Harris and Me

daughter, Glennis, who was fourteen; and my second cousin, Harris, who was nine.
I thought of what to do as we moved down the drive. I had done this many times—been put in new places—and I had devised a method that worked. I pretended to be shy. Actually it was only partly pretending since I had a caution of meeting new people that often translated as flight. But shyness had served me well, and as we approached the house and farm buildings I began to withdraw.
They must have been expecting us because as the deputy worked the Ford down the driveway and we bounced into the yard, they were all standing there, waiting, one next to the other, where the driveway turned and widened next to the house.
The deputy lifted his weight out of the car—holding on to the top of the car door and grunting—and motioned for me to get out the other side.
I held back—the shyness kicking in—but in a moment realized that I would appear ridiculous if I stayed in the car and so got out but stood by the door waiting.
“Well, here he is,” the deputy said. “I think we might be a bit early...”
His voice was fishing, ending in half a question, which didn’t make any sense until my aunt Clair smiled, wiping her hands on her apron—an act I found later she did when worrying or thinking—and said, “Don’t worry, Orlo. I made rhubarb pie and it’s done. You aren’t that early.”
The deputy smiled, nodded, and turned back to me and the car. “Don’t hold back that way. Fetch your box and come on.”
I still didn’t move but Glennis, Harris’s sister, who was coltish and smiled with her whole face, came forward and took my box out of the backseat of the car and started for the house with it. It was meant in a helpful way but posed a problem because I had my private stuff in the box. Even that wouldn’t have been bad except that part of my private stuff was a collection of “art” photographs that I had bought for seventy centavos in the Philippines from a man on the street in Manila.
In higher circles the pictures would be known as artistic anatomical studies but the man who sold them to me called them “dourty peectures,” which seemed far more accurate.
I enjoyed looking at them—being a student of art and at an age when the hormones seemed to dominate my every waking moment—but was fairly certain neither Glennis nor her mother would approve of them. This nervousness was compounded by the fact that the deputy was still there and I had somehow picked up the idea that the pictures were illegal. A mental image of me being arrested in front of all of them for possessing “dourty peectures” overcame my shyness, and I jumped forward and grabbed the box from Glennis.
All this time Harris had been standing, watching, his hands behind him. I hadn’t really looked at him, but when I moved to take the box from Glennis the grown-ups fell in together and started walking toward the house and Harris came up alongside me just as I grabbed the box.
Physically he was of a set piece with Glennis. Blond—hair bleached white by sun—face perpetually sunburned and red with a peeling nose, freckles sprinkled like brown pepper over everything, and even, white teeth, except that when Harris smiled there were two gone from the front. He was wearing a set of patched bib overalls. No shirt, no shoes—just freckles and the bibs, which were so large he seemed to move inside them.
“Hi.”
He walked beside me, his hands still to his rear. I would subsequently find that this posture could be dangerous, meant he was hiding something, but I didn’t know that this soon so I nodded. “Hi.”
“We heard your folks was puke drunks, is that right?”
“Harris!” Glennis was walking on the other side of me and her voice snapped. “That’s not polite, to talk that way.”
“Well you can just blow it out your butt, you old cow. You ain’t no grown-up to tell me what to do. How the hell am I supposed to know things if I don’t go ahead and ask them?”
Glennis was a strapping girl, and she reached across my back and slapped Harris on the side of the head so hard his teeth rattled.
“You watch your tongue with all that swearing—I’ll tell the folks and Pa will take a board to you.”
But Harris ignored her—I would find later that getting hit hard by Glennis was a regular part of his life—and asked again, “Well, are they?”
I nodded. “They drink too much.”
“Do they see stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like old man Knutson in town. He’s always drunk and pees his pants and he’s all the time talking about seeing Jesus in a peach tree.” He snorted. “Heck, there ain’t a peach tree closer than a thousand miles to here—how can he see Jesus, even if Jesus was dumb enough to stand up in a peach tree? But like that—do your folks see things?”
I shook my head. “They just fight and then they puke.”
“Hell, that’s nothing. I puke all the time. Once I got the mad croup and I puked green for three, four days. Just as green as grass...”
We had been walking all this time and had reached the porch. The house was old and needed paint but was clean and looked somehow well cared for, comfortable. There were antlers nailed to the wall under the porch roof and an old shotgun rested in them and rubber boots were lined up near the door.
Glennis opened the door. “Straight in, then up the stairs.”
I moved through the door into a small hallway with stairs at the end, and I climbed them to an unfinished upper floor that had been divided into two large rooms by a wooden wall. Outside it was beginning to become evening and dark, and inside it was hard to