Ellis
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Chapter 1:- one
Ellis
When I was young and not yet frightened we lived in northern Arkansas on the edge of a general store and gas station town across the road from an old man who plowed his garden with a pair of mules. I had a friend who was a year or so older than I and small for his age. His name was Ellis and he had gray, curly hair and was gentle and wise. Naturally he was often the victim of schoolyard violence and I had several times fought for him. I was not so small or as gentle.
We were country children and poor. My father had been crippled by polio and we lived in a three room shack trying to exist on his pension from the social security. Ellis’s father was working to raise crops on a ramshackle place a mile out of town, but he was one of those kindly, unlucky men for whom nothing works no matter how much thought or effort are put into it.
That summer morning I left the house as early as I could after choking down whatever form of breakfast my mother made me eat that day. It was a gloomy time, my parents bogged in financial troubles and I spent as little time as possible around the house. I made some explanation to my father in passing as he sat at his workbench trying to make a little extra money working leather. I didn’t have any trouble getting away, never did. I was not unloved, but I was for some time ignored. They had too much else on their minds. Outside I clattered down the ramp for dad’s wheelchair, climbed the little stone wall and started down the red clay road to Ellis’s.
It was not yet high summer and miserable, but the sun was solid and warm on my back. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, was wearing shoes. Most kids including Ellis would be barefoot on such a day, but my mother, thinking of hookworm, demanded that I always be shod. I wasn’t a particularly obedient child, but it never occurred to me to take them off behind her back.
I was shuffling my feet in the thick red dust trying to see how much of it I could pile on my shoes. At that time I didn’t consider a mile much of a walk and spent my time looking for lizards in the ditch, hoping to see a deer standing among the trees.
As I neared the place their dogs, two nearly identical black and white shepherds, came to greet me knowing that I, being dogless, was always ready to scratch some ears and while I fooled with the dogs Ellis’s mother came out on the front porch looking at me with one hand over her eyes against the sun.
I hoped to avoid being spotted by her knowing that she would pin me down for questioning. I dreaded the questions of adults that so often were framed in ridicule or casual cruelty.
“Morning,” she said. “How’s your mama?”
“Fine maam.”
“Is she working now?”
“No maam, not just now.”
“Well, she’ll find something.” She waved toward the back of the house. “Ellis is out to the barn.”
“Yes maam, thank you,” and, glad to get away so easily, I ran around past the fenced back yard where Ellis’s little brother was penned in against accident, went by the tractor, harrow and hay-mow to the big, tin-roofed barn. There was a feed room tacked on the side where Ellis fooled with his animals and I stepped inside. Ellis was kneeling on the dirt floor. Looking up, he saw it was me and turned his attention back to the bird in his hand.
“Bobwhite,” he said, “picked up some shot.”
I squatted beside him, watched him parting the feather to get a look at the wound. “What you going to do?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Keep him fed and watered, let him rest and see what happens. Don’t know nothing to do except give it a chance to heal.”
“Let me see,” I said and Ellis, who trusted me, handed the bird over, but I only held it a second before giving it back. In my hands the bird became frightened and struggled and I was afraid it would do itself a hurt. Ellis cupped the quail in his two hands making low, nonsense noises at it and the animal quieted. Ellis had the touch, the gentleness that calmed animals. That they trusted. Most animals just seemed to sense it and gave themselves up. With others he only had to talk to them in his way or touch them and they would know. A limping dog shying away from everyone would lie down before Ellis and let him do what he would. Wild creatures would make their frantic attempts at escape, but as soon as Ellis caught them, laid on his hands they would quiet and be still. I had watched him talk any amount of scary stock into friendliness.
Ellis put the quail into one of the cages he built of twigs and twine and we stood up.
“Seen coon tracks,” he said.
I nodded and we left the barn.
“I better shut up the dogs,” and he turned the two shepherds into the backyard. They would be let out again as soon as they put up enough racket for his mother to notice, but we’d be gone by then and they’d stay around the house.
We both picked up sticks to switch the grass with and went across the pasture where his father’s dairy cattle didn’t look up and waded the creek. On the other side we were in the woods. Old, never cut woods of oaks and sycamores.
“Was over by the slough,” Ellis said, letting me know where we were going. “Seen the tracks of a big one, female I guess, and a bunch of little ones. Maybe we can get a look.”
“You gonna catch one.”
Ellis grinned at me. “Maybe. Gotta find out how dad’d take it.”
I nodded knowing the difficulty of figuring the adult mind. I was as confused as anyone about how a thing that made them laugh one day would fetch a slap a week later. Every day and on every subject a grown-up’s temper needed careful scouting.
We were following a cattle trail that wound around the hill and now dipped down into the little hollow in which the slough lay. At the trampled spot where the cows came to wade belly deep and cool themselves in hot weather Ellis signaled me to follow and headed off the slough.
Ellis was entirely quiet in the woods, walked through dry leaves without a sound. I tried my best to do the same, but compared to Ellis, I sounded like an old hog rooting around. Sometimes I fooled myself into thinking I was as good as Ellis in the woods, but I never was.
After a bit Ellis came to full stop in mid stride and I knew enough to do the same. He had his head cocked, listening. He could do that too. He could hear squirrels in the trees and rabbits in a brush pile and tell you where to go find them. He talked to me from the corner of his mouth. “Think I hear them, I’m gonna go see.”
He waited and would have let me tag along if I wanted even though I’d probably be clumsy and spook them.
“I’ll go down by the slough and see if they come along.”
“Okay,” Ellis said and he started through the brush.
Quiet as I could, I went to the slough and stood beside a tall, smooth-trunked sycamore where I was in its shade and, keeping still, wouldn’t be noticed. I stepped in between two knobby kneed roots and that’s when I got myself beside the snake.
I didn’t see or hear the moccasin, but felt it. This is hard to explain though it is a real thing, not imagination. Standing with the summer whine of mosquitoes in my ear watching Ellis make his was through the bushes I suddenly felt its presence, sensed through the side of my foot that something was there and really knew what it was, what it had to be before I finally looked down and my eyes picked out of the leaf litter the arrowhead, the looped metallic body, the flicking tongue.
Once, when I was much younger, I found myself beside a copperhead and I screamed and jumped. The copperhead’s strike missed and my grandfather killed it using up on the snake his anger at my being such a fool. This time I stood still and waited. I had made the mistake and now things were up to the snake. There seemed, at that moment, a certain justice to it and I was calm and satisfied to let the moccasin decide if I should be punished for my carelessness. For a few moments and forever I was a statue in the humming woods where the only movement was the pit viper’s tongue slipping out to test the situation an inch or so from my right foot.
I was once told that a snake stung with the tongue’s forked points, but even then I was a reader and knew that to be false. I knew well how the jaws would spread jutting the fangs nearly straight to stabbed by the released coil of the neck.
If I had my winter shoes, the heavy, high-topped broguns I would have been safe. Even in summer, if my mother saw a snake about, killing it or watching it escape, she made me put on the leather shoes, boots really and I wore them until her scare had passed, but there had been nothing lately, my mother’s guard was down and I was in my summer sneakers.
In my strange, clear-headed state I decided that I had a better chance if the strike was high against my leg where the thick, loose-hanging denim might waylay and turn the thrust. The canvas of my shoes, tight against the foot’s flesh, would receive the bite easily.
Then, at my shoulder, there was a low, sibilant hiss, the sound you might make blowing air out between tongue tip and palate and I saw Ellis stepping past me putting his naked feet in the snake’s terrain and kneeling down to it. His hands loose on his knees, he continued hissing until the moccasin swiveled its hooded, emotionless gaze to him, sent the tongue out to gather Ellis up and bring him back to the sensing pits for deciphering.
Ellis, dipping his face to the coils, offering it, said to the snake, “go away,” and the snake unfolded itself slowly, one loop from the other, through the slightly rustled leaves and curved into the coffee brown slough.
Ellis stood beside me and we watched the moccasin swimming.
“Think we should kill it?”
“No,” Ellis said. “Ain’t no children around here, ain’t likely to be none. Let him be.”
By children Ellis meant the small non-speakers like his brother with no sense yet, who needed looking after. He and I, at nine and ten, were elder children and accountable for our actions. The snake biting me would have been too bad, but it also would have been my fault. I should have watched out.
We didn’t find the coons and I really don’t remember what we did the rest of the day. Probably poked around, looked for rabbits, looked for squirrels, threw rocks at a likely tree and wondered if there were really wolves in Arkansas. Eventually I went home and didn’t say anything about the snake. Often it’s best to just keep quiet. We ate supper and mother washed the dishes, dad worked at his leather and I probably got too rough playing in the house and was yelled at.
A few days later our cat came home with a broken leg. It had gotten caught in somebody’s trap and while we were fighting to splint the leg and being scratched and bitten I told mother that we should get Ellis to take care of it, but she paid me no mind.
Ellis
When I was young and not yet frightened we lived in northern Arkansas on the edge of a general store and gas station town across the road from an old man who plowed his garden with a pair of mules. I had a friend who was a year or so older than I and small for his age. His name was Ellis and he had gray, curly hair and was gentle and wise. Naturally he was often the victim of schoolyard violence and I had several times fought for him. I was not so small or as gentle.
We were country children and poor. My father had been crippled by polio and we lived in a three room shack trying to exist on his pension from the social security. Ellis’s father was working to raise crops on a ramshackle place a mile out of town, but he was one of those kindly, unlucky men for whom nothing works no matter how much thought or effort are put into it.
That summer morning I left the house as early as I could after choking down whatever form of breakfast my mother made me eat that day. It was a gloomy time, my parents bogged in financial troubles and I spent as little time as possible around the house. I made some explanation to my father in passing as he sat at his workbench trying to make a little extra money working leather. I didn’t have any trouble getting away, never did. I was not unloved, but I was for some time ignored. They had too much else on their minds. Outside I clattered down the ramp for dad’s wheelchair, climbed the little stone wall and started down the red clay road to Ellis’s.
It was not yet high summer and miserable, but the sun was solid and warm on my back. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, was wearing shoes. Most kids including Ellis would be barefoot on such a day, but my mother, thinking of hookworm, demanded that I always be shod. I wasn’t a particularly obedient child, but it never occurred to me to take them off behind her back.
I was shuffling my feet in the thick red dust trying to see how much of it I could pile on my shoes. At that time I didn’t consider a mile much of a walk and spent my time looking for lizards in the ditch, hoping to see a deer standing among the trees.
As I neared the place their dogs, two nearly identical black and white shepherds, came to greet me knowing that I, being dogless, was always ready to scratch some ears and while I fooled with the dogs Ellis’s mother came out on the front porch looking at me with one hand over her eyes against the sun.
I hoped to avoid being spotted by her knowing that she would pin me down for questioning. I dreaded the questions of adults that so often were framed in ridicule or casual cruelty.
“Morning,” she said. “How’s your mama?”
“Fine maam.”
“Is she working now?”
“No maam, not just now.”
“Well, she’ll find something.” She waved toward the back of the house. “Ellis is out to the barn.”
“Yes maam, thank you,” and, glad to get away so easily, I ran around past the fenced back yard where Ellis’s little brother was penned in against accident, went by the tractor, harrow and hay-mow to the big, tin-roofed barn. There was a feed room tacked on the side where Ellis fooled with his animals and I stepped inside. Ellis was kneeling on the dirt floor. Looking up, he saw it was me and turned his attention back to the bird in his hand.
“Bobwhite,” he said, “picked up some shot.”
I squatted beside him, watched him parting the feather to get a look at the wound. “What you going to do?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Keep him fed and watered, let him rest and see what happens. Don’t know nothing to do except give it a chance to heal.”
“Let me see,” I said and Ellis, who trusted me, handed the bird over, but I only held it a second before giving it back. In my hands the bird became frightened and struggled and I was afraid it would do itself a hurt. Ellis cupped the quail in his two hands making low, nonsense noises at it and the animal quieted. Ellis had the touch, the gentleness that calmed animals. That they trusted. Most animals just seemed to sense it and gave themselves up. With others he only had to talk to them in his way or touch them and they would know. A limping dog shying away from everyone would lie down before Ellis and let him do what he would. Wild creatures would make their frantic attempts at escape, but as soon as Ellis caught them, laid on his hands they would quiet and be still. I had watched him talk any amount of scary stock into friendliness.
Ellis put the quail into one of the cages he built of twigs and twine and we stood up.
“Seen coon tracks,” he said.
I nodded and we left the barn.
“I better shut up the dogs,” and he turned the two shepherds into the backyard. They would be let out again as soon as they put up enough racket for his mother to notice, but we’d be gone by then and they’d stay around the house.
We both picked up sticks to switch the grass with and went across the pasture where his father’s dairy cattle didn’t look up and waded the creek. On the other side we were in the woods. Old, never cut woods of oaks and sycamores.
“Was over by the slough,” Ellis said, letting me know where we were going. “Seen the tracks of a big one, female I guess, and a bunch of little ones. Maybe we can get a look.”
“You gonna catch one.”
Ellis grinned at me. “Maybe. Gotta find out how dad’d take it.”
I nodded knowing the difficulty of figuring the adult mind. I was as confused as anyone about how a thing that made them laugh one day would fetch a slap a week later. Every day and on every subject a grown-up’s temper needed careful scouting.
We were following a cattle trail that wound around the hill and now dipped down into the little hollow in which the slough lay. At the trampled spot where the cows came to wade belly deep and cool themselves in hot weather Ellis signaled me to follow and headed off the slough.
Ellis was entirely quiet in the woods, walked through dry leaves without a sound. I tried my best to do the same, but compared to Ellis, I sounded like an old hog rooting around. Sometimes I fooled myself into thinking I was as good as Ellis in the woods, but I never was.
After a bit Ellis came to full stop in mid stride and I knew enough to do the same. He had his head cocked, listening. He could do that too. He could hear squirrels in the trees and rabbits in a brush pile and tell you where to go find them. He talked to me from the corner of his mouth. “Think I hear them, I’m gonna go see.”
He waited and would have let me tag along if I wanted even though I’d probably be clumsy and spook them.
“I’ll go down by the slough and see if they come along.”
“Okay,” Ellis said and he started through the brush.
Quiet as I could, I went to the slough and stood beside a tall, smooth-trunked sycamore where I was in its shade and, keeping still, wouldn’t be noticed. I stepped in between two knobby kneed roots and that’s when I got myself beside the snake.
I didn’t see or hear the moccasin, but felt it. This is hard to explain though it is a real thing, not imagination. Standing with the summer whine of mosquitoes in my ear watching Ellis make his was through the bushes I suddenly felt its presence, sensed through the side of my foot that something was there and really knew what it was, what it had to be before I finally looked down and my eyes picked out of the leaf litter the arrowhead, the looped metallic body, the flicking tongue.
Once, when I was much younger, I found myself beside a copperhead and I screamed and jumped. The copperhead’s strike missed and my grandfather killed it using up on the snake his anger at my being such a fool. This time I stood still and waited. I had made the mistake and now things were up to the snake. There seemed, at that moment, a certain justice to it and I was calm and satisfied to let the moccasin decide if I should be punished for my carelessness. For a few moments and forever I was a statue in the humming woods where the only movement was the pit viper’s tongue slipping out to test the situation an inch or so from my right foot.
I was once told that a snake stung with the tongue’s forked points, but even then I was a reader and knew that to be false. I knew well how the jaws would spread jutting the fangs nearly straight to stabbed by the released coil of the neck.
If I had my winter shoes, the heavy, high-topped broguns I would have been safe. Even in summer, if my mother saw a snake about, killing it or watching it escape, she made me put on the leather shoes, boots really and I wore them until her scare had passed, but there had been nothing lately, my mother’s guard was down and I was in my summer sneakers.
In my strange, clear-headed state I decided that I had a better chance if the strike was high against my leg where the thick, loose-hanging denim might waylay and turn the thrust. The canvas of my shoes, tight against the foot’s flesh, would receive the bite easily.
Then, at my shoulder, there was a low, sibilant hiss, the sound you might make blowing air out between tongue tip and palate and I saw Ellis stepping past me putting his naked feet in the snake’s terrain and kneeling down to it. His hands loose on his knees, he continued hissing until the moccasin swiveled its hooded, emotionless gaze to him, sent the tongue out to gather Ellis up and bring him back to the sensing pits for deciphering.
Ellis, dipping his face to the coils, offering it, said to the snake, “go away,” and the snake unfolded itself slowly, one loop from the other, through the slightly rustled leaves and curved into the coffee brown slough.
Ellis stood beside me and we watched the moccasin swimming.
“Think we should kill it?”
“No,” Ellis said. “Ain’t no children around here, ain’t likely to be none. Let him be.”
By children Ellis meant the small non-speakers like his brother with no sense yet, who needed looking after. He and I, at nine and ten, were elder children and accountable for our actions. The snake biting me would have been too bad, but it also would have been my fault. I should have watched out.
We didn’t find the coons and I really don’t remember what we did the rest of the day. Probably poked around, looked for rabbits, looked for squirrels, threw rocks at a likely tree and wondered if there were really wolves in Arkansas. Eventually I went home and didn’t say anything about the snake. Often it’s best to just keep quiet. We ate supper and mother washed the dishes, dad worked at his leather and I probably got too rough playing in the house and was yelled at.
A few days later our cat came home with a broken leg. It had gotten caught in somebody’s trap and while we were fighting to splint the leg and being scratched and bitten I told mother that we should get Ellis to take care of it, but she paid me no mind.
