by Robert Ruark
I noticed that from force of habit I had brought the cast net, and there were hand lines in the locker. I drove the boat over into the shallows, jammed her into the bank with an oar, and looked about the marsh for some schools of shrimp. In a bit I had bait, and I pushed her free of the beach and went out to a fishing hole I knew, where there were plenty of croakers and often sea trout. I anchored, baited the line, and proceeded to fish. What I caught I cannot say. I assume I caught something. I usually caught something on these expeditions.
“March is an awful month,” the Old Man used to say. “Best you use it for remembering.” So I sat in the boat and methodically fished, and remembered.
“I ain’t going to leave you much,” he had said, when it got bad toward the end. “This sickness cost an awful lot of money. The house is mortgaged, and there’s a note in the bank, and the depression is still on. There won’t be much left but some shotguns and a cast net and a boat. And, maybe, a memory.”
All of a sudden the sun came out in my head. What did he mean, he wasn’t going to leave me much? Who was kidding whom? I was the richest boy in the world. Croesus was a beggar alongside me. I had had fifteen years of the Old Man, and nearly everything he knew he’d taught me. I started to take a check on my assets.
First he had raised me as a man among men, without condescension, without patronizing. He had allowed me companionship on an equal basis with himself and with his men friends. He had given me pride and equality. He had taught me compassion and manners and tolerance, especially toward the less fortunate, white or black. That sea of black faces which appeared in the street had not heard desegregation or any other “ation” except starvation. They came because they loved the Old Man, their friend. All but the younger ones had been born of slaves.
The preachers, white and black, had been in the crowd. And so had the bums. These were the hairier types who had taken a part in my education, the drinkers and the fighters and the loafers. They were there, together with the city fathers, and the Coast Guard boys, and the Pilots’ Association, plus the relatives and the hound dogs. I reckoned that the Old Man must have had something that rubbed off on people, including me.
What else was there?
Well, he had given me the vast gift of reading. He had made reading a form of sport, like hunting was a sport and fishing was a sport. He had unleashed all the treasures of the knowledge of the world, so that I always had my nose buried in a book. It didn’t matter what kind of book so long as it had words in it. I was reading Macaulay and Addison and Swift and Shakespeare for kicks. I never read the Bible for religious reasons. Reading the Bible as a straight book, and not as a tract, I had found it to have more action than Zane Grey’s woolliest westerns. I read history as avidly as fiction, and the ancient Egyptians got away with very little I wasn’t hep to. Everybody else called her Venus, but I knew the lady that rose from the sea was called the Aphrodite of Melos a long time before Dr. Harland got hold of me in college.
So the Old Man had also given me the gift of avoidance of boredom. If there is any piece of paper anywhere, whether it’s a patent-medicine bottle or a soap wrapper, and if it has words on it I will read the words and not be bored. I am well past forty now, and do not remember a moment of boredom, because, among other things, the Old Man also gave me eyes to see—to actually see.
“Most people,” he had said, “go through life looking and never see a thing. Anything you see is interesting, from a chinch bug to a barnacle, if you just look at it and wonder about it a little.” Then he would send me to the swamps or out in the boat or off along the beach with a firm command to look and tell him later what I saw. I saw plenty and in detail, whether it was ants working or a mink swimming or a tumblebug endlessly pushing its ball.
I saw male squirrels castrate rivals in the rutting season; I saw a sea turtle laying eggs and weeping great tears. I saw the life of the swamps and the marshes, heard the sounds and watched the lives outdoors change as the climate varied. I learned to listen to the night sounds: the dogs barking in concert when the moon was right for it, the mournful hoot of owl and plaint of whippoorwill, the querulous yap of fox and the belling of a lonesome hound on a trail of his own devising. I learned to love the mournful coo of doves as the evening approached, the desperately forlorn call of quail as they tried to reassemble a scattered covey.
I became acutely conscious of smells: crushed fern, dogfennel, the bright slashes of split pine with the oozing gum, bruised Jimson weed—the little smells apart from the major ones, like jessamine or magnolia or myrtle. The smell of summer differed from the smell of autumn. Summer was languid and milky, like the soft breath of a cow. Autumn was tart and stimulating, with leaves burning, frost on the grass, and the gum trees turning. Spring was a young girl smell, and winter was an old man’s smell, compounded of grate fires and tobacco juice.
Cooking? The Old Man had taught me that food can be something more than fodder to distend a growling gut. We had had as much fun out of preparing food as in the procuring of it with gun or rod. He had taught me to make an adventure out of cooking a catfish on a sandspit, of making an oyster roast or eating raw clams busted on the gunwale of a boat. I was proud of me as a cook—and grateful for the knowledge that hawg-and-hominy, if you’re hungry, or a bait of turtle eggs or a fried squirrel or rabbit is better than the fine-haired saucy stuff you eat when you get wealthy enough to traffic with restaurants.
What else had he left me, apart from these things?
Well, good manners, painfully impressed, and once or twice with a lath. I said “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “Please” and “Thank you,” and was more or less silent in the presence of my elders and at table. I didn’t try to hog my shooting partner’s bird shots, and I never infringed on another man’s right to command his dogs. I was quiet in the woods, and I left my campsites clean, with all the refuse buried and the fire raked neat.
I could throw a cast net, shoot a gun, row a boat, call a turkey, build a duck blind, tong an oyster, train a puppy, stand a deer, bait a turkey blind (illegal), call the turkey to the blind, cast in the surf, pitch a tent, make a bed out of pine needles, follow a coonhound, stand a watch on a fishing boat, skin anything that had to be skun, scale a fish, dig a clam, build a cave, draw a picture, isolate edible mushrooms from the poisonous toadstools, pole a boat, identify all the trees and most of the flowers and berries, get along with the colored folks, and also practice a rude kind of game conservation.
That seemed to sum it up, as far as legacy was concerned; two shotguns, a cast net, a boat, and a house with a new mockingbird in the magnolia—a house that wouldn’t be ours much longer. College just around the corner, if I could figure out a way to work my way through it.
I heaved up the hook, picked up the oars, and rowed home. By the time I got there the funeral crowd had dissipated, and there wasn’t anybody there but a few relatives and close friends. Nobody appeared to have missed me.
I was hungry, and in the South funerals are always accompanied by food. The idea is slightly macabre, but everybody pitches in a cake or a turkey or a ham, and if you can conquer the funereal smell of the flowers the dining-room table is groaning. I made myself a ham sandwich and was pouring a glass of milk when one final thought hit me, wham!
On the rainy days or driving the Liz or rowing a boat or in the off seasons where there wasn’t anything to hunt or fish the Old Man had made a habit of what he called indoctrinating me into the world of human beings. This consisted of the sum of his travels and his reading. He was a shark on the old West, for instance, and he knew a great deal about Coronado’s treasure and the people who had wasted their lives looking for it. He was a bug on the great trek westward, when the prairie schooners set out on a prayer and a venture. He knew all about what happened to the buffalo and about the passing of the carrier pigeon. He was an old-timer who was modern enough to know he was the last of the old-timers. He knew about all the world as well, whether it was ancient Egypt or Stanley looking for Livingstone
in Africa, and he had fed me these stories like cakes ever since I was a toddler.
It suddenly occurred to me that I was educated before I saw a college. I made up my mind right then that someday I would learn to be a writer and write some of the stuff the Old Man had taught me. There was only one thing I had to do first, and that was to get educated and make enough money to buy back the old yellow-painted square house with its mockingbird in the magnolia and its pecan trees in the back yard.
This took a lot of time, and included a war, outraged peace, and a lot of written words. It included Washington and New York, London and Paris, Spain and Australia, Africa and India, lions and tigers, hope and despair. But the Old Man’s house is back in the family now, and the mockingbird—lineal descendant of the one I once murdered—sings cheerfully on the moonlit nights in the magnolia, the pecans are bearing again and so is the fig tree. The oak grove hasn’t changed.
There is gray in the boy’s hair, but the Old Man persists, and you will be hearing more about the things he told me. And perhaps the gray will momentarily depart, and I shall not be the Old Man, but the boy again, because it is all coming powerfully clear.
2—Nobility Is Wrecking the Country
Some five years from the day I told the Old Man good-bye Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was saying—for about two hours—to several hundred bright-faced young people in the football stadium, “...and the future of the world rests solidly on your sturdy young shoulders,” as the University of North Carolina prepared to thrust the graduates of 1935 out into the jungles of commerce.
Three of these sturdy-shouldered young men were not, I am afraid, treating the graduation exercises with proper respect. Among the three R’s grouped together on the hard stadium seats was a scientist. Working secretly, just at dusk, he had managed to hide a large crock under the middle R. By way of individual rubber hoses, run from the crock underneath our scholarly robes, we could siphon sufficient home-brewed happiness to relieve the ceremony of some of its tedium. I am afraid that at least three young plumed knights wore their mortarboards at a rather rakish tilt when they marched bravely up to receive the sheepskin that declared them to be World Saviors (j.g.).
During the lengthy orations—or exhortations—I kept thinking how much more fun a colored camp meeting was, which conjured up the kind of graduation speech the Old Man might have made. Once he had said, “You’re going to be a man soon. There never was anybody fit to tell another man how to be a man. Free advice generally accomplishes two things. If you take the advice and it turns sour you hate the man that gave it to you. If it works out sound you still don’t like him for telling you how to run your life. And if you refuse the advice and make out all right he’ll never forgive you for making him look bad.” He paused to fire up his prop—the pipe.
“I plead guilty to having tried to teach you a few things I know, like not blowing your foot off or shooting me for a deer or killing all the quail instead of just a few. You were raised honest and decent to the best of my notion, and if none of it took, why, it’s too late to do anything about it now. What you make of your early raising is strictly up to you.
“But I would ask your permission to throw a couple more thoughts at you, which might keep you out of jail or the loony bin. Don’t be noble—it’s wrecking the country. And try to remember that having a little fun as you go along ain’t no sin. It’s just as necessary as sleeping. Don’t take yourself seriously, because you’re competing with about a hundred billion people, including Chinamen and Ubangis, who think that they’re just as important as the next Chinaman or Ubangi, and they never heard of you at all.
“Speaking metaphorically,” he concluded with a flourish, “I will look down on you from wherever I’m at and smile if you manage to struggle through the next fifty years or so without setting fire to the bush, leaving a messy campsite, or hogging the shots from your fellow man. Selah.”
The old gentleman had already read me a lecture on turning personal tragedy into high adventure (and sometimes low comedy) if you could only manage to regard yourself as somebody else, which I have found a handy aid over the last triple decade. At least if you can laugh instead of cry the troubles will either kill you or go away, and it is a bit better to die laughing than to die crying.
From the first days I was old enough to toddle into the woods the Old Man was able to make the tiniest occurrence—things that many people pass by—seem adventurous. He could find a symbol of life’s struggle merely by watching a tumblebug struggle with his ball.
“There,” he would say, “is Everyman, trying to shove that ball uphill as a life’s work and never quite making it. But you can’t say the little devil ain’t giving it his best effort, and he don’t seem to be whining for any help.”
He broke me into life as you’d teach a child to walk or a puppy to respect an older dog’s point. He suggested rather than ordered, and he was diabolically oblique in his methods. Havilah Babcock once wrote a piece in which he cured an obstreperous puppy of breaking a back-stand by eventually beating the old dog that was suffering the indignity. The puppy’s papa finally turned on the puppy instead of humoring him, and trounced the daylights out of the sinner. The sinner immediately conformed to the society of decent bird dogs. (The Old Man would have loved that piece as did I, because I could read me very easily into the puppy’s part.)
The only thing the Old Man was intolerant of was intolerance. He construed intolerance as several things. Basically he was highly tolerant of other people’s rights, whether it had to do with race, creed, or property. He respected Posted signs, but sometimes, when he figured the end justified the means, he was not averse to calling another man’s turkey across the road to where there weren’t any POSTED signs—if nobody was shooting the turkeys anyhow. He was intolerant of impoliteness, whether it was in the house or in the field, whether it involved hogging a shot or leaving a filthy campsite or setting fire to a forest. He taught me humility in a darkening swamp, when the doves moaned and the shadows fell and all the spooky, late-afternoon swamp noises set in.
About this time of year, when I had been bucking and rearing like an overfed colt all spring, he calmed me down by letting me help him build a boat, and then sent me off for a summer on the waters all by myself. He was the original do-it-yourself inventor, especially if doing-it-yourself—such as scaling the fish or chopping the firewood or shooting quail in the rain—involved me.
“Boys,” he would say, “belong to do a lot of men’s work, out of respect to their elders’ rheumatiz, and also as a kind of apprenticeship toward manhood. It’s the price you pay for being a boy.”
Curiosity, he reckoned, was one of the cardinal virtues of life. “They say curiosity killed the cat,” he would opine, “but more likely it was an overdose of mice.” He looked under logs and peered around the corners. He wasn’t satisfied until he knew all there was to know about anything that crossed his path, and that included everything from Greek mythology to the nesting habits of a tomtit.
He had a strange sense of beauty and a stranger sense of humor. One time I deliberately stepped on a caterpillar.
“Don’t let me see you do that again,” he said sharply. “You’ve just squashed the daylights out of a diurnal rhopalocerous lepidopterous creature—a thing of beauty.”
“A which?” I asked.
He grinned. “A butterfly that ain’t born yet.” He was full of that sort of foolishness, because while he used “ain’t” and double negatives for emphasis he read encyclopedias for fun, and very early he had my nose stuck into Bulfinch’s Mythology which I found fascinating. He had me reading Shakespeare for fun, instead of yellowbacks of blood and thunder.
“Shakespeare’s got more blood and thunder in him than Nick Carter and Ned Bundine put together. And stay away from the Horatio Alger books. All them heroes are namby-pamby bores, and anyhow it didn’t happen that way. Bosses are a little choosy about who marries their daughters. You can’t build a life hoping to find a pocketbook on the streets so yo
u can return it to the boss and get to be president of the bank.”
Fun had several definitions. “No man belongs to play until the work’s done,” he would say sternly. And then slyly, “But there ain’t nothing wrong in turning work into fun if you can get away with it. I see nothing wrong about pretending you’re a high-rigger in an Oregon fir forest, two hundred feet above the ground, when all you’re really doing is chopping kindling.”
He dearly loved his toddy, but he was very stem about mixing up drinking with hunting or any other kind of sport or work that needed a keen eye and full concentration.
“You either come to hunt or you come to drink,” he said. “It’s all right with me if the drunks want to stay in camp, but I don’t aim to have my head blown off by no damn fool in a duck blind. Drinkin’s for when the work’s done, too. Nothing I admire more than a cup of corn at the end of the day—or even,” with a wink, “in the case of old men, when the morning’s bitter and the stars are still up and it’s colder’n a mile into an iceberg. But not while you’re hunting. Or fishing. I know many a man to get himself drownded when he was drunk. Or fall off a hill and bust his neck.”
He would continue on his favorite topic—fun. “Fun is a little present you give yourself as a reward for what you’ve earned. You can turn work into play, but you can also turn play into work if you don’t balance it off with a little honest toil. You run out of things to play at, and you run out of play toys. Them rich playboys are as useless as tits on a boar, A bum is a bum, whether he’s rich or poor.”