Catty Atkins

I put a bottle on a box against the side of the barn and aimed as careful as all-git-out. My idea was to bust it right at the neck. Well, I jerked on the trigger and the gun went off and I looked at the bottle. It was still there, neck and all.

After the aim I took it didn’t seem possible, so I walked up close to find out if maybe I hadn’t slammed a hole right through it that couldn’t be seen—but there wasn’t any hole. I knew right off there must be something wrong with that gun. It was the very first time I’d ever shot it, and if a gun don’t shoot straight the first time, when it’s spang-whang new, what kind of shooting will it do when it gets to be old and worn? I was dog-gone disappointed.

Dad gave me that rifle for my birthday and I’d come hustling out right after breakfast to give it a try—and it wasn’t any good! I put in another cartridge and got some closer to the bottle and tried again. The bottle never wiggled. I came some closer and shot again, and then I came still closer and shot again. Six times I shot before I hit the danged thing and then I was so close I could have knocked it over with the rifle-barrel.

“Pretty middlin’ shootin’,” says somebody behind me, and I turned around quick. There was a kid I’d never seen. He was kind of small, with bare feet and clothes that looked as if he’d found them in an ash-barrel and then slept in them. His hair was kind of bristly, and he didn’t have on any hat. He wasn’t smiling or making fun of me as far as I could see, for his face was as sober as a houseful of deacons. It was a kind of a thin face with a sharp chin and a straight nose and funny crinkles around the eyes. But the eyes were gray and kind of sparkly. I looked at him a minute, wondering who he was, before I said anything. Then I says:

“Calc’late this gun ain’t much good.”

“Is it a reg’lar gun,” says he, “or jest a kind of a cap pistol?”

That made me mad, so I says, sarcastic: “Naw, this ain’t a gun. This is a pan of mush and milk.”

“Maybe,” says he, kind of slow and solemn, like he was thinking it over mighty careful—“maybe you could hit things better with it if it was mush and milk. It would spatter more.”

“Say,” says I, “who are you, anyhow?”

“I wa’n’t brung up to give anythin’ away free,” says he, “but I’ll trade you—my name for yourn.”

“It’s a trade,” says I. “Mine’s Moore. Mostly the kids call me Wee-wee.”

“Mine’s Atkins,” says he, “and folks call me Catty because I can climb like one.”

“One what?” says I.

“Mud turtle,” says he; “that’s plain. C-a-t-t-y—mud turtle. Spells it every time where I come from.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Different places.”

“Goin’ to live here?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Hain’t thought about it much.”

“If you’re not goin’ to live here, what made you come here?”

“A body’s got to go some place,” says he, very solemn. “Dad and me wasn’t p’tic’lar. We didn’t start out to come here, we just got here, and here we be!”

“What’s your Dad do?”

“Dad don’t do much. He calc’lates to be shiftless.”

“Don’t he work?”

“I’ve seen him,” says Catty, “but it hain’t usual.”

“Are you rich?”

“Well—we got our health and these here clothes is mine, free and clear. No mortgages on ’em nor nothin’. Dad’s clothes is his’n, too, but they hain’t so gaudy as mine.”

“Kind of tramps?” says I, getting interested.

“Not tramps—j’st shiftless. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Where you sleepin’?”

“If you ain’t careful,” he says, as solemn as an owl, “you’ll ketch yourself askin’ a question. We been livin’,” says he, “in a little house down by the bayou.”

“That tumble-down shanty not far from the waterworks?”

“That’s the one.”

“There isn’t any furniture in it,” says I. “Movin’ about like Dad and me, furniture would be a nuisance.”

“There’s no glass in the windows.”

“We’re partial to fresh air.”

“Huh!” says I. “You’re dog-gone easy suited. If your Dad doesn’t work, how do you get to eat?”

“Well, there’s times when we have more mealtimes than we do meals, but Dad he gits an odd job, and I git an odd job and mostly we do pretty well, thank you kindly.” Just then Dad came out through the back gate, and right here I want to say something about my Dad. I heard a couple of women say one day that they guessed he was a little crazy, but I want to let you know that he ain’t crazy a bit, and I can lick any feller that says he is. Dad ain’t old, either. He ain’t forty yet. Only thing I got to complain about is the way he cusses over my grammar. He always talks as correct as Mother does, only more so, and he’s got manners. Not the kind of manners folks put on at a party or in church, but the kind you have always and use always and that look to people as if you didn’t really try to have ’em, but as if they came natural.

The reason those women said he was kind of crazy is because he don’t act just like everybody else in town. He’s polite even to the man that comes to get our garbage, and he treats boys as if they were just as old as he is, and don’t call them “My boy” and “Bub” and such like names. And he fusses around with me just like he was a kid. Why, he can do more things than any kid I ever saw!