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.