Swatty: A Story of Real Boys. Butler Ellis Parker

swayed this old, bald-headed court right down to the mud he’s standing in and, so help me John Joseph Rogers! if those two parents of yours get a divorce it will only be over my dead body! Hey, Sheb! can these kids go up to your house and get some buttermilk?”

      So I said I didn’t like buttermilk and the judge said: “Caesar’s ghost! I didn’t mean get it for you; I meant get it for us!”

      So we got it. So Bony’s folks didn’t get a divorce. Anyway, if they did they didn’t separate apart from each other and that was all me and Swatty cared for because Herb Schwartz wouldn’t be scared to marry Fan, and maybe we could hurry up the wedding and get the tricycle sooner.

      IV. THE STUMP

      Well, you never can tell how things are going to go in this world, I guess. I don’t mean that I spent all my time thinking how getting the tricycle with two seats would make Mamie Little think more of me than she thought of Toady Williams, because I didn’t. I had school and my chores and me and Swatty and Bony was building a capstan in our side yard, to pull up stumps and move houses if we wanted to, but once in a while I did think how I would ride up to Mamie Little’s front gate on the tricycle and say, “Say! wanta take a ride?”

      It looked as if it wouldn’t be long before Herb and Fan got married, because they hadn’t fought for a long while and Fan was embroidering towels by day and by night. One reason it all looked good was that Miss Murphy, who was my teacher and had had Herb for a while, had gone away for a while and Miss Carter was substituting for her in our room. So Fan needn’t be jealous of Miss Murphy any more.

      So I felt pretty good mostly but I was feeling pretty mean this day, because Swatty and Bony had been let out on time and Miss Carter had kept me in after school. I was feeling mean because they would be working on the capstan, and it was the day we thought we would get it finished and begin capstaning things with it, and I wouldn’t be home when they got it done. I wanted to be there when they started to use it. So that made me feel mean one way, and teacher made me feel meaner, another way.

      I liked Miss Carter better than any teacher I ever had. So all I did was not know my geography-lesson, or my arithmetic-lesson or my grammar-lesson, or my history, and I missed in spelling. I guess maybe I read all right, because she didn’t say I didn’t, but maybe she forgot to talk about that because she was so busy saying my deportment was bad and it was certainly an outrage that my copy-book was so poorly kept. So she kept me in to study, and it was four o’clock pretty soon, and she put her papers in her desk and shut down the lid and came back to my seat. Everybody else had gone home. I was sort of scared. I thought she was going to say her patience was exhausted and then whale me with the rawhide she kept in the closet.

      But she didn’t. She came back to where I was, and when she got to my seat she sat down in it beside me and I had to move over so she would have room. I guess I ought to have put my hands in my pockets, but of course I didn’t know what she was going to do, and the first thing she did was to put her left hand on top of my hand and hold it, like that, on top of my desk. So I tried to pull it away, but she held on. So then she put her arm – her right arm – along the desk back of me, and I felt mighty mean. A boy don’t like to be armed around that way, or his hand held like that.