Swatty. Ellis Parker Butler
Swatty yelled at me. “Ain't it bad enough without you bellering?”
So there we were.
When Bony saw us go out into the river he sat on his timber with his mouth open, and he couldn't even holler—he was so scared—and then he just paddled for shore and jumped off his timber and ran. He didn't know where he was running—he was just running away from there. He was scared stiff. When he come to, he was halfway home, and blubbering and panting, and then he sat down on a horse block and didn't know what to do. He thought we were drowned, sure. So he thought the best thing to do would be to not say anything about it. He was afraid. First he thought he would go home and act as if he had been at school and just stayed out playing a while, and not do anything else about it and let folks find out anyway they could; and then he thought that Mrs. Schwartz would miss Swatty when it was time to fetch the cow, and that she would come over to his house to see if Swatty was there, and he didn't know what else. So he thought he would go over to Swatty's house first and sort of keep Mrs. Schwartz from doing anything like that. So he went. He forgot he was in his bare feet, or that he had ever had shoes and stockings.
When he got to Swatty's house Mrs. Schwartz was on the front terrace in her calico dress and with a birch switch in her hand, looking for Swatty, because Swatty knew what time the cow ought to be fetched home. Bony went up to the steps.
“Do you want me to fetch the cow home, Mrs. Schwartz?” he asked.
“What for should you fetch the cow home?” said Mrs. Schwartz, as angry as could be.
“I thought maybe Swatty was late, and I didn't want to keep you waiting,” he said.
“For why should you think he was late?” Mrs. Schwartz asked. She always talked in a funny way, because she was German.
“I thought maybe he was playing down at the river,” said Bony. “Lots of boys were playing down there to-day.”
“So!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “And he sends you home to get his cow, yes? He could get his own cows. I wait for him.”
So then Bony didn't know what to say. He stood around. And after a while he said:
“Maybe he won't come home to get the cows.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Schwartz. “Maybe he's drowned,” said Bony. “Maybe him and Georgie went down to the river and—and—”
So then he began to cry, and the first thing anybody knew he had me and Swatty drowned and our bodies floating down to St. Louis or New Orleans, and Mrs. Schwartz wringing her hands and hollering for Herb. So Herb come out on the porch, and Bony told him me and Swatty had floated away on a bridge timber and got drowned, and Herb got Mr. Schwartz out of the house, and then he come over to my house to tell my father, and my father and mother and Fan and all the Schwartzes and a lot of neighbors all went running down to the levee, and took the Bony Highlander with them to show them where we had got drowned from. So that was why Bony didn't go home, and why he got licked when he did get home.
By that time it wasn't dark but it was getting dark. Me and Swatty just hung onto our trees, and that was all we could do; but all our folks and most everybody in town got down to the levee, because Tim Mulligan at the waterworks pump-house blew the alarm whistle. The firemen all came, too, with their hose carts and ladder trucks, but most of the folks just went around saying it was too bad, but that it was hopeless. Even the mayor said it was hopeless. You see, nobody knew we were on Tow Head. They thought we were drowned in the river, like Bony said. So there wasn't anything to do, because it was too hopeless to do anything. The only thing to do was to wait until the river fell, in a couple of weeks or so, and then maybe they'd find what was left of me and Swatty down-river, where we'd be washed up, if we ever was.
Well, that was what everybody thought. My mother cried, and Mrs. Schwartz cried, and I guess most of the women cried, and the men looked mighty sober, and said what a pity it was so hopeless; but what could they do? Everybody was sober or crying, I guess, except Fan, and I guess she'd been so mad at Herb she just couldn't be anything but mad. She was so full of mad that it had to come out, so while everybody was crying and all she just flew up in the air and went over and gave Herb a good raking.
“Well!” she says. “And you call yourself a man! Do you mean to stand around here like a bump on a log and do nothing?” she says. “I'm glad I found out in time what a helpless ninny you are,” or something like that. She gave it to him good, I tell you! “This trash,” she says—meaning the mayor and the firemen and the city council and everybody—“I don't expect anything else from, but I once thought you had some gump.” Or something like that. So Herb got red.
“Very well,” he says, like a man ready to jump off the high school roof, “if you say so, I'll take a skiff and go out upon the river. You can't call me a 'fraid-cat, Fan. You'll never call me that.” Or something like that, he said.
“Skiff indeed!” says Fan. “You'd have a nice picnic with a skiff, wouldn't you? Have some sense, Herbert Schwartz. What good is that ferryboat doing, tied up here?”
Well, that was what they done. At first Captain Hewitt didn't want to take the ferryboat out. He said it was hopeless, and that she was an old rotten hull, and that a log would go through her like a needle, and she'd sink, and she couldn't make headway up-stream against such a flood, and a lot more, but with all the folks in town there he couldn't keep that up long; so he went aboard and fired up, and sent up-town for Jerry Mason, who was the regular fireman. By that time it was dark enough for anybody, so Mr. Higgins, the steamboat agent, went and got the two flambeaux he uses when steamboats unload at night, and everybody that had a porch lantern with a reflector got that, and they put them all on the ferryboat. Flambeaux are big iron baskets on iron poles, and the poles are pointed at the bottom so they can be jabbed into the ground or a floor or anything. You fill the baskets with tar and wood and light them. So when that was all ready most of the firemen got aboard with their hooks, off the hook and ladder trucks, and a lot of other men got aboard with pike poles and grapple hooks, and Herb went up in the pilot house with Captain Hewitt, and they set out to find our bodies.
But me and Swatty wasn't bodies yet, we was still folks. We were feeling a little bit better, too, because Swatty found out that the tree he was in was a slippery elm tree, and he peeled off some slippery elm bark and chewed it, and he tossed some over to me, and I chewed that. So we wondered how long a fellow could live on slippery elm bark, and if Swatty would have the tree peeled clean before the river went down. If he did we'd starve to death; but Swatty said that, as the water went down, more and more of the tree trunk would be above water and we could peel it and eat it. So we both felt better, only there was a dead something had caught in the tree branches and when the wind changed it didn't smell very good. It smelled worse than that, even. So about then we began to see the lights come out on shore, and pretty soon we saw the big, smoky light the flambeaux made. We thought it was a bonfire on shore up at town.
Well, I guess we'd have been bodies before anybody got to us, anyway, if we hadn't had some bad luck. Me and Swatty was there in our trees chewing away at slippery elm when all at once something big and black come slamming down onto the point of the Tow Head. It looked like a house, but I guess it was only a cow shed or something like that, that had got floated off the river bottoms by the flood. It came all of a sudden, and before we knew what had happened it hit the Tow Head point and banged into the tree I was on, and the water began to rush over it, and then all at once the tree I was on began to give. It began to topple. It went slow at first and then it went quicker, and it fell over against the tree Swatty was in, and the shed came bumping after it, and then Swatty's tree keeled over, too, and me and Swatty went down under, and the shed come grating over us—right over our heads and pushing our trees down into the water.
All I ever knew was that the next thing I knew I was slammed up against the side of the shed by the water and pushed against it like a big hand was pushing me, and I was fighting to get more out of the water, and then the shed sort of melted and went to pieces and I was holding onto a board and going down with the current between the trees of the Tow Head. Sometimes the board hit a tree, and sometimes it didn't, but I thought I was all over with, anyway,