Swatty: A Story of Real Boys. Butler Ellis Parker
he said, “I’ll go back and help Captain Hewitt get the boat in shape. I guess I’ve done enough to show you I ‘ve some gump.”
“But I want you to come,” Fan says. “I want to talk to you.”
So he came. Him and Fan sat on the front seat and drove and talked, and I guess their talk was all right, because they fixed everything up. And that was where Miss Murphy got left. Just because she wanted to lick Swatty she lost her beau. That’s why I say I guess if teachers always knew how their lickings were going to turn out they wouldn’t lick us fellows so much. Not when the fellow is the brother of their beau, anyway.
II. MAMIE’S FATHER
I guess this is a good time to tell about Mamie Little, because now you know who me and Swatty and Bony are. Mamie Little was my girl, only she didn’t know it. Nobody knew it but me. It was a secret I had. That’s the way a fellow has a girl at first: she’s a secret and she don’t know she’s his girl. Sometimes she don’t never get to know it and the fellow has to get another girl. But while he “has” her the fellow knows it, and it makes him feel bashful and uncomfortable and frightened when she is near by and it is pretty bully.
The reason I picked out Mamie Little for my girl was because she had the nicest eyes and nicest hair of any girl I ever saw and the way she swished her dress when she walked. She lived across the street from my house and mostly played with my sister Lucy. So when I played with Lucy I could play with Mamie Little, too, and nobody would think it was because she was my girl. They would think I was just playing with my sister.
Mamie Little had been my girl a good while like that, with nobody knowing it but me, and I guessed that pretty soon it would be time for me to fight Swatty or somebody about her and have her for my real girl, if she didn’t mind; but just then Toady Williams came to town and he picked out Mamie Little to be his girl and didn’t care who knew it. And Mamie Little didn’t care who knew it.
Toady was a new kid in town, because his father had come to Riverbank to start a store. We never said Toady could be one of our crowd and we never wanted him to be, but he just joined on because he felt like it. That’s the kind of boy he was. He thought anybody would be tickled to death to have him be around with them. He wasn’t a fat boy, but he was a plump one, and his breeches always fit him so close they were like the skin on a horse; when he wrinkled they wrinkled. He wore shoes in summer. He looked all the time like company come to visit, and I guess that was one reason we didn’t care for him much.
The reason we called him Toady was because of his eyes. They popped out like a frog’s eyes, sort of like brown marbles, and the more he talked the more they popped out. When he talked he couldn’t do anything else but talk. Swatty could lie on his stomach and chew an apple and play mumblety-peg and kick a hole in the sod with one toe and talk, all at one time, but Toady couldn’t. He had to sit up straight and pop his eyes out. When he got started talking you could cut in and say, “Was your grandmother a monkey?” and he’d say, “Yes,” as if he hadn’t heard, and go right on talking. He wouldn’t fight, like me and Swatty, and sometimes Bony, would. If you thought it was time to have a fight with him and pitched into him he would bend down and turn his back and let you mailer him until you got through. But, mostly, he would talk somehow so you wouldn’t want to fight him. That’s no way for a boy to talk. It’s the way girls talk. Or preachers.
Toady didn’t get Mamie Little for his girl the right way. He never said she wasn’t his girl, he just said she was. The right way is that when the other fellows find out he has a girl they holler at him: “Mamie Little is Georgie’s girl! Mamie Little is Georgie’s girl!” And he has to get mad and fight them about it to prove it’s a lie, but after he has fought enough to prove she isn’t his girl, why, then she is his girl and he can have her for his girl and nobody hollers it at him. So then she is the one he chooses to kiss when they play “Post-Office” or “Copenhagen” at parties, and if he’s got anything to give her he gives it to her, like snail shells or a better slate pencil than she has, and such things. So it’s pretty nice, and you feel pretty good about it and are glad she’s your girl.
Well, a short while before Toady Williams came to our town they had an election to see whether the state was to be prohibition or not, and all the school children whose fathers were prohibition paraded; so Mamie Little paraded because her father had the prohibition newspaper in Riverbank, and I paraded because Mamie did and my father didn’t care whether there was prohibition or not. Swatty didn’t parade because his father was a German tailor, and when he felt like a glass of beer he wanted to have it, and every fall Swatty’s mother made grape wine out of wild grapes that me and Swatty got from the vines in the bottom across the Mississippi. When they had the election, prohibition was elected all over the state, but not in Riverbank; but we had to have it in Riverbank because the state elected it.
Of course I was prohibition, because I had paraded and because Mamie Little was, but Swatty was antiprohibition. I didn’t say a thing to make Swatty mad; all I said was: “Huh! You thought you was so smart, didn’t you? You thought prohibition was going to get licked, but it was you got licked. Next time you won’t be so smart. I guess you and your father feel pretty sick about it.”
“Don’t you say anything about my father!” Swatty said.
“I’ll say he was licked, because he was licked,” I said.
So Swatty pulled off his coat and I pulled off mine, and we had a good fight. He licked me because he always did; and when he was sitting on my ribs and had his knees on my arms so I couldn’t do anything, he asked me if I had had enough, and I said I had. Because I had had.
“I guess I showed you how much the prohibitions can lick the anti-prohibitions!” he said.
“Let me up,” I said.
“Are you prohibition?” he asked.
I said, “Yes, I am.”
“All right!” he said, and he put his hand on my nose and pushed. He pushed my nose right into my face. I never had anything hurt like that did. I yelled, it hurt so much. I told him to stop.
“All right,” he said, “if I stop what are you?”
I knew what he meant. He had already got me from being a Republican to being a Democrat that way once before. I wasn’t thinking of Mamie Little; I was thinking of my nose. So I said:
“I’m an anti-prohibition. Now let me up. You ‘ve busted my nose and some of my ribs, and I want to put some plantain on my eye before it swells up.”
We felt of my ribs and couldn’t find that any seemed busted, and my nose stopped hurting and came back into shape, so me and Swatty were better friends than we had ever been, because we were now both anti-prohibitions. We went around and made a lot of prohibitions into anti-prohibitions because Swatty showed me how to push a nose the way he pushed mine. But it didn’t do much good, I guess. The election was over and, anyway, there were always more anti-prohibitions in Riverbank than there were prohibitions.
It was almost right away after that that me and Swatty and Bony met Mamie Little and Lucy one Saturday afternoon. Lucy is my sister, and they were going down-town. Me and Swatty and Bony were sitting on the curb telling whoppers; or I guess Swatty and Bony were, I was just telling some things that had happened to me sometime that I’d forgot until I happened to think them up just then.
Swatty was telling how he went up to Derlingport and his uncle introduced him to the man that had the government job of making up new swear words, when Mamie and Lucy came along. I said:
“Where are you going?”
“Down-town,” Lucy said.
“Did Mother give you a nickel?” I asked, and I was sort of mad, because Mother owed me a nickel and hadn’t paid me, because she said she didn’t have one, and if she gave one to Lucy, why, all right for Mother!
“No, she didn’t give me a nickel, Mr. Smarty!” Lucy said. “If you want to know so much, we’re going down to Mr. Schwartz’s shop to see if he’ll let Mamie have a father.”
I