Harris and Me

since I arrived the night before.
Milking lasted perhaps two hours but it seemed a lifetime, an endless deluge of foamy-topped milk, a tidal wave of milk. Finally, when it seemed I could no longer move either of my arms and was seriously thinking of trying to use my foot, Harris came back in and grabbed the handle.
“My turn.”
His timing was perfect. Clair came in with half a bucket of milk, poured it in the bowl on top of the separator, and smiled at me. “That’s it—last one. Ready for a snack?”
I glared at Harris, realizing what he’d done to me. My arms hung uselessly at my sides, seemed so long I thought my knuckles would drag on the ground. “Snack?”
She laughed. “Sure. You didn’t think all we ate was breakfast around here, did you? Lord, we’d waste away to nothing.”
Harris did the last of the separating and the milk and cream cans were put in a water tank at the back of the small room to stay cool and we all walked back to the house.
Harris and I were walking in back of the grownups and Glennis, and I looked around for Ernie on the way back and Harris saw me and shook his head. “He don’t come when there’s big folks around—he’s yellow clear through. Just a damn coward.”
Smack. Glennis could hear a pin drop and she turned and whacked Harris across the head without missing her stride or her place in conversation with Clair.
In the house Glennis washed all the separator parts—disks and cones and weighted wheels—and hung them on wires on the porch to dry in the sun while Clair prepared the “snack.”
It was a huge pan of sliced potatoes that had been boiled the night before for dinner and now fried in fresh grease with pepper, a plate heaping with bacon, and two dozen—I counted them going in the skillet—scrambled eggs.
The style was the same as at breakfast. Knute sat silently—I was beginning to wonder if he could talk—drinking coffee from a mug while Louie and Harris fought over food as it was brought to the table.
Louie’s eating was different though still spectacular. He didn’t use a fork but raised the plate and scooped sections of food into his mouth with his knife, again widening his throat in some way to swallow everything almost whole.
When the snack was over and Louie had used a piece of bread to wipe the grease from the serving plate, his own plate, our plates, and the frying pan, then pushed the bread into his mouth as he did the pancakes, letting the grease squeeze off and into his beard and down his chin—when it was all over I leaned back and tried not to throw up. It was delicious and I had more than overeaten. I was stuffed and thought seriously of going back to bed though it was only about the time I would normally get up. I was sure I couldn’t move.
“Come on,” Harris said. “Let’s go play.”
And he ran out the door.
I hesitated, wondering if I could get up, and Clair misread my inaction.
“Don’t worry, dear—you go play. I’ll call you for forenoon lunch.”
I nodded and staggered to the door and heard Clair say to Knute:
“I like a boy with a good appetite, don’t you?”

4
In which war is declared
and honor established
Harris stopped at the gate to the yard fence—a combination of boards, nailed vertically, and square-netted sheep fencing—and studied the yard.
Ernie was near the granary, pecking and scratching with the chickens, and Harris nodded. “Good. He’s busy. You want to play war?”
I looked at the rooster. “You mean with Ernie?” I didn’t know for sure what Harris meant by “play war”—maybe not the same as me, which was setting up imaginary enemies and fighting them—but I was pretty sure Ernie didn’t take prisoners and I wasn’t about to play with him unless I had at least a machine gun.
“Naw—the pigs. I pretend the pigs are commie japs and sneak up on them. You know. Just pretend.”
“Commie japs?” I had lived in the Philippines a year after Japanese occupation and understood thinking of the Japanese as enemies but I had never heard the term commie japs. “What are they?”
“It’s what Louie calls ’em.”
“The pigs?”
“No. Louie almost went to fight in the war and he said the people he was going to fight were commie japs, so I just call the pigs that and then fight them.” He moved toward the granary. “Let’s go. I’ve got guns over here.”
His “guns” were two narrow boards—one of which he’d used to pound on Ernie earlier—but with a little imagination they worked. I kept a wary eye on the rooster until Harris saw me and shook his head.
“Don’t worry. He won’t come at you if you see him. Only don’t you see him, then watch it.”
And so we went to make war on the pigs, Harris on the right, me on the left, keeping one eye over my back on Ernie should he decide to enter the fray.
Our enemies lay sublimely ignorant of our intentions, or so I thought, buried in a stew of mud with grain slop all over their noses, stomachs rumbling, grunting happily. There were three sows in one pen, a boar in another, and one sow in still another with ten or so piglets that were small enough to get through the fence if they wanted to.
“Look at ’em,” Harris whispered as we made our assault. “Dirty commie japs laying there like they own the world.”
I nodded. “Dirty commies.” Which was at least partially true. They were, if possible, even dirtier than Louie.
“You ready?”
I nodded again, working an imaginary bolt on my board rifle. “Ready.”
“I’ll go right, you go left.” Harris started for them in a crouch, gun raised, one foot slowly in front of the other.
“Left...,” I repeated, and mimicked his form.
My mistake was in becoming too intense. I’m not sure what I expected—maybe something along the lines of