back enough to see out.

  The door to the hall opened a couple of inches. I got up on my knees and elbows again so I could see better. Just then my old man kicked the door open with his foot. It flew back against the wall, knocking loose dust that nobody knew was there before.

  “What do you want, Morris Stroup?” Ma said, folding her arms and glaring at him. “What do you want this time?”

  “Come on in and make yourself comfortably at home,” my old man said, turning around and jerking somebody into the room by the arm. “Don’t be backward in my own house.”

  He pulled a girl about half the size of Ma into the room and pushed her around until they were over against Ma’s sewing machine. Ma turned on her feet, watching them just like she had been a weathervane following the wind.

  It was pretty serious to watch my old man drunk and reeling, and to see Ma so mad she could not get a word out of her mouth.

  “Say ‘Howdy,’” he told the girl.

  She never said a thing.

  My old man put his arm around her neck and bent her over. He kept it up, making her bow like that at Ma, and then he got to doing it too, and pretty soon they were keeping time bowing. They did it so much that Ma’s head started bobbing up and down, just like she could not help herself.

  I guess I must have snickered out loud, because Ma looked kind of silly for a minute, and then she went and sat down by the fire.

  “Who’s she?” Ma asked, acting like she was pretty anxious to find out. She even stopped looking cross for a little while. “Who is she, Morris?”

  My old man sat down heavy enough to break the bottom out of the chair.

  “She?” he said. “She’s Lucy. She’s my helper nowadays.”

  He turned around in the chair and looked over at me on my knees and elbows under the covers.

  “Howdy, son,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Pretty well,” I said, squeezing down on my knees and trying to think of something to say so I could show him how glad I was to see him.

  “Still growing, ain’t you, son?” he said.

  “A little, I reckon,” I told him.

  “That’s right. That’s the thing to do. Just keep it up, son. Some day you’ll be a man before you know it.”

  “Pa, I—”

  Ma picked up a piece of kindling and slung it at him. It missed him and hit the wall behind him. My old man jumped up on his feet and danced around like it had hit him instead of the wall. He reeled around like that until he lost his footing, and then he slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

  He reached over and got his hands on a straight-back chair. He looked it over carefully, and then he started pulling the rungs out. Every time he got one loose, he pitched it into the fireplace.

  When all the rungs and legs were out, he started picking the slats out of the back and throwing them into the fire. Ma never said a word. She just sat and looked at him all the time.

  “Let’s go, Morris,” the girl Lucy said. It was the first thing she had said since sh
e got there. Both Ma and me looked at her sort of surprised, and my old man cut his eyes around too, like he had forgotten she was there. “Morris, let’s go,” she said.

  Lucy looked all but scared to death, it was easy to see. Everybody had stared at her so much, and Ma was acting so mad, that it was no wonder.

  “Sit down and make yourself comfortable,” my old man told her. “Just sit, Lucy.”

  She reached for one of the chairs and sat down just like he told her to.

  The way she was sitting there, and Ma’s mad streak on, and my old man picking the chair to pieces was a funny sight to see. I guess I must have snickered again out loud, because Ma turned around at me and shook her finger and motioned for me to pull the covers up over my head, and to go to sleep too, I guess. But I could never go to sleep while all that was going on, and Ma must have known it. I just squeezed down on my elbows and knees as much as I could, and kept on looking.

  “When you get that chair picked to pieces, Morris Stroup, you can just hand me over seven dollars to pay for a new one,” Ma said, rocking back and forth.

  “Shucks, Martha,” my old man said. “Shucks, I don’t believe there’s a chair in the whole world that I’d give more than a dollar, maybe two, for.”

  Ma jerked out of her spell like a snapped finger. She jumped up and grabbed the broom from the side of the mantlepiece and started for him. She beat him over the head with it until she saw how much damage she was doing to the broomstraw, and then she stopped. She had beat out so much straw that it was scattered all over the floor. After that she turned the broom around and began poking him with the handle.

  My old man got up in a hurry and staggered across the room to the closet, throwing what was left of the chair into the fire as he passed it. He opened the closet door and went inside. He did something to the lock, because no matter how hard Ma tried, she could not make the door open after he had closed it.

  By that time Ma was so mad she did not know what she was doing. She sat down on the edge of the bed and pinned her hair up a little.

  “This is nice goings-on at this time of night, Morris Stroup!” she yelled at him through the door. “What kind of a child can I raise with things like this going on in the house?”