Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. by Robert Paul Smith

Author:Robert Paul Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TREEHOUSE WAS THAT, little though we were, we could not for long convince ourselves that it was a house. It wasn’t, and we knew it after what may have been days or weeks or months—time is a very flexible thing with kids. I know today that I could not possibly have stared at my first cricket for more than minutes, and yet today in that length of time I could write a whole first act. The treehouse after a certain length of time was only a couple of boards and a piece of awning loosely attached to a tree.

But the hut; well, that was a place where we could live. I have been trying hard to remember just how we started to build it. Certainly there was no foundation. I seem to remember building the first wall in one piece, boards and tarpaper hammered onto a couple of two-by-fours, and the two-by-fours extending below, the whole structure raised and the extensions going into holes, and rocks being jammed around. I imagine we got the second wall up the same way, and ran roof beams across the top so that it stood up. The roof, if memory serves, and I am getting pretty dubious about that, was something that was lying around the lot. An abandoned cellar door, perhaps.

I am lying a little now—hell, I am lying a lot. I don’t really remember building the hut. I remember repairing it, and expanding it, and putting a better door in it, a hasp and a lock. I remember packing rocks from the rockpile around the perimeter, to strengthen the hut—it was by then a fortress—against any attack. I remember tamping down the dirt floor, and finding a piece of linoleum and a gunny sack to brighten the corner which was mine.

I suppose, when I come right down to it, none of us could stand upright in the hut, and I have a kind of notion that when there were more than two of us in it, no one of us could move.

This is a hell of a note, on an August afternoon in my declining years to realize that really, that hut, that shining palace, that home away from home, that most secure of all habitations, was not much bigger than a big doghouse, and could have been pushed over by an angered Shetland pony. (Which any of us were going to get any moment, or a magic lantern, as soon as we had sold thirty-four million packages of blueing.)

No matter. It was ours. It belonged to us. And if you were not one of us, you could not come in. We had rules, oh Lord, how we had rules. We had passwords. We had oaths. We had conclaves.

It was a pitiful wreck of a tarpaper hut, and in it I learned the difference between boys and girls, I learned that all fathers did that, I learned to swear, to play with myself, to sleep in the afternoon,

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