Man of the Family (14 page)

All the fellows from out around our old ranch were waiting for me at the track gate, and they all shook hands with me. Fred Aultland was the last one. Just before he led the bay away to cool him, he reached his hand out to me—and there was a ten-dollar gold piece in it.

I hardly stopped to thank him, but went running down to where Lady was hitched behind the grandstand. I'd never had a chance to take Mother any of the money I'd earned in races, and I could only think about wanting to show her the gold piece. I even forgot about Grace and the other children.

It's funny how you seem to love somebody—somebody that you really love—so much more at one time than at another. Or maybe it's just that it bubbles over once in a while. I guess that's what happened to Mother and me when I got home. At first, I forgot all about showing her the gold piece, and just hugged her around the neck. But she knew I'd won, just as well as if she'd been at the fairgrounds. She squeezed me up tight in her arms and kissed me on my neck and the side of my face. In between, she kept telling me she was proud of me and that I was going to look just like my father.

16

Kathleen Mavourneen

T
HAT
year I went into the seventh grade. Our room was up on the second floor of the schoolhouse, and we had a real nice teacher—but I didn't like her very well that first day. As soon as they opened the schoolhouse doors I ducked in and ran all the way up the stairs, so I could get a seat at the back of the room with the big fellows, but Miss Curtis wouldn't let me keep it. She said I'd be lost at one of the big desks, and made me move almost up to the front of the class—right in the middle of a bunch of girls.

Eva Snow sat in front of me. She had two of the thickest pigtails I ever saw on a little girl. I didn't like having to sit up there with the smaller girls, and I wasn't paying very much attention while Miss Curtis was calling the roll and telling us that she wouldn't put up with any misbehavior. The first thing I knew I was counting the spots on the back of Eva's neck between the braids. They weren't freckles, they were speckles; just little dots, as if somebody had splattered the back of her neck with red ink. I was just up to eighty-six when Miss Curtis said, “Ralph, where are the Himalayas?” She said it like Him-mall-ya, and I'd always heard them called the Him-a-lay-as, so I didn't know what she was talking about. I didn't even know we'd started having a geography lesson, and before I ever thought, I said, “I don't know. I haven't seen them.” And I was still trying to keep track of the place where I left off counting the dots on Eva's neck.

Everybody laughed except Miss Curtis and me. She spanked her hands together so hard it sounded like a firecracker, and when I looked up, her face was as red as a thorn apple. Then she got up from her chair and started toward my aisle. Her eyes were looking right straight at mine all the time, and she walked slowly. I didn't know what she was going to do to me, but she looked as though she might be going to wring my neck. I don't believe anyone else in the class even breathed, and all I could hear was the click of Miss Curtis' heels and the pounding of my own heart.

I couldn't seem to take my eyes off hers until she was standing right beside my desk. Then she reached down and pulled me out of it by one of the shoulder straps of my overalls—just the way she'd have pulled a rabbit out of a hole. She didn't raise her voice and she didn't make any move to slap me as most teachers would have if they'd been that mad. She just stood me down in front of her, with one hand still holding onto the strap of my overalls. She put the other one on top of my head and turned my face up toward hers. “I think we'd better understand each other right at the beginning,” she said. “I know you've had every chance to be spoiled by some of the men around town, but we're not going to have any spoiled boys acting smart in this class.”

It wasn't like a scolding—she was just telling me. If she'd slapped me or scolded me it wouldn't have bothered so much, but there was something about the way she spoke that made a lump come up in my throat. “I wasn't trying to be smart,” I said; “I just didn't know what it was you asked me about.”

“That was very evident,” she said, “and that's just why I called on you. If you'd been paying more attention to your lesson and hadn't been staring so hard at Eva's braids you'd have known what I asked. Now, in what country are the Him . . .”

As she was speaking she let her hand slide off my head, and leaned farther over toward Eva. She seemed to be trying to count the red dots herself. “Eva!” she said. “Are you feeling well? Do you have a rash anywhere except on the back of your neck? Has your throat been sore?”

“It was sore when I woke up this morning. I've got an itch on my chest; I guess it's from this wool dress.”

Miss Curtis forgot all about the Himalaya Mountains, and started to unbutton the collar of Eva's dress. In a minute she straightened up and said, “Class is dismissed. It may be several days before this term will commence for the seventh grade. And, Eva, I'd like you to wait a few minutes while I write a note to your mother.”

As soon as Miss Curtis said class was dismissed, I hurried right home, but I forgot to tell Mother anything about the spots on Eva's neck. I just said the seventh grade wasn't going to commence for two or three days. Then I took Lady and rode out to where there'd nearly been a wreck on the railroad a few days before. A brace rod on a freight car had broken a couple of miles south of Littleton, and caught in the crossties. Before they stopped the train, it had plowed a chunk out of every tie for two hundred yards. I knew they'd all have to be taken out, and Mr. Carey had told me he'd pay ten cents apiece for all the ties I could bring him.

I knew the section boss on the Colorado and Southern. He was an old Mexican, and he was my friend. Though he was supposed to burn every tie they took out of the tracks, he'd always let me take what I wanted before burning the rest. But I'd never taken any ties without asking him first. As I rode out from Littleton, the only thing that worried me was how to get the ties from the C. & S. tracks to the wagon road.

The Denver and Rio Grande tracks ran close to the road, and the Colorado and Southern right-of-way was fifty yards beyond it. The accident had happened in the middle of a half-mile stretch where both railroads were graded twenty feet above the wagon road.

I rode Lady to the center of the grade, tied her to a fence post, and climbed the cinder bank to the D. & R. G. tracks. When I got up there, I wanted to turn and slide right back down. If the hollow between the two railroad grades hadn't had so many ties in it, I would have. There were about fifty Mexicans working on the C. & S. track, but none of the regular crew was there. Instead of the old Mexican section boss, there was a great big man with a red mustache strutting around. I knew him the second I saw him, and a whole string of shivers ran up and down my back. He was a big Irishman, and I'd seen him drunk outside of Monahan's saloon on Labor Day. And I'd never seen a Durham bull as ugly as he was, or that could bellow as loud. He was in a fight with half a dozen of Charlie Bowles' cow hands and he was knocking them around like a grizzly bear fighting a pack of dogs.

As I stood there on the D. & R. G. tracks staring at him, he hit one of the Mexican section hands and knocked him as limp as an empty grain sack, and then he strolled off down the track whistling “Kathleen Mavourneen.”

I sat down on the edge of the cinder bank, and tried to figure out what I should do. From where I sat, I could see the ties strewn along the bottom of the hollow like a jumble of spilled toothpicks. There were hundreds of them, and the wood was bright and clean where the brace rod had gouged a chunk out of them. I knew I could sell them easy enough, but I didn't think there was much chance of getting them from the Irish section boss.

It was his whistling that made me think about Grandmother. She had come over with her father from the North of Ireland when she was a little girl, and her name had been McLaughlin. Everybody knew that one Irishman was always good to another Irishman, so at first it seemed as though it would be best to say, “I'm Mrs. McLaughlin's grandson, and we'd like to have some of these old ties”; but she wasn't really
Mrs.
McLaughlin—that must have been her mother's name—and it would have sounded crazy to say, “I'm Mrs. McLaughlin's great-grandson.” I couldn't say, “Mrs. McLaughlin sent me,” either; and I couldn't say, “I'm one of Mrs. McLaughlin's boys.” I would just have to say I'd come from Mrs. McLaughlin who used to live in Ireland. I pushed off over the edge and slid down the D. & R. G. cinder bank into the hollow where the ties were.

The section boss spied me when I was sliding down the bank. I was hardly at the foot of it before he hollered at me, “What in the hell are ye doin' down there, ye little divil? Ye'll be after gettin' your neck broke wid a careenin' tie. Now git the hell outa here! Git! Git home and tell your mother she wants ye!”

At first there didn't seem to be anything to do except to go home, but I wanted those ties. Then I remembered about Grandmother, but I forgot all about the McLaughlin part of it, and called up to him, “I'm an Irishman, too, and I just came out to talk to you.”

“Divil a bit ye're an Irishman,” he called back; “ye look to me like a cotton-headed Swaide, but shin yourself up here an' let's have a peep of ye. Mind them ties, ye don't git kilt!”

I started to shin up the C. & S. cinder bank, but I didn't say anything more. I knew I didn't talk very much like an Irishman. Before I was halfway up, he hollered again, “Bi Jaikus Jack, an' it's the same little tike what rode in the fair! Like a monkey on horseback ye was!”

I don't think any of the Mexicans could understand a word of English, let alone his brogue, but he looked down the track toward them and bellowed, “Irish I knew him the sicond I clapped eyes on the lad. Shin up here, lad, shin up. 'Tis Jerry McEnerney 'twould be shakin' yer hand.”

As I scrambled up to the C. & S. roadbed, I tried to think as fast as I could. After telling me his name, I was sure he'd ask me mine, and Moody didn't sound right for a fellow who had just said he was an Irishman.

Mr. McEnerney squatted down and stuck his hand out toward me. It was so big and thick that it looked like a slab of bacon, and so brick-red that the hairs on the back of it looked pink. When I grabbed hold of it, he hauled me up the last couple of feet and right in between his knees, so that our faces were about the same height.

He took one of my arms in each hand, and his voice had the same deep, soft rumble to it that a cow's does when she croons to her calf. “An' tell me now, what name would they be callin' ye?”

“Mostly they call me Little Britches,” I told him, “but my second name's Owen.” That is my middle name, and I thought it would sound more Irish than Ralph.

“Owen, Owen,” he chuckled. “Now, that's a hill-of-a-name to be puttin' on a little tike. Owen McCarthy I knew in the old country, an' owin' somebody or other he was, poor divil, all the days of his life.”

My arms were just about as big in his hands as one of his fingers would have been in mine. “Jaikus!” he said. “In the name o' Gahd where do ye git the strenth to hold a nag, wit' pipestems the like o' that for arms?” He bounced me up off the cinders a couple of times and chuckled again. “Lad, lad, the whole kit o' ye wouldn't make up foive stone. But tell me now, what could a McEnerney be doin' for an Owen?”

“It seems too bad to waste all these ties, doesn't it?” I said. “Most of them look like they're nearly brand-new.”

“Don't be fashin' yourself at all, at all, about the waste of it. Them big moguls in the C. & S. has more millions than a pig has hairs. To them, a little waste like this is no more annoyance than a flea bite to an elephant.”

“I guess I wasn't thinking so much about moguls,” I said. “I was thinking what a waste it is to burn ties up out here when they could be keeping people warm this winter.”

“Jaikus, yes, a pity it is! But orders is orders. What do them big moguls care for a poor man's fire o' ties? 'Tis coal they'd be havin' him burn so's they can haul it in on the cars.”

Of course I knew the answer, but I couldn't think of anything else to say and still keep talking about his giving me the ties, so I said, “Do they make you burn up every last one of them?”

“Ivery blessit one! Was I to leave the job witout burnin' ivery tie in sight, they'd wring me neck like a fat hen for the pot.”

“But if some got carried away before the end of the job, they wouldn't wring your neck for not burning them, would they, Mr. McEnerney?”

Mr. McEnerney looked at me kind of funny for a couple of seconds. The curls at the ends of his mustache bounced up a little, and he half squinted one eye. “Are ye tellin' me, lad, that yer old man sent ye out here to be beggin' ties offa me?”

That made me mad; and made me want to cry at the same time. The back of my throat hurt, and I pretty near yelled at him, “My father did not send me—he died last spring. Nobody sent me; I came all by myself; and I'm not begging ties from you or anybody else.”

I jerked away, and turned to slide down the cinder bank, but he caught me in both his arms and picked me up as if I'd been a baby. “God bless ye, lad, 'tis Irish ye are to the very heart o' ye. And here's Jerry McEnerney again wit' his foot in his big mouth.”

He sat down on a rail, and balanced me up against one knee. Then he looked down into the hollow where the ties were scattered, and said, “And who'd be haulin' ties for ye, and how in the name o' Heaven would he be gittin' 'em outta that hole?”

“I'd haul them out myself,” I said. “I could lead our mare in over the D. & R. G. tracks at the crossing this side of Wolhurst. The bank's low there, so I could get down into the hole. Then I'd drag the ties out one by one the same way we came in.”

Mr. McEnerney sat for a couple of minutes, not saying anything, just shaking his head back and forth like the old cinnamon bear they had in the Denver Zoo. When he started talking, I didn't know whether it was to himself or to me. “Divil a bit. Divil a bit. . . . Them Rio scoundrels catch a body draggin' ties acrost their right-o-way and it's the jailhouse. . . . Dangerous too . . . might derail a whole bloody train. No, lad, no. Ye gotta figure a better one than that. Jaikus! If ye had the wings of an angel ye couldn't be gettin' ties outta that hole . . . and a stout man 'twould be takin' to pack one up over yon cinder bank on his back. Bide your time, lad, bide your time. There'll be ties taken out another place where ye can get at them . . . and 'tis meself'll be speakin' a word to the regular section boss for ye.”

I didn't want to tell him that I didn't need any word spoken to the regular section boss for me, and I still thought I could get some of the ties out of there, so I just said, “Well, if I can find a way to get some of them out, will it be all right for me to have them?”