Too Soon A Man

Floyd don’t see none too good, but he has the best pair of ears of any of us.  Floyd’s the oldest and I’m the youngest of five boys, and I ain’t bragging none when I say I can count a bumble-bee’s teeth at a hundred yards, but I sure can’t hear nothing like Floyd can.  That Floyd can hear a granddaddy-long-legs tip-toeing across a silk handkerchief.

Floyd’s old enough to get himself a woman and go out on his own, but for some reason he hasn’t.  He’s stayed on the farm, scratching these scrubby acres, knowing all the time it ain’t no use.  Ain’t no way a man can get ahead.  A man’s mighty lucky just to stay even.  What with Pa drinking corn whiskey all the time and never doing a lick of work, we have to work from sun up ‘til we’re plumb---plumb tuckered out---and then there ain’t quite enough time to get everything done.

Me and Floyd had been choppin’ cotton since sunrise on the river bottom forty.  That’s what we call it.  But the Washita River ain’t much of a river, a wide sand bed with a small trickle of water and a few muddy holes with catfish in them.  But then we ain’t much of a farm, either.  This is the best piece of land we got and things grow tolerable well on it.  Unless, of course, like often happens, it don’t rain, then things just wilt and die.  Or sometimes it rains and rains and rains.  That’s when that little old trickle of water grows until it overflows the banks and washes everything out.  But sometimes when the weather is just right, we get a dang good crop on this chunk of land.  But it don’t happen very often.

I know one thing, when I get as old as Floyd, I’m going to leave here.  Ain’t no way I’m going to stick around, busting my back from daylight ‘till dark.  No sir.  I’m going to a city up North someplace where it’s cool and get myself a job.

It was halfway between morning and noon and the summer heat was already beating down on my bare back.  Floyd’s shirt was wet with sweat and our faded jeans had white half moons of salt on them.  Our hoes worked up and down, breaking the thin, dry crust, cutting weeds, and bringing up the damp dirt.  Gnats were swarming around our heads and I had three welts on my bare back where sweat bees had stung me.  I chopped and chopped and told Floyd all the things I was going to do when I growed up.

Floyd stopped choppin’ and stood still.  “Did you hear that, Billy?”

I told him I didn’t hear nothing, and kept on talking and choppin’.

“Well, shut up and listen,” he said.

I stopped choppin’ and looked at Floyd.  He was standing still, his wide shoulder back, his shaggy head turning from side to side, and I swear his ears were cocked like a big shaggy dog.  His jaw bulged from a half plug of eatin’ tobacco, and he spit once.  We sometimes called Floyd the big Swede, but it ain’t true.  He’s a full-blooded German like the rest of us Harshburgers.

“Hear that?” he asked again.

Then I heard it.  A faint scream seemed to just hang there in the still air.  It sounded like the time I was riding the blue filly after the cows, and she stepped into a prairie dog hole and broke her leg.  She screamed and screamed until Floyd came out and shot her.

Pa was real mad at me for doing such a fool thing and he hung me up and whipped me until I passed out.  I pissed blood for a long time afterwards and the thoughts of it still make me flinch.

“Don’t you hear it, Billy?”

“Yeah,” I answered.  “What is it?”

But I was talking to empty air.  Floyd had already started towards the house.  He was running with that long loping stride of his that just eats up the ground, and I had to sprint to keep up.  By the time we reached the locust grove just south of the house, I knew it weren’t no use.  I was falling farther and farther behind.  I had outrun Floyd before in races, but today it weren’t no use.  Today I just couldn’t keep up with that Floyd.