Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  The Old Man looked at me and grinned. “There’ll be no living with him,” he said to nobody at all and shrugged. Then I looked at the goose-littered terrain and there were two more Canadas, both females, lying close aboard my ganders.

  “Just call me a pothunter, not a hero,” the Old Man said. “We got enough geese, boys. Let us allons-nous the hell out of here.”

  I’ll say we had enough geese. We had enough for everybody to make two trips from the blind to the bateau. “Eet look like we shoot a snowstorm,” Pierre ventured, “except for mebbe one, two leetle spots dirty snow.”

  My big gander weighed fourteen pounds. That is a very large gander....

  It was now about ten minutes, again, from finish-lookout and the same dreadful breakfast. As I sat down to the table my foc’sle-head mind raced back again to the dinner Pierre had smoking in the galley when we arrived triumphant with a bateau full of geese.

  We had oysters on the half shell. We had a tawny-red soup called crayfish bisque, with the big crays, heads and all, in the sherry-rich soup. We had tiny teal broiled with bacon, like baby chickens, which fell apart in the fingers. Each man had a big pintail, cooked to pieces, with carrots and onions and potatoes and apples and sage shoved into its inside. We had that French bread and a chicory salad, and a side dish of redfish with a sauce of tiny shrimps and sherry and cream, which Pierre got the Lord knows where, unless he hijacked a cow. We had coffee.

  “Tomorrow,” Pierre said, “we have roas’ goose. Weeth fresh goose leever for de hors de’œuvre.”

  The city of Hamburg, Germany, has a fine roast goose, and it is possible to buy a good goose-liver sausage, and if you are in funds a fine goose-liver pâté that comes from Strasbourg. When we docked there the skipper forgot the night-lunch-stealing episode and paid us off. Still haunted by Louisiana memories I went ashore and blew a week’s pay on just one dinner.

  It was then I decided that the Germans, when war inevitably came, would lose it. They couldn’t have touched Pierre’s goose with the business end of a pirogue pole.

  5—How to Make a Hoorah’s Nest a Home

  Well, I been laying off to tell you about the spring when the Old Man and I decided to rebuild our fishing shack, which had been mauled by a couple of hurricanes. It never had been much of a shack, even for fishing every now and again—some four-by-fours and two-by-fours with a tar-paper roof and some warped, uncurried boards for walls. Everybody had used it and abused it, and even in good weather the inside looked like a tornado had struck it.

  The Old Man used to grumble, “That’s the trouble with being nice to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes down the pike. They’d ride a free horse to death.” Usually the place looked and smelled like a hoorah’s nest—old tin cans, coffee grounds, papers, and rusty tackle scattered every which way; the mattresses torn and dirty, and the lamp chimneys dyed black from smoke.

  The last couple of big blows had really fixed her. Outside the shack looked like a bird’s nest in a high wind—tar-paper blown to tatters, planks ripped off the sides, sand drifted up against the door.

  “We’ll salvage what we can and then burn her,” the Old Man said. “It stinks like a cooter’s den. Judging from the bottles the last few parties that used this shack didn’t do much fishin’. Then we’ll move over to another site and build us a proper lodge. Well clap a lock on her, stick up a PRIVATE sign, and get the Coast Guard boys to keep an eye on her when they ride beach patrol. I hate to do it, but these days the only way a man can keep a decent permanent camp is to be selfish about it. Twenty, even ten years ago you could leave any door open and your provisions in the locker. People would come in, use what they needed, and leave the place clean. Later you’d find they’d put back what they used.

  “It don’t seem the same today, which is why, when you’re my age, there practically won’t be no such thing as common shootin’ and fishin’. Everything will be posted and locked up, just for the protection of the farmer that’s tired of having his pigs shot, and his hayfields burnt down with careless matches, and his property mucked up with old tin cans and filth. Dodlimb it,” the Old Man said, “I’m just surprised this last bunch didn’t set the place afire and be done with it.”

  The Old Man was striding up and down, mumbling and cussing under his breath. If there was anything he hated, it was a filthy camp. He was a real old maid about burning rubbish and burying leftovers and generally leaving a place cleaner and better than when he found it. I suppose a lot of it rubbed off on me, because even today a nest of beer cans and tumbleweeds of greasy paper can make me mad, just looking at the mess.

  As far as we could see, up and down the beach, the shore was strewn with wreckage from the hurricanes. When she blows in that neck of the woods she rears back and blows, all the way from the Caribbean, past Hatteras, and right on up north. Anything that isn’t secured pretty fast carries away. Most of it fetches up on the beach as flotsam, and a lot of it is usable. Where we used to call “down home,” around Hatteras and Nags Head, the wreckers once made a considerable living gathering up the stuff that floated in off the ships that were wrecked, some by accident, some on purpose. The Old Man said Nags Head got its name from a cute little habit the natives had of hanging a lantern on a horse’s neck and walking him up and down the beach during a storm. The distressed ships mistook the bobbing light for a signal light, plowed ahead, and broke up on the reefs. The flotsam came ashore, and when the weather calmed down the wreckers would go out in boats and pick the hulk clean, like buzzards. It was a long time ago, but that’s how the story went anyhow.

  The sand here was hard-packed, and we were able to get the Liz, the old high-axled Liz, down onto the beach. The Old Man had a coil of one-inch hemp in the stern sheets, and we went trundling down the beach looking for likely building materials. There was plenty to find: scantlings, a few tarry pilings where some fisherman’s little dock had blown loose, a whole section of roofing—planks and joists and beams and the Lord knows what all in the way of innards—part of a staircase, ruined chairs, busted tables, even an old toilet seat.

  A lot of it was no earthly good, but it was enough for a start. We made the line fast around what we wanted, piece by piece, bit by bit, and snaked it to the new building site, while the Liz panted and snorted and bucked and boiled over. I never saw such a car as those old T Models. They rattled and shook and made noises like coffee grinders, but they’d go places you couldn’t get a team of horses in.

  It took us the whole weekend to assemble the stuff and stack it in building order around the new site—one well back from the first line of dunes, one which grew enough sea oats to be anchored fairly permanent.

  “We’ll build her here,” the Old Man said, “in that kind of gully between the dunes. That way we’ll get some wind protection. We won’t have to worry about storm tides. What’s more we’ll set her up on pilings.”

  “How come pilings?” I asked. “Seems to me you’re just shoving her up there in the air for the wind to blow over. Wouldn’t it be better to snug her close to the ground?”

  “I am no engineer,” the Old Man said, “but I know a thing or three about building on a windy coast. A big wind don’t fancy anything better than something that’s nailed firm to a foundation, so’s it can really bend a shoulder onto it and shove. I don’t generally criticize the Good Book, but that business about the man who built his house upon a rock and the man who built his house on sand ain’t strictly accurate for the Carolina coast. The principle is simple: You know how a big tree’ll blow over and some wavy sapling will still stand in a gale? The limber log rocks with the gusts, the big stiff log or the pile of bricks tries to stand firm and shove back. One stays standing and the other blows down.

  “There’s another thing in favor of putting your house on stilts. It leaves plenty of space for the wind to blow underneath, and a lot of force gets diverted that way and passes on. The house’ll rock a little and bend before the gale, but the gale goes round it and over it and under it. We’
ll shingle the roof. A blow might steal a few of your shingles, but you ain’t apt to come here after a storm and find the hull roof carried away.”

  “It sounds reasonable,” I said.

  “There’s still another thing you ain’t spotted, from our standpoint, in terms of saving work. You know what I’m driving at?”

  He had me stumped. “No sir,” I said.

  “Well, half or more of the work in a fishing or hunting camp can be better done under the house than in it. You can haul a boat up out of the weather for painting or repairs. It’s cool underneath, out of the sun in the daytime. You can sort your tackle or mend a net or clean a mess of fish without cluttering up your house. You can stack your rods or your oars and leave your boots. You can dry your washing. You can tie your dogs under the house. All over the East and in the Pacific the saltwater people spend more time under the house than they do in it.”

  “You can’t keep leaving gear and boats just loose when you go away,” I said. “How you going to keep the stuff from getting swiped?”

  “Simple,” the Old Man grinned, “easy as pie. We build a lattice, about six-inch squares, all around the pilings. We put a heavy lattice door on it with a lock. I have noticed that while a man will use what’s laid out handy and not nailed down he’ll think twice before he’ll batter open something that’s got a door and a lock on it. We haven’t got too many bad people around—just careless. Leave something loose and they may abuse it. Shove a lock on your gear, and tearing down the surroundings to get at it constitutes breaking and entering and maybe even burglary. We run powerful few burglars to a hill in these parts.”

  “All right,” I said, “that’s fine. You got me sold. But what about this business of the wind blowing underneath the house and passing on?”

  “It blows through the holes in the lattice. The lattice’ll be limber, too. So what does it matter if the wind rips off a strip or two? They’re easy put back. So what you really got is not one house, but two houses. One is cool and shady to work in when it’s hot, and the other is snug and warm to cook and sleep in when it’s cold or rainy or blowy—all in the same space.”

  I don’t know where the Old Man got all these ideas, except he had been nigh everywhere when he was younger, and he always had his nose stuck in some book that was too heavy to lift. But I must say most of his home-grown prescriptions for nearly everything had a practical side and generally seemed to work.

  School let out in another week, and we went into the housebuilding business on a full-time basis. We took a little fly tent over to the island and some cooking gear and a cast net and a rod or so. We lived off the country. The big sea turtles were laying, and when you walked the beach in the moonlight it wasn’t much trouble to get yourself a mess of fresh eggs for breakfast, if you just followed the big old herringbone marks the female made when she lurched across the wet sands to deposit her eggs. There were mullet and shrimp and pan fish in the creek, and an occasional puppy drum or little blue or Virginia mullet in the sloughs, working on the sand fleas. The big stuff was still up north or away off at sea using around the big shoals, but we made out. We had a hard-cured ham and some canned salmon and sardines and truck like that, and we ate pretty good.

  Brother, we worked. The Old Man had sweet-talked some-body into sending over a truckload of stuff we hadn’t been able to scavenge off the beach: cedar shakes for shingles, heavy-duty strips for the lattice work, creosote for the pilings, fittings for the innards. You’d have thought, the Old Man remarked, that we were building the Taj Mahal, which turned out to be some place in India. “But I must say,” he said, “we’ll take less time than they spent on the pyramids.”

  We sank the pilings about halfway to China, seeing as how I had to dig the holes, poured in a little cement to anchor the bottoms in the sand, and then built a platform across the top, which was the floor. There were good pine planks, and the Old Man shinnied up an improvised ladder and planed them smooth. He said his feet hurt bad enough without collecting splinters in his sock feet.

  We reared the walls to six foot six, left room for a big window fronting the sea, and put what you might call square portholes on two sides. We installed a plank ceiling, and then built a shingled, pitched roof about a foot above the ceiling. The Old Man had got hold of some ratty old mattresses and he ripped the stuffing out of them and shoved it between the false roof and the regular roof. He said that was insulation and would keep the shack cool.

  We cut the living quarters into two parts. One was the kitchen-living room, and the other was what the Old Man called the bull pen or sleeping quarters. The Old Man said he didn’t like the idea of confusing slumber with grub.

  He built—this called for fancywork—a hinged drop-leaf table that fell vertically against the wall and was out of the way when you weren’t using it. He built cabinets all along one wall to hold the permanent stuff—canned goods, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, mustard, catsup—that kind of camp truck. He built a perishable-food safe, with wire sides port and starboard, that fitted into one of the windows and could be hung outside in the breeze. We installed a two-burner cookstove that would feed off oil, and when it got hot it jumped up and down on its legs and filled the room with heat. Later on he arrived with two wicker rocking chairs—stolen from Miss Lottie, no doubt—and a couple of straight kitchen chairs. He built in lockers all around the room, for cups and saucers and frying pans and glasses, and he built one bookshelf the length of the room. We hung hurricane lamps from the ceiling. That was the living room-kitchen.

  The bull pen was simple. It contained four beds—two doubledecker bunks built right onto the walls on opposite sides of the room. Under each bottom bunk was a double set of lockers for clothes, and at one end of the room was a crosspiece for hangers. There was no running water in the shack, but in the kitchen he stuck a sink with a drain for inside dish washing and face washing.

  It took near about all summer, building a rude staircase up from the ground, fitting the doors and storm windows, and building the lattice for the underpart. We sank a well about two hundred yards back toward the brush, and while the water was brackish it was usable. We put an old-fashioned stiff-handled pump on the well with a pumpshelf. Then he built a small rain water catcher—a reservoir—and put drains around the roof leading into it. He reckoned we could catch enough rain water to drink. About the last thing we constructed, back in the brush, was a two-hole privy with a deep trap. When we hung the Sears Roebuck catalogue on a nail we reckoned we had finished the job.

  “She may not be much to look at,” the Old Man said, as he dumped the mattresses into the bunks and hung the cups on the hooks and stuck the dishes in the racks, “but she’s sound and weatherproof and she’s ours. Anything you make yourself has a little bit more significance than if you got somebody to do it for you.”

  I rubbed a sunburnt nose with a palm that had long since seen its blisters change to horn. It seemed to me about the handsomest fishing lodge I ever saw—everything what they used to call shipshape and Bristol fashion. We had a power of fun in that little shack for as long as the Old Man lasted.

  It’s been about thirty years since we built it, and there have been a lot of hurricanes along since—Alice, Ethel, Helen, I don’t know how many. But I am willing to bet that unless somebody tore the house down on purpose, the best part of it is still there. Certainly they haven’t built a hurricane yet that would make it do anything more strenuous than take a bow.

  6—If You Don’t Care Where You Are You Ain’t Lost

  The Old Man and I were sitting in front of a driftwood fire we’d built down on the beach close to the water, and although it was late August the fire felt mighty good and looked prettier. You know how those old salt-sodden driftwood logs burn, light blue fairy flames that seem to dance over the wood, as alcohol burns. Sometimes you can’t see the flickering flames at all the blue is so fragile against the night sky.

  A sizeable mess of medium bluefish made silver stacks alongside the fire, and there were
a couple of respectable puppy drum. An unseasonable nor’-easter, not due until September, had raised a ruckus and brought the first fish into the fresh-cut sloughs, where they were having a roaring fine time with the email bait and the sand fleas. We’d also had a roaring fine time with the feeding fish, until they knocked off biting when the tide came full flood. A little moon was shoving its way up over the horizon and any minute the water would start to ebb, and we figured we’d fish the ebb for another hour before we packed a mile up the beach to the shack.

  “I wish we’d brought a wheelbarrow,” the Old Man said, rummaging in the tackle box for his anti-sea serpent lotion. He found it, uncorked it, and blew drops of moisture through his mustache. “You’re going to be powerful tired, sweating all those fish all the way back to the shack. I’d help you, but I’m too old and feeble and full of dignity to go around toting fish like a common peddler. Shouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t have to make two trips.”

  He snorted at his idea of a joke. I didn’t laugh. I knew he’d help me lug the fish back to camp, but I had a strong suspicion about the identity of the fellow who would scale and gut ‘em, and that fellow did not own a mustache or drink anti-sea serpent lotion out of a tackle box.

  We sat quiet for a spell waiting for the tide to change, and the Old Man fired up his pipe and took another small precaution against moonstroke from his anti-moonstroke lotion. Then he hit me with one of his sudden questions. “What do you want to be when you grow up, now that you’re past the policeman, fireman, cowboy stage? What do you want most?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Money, I suppose. I want to have a lot of money.”