Harris and Me

herself if she could figure out how to do it.”
“Why doesn’t somebody kick her back?”
Harris snorted. “I tried that once and she damn near killed me...”
Smack.
“...Well, she did! I’m just saying what happened. You don’t got to hit me for every little damn thing.”
Smack. “It’s the swearing, dear. You have to do something about it.”
Harris turned to me. “You about ready to quit laying around? We’re wasting daylight.”
I tried to sit up but Clair held me down. “Not yet. Vivian caught you on the top of the head pretty hard. You take it easy for a little while. I’ll get you some pie and a glass of milk and then we’ll see.”
Actually my head didn’t hurt as much as my crotch but I couldn’t tell her that so I just nodded. “Thank you...”
“Well, for God’s sake—you’re going to give him pie? For a little thing like that?” Harris shook his head. “Hell, I busted a leg and nobody gave me pie. I’ll go out there and let that old bat kick me all day long if you give me pie for it.”
The last words were rising in tone because Clair had finally had enough and she grabbed Harris and pulled him across the kitchen counter and pounded on his butt with a steel ladle. He wailed a bit but even I knew he was faking it and could tell that the whipping was having no real effect.
He ran outside as she dropped him. I rolled to a sitting position and resisted grabbing my groin and sat quietly at the table eating pie, which had a delicious tang that almost made the pain go away.
“You play slowly today,” Clair told me as she and Glennis moved to the door with buckets, headed for the barn. “Don’t let Harris talk you into anything wild.”
“I won’t.”
And the thing is, I believed it. I really meant to take it easy, go slow, but as soon as they were out of the house Harris came in and stood next to me, fidgeting impatiently.
“Come on. We’ve got lots to do.”
I followed him out, wiping the milk mustache off my upper lip, curious about the farm. The truth was I hadn’t seen it during the daylight and had no knowledge of what was there.
Harris led off, headed for the barn where they were still milking. The barn lay about fifty yards from the house and was made of old hewn timbers with a slanted corrugated-metal roof. To the right on the way to the barn was a board-sided granary and attached to one wall of the granary was the chicken coop. In front of the coop was a fenced pen and the pen was full of white young chickens—what seemed to be hundreds of them. There were other kinds of chickens loose all around the yard—fifty or so, pecking at the grass and scratching—and several dozen chicks following different hens, mimicking their mothers. The loose chickens were mixed red and black and spotted white, some with funny feathers on their heads that looked like pom-poms.
Various machines were lined up in a row beyond the chicken pen. Some I didn’t recognize yet—a mower, rake, seeder, cultivator—but I knew what the tractor was, an old, green John Deere, and there was a tired-looking, caving-in truck with the Ford emblem on the radiator grill. Everywhere there seemed to be odd bits of junk and old machinery—mechanical arms that stuck up in the air, two old bicycles, or perhaps three or four old bicycles (it was hard to tell), rusting rolls of fencing, steel pipe, bits and pieces of old cars; it was like a junkyard.
Attached to the side of the barn were wooden pigpens, which seemed to be full of living boulders—enormous pigs that could have walked through the flimsy boards whenever they wished, or so it looked—and I was just going to ask Harris what kept them in when he stopped dead.
“Oh no...”
I had been following him closely and bumped into him when he stopped. He was scanning the yard and the area around the chickens, looking toward the top of the granary roof, which was to our right, and peering into and under the machinery.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I don’t see him.”
By this time I had figured Harris was pretty much invulnerable; it didn’t seem that anything could harm him. But he was clearly concerned and I felt his uncertainty infect me. The hair went up on my neck. “Don’t see who?”
“Ernie. I don’t see Ernie. It ain’t good when you can’t see him.”
“Who”—I looked quickly around—“is Ernie?”
But Harris wasn’t listening. He kept scanning the yard and started walking toward the barn, walking so fast I almost had to jog to catch up to him.
“It’s bad, me forgetting. It’s ’cause you’re here, of course, and you had to walk up old Vivian’s butt and get a little kick and make me forget to watch... LOOK OUT!”
He had turned and was looking over my shoulder to my rear and his eyes grew wide. I half whirled, had a fleeting image of wings—huge wings, the wings of death—coming at my face and then Hams grabbed my hair and threw me down on my face out of the way.
“You feathered pile of...”
Harris was on his back, then on his hands and knees, and then on his back, rolling over and over, beating at what looked like a giant ball of dust and feathers and wings. This broiling mass of dust and profanity moved in the direction of the granary, bounced against the wall. I saw an arm shoot out of the middle and grab a piece of board and start beating the feathers until the dust settled and Harris was on his knees, holding the board with both hands, pounding on what seemed to be a tired feather duster on the ground.
“Damn you, Ernie. I’ll teach you to jump me that way...”
I had risen to my feet gingerly—half expecting some form of attack from a new direction