The Jack-Knife Man

Below that, dwellings fronted the river and the streets of the town opened in long vistas as the boat came to them, closing again immediately as it passed. The hissing of a switch-engine, sidetracked to await the passing of a train soon due, and the clanking of a poker on the grate bars as the fireman dislodged the clinkers, came to Peter’s ears distinctly. Then the boat slipped past George Rapp’s stable, with its bold red brick front, and as he passed the door, Peter could hear for an instant the scrape of a horse’s hoof in the stall, although the boat was a good half mile out in the river. Beyond the stable was the low-lying canning factory, and the row of saloons, and the hotel, and the wholesale houses, partly hidden by the railway station on the river side of Front Street, and the packet warehouse on the river’s edge. Then the low rumbling of the dusty oatmeal mill, cut by the excited voices of small children playing at the water’s edge, became the prominent voice of the town.

From the edge of the river the town rose on two hills, showing masses of gray, leafless trees, with here and there a house peeping through. From Peter’s boat it looked like the dead corpse of a town, but he knew every street of it, and he knew Life, with its manifold business of work and play, was hurrying feverishly there, and he knew, too, that not one of all those so busy with Life knew he was floating by, or if knowing it, would have cared.

“That there is a town, Buddy,” said Peter. “That’s Riverbank.”

“Is it?” said Buddy, without interest. He gave it but a glance.

“Yes, sir!” said Peter. “That’s the town. And it’s sort of funny to think of that whole townful of people rushing around, and going and coming, and doing things that seem mighty important to them whilst your – whilst this boat goes floating down this river as calm and peaceful as if the day of judgment had come and gone again. It’s funny! Probably there ain’t man or woman in that whole town but, a couple of days ago, was better and whiter than – than a certain party; and now there ain’t one of ‘em but is all smudgy and soiled if compared with her. Yes, sir, it’s funny!”

He worked his sweep vigorously to carry the shanty-boat to the east of the large island – the Tow-head – that lay before the lower-town. The screech of boards passing through the knives of a planing-mill drowned the rumble of the oatmeal mill. A long passenger train hurried along the river bank like a hasty worm, and stopped, panting, at the water tank, and went on again. The boat, as it passed on the far side of the island, seemed to drop suddenly into silence, and the chopping of the waves against the hull of the boat made itself heard.

“Yes, sir, towns is funny!” said Peter. “Now, take the way going behind this island has wiped that one out. So far as you and me are concerned, Buddy, that town might be wiped off the earth, and we wouldn’t know. We wouldn’t hardly care at all. The folks in it ain’t nothing to us at all, right now. And yet, if I go into that town, I’m interested in every one of the folks I meet, and it makes me sort of sick to see any of them cold and hungry. Maybe that’s what towns is for. Maybe I live alone too much. I get so all I think about is sleep and eat. And eating ain’t a bad habit. How’d you like to?”

Buddy was willing. He was willing to eat any time. He ate two apples and eight crackers, and watched the apple cores float beside the boat.

“Now, you ‘re going to fish,” said Peter. “Right here looks like a good place to fish. Maybe you’ll catch a whale. You’re just as apt to catch a whale here as anything else.”

“Ain’t Mama hungry?” asked Buddy so suddenly that Peter was startled.

“Now, hear that!” he said. “Ain’t you just as thoughtful! Why, no, Buddy. It’s real nice for you to think of that, but your ma ain’t hungry. She ain’t going to be hungry or cold or wet any more, so don’t you bother your little head about it one bit. She don’t want anything but that you should grow up and be a big, fine man.”

“Like you, Uncle Peter?” asked Buddy. “My land, no!” said Peter impulsively. “I mean, no, indeed. Don’t you take me for no model, Buddy. You want to grow up and be – I’ll explain when you get older. I want you to grow up to be a good man; the kind of man that takes some interest in other folks. You don’t want to be a dried-up old codger like me.”

“What’s a codger?” asked Buddy.

“A codger is a stingy, old, hard-shell cuss – ” Peter began. “I guess you could eat another apple,” he finished, and Buddy did.

The island they were passing was low and fringed with willows, now bare of leaf, and the shanty-boat kept close in until the current veered to the Illinois shore, with its water-elms and maples, and tangles of wild grapevines. Peter knew every mark of this part of the river well. The current swung from shore to shore, now crossing to the Iowa side again, where the levee guarded the fields, and now swinging back to the Illinois bottom-land. For the boy the scene held little interest; for Peter it was a new chapter of an old story he loved. Here a giant sycamore he had known since youth had been blackened and shortened by lightning; there an elm, falling, had created a new sand-bar on which willows were already finding a foothold. In time it might be quite an island, or perhaps the next spring “rise” might sweep it away entirely. A farm-house high on the Illinois bluff had a new windmill. A sweet-potato bam on the other side of the river was now a blackened pile of timbers. Rotting sand-bags told the spot where the river, on its last “rampage” had threatened to cut the levee.

Buddy fished patiently until even a more interested fisherman would have given it up as a bad job, and Peter fed him a slice of bread and butter. For half an hour he watched Peter whittle a nubbin off the end of the sweep and fashion it into a top, but at the first attempt to spin it the top bounded into the water, and floated away, and this suggested boats. For the rest of the afternoon Peter doled out pieces of the pile of driftwood on the deck, and they went over the side as boats, Peter naming each after one of the river steamers, until Buddy himself said, “This is the War Eagle, Uncle Peter,” or “This is the Long Annie. She’ll splash!” Peter did not grudge his firewood; there was an abundance of driftwood to be had in the slough for which they were making. The last piece he fitted with a painter of twine, and Buddy let it drag in the water, enjoying its “pull,” until the afternoon grew late and the sun set like a huge red ball that almost reached from bank to bank, and made the river a path of gold and copper.

As they floated down this glowing way, Peter fed the boy again. Little as he knew about boys, he knew they must be fed.

“There, now!” he said when the tired boy could eat no more, and the tired eyes blinked, “I guess you’ll sleep like a sailor to-night, and no mistake, Buddy-boy, and I’m going to give you a treat such as boys don’t often have. You see that great, big, white moon up there? I’m going to let you go to bed outdoors here, so you can look right up at that moon and blink your eyes at it, and see if it blinks back at you. That’s what I’m going to do; and whenever you want to, you can open your eyes and you’ll see that big old moon, and those stars, and Uncle Peter.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” said Buddy.

“Nobody said you had to go to sleep,” said Peter. “You stay awake, if you want to, and watch that funny old moon. You’d think we’d float right past it, but she floats along up there, like a sort of shanty-boat up in the sky, and the stars follow along like the play boats you put in the water. You wait until you see the bed Uncle Peter is going to make for you!”

Buddy fixed his eyes very seriously on the moon, while Peter unlocked the cabin door and brought out an armful of nets and blankets and a pillow. Close against the cabin Peter built a bed of nets and blankets.

“There, now!” he said. “That’s some bed! I hope that moon didn’t blink at you. Did she?”

“No, she didn’t,” said Buddy. “But she almost did.”

“You crawl in here where you’ll be nice and warm, then,” said Peter. “Uncle Peter has to have somebody to watch that moon and tell him if she blinks, and you can lie here and look up, like the sailors do. If she blinks, you tell me, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Buddy seriously, and Peter tucked him in the blankets. “Uncle Peter,” he said, after a minute, “she blinked.”

“Did she, now?” said Peter, but Buddy said no more. He was asleep.

But the moon did not blink much. Big and clear and cold she filled the river valley with white light through which sparkles of frost glittered, and through the evening and late into the night Peter Lane stood at his sweep, looking out over the water and thinking his own strange thoughts. Now and then he stooped and arranged the blanket over Buddy’s shoulders, and now and then he knelt and dipped water from the river with his cupped hand to pour upon the sweep-pin lest it creak and awaken the boy. When he swung the sweep he swung it slowly and carefully, so that only the softest gurgle of water could be heard above the plashing of the small waves against the hull.

After midnight the night became intensely cold and Peter’s fingers stiffened on the sweep handle, and he warmed them by hugging them in his arm-pits. It was about two in the morning when the shanty-boat slipped into the mouth of the slough that cut George Rapp’s place, and floated more slowly down the narrow winding water until the soft grating of sand on the bottom of the hull told Peter she was going aground on a bar. Very quietly, then, Peter poled the boat close to the low, muddy bank – frozen now – and made her fast. His voyage was over.

He gathered driftwood and made a fire, well back from the boat so the light might not disturb the boy’s slumber, and sat beside it, warming his hands and feet, until the sun lighted the east. It was a full hour after sunrise before Buddy awakened, and then he looked expectantly at the sky.

“The moon got lost, Uncle Peter,” he said with deep concern.

“Well, we haven’t time to bother about any moon this morning,” said Peter briskly. “This is the day you are going to have a real good time, because a farmer man lives not so far away from here, and he has more pigs than you ever heard of, and horses, and cows, and chickens, and turkeys, and guinea-hens, and I don’t know what all, and I dare say he’s wondering why you haven’t come to see them by this time. Yes, sir, he’s wondering why Buddy hasn’t come yet. And so are the pigs, and the cows, and the horses, and the chickens, and the guinea-hens.”

“And the turkeys,” said Buddy, eagerly.

“Yes, siree, Bob!” said Peter. “So we’ll hurry up and wash our faces – ”

Buddy scrambled to his feet, all eagerness, and then, with the sudden changefulness of a small boy, he turned from Peter, toward the cabin door.

“I want my mama to wash my face!” he said.

Peter Lane put his thin brown hand on Buddy’s shoulder.

“Son,” he said, so seriously that Buddy looked up, “do you recall to mind the other night when you and your ma come a knocking at my door, and how cold and wet and tired in the leg, and hungry you was? Well, Buddy, your ma was awful sorry you was so tired out and all. I guess I couldn’t half tell you how sorry she was, son, not in a week. You took notice how your ma cried whilst you was on that trip, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Mama cried,” said Buddy.

“Yes, she cried,” said Peter. “And the reason she cried was because she had to take you on that trip that she didn’t know what was to be the end of. That’s what she cried for, because she had to let you get all tired and hungry. And you wouldn’t want to make your ma cry any more, would you?”

“No,” said Buddy simply.

“Well, then,” said Peter, clearing his throat, “your ma she has had to go on another trip, unexpected, and she says to me, in a way, so to speak, ‘Uncle Peter,’ she said, ‘here’s Buddy, and he just can’t go with me on this trip, and I want you to take him and – and – show him the pigs and – ‘”

“And cows,” Buddy prompted. “And horses. And turkeys.”

“Why, yes,” said Peter Lane. “So to speak, that’s what she meant, I guess. The horses and turkeys and the things in the world. So she went away, and she wouldn’t like to have you fret too much just because she couldn’t take you along.”

“All right,” said Buddy, quite satisfied. “Let’s go see the pigs, and the cows, and the turkeys.”

For Peter it was a long day, from the time he carried Buddy on his shoulder to the farm-house two miles back on the bluff to the time he stopped for him at the farm-house again, late in the afternoon, and bore him back to the boat, with a chunk of gingerbread in his hand, and the farmer’s kind wife standing in the door, wiping her eyes on her blue apron.

When Peter had tucked the boy in the bunk, and had said “Good night,” he took out his jack-knife to shape a wooden spoon. The boy, raising his head, watched him, and Peter, looking up, saw the blue eyes and thought he saw a reproach in them.

“That’s so!” he said. “That’s so! I forgot it teetotally last night.”

He seated himself on the edge of the bunk and leaned over the boy, taking the small hands in his.

“I don’t know if your ma had you say your prayers to her or not, Buddy,” he said, “and I don’t rightly remember how that ‘Our Father’ goes, so we’ll get along the best we can ‘til I go up to the farm again and I find out for sure. You just say this after Uncle Peter – ‘O God, make us all well and happy to-morrow: Buddy and Uncle Peter, and Aunt Jane,’”

“And Aunt Jane,” repeated Buddy.

“And – and Mrs. Potter,” said Peter.

“And Mrs. Potter,” said Buddy, “and the pigs, and the horses, and the cows, and the chickens, and the turkeys.”

“Well – yes!” said Peter. “I guess it won’t do any harm to put them in, although it ain’t customary. They might as well be well and happy as not. – Amen!”

“Uncle Peter,” said the boy suddenly, “will Mama come back?”

“Oh, yes!” said Peter Lane, in his unpreparedness, and then he opened his mouth again to tell the boy the truth, but he heard the sigh of satisfaction as Buddy dropped his head on the pillow and closed his eyes.

“I got to take that lie back to-morrow,” said Peter gravely, but he never did take it back, never! It stands against him to this day, but it is quite hidden in the heaped up blossoms of his gentle kindness.

VI. “BOOGE”

NO, siree, Buddy!” said Peter, shaking his head, “my jack-knife is one thing you can’t have to play with. There’s two things a man oughtn’t to trust to anybody; one’s his jack-knife and one’s his soul. He ought to keep both of them nice and sharp and clean. If I been letting my soul get dull and rusty and all nicked up, it’s no sign I’m going to let my jack-knife get that way. What I got to do is to polish up my soul, and I guess there ain’t no better place to do it than down here where there ain’t nobody to bother me whilst I do it. You hain’t no idee what a soul is, but you will have some day, maybe. I ain’t right sure I know that, myself.”

The shanty-boat was moored in Rapp’s slough, and had been there three days. The cold weather, which continued unabated, had sealed the boat in by spreading a sheet of ice over the surface of the slough, but Peter did not like the way the river was behaving. Between the new-formed ice and the shore a narrow strip of water appeared faster than the cold could freeze it and the ice that covered the slough cracked now and then in long, irregular lines, all telling that the river was rising, and rising rapidly. This meant that the cold snap was merely local and that up the river unseasonably warm weather had brought rains or a great thaw. There was no great danger of a long period of high water so late in the season, for cold waves were sure to freeze the North soon, but the present high water was not only apt to be inconvenient but actually dangerous for the shanty-boat. A rise of another foot would cover the lowland, and if the weather turned warm Buddy and Peter would be cut off from the hill farms by two miles of water-covered “bottom,” to wade across which in Peter’s thin shoes would be most unpleasant.

The danger was that the wind which now blew steadily toward the Iowa side and down stream, might force the huge weight of floating ice into the head of the slough, pushing and pressing it against the newly formed slough ice and crumbling it – cracked and loosened at the edges as it was – and thus pile the whole mass irresistibly against the little shanty-boat. In such an event the boat would either be overwhelmed by one of those great ice hills that pile up when the river ice meets an obstruction or, borne before the tons of pressure, be carried out of the slough with the moving ice and forced down the river for many miles, perhaps, before Peter could work the boat into clear water and find shelter behind some point. The water reached the height of the bank of the slough the third day, and Peter made every possible preparation to save the boat should the ice begin to move. There was not much he could do. He unshipped his small mast and drove a spike in its butt, to use as a pike pole, stowed his skiff in a safe place between two large trees on the shore, and saw to the hitch that held the boat, that he might cast off promptly if the strain became too great.

Peter did not blame himself for the position in which the untimely rise had placed him. The slough should have been a safe place. Once let the ice firmly seal the slough – any slough – and all the weight of all the floating ice of the whole river could not disturb the boat. When the ice moved out of the river in the spring it would pile up in a mountain at the head of the island formed by the slough, choking the entrance, and not until the slough ice softened and rotted and honeycombed and at last dissolved in the sun, could anything move the shanty-boat. A big rise in November is rare indeed.

“But I want your jack-knife, Uncle Peter,” said the boy insistently. “I want to whittle.”

“And I wouldn’t give two cents for a boy that didn’t want to whittle,” said Peter. “A jack-knife is one of the things I’ve got to get you when I go up town, and I’ll put it right down now.”

From his clock shelf – still lacking its alarm-clock – he took a slip of paper and a pencil stub. It was his list of goods to be bought, and it was growing daily.

Coffee

Rubber boots for B

Lard

Sweter for B. red one

Bibel

Sope

Hymn Book

Stokings for B

A. B. C. blocks for B

60 thread. 80 too

Under this he added “Jack-knife for B.” and replaced the list and pencil. He shook his head as he did so. He had forty cents in his pocket, and the small pile of wooden spoons that represented his trading capital had not increased. Getting settled for the winter had taken most of his time, and while his jack-knife was busy each evening its work was explained by the toys with which Buddy had littered the floor. These were crudely whittled and grotesque animals – a horse, a cow, two pigs and a cat much larger than the cow, all of clean white maplewood – the beginnings of a complete farm-yard. Of them all Buddy preferred the “funny cat,” and a funny cat it was.

Peter had his own ideas on the question of when a small boy should go to bed, but Buddy had other ideas, and Peter was not sorry to have the boy playing about the cabin long after normal bed-time. When, on the night of the funeral, it became a matter of plain decency for Buddy to retire, and he wouldn’t, Peter had compromised by agreeing to whittle a cat if Buddy would go to bed like a little soldier as soon as the cat was completed. The result was a very hasty cat. Peter made it with twenty quick motions of his jack-knife – which was putting up a job on Buddy – but Buddy was satisfied. The cat had no ears. It might have been a rabbit or a bear, if Peter had chosen to call it so. It was a most impressionistic cat. But Buddy loved it.

“Ho! ho!” he laughed, throwing his legs in the air, as was his way when he was much amused. “That’s a funny cat, Uncle Peter. Make another funny cat.”

“You get to bed, young Buddy!” said Peter. “I said I’d make you a cat, and you say that’s a cat, and you said you’d go to bed, so to bed you go.”

And to bed Buddy went, with the cat in one hand. Next to Peter himself Buddy loved the cat more than anything in the world. He loved to look at the cat. It was the sort of cat that left something to the imagination. That may be why he liked it. Children are happiest with the simplest toys.

In Peter’s list of prospective purchases the “Bibel” had been put down because Peter, watching Buddy’s curly head as it lay beside the cat on the pillow of the bunk, had suddenly perceived that a child is a tremendous responsibility. Buddy’s hair did it. He noticed that Buddy’s hair, which had been almost white, had, in the few days Peter had had him in charge, turned to a dirty gray. He had not minded Buddy’s dirty face and hands – they were normal to a boy – but the soiled tow hair shamed Peter. Even a mother like Buddy’s had kept that hair as it should be, and Peter was shocked to think he was already letting the boy deteriorate. If this continued Buddy would soon be no better than himself – a shiftless (as per Mrs. Potter), careless, no-account scrub of a boy, and it made Peter wince. He thought too much of the freckled face, and the little tow-head to have that happen.

It made him down-hearted for a minute, but Peter was never despondent long. If the cold chilled his bones it suggested a trip to New Orleans or Cuba, and he instantly forgot the cold in building one detail of the trip on another, until he had circumnavigated the globe and decided he would go to neither one nor the other, but to Patagonia or Peru.

If that was the way Buddy’s hair looked after a few days under the old Peter, then Peter must turn over so many new leaves he would be in the second volume. He would be a tramp no more. He would have money and a home and be a respected citizen, with a black silk watch fob, and go to church – and that suggested the “Bibel.” With “sope” and the Scripture on his list Peter felt less guilty.

The “hymn book” was a sequential thought. Bibles and hymn books go hand in hand. Peter meant to start Buddy right, and he was going to begin with himself. He meant, now, to be a good man, and a prosperous one – perhaps a millionaire. His idea was a little vague, including a shadowy Prince Albert coat and a silk hat, but he thought a Bible and a hymn book, at least, ought to be in the stock of a man that was going to be what Peter meant to be. The A. B. C. blocks on the list were to be the cornerstone of Buddy’s education, and on them Peter visioned a gilded structure of college and other vague things of culture. Peter’s plans were always dreamlike, and all the more beautiful for that reason. He was forever about to trap some elusive chinchilla on some unattainable Amazon.

“Make a funny cat, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy when he was convinced he could not coax the jack-knife from Peter.

“Oh, no!” said Peter. “You’ve got one funny cat. I guess one funny cat like that is enough in one family. Uncle Peter has to keep his eye out to watch if the ice is going to move this morning. He can’t make cats.”

“Make a funny dog,” said Buddy promptly. “Well, Buddy, if I make you a funny dog,” said Peter, “will you be a good boy and play with it and let Uncle Peter get some stove wood aboard the boat?”

“Yes, Uncle Peter,” said Buddy. He had the smile of a cherub and the splendid mendacity of youth. He would promise anything. Only the most unreasonable expect a boy to keep such promises, but it does the heart good to hear them.

Peter took a thin slice of maplewood from his pile, and seated himself on his bunk. He held the wood at arm’s length until he saw a dog in it, and Buddy leaned against his knee.

“Now, this is going to be a real funny dog,” said Peter, as his keen blade sliced through the wood as easily as a yacht’s prow cuts the water. “S’pose we put his head up like that, hey, like he was laughing at the moon?” Two deft turns of the blade. “And we’ll have this funny dog a-sitting on his hind legs, hey?” Four swift turns of the knife.

“That’s a funny dog!” laughed Buddy. “Give me the funny dog.”

“Now, don’t you be so impatient,” said Peter. “This is going to be a real funny dog, if you wait a minute. There, now, he’s scratching that ear with this paw, and he’s ready to shake hands with this one, and” – two or three quick turns of the knife – “there he is, cocking his eye up at you, like he was tickled to death to see you had your face washed this morning without howling no more than you did.”