The Boy Who Found Christmas

THE LAND OF NO WORK

Table of Contents

When I asked the judge about writing this, he said: “The way to begin, Lew, is to start out like this… ‘I, the Kid, alias the Oklahoma Kid, alias Oklahoma, alias Lew, being twelve years of age and in my right mind, do affirm that…’”

“Judge,” I said, “hand it to me straight, will you?”

The judge scratched his chin and said: “Tell them the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Then he winked. So I’m doing just what he said: telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth—with a wink.

I was born on Black Friday. The same day, my mother died and my dad lost his job. Them two things took the heart of him. She was a black-haired Riley, and he was a red-headed Maloney, and, when she died, everything went wrong for Dad. He never did no good for himself nor nobody else after that. The only way I remember him was when I was four or five years old. He used to put me on the bar and drink to me and tell me I was to grow up past six feet with a punch in both fists. The booze got him.

After he died, I went to live with Aunt Maria in a terrible clean house. Aunt Maria was a queer sort. She’d had a great sorrow in her past, someone told me, and was kind of sour on life in consequence. She was a good soul in a hard, severe way, but nothing religious about her, though. On the contrary, she hated church and ministers and all that like poison, wouldn’t let ‘em have anything to do with her, and was always reading books written to prove that they were all wrong in their beliefs.

This aunt of mine had four sons of her own, and what with me doing odd jobs around the place, fighting her boys, and getting lickings from her, times was hard. Her place was a ways out of the town and it was too far away for us—me and her sons, that is—to go to the district school even if she’d wanted us to, which she probably didn’t. In the mornings, she’d put in an hour teaching us kids to read and write and figure, and that was all the schooling we got or were likely to get. It was all work and no play with Aunt Maria. She worked herself and made us boys work seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year. She never took a holiday herself and never gave us one. She was a hard taskmistress.

Then Missouri Slim blew in one day and seen me chopping kindling in the woodshed. I took to Slim right away. I’d seen plenty of rough and tough ones in my time, but Missouri was different. He was long and skinny. He had a big, thin nose and a little mouth and chin like a rat’s, and a pair of small, pale blue eyes that never stopped moving. He was wearing seven days’ whiskers, and he didn’t look like soap bothered him none.

His clothes was parts of three different suits, and none of the three could ever have fitted. His coat sort of flapped around him with bulges in the pockets, and his trousers bagged at the knees and the seat, which showed that he done most of his hard work sitting and thinking. He looked like today was good enough for him and like he didn’t give a hoot what come tomorrow. I figured he was right. He didn’t talk much, neither, and, after Aunt Maria, that was sort of restful.

He says: “How old are you, young feller?”

“Seven,” I says.

He watched me chop wood for a while. Then he pulled an old violin out of an old battered case and tuned her up. When he begun to play, smiling and with his eyes shut, I started seeing dreams. He finished and packed up his violin.

“Where you going?” I asks.

“Where nobody works,” says he.

I asks him if that was heaven, and he allows that maybe it was. He says his first stopping place was down in the hollow just outside of town, near the railroad bridge, and that, if I wanted to see him and talk about the land where nobody worked, I could come down the next morning. He says he couldn’t do no talking while I was chopping that kindling. He says it made him sort of sick inside to do any work or to see anybody else work.

“Look at that cow over in the field,” says Slim. “Is she happy?”

“Sure,” says I. “She’s chewin’ her cud.”

“Has she done any work?”

“Nope.”

“Look at them two dogs,” says Slim. “Are they happy playin’ tag?”

“I hope to tell!” says I.

“Do they do any work?” says Slim.

“Nope,” says I.

“Nobody but fools work,” says Slim.

I watched him out of sight. When I come to, Aunt Maria had me by the hair of the head.

“Not finished yet!” she says. “You lazy, good-for-nothing! Like father, like son!”

“My dad,” says I, “was the strongest man in the county and the best fighter, and he never said quits!”

“It’s a lie,” says Aunt Maria. “He was a loafer, and he let a whisky bottle beat him and kill him!”

When it came to a pinch, I had a way of doing my arguing with my hands—until Slim taught me better. Now I grabbed a chunk of wood and shied it at Aunt Maria and hit her funny bone. It made her yell, but she was a Maloney, too. She caught me by one foot just as I was shinnying over the fence. When she got through with me, I couldn’t stir without raising an ache. Besides, she sent me to bed without supper. I lay in bed, twisting around, trying to find a comfortable way of lying, but I couldn’t invent none. Then I thought of Slim.

I went to the window and looked out. There was an old climbing vine that twisted across the front of my window. I smelled the flowers; I looked beyond and smelled the pine trees in the wind. Before I knew it, I was on the ground. I stood there a while, sort of scared at what I’d done and wondering if I could climb back the same way that I’d climbed down. I heard Billy and Joe snickering and laughing in the front attic room; I knew they was talking about me and my licking. I heard Aunt Maria rattling in the kitchen and finishing up her work. I smelled a couple of apple pies that was standing in the kitchen window, and they made me sort of homesick, but I told myself that I’d started along so far, that I’d better get the worst of it over before I come back to take my licking and go to bed again. I looked around me.

Take it by and large, the dark is pretty creepy inside of a house, but I seen that on the outside it was tolerable friendly. I could hear the frogs croaking out on the flat; I could hear crickets singing up and down the scale; the smell of pine trees was sweeter and stronger than it ever could be by day; and the sky was full of star dust and of stars.

There was nothing to fear as far as I could see or hear, except the black windows of Aunt Maria’s house with a glimmer of light in ‘em like the light in a cat’s eye, and the noise of Aunt Maria in her kitchen. So I seen that there was nothing to worry about and lit out for the hollow beside the railroad bridge.

I come down through the trees and out into a little clearing, with the creek cutting through the middle, and firelight dancing across the riffles or skidding across the pool. There was four men sitting around the fire, drinking coffee out of old tomato tins, and in a sooty old wash boiler near the fire I could smell all that was left of a fine chicken stew. Maybe the Plymouth Rock rooster Aunt Maria had missed that day was in that stew. I hoped so. Three of the men had strange faces. The other was Slim. I come out and spoke up behind the place where he was sitting, sipping his coffee.

“Slim, will you let me eat while I listen to you talk about the land where nobody don’t work?”

He didn’t even look around. “It’s the kid,” says he, “the one I was telling you about. Are you hungry?” says he to me.

But I was already diving into the mulligan. I ate hearty. Now, says I to myself, when I couldn’t hold no more, no matter how hard Aunt Maria licks me, this has been worth it! Then I looked up and seen they were all sitting around and watching me with their eyes bright, looking every one like the grocery man when he’s adding up a bill.

“You’ve ate,” says Slim in a way I didn’t like at all. “Now what you got to pay for what you ate?”

I blinked at him and seen he meant it. “What’s it worth?” asks I.

He looks at the others. “Forty cents,” he says. “There was one chicken alone in that stew that would’ve cost anybody but me a whole dollar and a half. That ain’t saying nothing of the two fryers that was alongside of him, and the onions and the beans and the potatoes and the tomatoes, and the work of bringing in the chuck, the cleaning of the pans, the building of the fire and the watching it, the picking of the chickens along with the cleaning and the cooking of ‘em, the peeling of the potatoes and the slicing of ‘em, and a lot of little odds and ends that’s thro wed in for nothing. Forty cents is dirt cheap. It’s lower’n cost, and what I got to have is cash!”

“I got no money,” says I.

“Then you can pay with work.”

“I thought that there was no work in your land,” says I.

“Work or get money by your wits,” says Slim. “It’s all just the same.”

“I got to work, then?” says I, backing off a little, for I could tell dead easy now that there was real trouble ahead of me, and a lot worse trouble than any I’d ever gotten into with Aunt Maria. “I’ll do my work running,” I says, and turns and run with all my might.

I’d taken three steps when a stone as big as a man’s hand hit me and knocked me on my face, but still I could understand ‘em talking.

“You’ve killed the kid, Slim,” says one of ‘em.

“Then he’s died knowing that I’m his master,” says Slim. “But he ain’t dead. He’s too chuck full of hellfire to die like this. No rock will end him… it will take steel or lead to do his business. Mind me, pals!”

I got my wind back and tried to duck away again. Another rock hit me and dropped me. I come to with water in my face and sat up, asking where I was.

“With your boss,” says Slim, leaning over, “and here’s my signature.”

He showed me his bony fist doubled up hard.

“Leave go of that idea,” one of the others says. “How d’you figure in on him more than any of the rest of us?”

“By reason of this,” says Slim, and eases a long knife out of his clothes. “Does it talk to you?”

After that, they scattered and there was no more argument. After that, too, I belonged to Slim. I tried for six months to get away from him, but I never could work it. He kept an eye on me all day, and every night he tied my wrist to his wrist with a piece of baling wire. By the time that half year was up, I wouldn’t have left him if I could. I’d got used to him and his ways, and I liked the life.

Besides, he learned me a lot. He learned me to sing a lot of songs by heart, playing the tunes to me on his violin. He showed me how to dance the buck and wing, or straight clog dancing. He showed me how to handle a knife so as to take care of myself if anybody else tried to get me. He taught me how to throw it like a stone and sink the point into a tree twenty yards away.

Once I says: “Slim, how come that you work so hard teaching me things?”

He says: “I work for you now… you work for me later on.”

And I did. After that first six months, when he found out that he could trust me away from him because I was sure to come back, Slim never raised his hand. I used to knock at doors and ask for hand-outs. Mostly the womenfolk used to fetch me inside and set me down at a table and give me three times as much as I could put inside me, so I’d take it to Slim in my pockets.

Sometimes they got real interested and tried to adopt me. They’d wash me clean, dress me clean and new, give me a name like Cecil, or Charles, or Robert, or some other sort of fancy name like that, that a dog wouldn’t have taken and kept. They’d put me to sleep in a fine bed covered with cool sheets. They’d come in and kiss me good night and cry over me; but in the middle of the night I’d come awake when a railroad train whistled for the stop, or because I felt the weight of the ceiling above my face, or because I choked with the smell of cooking and other folks that hangs around inside of any home.