Summer of the Monkeys (2 page)

I grew up on that Cherokee farm and was just about as wild as the gray squirrels in the sycamore trees, and as free as the red-tail hawks that wheeeeed their cries in those Ozark skies. I had a dandy pocketknife, and a darn good dog; that was about all a boy could hope for in those days.

My little sister Daisy grew up, too; but not like I did. It seemed as if that old leg of hers held her growing back. Each year it got
worse and worse. The foot part kept twisting and twisting, until finally she couldn’t walk on it at all. That’s when Papa made a crutch for her out of a red oak limb with a fork on one end. The way Daisy could zip around on that old home-made crutch was something to see. She could get around on it just about as well as I could on two straight legs.

It was always a mystery to me how my little sister could be so happy, and so full of life with an old twisted leg like that. She was always laughing and singing and hopping around on that old crutch just as if she didn’t have a worry in the world. Her one big delight was in getting me all riled up by poking fun at me. She never overlooked an opportunity, and it seemed that these opportunities came about every fifteen minutes.

Up on the hillside from our house, under a huge red oak tree, Daisy had a playhouse. From early spring until late fall, practically all of her time was spent there.

I didn’t like to mess around Daisy’s playhouse. Every time I went up there, I had a guilty feeling—like maybe I shouldn’t be there. She had all kinds of girl stuff setting around; corn shuck dolls, mud pies, and pretty bottles. She treasured every tin can that came to our home. In each one, some kind of wild flower peeked out.

At one end of her playhouse, Daisy had built a little altar. She had made a cross by tying two grapevines together and covering them with tinfoil. The face of Christ was there, too. Daisy had molded it from red clay. For the eyes, she had pressed blue shells from a hatched-out robin’s nest into the soft clay. She had covered the crown with moss to resemble hair. When Mama discovered that the moss was actually growing in the soft clay, she told everyone in the hills about it. People came from miles around to see the miracle. I never saw anything like it.

It was pretty around Daisy’s playhouse; especially, in the early spring when the dogwoods, redbuds, and mountain flowers were
blooming. Warm little breezes would whisper down from the green, rugged hills; and the air would be so full of sweet smells, it would make your nose tickle and burn. If you closed your eyes, and filled your lungs full of that sweet-smelling stuff, your head would get as light as a hummingbird’s feather and feel as if it was going to sail away by itself.

Daisy was never alone in her playhouse. She had all kinds of little friends. Big fat bunnies, red squirrels, and chipmunks would come right up to her and eat from her hand. She wouldn’t be in her playhouse five minutes until all kinds of wild birds would come winging in from the mountains. They would sit around in the bushes and sing so happy and loud that the mountains would ring with their birdie songs. Sometimes they would even light on her shoulders.

I never could understand how my little sister made friends with the birds and the animals. I couldn’t get within a mile of anything that had hair or feathers on it. Daisy said it was because I was a boy and was catching things all the time.

One morning in the early spring, Papa came in from doing the chores with an empty milk bucket in his hand. He looked grouchy, and didn’t even say “Good morning” to any of us. This was so unusual that right away Mama knew something was wrong.

From the cook stove where she was fixing our breakfast, Mama smiled and said, “Knowing how desperate you are to get the planting done, I’d say it was going to rain.”

“No,” Papa said, in a disgusted voice. “It’s not going to rain. Sally Gooden’s gone again.”

Sally Gooden was our crazy old milk cow.

“Oh, no!” Mama exclaimed. “Not again!”

“I can’t understand that old cow,” Papa said, shaking his head. “Just last week I put an extra rail on the pasture fence. It didn’t do any good though. She sailed over it as if it wasn’t even there.”

Turning to me, Papa said, “Jay Berry, you’ll have to find her;
that’s all there is to it. It’s wild onion time, and if she gets a bellyful of those things, her milk won’t be any good for days. We can’t do without milk and butter.”

When Papa asked me to do important things like that, it made me feel just about as big as those Ozark Mountains around our log house.

I puffed out my chest and said, “I’ll find Sally Gooden, Papa. She’s probably down in the river bottoms. That’s where I usually find her.”

It seemed that Papa and I never could hold a man-to-man conversation without Mama getting all worked up; especially, if we were talking about my going down to the river bottoms.

Mama frowned and said, “That crazy old cow anyhow. Jay Berry, you be careful. I worry every time you go down in those bottoms.”

“Worry!” I said, big-eyed. “Why, Mama? What do you have to worry for? I’ve been all over those bottoms. You know that.”

“I know,” Mama said, “but I worry just the same. It’s no place for a fourteen-year-old boy. Why, it’s a regular jungle down there. You can’t see ten feet in any direction; and there are snakes, wild hogs, and goodness knows what all.”

“Aw, Mama,” I said, “you make it sound like I was going to the jungles in Africa, or something. I’ve chased Sally Gooden out of those bottoms a thousand times and nothing’s happened yet. Besides, Rowdy’s always with me and he wouldn’t let anything get in a mile of me.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but about an hour later I wasn’t so sure but that I was in Africa—the deepest part of Africa.

Sally Gooden was the one thing we had around our farm that I thought was hardly worth putting up with. I always figured that she was a twin sister to the cow that jumped over the moon. She could stand flatfooted and jump out of a well. It seemed as if I spent about half of my time looking for her, and I figured my time was very valuable.

We kept a bell on the jumping old thing, but that didn’t do any good. Every time she heard me coming, she would get behind a bush and stand as still as a fence post. Sometimes I swore that she held that bell in her mouth just to keep me from hearing it. I don’t think I ever could have found her if it hadn’t been for Rowdy. He could sniff her out every time.

Right after breakfast I called Rowdy and we lit out for the bottoms to look for the Lee family’s milk supplier. It didn’t take Rowdy long to sniff out Sally Gooden. She was down by an old slough that emptied into the river. It was cool and shady along the banks of the slough and there was plenty of green grass. She was just standing there under a big sycamore, chewing her cud, and looking as innocent as the day she was born. I was just about to warm her up with a switch when an idea popped into my head.

Looking at Rowdy, I said, “It’s a cinch she’s not going anywhere. Her milk bag is so full now she’ll have to walk spraddle-legged. Let’s leave her alone for a while and do a little looking around.”

Rowdy’s long skinny tail started fanning the air. He whined and licked my hand. That was his way of saying, “If you want to do a little looking around, pal, it’s all right with me.”

Now if there ever was a place that needed looking into, it was the Cherokee bottoms. A jillion little game trails twisted their way through jungles of wild cane and matted masses of elder. Like the crawl of a black snake, they wound their way beneath tall white sycamores, black gums, birches, and box elders. Every chance I had, I was down in those bottoms and was doing a pretty good job of leaving my barefoot tracks in the dust of each trail and of carving my initials in the smooth white bark of every sycamore tree.

In the cool silence of those Cherokee bottoms, I could find all the wonders of a storybook world. Sometimes I was Daniel Boone; then there would be spells of Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, the Last of the Mohicans, and Tarzan of the Apes. My favorite hero was
Daniel Boone. With hawk feathers sticking in the top of my old straw hat and with my face painted with pokeberry juice, till I’m sure that it would have scared a hoot owl to death, I laid ten thousand Indians to rest in that sycamore heaven.

Old Rowdy was always there, and he was always in the lead, ever alert for any danger that might lie in my way. He could scent a diamond-back rattler or a copperhead long before I saw it, and he’d let me know that it was there. If there were any wild hogs around, he could scare the daylights out of them with his deep voice.

Sometimes Old Rowdy would hop up on a sycamore log, raise his head high in the air, and bawl. I always smiled when he did it because I knew what he was doing. That was his way of telling every living thing in those Cherokee bottoms to look out, for a mighty hunter and a bluetick hound were on the prowl.

I loved every bone in Old Rowdy’s body, but what I liked about him most of all was the way he could understand me. Sometimes I figured that he could understand me even better than grown folks could. At least, he would never say “No” to anything I suggested.

We were following a little game trail deep in the heart of the bottoms, when all at once Rowdy stopped and raised his head in the air. Standing as rigid as a black locust stump, and with his long ears fanned open, he started sniffing the air. I could tell by Rowdy’s actions that he had scented something, but was having trouble locating it. Just then a warm summer breeze whispered down from the hills and fanned its way through the tall-timbered bottoms. That was all it took for the sniffing of Old Rowdy to zero in.

“What is it, boy?” I whispered.

Rowdy looked at me and whined.

“Go get it, boy,” I said in a low voice.

With no more noise than the shadow of a winging hawk, Rowdy turned and padded from sight in the folding green. Standing
as still as the sycamores around me, I waited and listened. I didn’t have to wait long. The bell-like tones of my old dog’s voice jarred the silence around me. He was bawling treed, and his deep voice was telling me and the whole wide world that he had something up a tree.

To let Rowdy know that I was coming, I reared back and whooped as loud as I could, “Who-o-e-e, tell it to him, boy. Sing him a hound-dog song.”

Ducking my head and running as fast as my legs could carry me, I started boring my way through the underbrush.

Rowdy had something treed in a huge bur oak that was a solid mass of green. As I walked around the big tree, I peered into the dark foliage.

I said, “What is it, boy? A squirrel?”

Not being able to see anything, I backed off to one side, picked up a stick, and threw it up into the branches. From a shadow close to the trunk of the big tree, something moved out on a limb. I couldn’t see what it was until it walked into an opening.

At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a monkey—an honest-to-goodness live monkey. I was so surprised I couldn’t move or say a word. All I could do was stand there with my eyes bugged out, and stare at it.

The monkey was staring at me, too. He just sat there on a limb, boring holes through me with his bright little eyes. Then he opened his mouth like he was going to scream his head off, but he didn’t make a sound. All he did was show me a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. He looked so cute and funny, I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

Rowdy had seen the monkey, too; and was having a hound dog fit. He was trying his best to run right up the trunk of the bur oak tree; and all the time his deep voice was telling that monkey it was the end of the road.

I don’t know whether the monkey got mad or scared. Anyhow, he reared up on his hind legs and let out a cry. All around me the bottoms came to life with noises I had never heard before; grunts and squeals, barks and cries, and everything else.

I didn’t get scared until I remembered that about the only place you could find wild monkeys was in the jungles somewhere. The very thought of jungles brought up visions of all kinds of man-eating things like lions, tigers, and gorillas. Then I really got scared. My old heart started turning somersaults; and something that felt like a thousand-legged centipede jiggled its way up my spine.

“Let’s get out of here,” I yelled at Rowdy, and tore out down a game trail like a scalded cat.

Any second I expected something to jump out of the bushes and eat me up. Old Rowdy could usually outrun me, but it was all he could do to stay up with me.

I came tearing out of the bottoms into one of our fields. At the far end, I saw Papa hitching one of our mules to the corn planter. I headed for him, kicking up the dust.

About five feet from Papa, I threw on the brakes and said in a loud voice, “Papa, Rowdy treed a monkey.”

Papa just stood there for a second looking at me, then he smiled and said, “Jay Berry, when a boy’s growing up, it’s all right for him to see things. I did myself, but you’re getting to be a pretty big boy now and I think it’s time you quit seeing things. Rowdy probably treed a squirrel.”

“No, he didn’t, Papa,” I almost shouted. “It wasn’t a squirrel. It was a monkey—an honest-to-goodness live monkey. I saw it plain as day.”

Looking at me kind of hard, Papa said, “Now hold on just a minute. I can’t remember that you’ve ever seen a monkey before.”

“I haven’t seen a live one, Papa,” I said, “but I have seen pictures of them. You remember that little thing Grandma gave me a
long time ago. That little thing that had three monkeys on it who couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, or say anything. Well, that thing that Rowdy treed looked just like they did. I’m sure it was a monkey all right.”

I guess papas have a way of knowing when boys are telling the truth.

Papa frowned and looked off toward the bottoms. “Maybe you did see a monkey,” he said, “but it’s sure hard to believe. I’ve never heard of any monkeys being around here.”

“Well, there’s one here now, Papa,” I said. “He’s right down there in the bottoms, sitting on a bur oak limb, big as you please.”

Papa didn’t even act as if he heard what I had said. He just stood there with a thoughtful look on his face, staring off toward the bottoms.