A Childhood by Harry Crews

Author:Harry Crews [Crews, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

I was in the bed for six weeks with my legs drawn up, and I never expect to spend a longer six weeks in my life. The visits by the doctors became fewer and fewer, and finally, they did not come anymore. They had done all they knew to do. I think I was an embarrassment to them.

The fever was gone. There were cramps still in the middle of the night, but about all that could be done for them was to have Auntie rub my legs, which she did. The uncle who spoke in tongues came back and fell across my bed several times. Even that did not cure me.

For reasons nobody ever knew, toward the end of September my legs had loosened up a little and I was able to sit on the porch for a while every day if I wanted to. I was on the porch when the last load of cotton was hauled off to Blackshear in the back of the pickup truck, on the way to a huge open-sided warehouse where the buyers would walk among the high-stacked bales, followed by the farmers, many of them wearing new overalls and new brogans, their ancient black hats pulled low over their grim faces as they listened to the buyers tell what a year of their sweat and worry was worth.

Sam sat beside me on the porch, but he too was in a bad way. Old age had dropped on him sudden as a stone. He had lost the sight in both eyes within a period of less than a week, and he had started to bleed from his ears. The bleeding was not continuous, just a kind of spotting that left an irregular and inconstant blood spoor wherever he went.

Because my legs were loose enough to allow me to be carried about over the farm to the tobacco barn, out to sit under the oak tree, down to the abandoned barn to see my goats in the afternoon, I got to see the last catch Sam ever made before he had to be taken down behind the field and killed with a shotgun. Sam and I were taking the weak fall sun on the front porch one morning when daddy came walking up from the mule lot. He carried his left arm hooked up at the elbow, his hand held up in front of him. His hand was bloody, and blood had run down over the sleeve of his shirt.

He stopped at the edge of the porch and said: “Son, I believe I’m gone have to borry your dog. Will and me been trying to load that old brood sow and damned if she ain’t bout bit my finger off here.”

He took me off the porch, and Sam fell in behind us, following, as he had to do now, the sound daddy’s feet made over the dry sand down to the lot where the enormous sow stood grunting and snorting in the corner of the fence.

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