The trouble was that a good family has to have anyway one father in it, and the magazines didn’t have colored fashion plates of fathers. They didn’t have any fathers at all.
Some of the girls drew fathers on paper and painted them, but they looked pretty sick. I guess all the girls were jealous of Lucy because she was kind of Swatty’s girl, and Swatty sort of borrowed an old colored tailor fashion plate out of his father’s store and gave it to Lucy. So Lucy had the only real fathers that any of the girls had. She gave Mamie a couple of fathers out of the fashion plate, but they were the ones that had been standing partly behind other fathers and had mostly only one leg, or pieces cut out of their sides or something. They didn’t make Mamie real happy, I guess, so she thought she’d try to get some good fathers. They were going down to ask Mr. Schwartz for a fashion plate.
Swatty was frightened right away, because he hadn’t asked his father if he could have the old fashion plate but had just sort of borrowed it. So he said:
“What are you going to ask my father?”
“I’m going to tell him he gave you one for me,” Lucy said, “and I’m going to ask him if he’ll give me one for Mamie.”
So then Swatty was scared.
“No, don’t do it!” he said.
“I will, too, do it!” Lucy answered back. “I guess I know your father, and I guess my father buys clothes of him, and I guess we take milk of your mother, and I guess I will, too, ask him if I want to!”
Well, Swatty couldn’t answer back because he had Lucy for his secret girl like I had Mamie Little.
So I got up and stood in front of Lucy and pushed her a little, because she wasn’t my girl but only my sister, and I said:
“You will not do it. You go home!”
“You stop pushing me! I won’t go home.”
“Yes, you will, when I say so!” I said.
I was going to tell her that as soon as there were any more old fashion plates at Swatty’s father’s, Swatty would swi – would get one for Mamie, but Lucy got mad because I just took hold of her arm too hard between my thumb and finger. She said I pinched her, but I did not; I just sort of took hold of her that way. She ran back a way and stuck out her tongue at me.
“Now, just for that, Mr. Smarty,” she yelled, “I’m going to tell Mamie on you!”
“You just dare!” I started for her, but she skipped off.
“Mamie,” she shouted, “you’ll be mad when I tell you! Georgie Porgie is an anti-prohibition!” Mamie just stood and looked at me, because I’d said I’d always be a prohibition.
“Are you?” she asked.
If Swatty hadn’t been right there I would have changed back to a prohibition again and it would have been all right, but he was there and I wasn’t going to have him think I would change just on account of a girl. So I said:
“Uh, huh!”
“All right for you, Mr. Georgie! You needn’t ever speak to me again as long as you live!” she said.
I felt pretty cheap. I tried to say something, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I made a face at her and she made one at me, and then we were mad at each other and she went away. She went toward down-town, and Lucy skipped across the street and ran and went with her. And that was one reason Mamie was glad that Toady Williams had her for his girl when he came to town. She guessed I did not like it. And I didn’t.
Mr. Schwartz said Mamie could have the fashion plate as soon as he was through with it, which would be at the end of the season when he got a new one. Lucy let me know that, all right! I guess it was on account of Lucy he promised to let Mamie have the fashion plate, because he was awful fond of Lucy.
Anyway, Mamie was mighty pleased to know she was going to have a good father.
When she played paper dolls with Lucy I used to sort of go over where they were and maybe stand there to see if Mamie was mad at me still. About all she said was how glad she’d be when she had a good father. I guess I heard her say it a hundred times, but she never let on she knew I was there at all. Sometimes I’d sort of drop an apple or something so it would fall where she could reach it, but she never paid any attention. The most she would do would be to pick up a one-legged father and say:
“‘Where are you going, Mr. Reginald de Vere?’ ‘I’m going down-town to vote a while if you do not need me to take care of the baby.’ ‘Not at all, but I do hope you will show folks you are a prohibition. If I ever heard you were an anti-prohibition I would cut you up into mincemeat.’”
So then I most generally went away.
I got kind of sick of girls. I made up my mind they were no good anyway, and that I’d never have another one if I lived to be a million years old, and when I wrote notes to Mamie in school it wasn’t any use because she always tore them up without reading them. It made me feel awful to have her so mean. Because she wasn’t mean to Toady.
Well, it came to examination time and we began to be examined. Swatty and Bony and I didn’t have to be examined in arithmetic until Thursday afternoon and neither did Lucy or Mamie, so Swatty and Bony and I thought we might as well go fishing that morning. We got our poles and some bait and started, and we went down Third Street and when we came to the railway track we cut across through Burman’s lumber yard toward the river because that was the quickest way.
Burman’s sawmill was the biggest one in Riverbank then. I guess you know how big those sawmills were. Great big red buildings with gravel roofs where they sawed the logs that came down the river in rafts, and where they made shingles, and the row of sheds where they dried the lumber with steam, and another big one where the planers were. There were hundreds and hundreds of piles of lumber, each one as tall as a house, and all the ground was made of sawdust and rattlings, because it was filled ground.
There were railway sidings here, and there were flat cars and box cars being loaded.
Burman’s sawmill and lumber yards were just under the bluff. Once there had been a brickyard there, and the bluff was cut down steep where they had dug clay. Across the street there was still a brickyard, with hundreds and hundreds of cords of wood, ready to be used to burn brick, and with the kilns loosely roofed over. Back toward the town was a sash and door factory, a pretty big building, and then some houses, and then the stores began. About the fifth store on one side was Swatty’s father’s tailor shop. It was a building all by itself, and it was one story high and frame, and it had a false front above the first story, with Swatty’s father’s name on it, and there was one window on the street.
Well, Swatty and Bony and me went through the lumber yard to the place where Burman’s oil shed was.
The oil shed was right up against the bluff, almost at the railway, and it was up on stakes, so that it was safer. It was about as big as a kitchen, and was painted red and the floor and part of the and part of the stakes were soaked with oil, and the grass underneath was withered and oily because the oil had dripped and killed it.
Just as we got there we saw Slim Finnegan, who was in our class at school but ever so much older than we were, and he was under the oil shed smoking a corncob pipe. His coat was on the grass beside him, and just as we got there he jumped up and began slamming at the grass with his coat, for the grass was afire. Before we could guess what happened, the flames seemed to run up the stakes like live animals, and all at once the whole bottom of the floor of the oil shed was afire.
Slim Finnegan gave one look at it, and tucked his coat under his arm and ran. There were piles and piles of lumber right there and he jumped in among them, and I guess he hid. We didn’t see him any more.
Swatty ran for the sawmill. He shouted to the first man he saw before he was halfway to the sawmill, and the man hollered “Fire!” and ran for a hose wagon they had under a shed and began jerking it out, and Swatty ran on,