“My friends become still more solicitous,” said Uncle Nicholas. “They would ease the burden of my days, and give me release from a world which, for even the best of men, is no more than a compromise. I sympathize with their concern; but a man still has not the right to leave till he is called.”
And there was the time when he made the periodic check on his fire extinguishers, for he was a careful man and had several of them. Now, carbon-tetrachloride and kerosene both have pungent odors, but they are not the same and even a dotty old man (and he was not that yet) can tell the difference. Fortunately, for the several small fires that had broken out mysteriously, he had not had to use them.
All this time the years were going by and they were all getting a little older. It seemed in fact as though Clinton and Carla were gaining on Uncle Nicholas in age and might someday even surpass him if stern steps were not taken. But efforts were doubled and redoubled and all stops pulled out and thrown away.
There were Amenhotep I, II, III, & IV, not to mention V, VI, VII, VIII, & IX, the latter several of these having no dynastic equivalents. These, not to be mysterious, were cats. Uncle Nicholas had always kept a large black cat. And from common politeness he invariably offered the cat of his own fare several hours before partaking of it himself. And as each cat died queerly, he procured another from a cat man in a near town, all identical in appearance; and every few months he had to inter one and procure another, but the world did not know that he had more than one cat.
Carla continued to bring delicious and esoteric dishes to Uncle Nicholas, but she had long since lost faith in them.
“There are some very weird things going on at Uncle Nicholas',” remarked Clinton one day. “Weird indeed!” clacked Carla angrily. “If you can devise them any better, then the world is still waiting for it. Is it I have failed so far? But I will not always fail.”
Clinton noticed that of recent years his wife Carla used only the angry edge of her voice. She sounded like a cracked bell. There had been a time when there were chimes in her voice. And her looks had slipped a little. A bitterness had taken part of the sheen from her, and she was no longer the fairest female you might encounter in a long journey. A five minute walk now would turn up a dozen to beat her.
Once, for a few months in the middle years, there appeared a complication. Walter, the prodigal, came home with wife and waif, and, having no home of his own, they moved into the old house with Uncle Nicholas. The waif was Walter Jr. who had now reached his mid-teens; and the three interlopers worried Carla unaccountably. “There is the terrible possibility that Uncle Walter may change his will to include them,” she said. “We must somehow counteract their machinations.”
“I don't believe that Walter is at all interested in the inheritance,” said Clinton, “or has even thought about it.”
But that very summer a terrible accident occurred, the cause of which has never been ascertained. Uncle Nicholas had gone riding with Walter and his wife Velma and Walter Jr. in the sway-backed but very soupy old car of Walter's. Now, in an old car like that one that has the very whey driven out of it, and which was admittedly mobiling at a high rate of speed, a fault is always likely to occur. But what happened to the steering mechanism may not have been accidental, though the investigators could prove nothing definite from the wreckage.
Walter and Velma were killed, but Uncle Nicholas and Walter Jr. came out of the smash-up scarcely scratched.
“It saddens me,” said Uncle Nicholas to himself, “that my kind friends should have brought destruction to others in their attempts to shorten my long way. But it is always the case that an erroneous postulate will give an embarrassing answer.”
Clinton and Carla were now burdened with the care of Walter Jr., their growing nephew. Carla, who had in these years become nervous and taut, seemed unable to generate anything beyond a chilly sort of love for him, though Clinton came to like the boy well enough.
Then for a period of years they went through the last phase. Uncle Nick must have known that his friends would finally lay him to rest before his full days had run out. They hunted him over the squares of the old chessboard, and he knew there were only so many plays till mate.
“The boy also is a threat to us,” said Carla. “When he reaches his majority he will surely be included in the inheritance, or even earlier if Uncle Nicholas happens to think of it.”
“What is the difference? In any case we will in turn make him our heir.”
“There is all the difference. What if Junior should marry (and he does seem to have that glitter in his eye, young as he is) and Uncle Nicholas still be alive? Our own share would be diminished, and I will not be satisfied with anything less than the total; not after all the patient planning I have put into it.”
But Walter Jr. continued to grow up, and the nubile glitter in his eye had now become a gleam. And all the while Uncle Nicholas remained discouragingly alive.
“It is time to take stern measures,” said Carla. “I have been cautious and luck has been against me. I cannot afford to be cautious any longer. I will settle this one way or another this very weekend. This is the end of the road. There will be no backing down or half-way measures this time. It will be Uncle Nicholas or myself.”
But, as it happened, it was both of them.
It was an unusual accident; or, if not an accident, at least an unusual happening. What really took place, by the very nature of the thing, could have been known to only two persons, Uncle Nicholas and Carla; and they, both being dead at the finish of it, were unable (or at least unwilling) to come forward with an explanation. Uncle Nicholas burned to death, there is no doubt of that. He was thoroughly roasted. And Carla had apparently set herself slightly on fire in the melee; and then that cool woman seemed to have lost her head. She could easily have extinguished the little fire that had caught her. She did, in fact, put it out by her rolling fall downstairs. But she broke her neck in doing it, and died unjustified and perhaps unrepentant.
Clinton had expected to be lonesome now that his wife was gone, but he was not. He entered a period of surprising contentment. He himself would never have gone so far as to murder for money. But the murderer, if there was one, had been punished; and all of the apples had fallen into Clinton's waiting basket, though another had been to the trouble of shaking the tree. Clinton and Walter Jr. moved into the Old House, and Clinton now looked forward to many happy and full years in his new role as the older uncle. He became surpassing fond of young Walter, his pride and heir. This was a good boy of fine prospects, and when he married (as he had every indication of doing) then he would be given the New House for himself and bride, and Uncle Clinton would continue on in the Old House as proud uncle and respected head of the tribe.
So young Walter, as the heir apparent to a wealthy uncle, had his pick of them; and he married Charlotte, a designing woman.
Sometimes, if you are not paying attention, you may look away for an instant, and when you look back you will find that four or five years have gone by. If it weren't for these abridgements, life would be as long as it is wonderful. Something like this happened now and a handful of years had passed. Clinton one day wandered down to the New House of young Walter and his wife. And, not having announced his presence, he happened to overhear them quite by accident.
“He is not really old,” said Walter, “a little over fifty. We may as well take off our coats and hats and be patient. We may have a long wait.”
“There is a point where patience ceases to be a virtue, and with me it comes very early,” Charlotte said coldly. “Fate is the pokiest ox in the world if left to itself. But, with a prod, it can be hurried.”
“I hope you are not thinking what I am afraid your thinking,” said Walter.
“All I can say is that a person can grow a very long set of teeth while waiting to dine on a dead man's leavings,” murmured Charlotte.
And Clinton was chilled and saddened and suddenly aged when he overheard it. “I am deeply shocked to hear you
talk like that,” said young Walter.
Yet, a thoughtful listener, and such was Uncle Clinton now, might have felt that Walter was not as shocked as he should have been.
Saturday You Die
Besides being born (that is an ordeal, no less an ordeal because you forget it) the worst thing to be gone through is to be a new boy in a small Southern town. There are reasons for this. First, the boys are tougher in the South. They go barefoot in April. They play with green snakes. They keep scorpions in fruit jars. They clang cow bells, and they pop whips. In the second place, all the boys are bigger than you are. But in the North they had all been your size.
Howard Glass, Stanely Savage, Clifford Welch, and that other boy whose name had not been learned yet, they were all bigger than Henry. Howard and Stanely would both go to school next year. Not only that, but Clifford and that other boy had already been to school, and next year they would be in the second grade.
So all the boys in town were bigger than Henry. And, though he would have been the last to admit it, they were all tougher too.
“If you ever tell anybody what we tell you we'll throw you in the ditch at Carter Road and you won't be able to get out,” Howard Glass said. “And nobody will find you until the weed-cutter comes along, and then all they'll find is your bones.”
“I never tell anything,” Henry said steadfastly. “In all my life I never tell anything.”
The ditch at Carter Road was the deepest one in town and Henry didn't know whether he'd be able to climb out of it or not. In the entire North there was nothing remotely like that ditch at Carter Road.
“Or else we'll bury you in the cave,” said Howard Glass. “We have another cave under the floor of the first and we bury people there.”
They did have a cave in this new town. In the North they had only talked about caves but nobody had ever seen one.
Howard's name was Glass, probably because he wore glasses, the only one besides grown people who ever did so. He had eyes as big as a cow's. Clifford Welsh said that if Howard had his glasses off then his eyes wouldn't be any bigger than anyone else's, but there was no way to prove this. Howard always had his glasses on and they made him look like an owl. But they didn't have owls here in the South. If they had, they were a different kind, and you wouldn't know them for what they were.
And there is this about the South; it is larger than it is in the North. This is because more than half the trees had been cut down or had never been there; the grass was heavy green; and there was no snow left on the north side of the houses, and perhaps there had never been. The water came from crank-handle cisterns instead of pump-handle pumps; and more of the town people kept cows. The squirrels were grey instead of red. The trees were different. And they had new kinds of birds, like scissortails, that nobody had ever seen before. It was less cloudy, and the days were longer. You could see a great deal farther as both the earth and the sky were everywhere of more extent. Other people have noticed other differences between the North and the South, but it was Henry who discovered the essential difference: it is larger in the South.
“After you bury them in the cave, how long before you let them out?” Henry asked.
“How would we let them out? After you're dead there's nothing to let out.”
“Then you get to stay there all the time?”
“Sure. All the time. Except that the next Saturday we take you out again and cut you up.” Howard's eyes were flecked green behind his glasses and were bigger than a cow's. “Then we cut the flesh off you and put it in jars to sell for crawfish bait. And we put your bones in a box and bury them again.”
“But the first time you're buried, it's only for a week?”
“Yes, a week.”
“That isn't so bad to be buried for a week if you know that you're going to get out again.”
The hill at the edge of town was named Doolen's Mountain. It was closer to Henry's house than to any of the others. There had been nothing like Doolen's Mountain in the North, and those people wouldn't have believed it if it were told to them. The cave was in the near flank of Doolen's Mountain, and Henry knew that he could get into the cave when the rest of the boys had gone home for dinner. They said it was their cave and he couldn't go in, but now he lived in the house closest to it. But he didn't go into the cave on that first day: instead he climbed the mountain itself. It was three times as tall as a house, and it seemed to go down in five sides from the flat top of it.
Two of the fluted sides faced back into town. And down beyond the center one of the opposite sides there ran a long ragged ditch that twisted as far as the horizon through ragged pasture land. The other two country sides were green, but two different shades of green. One of them was blue-green and stretched to the limit of vision: it was winter wheat. One was bright green: a prairie-hay meadow coming to life.
There came some kind of bees or yellowjackets and chased Henry off the top of Doolen's Mountain. But he waited until he thought they would be gone, and then got a stick and went back up. He stayed there a long time. He threw rocks down the sides of the mountain. Then he happened to think: “If everybody would do that, then they'd use up the whole mountain and it'd be flat as the rest of the places and I'd have no place to climb.” He threw no more rocks down. Instead he went down and got rocks, some of them the same ones he'd thrown down and others that couldn't be identified, and carried them back to the top to repair the damage.
Clifford Welch came up to the top of the mountain and sat down two feet away from Henry. They seemed not to notice each other, and for a long while each went about his own business. But it was Clifford who spoke first which pleased Henry, for he knew that in this he was the victor.
“If any of the other boys hurt you, you tell me,” Clifford said. “I'm the biggest and I'll make them stop. When I tell anybody to do something they have to do it because they're all afraid of me.”
“What if they hurt me next week when you're in school?”
“After school you tell me about it and I'll make them quit.”
“What if they kill me?”
“Then I'll kill them.”
That seemed satisfactory, but oddly it wasn't. Often there are things left over that worry you when they should be settled.
“Howard Glass says he's going to kill me and bury me in the cave,” Henry said.
“Howard was just bragging. Last time was the first time we even let him watch. Stanely and I are the only ones who ever kill boys and bury them in the cave.”
“Howard says it will be next Saturday.”
“Yes. Next Saturday. We always do it on a Saturday.”
“Are you really going to do it to me?”
“Unless there's another new boy moves to town before then. If another new boy moves here, we kill him instead of you. We always kill the last one to come.”
“Maybe another new one will come,” Henry said. They left it at that. It wasn't completely satisfactory, but it would have to do. So much had happened since last Saturday, with almost all of two days on the train, and most of one night in the depot in Kansas City, and other things besides that. Last Saturday was a long ways away, and the next one would be a long time coming.
“If a new boy comes to town, can I help you kill him?” Henry asked.
“We'll see,” said Clifford. “Maybe we won't let you help with the first one, but there'll be others.”
From the top of Doolen's Mountain, three times as high as a house, higher than some barns, you could see everything. There was no limit to your vision except the sky itself.
“I've been in five states,” Henry said, “this one, and the one we left, and the two we came through on the way down here. And one week we went to South Dakota from Iowa when I was little. I've been in five states.”
“What are states?” Clifford asked. And the bitter disappointment cut Henry like a butcher knife.
But it was Stanely Savage who really told Henry what things were about. This was the next Monday when Clifford Welch and
the other boy were in school. The other boy was named Quenton Quint. And on that day also, Howard Glass (the other one who didn't go to school yet) had to stay in his house on account of his abominable conduct: — which is no part of this history, and yet in a way it is, for Howard often behaved abominably, as Henry was to learn as the days went by. But this Monday there were only Henry and Stanely. “Under our cave is another cave,” Stanely said, “and it goes for miles. It comes out on a river or ocean, and the boats tie up there. We go there at night and trade with the pirate boats when they come up.”
“But the cave is in Doolen's Mountain,” Henry said, “and the only river that comes near Doolen's Mountain is the bayou, and it's only a ditch. How could the cave come out on a big river or ocean where boats tie up?”
But as soon as Henry had asked that, he knew that his objection was a flimsy one. In a story, a boy finds a door in a tree and goes in, and there are hundreds of houses and towns and a whole country that is different from the outside one. A lot of things are bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Naturally Stanely didn't answer Henry's objection, but he continued:
“All the pirates come here, Black Wolf and Dread Wolf and Captain Kidd and John Silver, and that other pirate who has one red eye and one black eye. He's the king of them all.”
“What's his name?” Henry asked.
“We can't tell anybody his name. He's supposed to be hanged and drowned and not running loose. The pirates bring us live monkeys and parrots and gunny sacks full of gold. They bring us pearls as big as pigeon's eggs, and slaves in chains, and long swords, and those other kind of curved swords. They bring us guns with the barrel-ends like funnels, and red pants, and green pirates' coats.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 19