Harris and Me

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Epilogue
About the Author


Copyright © 1993 by Gary Paulsen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously for verisimilitude. Any resemblance to any organization or to any actual person, living or dead, is unintended.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Paulsen, Gary.
Harris and me: a summer remembered/Gary Paulsen
p. cm.
Summary: Sent to live with relatives on their farm because of his unhappy home life, an eleven-year-old city boy meets his distant cousin Harris and is given an introduction to a whole new world.
ISBN 0-15-292877-4
1. Farm life—Fiction 2. Cousins—Fiction. 3. Boys—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3566.A834H37 1993
813'.54—dc20 93-19788
eISBN 978-0-544-28955-0
v1.0813


1
In which I meet Harris and am
exposed for the first time
to the vagaries of inflation
Meeting Harris would never have happened were it not for liberal quantities of Schlitz and Four Roses. For nearly all of my remembered childhood there was an open bottle of Schlitz on a table. My parents drank Four Roses professionally from jelly jars—neat, without diluting ice, water, or mix.
They were, consequently, vegetables most of the time—although the term vegetable connotes a feeling of calm that did not exist. They went through three phases of drunkenness: buzzed (happy), drunk (mean as snakes), and finally, obliterated (Four Roses coma).
Unfortunately the buzzed, or happy, stage only lasted a short time, and it grew shorter as time progressed until they were pretty much mean whenever they were conscious.
Home became, finally, something of an impossibility for me and I would go to stay with relatives for extended periods of time.
By the time I was eleven I had stayed with several uncles, my grandmother, and an old Norwegian bachelor farmer who thought God lived in the haymow of his barn, where he was afraid to go without wearing a feed sack over his head. He told me God couldn’t see through feed sacks and if God couldn’t see you, you never died.
I had many uncles and shirttail relatives and when I was eleven a kind of rotation dumped me with Harris and his family.
The sheriff sent a deputy to pick me up and we left for the Larsons’ place in late afternoon. They lived on a farm forty miles north of the town I lived in, yet it might as well have been on a different planet. The ride took about an hour and a half but it went through such varied terrain that before we had gone five miles I was in despair. For two or three of those miles the car moved past farm country that still seemed rather settled. Frequently there were tractors working in the fields and people who waved cheerfully, walking down the sides of the road. But soon the trees closed in, closer and thicker until they were a wall on either side and the road and car were enveloped in a curtain of green darkness. And there were no more open fields or driveways, just dirt tracks that disappeared into the forest and brush. It was like going off the edge of the earth on those old maps used by early explorers, into places where it said: There Be Monsters Here.
The deputy I was with spit constantly out the side window while extolling the virtues of the car—a 1949 Ford.
“It’s got the V-eight,” he told me. “Gets you a lot of power, the V-eight.” Spit. “You need power for catching criminals while in hot pursuit.” Spit.
“You want to be able to move this thing when you go into a hot pursuit situation.” Spit.
There was absolutely no break in the forest. Black-green, densely vegetated, the summer northern woods fought right to the shoulder of the asphalt. Indeed, in places the trees came out over the road and made a green tunnel. I kept looking for an indication of life.
“People live here?” I asked finally.
“Sure.” Spit. “Must be two, three hundred of ’em scattered around. You know, back in a ways.”
The road grew more narrow, closed in until it nearly disappeared ahead of the car, and just when it seemed the car would have to dive into the trees, the deputy hung a left and the car bounced as we turned onto a dirt road—or, more accurately, a set of ruts.
We drove on this track for some miles—probably seven or eight—and again, just as the car seemed to run out of road, the deputy turned left once more. The tracks were still more narrow and I thought we would surely get stuck in the ruts, but suddenly we exploded out into a large area of cleared land.
“The Larson place,” the deputy said.
The cleared land must have been more than half a square mile. It was planted in corn and small grain and looked rich and even. Along one side of the rectangular field lay a half-mile-long driveway, straight along the edge, and we now turned down it.
By this time I was nervous and had trouble sitting still. I had met the Larsons only once, though they were in some distant way related to me, and that had been four years earlier, when I was just seven. I had lived considerably since then—including almost three years in the Philippines where my father had been stationed—and I had almost no memory of how they looked, what they were like. There were four of them, I knew that: Knute, some kind of second uncle; his wife and my second aunt by marriage, Clair; their