Harris and Me

getting close to the enemy and then blasting them with heavy fire before they had a chance to escape. But I had a good imagination and inside of two steps they weren’t pigs any longer. They were commie japs who wanted to rule the world and we were the only thing between their evil ambition and the true American way, and whatever Harris did I would back him up, I would follow.
And what Harris had in mind was hand-to-hand combat.
Ten feet from the pigpen Harris looked back at me, a strange glint in his eye, and silently raised an eyebrow in question.
I nodded, ready to follow him. Ready for anything. Ready.
He waved an arm in the classic infantry follow-me wave and screamed.
“Arrrrrgggggh! Die you commie jap pigs!”
He threw his board/gun aside, hit the pen at a dead run, vaulted over the low board fence, and leapt spread-eagled on the sows.
If asked later if I fully intended to follow Harris and jump into a pigpen, I would have denied it. You could smell the pig crap fifty yards from the pen. But this was war. My imagination had taken me, and caught up in the intensity of it all I was much too far gone to know what I was doing and I landed on the sows not two feet behind him, screaming something incoherent.
It is possible the sows had never been commie japs before—although since Harris lived there it’s doubtful they could have missed out on such entertainment long. And it is also possible Harris had never jumped on them before in just this way, screaming and stabbing with an imaginary knife—although, again, with Harris there all the time it’s doubtful. But I think it’s fairly certain the sows had never been jumped on by two boys wielding imaginary knives, screaming death and mayhem at the tops of their lungs.
The effect was cataclysmic. Pig dung and mud went thirty feet in the air in a spray that seemed to block the sun and I learned—along with the fact that I had made a terrible mistake—something about basic physics: a lighter object, say a falling hundred-pound boy, cannot hope to move a heavier object, say a three-hundred-pound sow. Added to that was the realization that a sow covered in mud is too slippery to hang on to, and the final knowledge that the sows only seemed lethargic and were up and ready to do battle with any and all forces in less than a second.
We never had a chance.
I landed on a sow, grabbed, slipped, and was driven into the mud and pig crap by a hoof in the middle of my back. Out of the corner of one eye I saw the same thing happen to Harris—though he fought well on the way down, stabbing right and left—and then all was lost.
What actually happened is now blurred in confusion. I was up, Harris was up, I was down, Harris was down, we were pushed, pummeled, tossed and rooted, pounded into the muck, rolled into balls, and tossed like garbage back out of the pen.
“I’m blind! I can’t see!” I screamed. I had pig crap under my eyelids. “Where are you? Harris!”
Something grabbed my hand and jerked, and I pulled back, thinking one of the sows still had me.
“It’s me,” Harris yelled in my ear. “Come on—we’ve got to get to the river.” And he was laughing. “You look like a giant pig turd. Come on, let’s get in the river.”
A small river—little more than a creek, really—flowed along beside the farm in lazy S’s that made shallow pools. Harris took my hand and dragged me through the pasture fence, across rough ground that kept tripping me, and into three feet of cold water.
I went down like a whale, sloshing back and forth, my mouth and eyes open—I had the muck inside my mouth as well—and didn’t come up until all I tasted was water.
Harris was on the bank, dripping wet, rolling and slamming the ground with his fists, laughing so hard I thought he would choke.
“It wasn’t funny.” I said. “I think I ate pig crap.”
“Minnie...” He choked back, trying to talk.
“Minnie?”
“Minnie... almost died when you landed on her...” He was off again, gasping and wheezing, and when I thought of the sow I landed on—apparently Minnie—and remembered her little pig eyes looking up at me as I came down, I started smiling, then giggling, and pretty soon both of us were rolling on the side of the river and we didn’t - stop laughing until I heard Clair yell something from the house.
Harris rolled to his feet. “Come on.”
“What is it?”
“Lunch,” he yelled back at me, running toward the house. “Forenoon lunch.”
“But we just ate a few minutes ago.”
“Did not. Hell, it’s been close to an hour, maybe more. Come on—you want Louie to get all the cake?”
It wasn’t a full meal—like the two breakfasts. There was sliced Velveeta cheese, some homemade bread, slices of meat (I found later to be smoked venison), pickles, and a large cake with chocolate frosting in a rectangular metal pan.
The problem was that the food was all sitting on the table ready for us and Louie was already there free feeding, so when we got there a lot of the sandwich fixings were gone and about half the cake, and Louie was sitting at the table with crumbs and bits of cheese and bread all over him. Knute was drinking another cup of coffee, staring at the table, and we ate silently, standing, dripping by the door, each with a sandwich in one hand, a piece of cake in the other.
Nobody asked why we were soaking wet or what we had been doing, which I thought strange until I remembered that they had been exposed to Harris much longer than me and were probably used to anything.
“The east forty is ready for mowing.”
For a moment the words didn’t register—seemed to be the voice of God talking. A deep