_AUTHOR'S NOTE--Another version of this story appeared in a book
entitled “Danny's Own Story,” published in 1912 by Doubleday, Page &
Co._
I'm not so sure about Prohibition and pledges and such things holding
back a man that has got the liquor idea in his head. If meanness is in
a man, it usually stays in him, in spite of all the pledges he signs and
the promises he makes.
About the meanest man I ever knew was Hank Walters, a blacksmith in a
little town in Illinois, the meanest and the whiskey-drinkingest. And I
had a chance to know him well, for he and his wife Elmira brought me up.
Somebody left me on their doorstep in a basket when I was a baby, and
they took me in and raised me. I reckon they took me in so they could
quarrel about me. They'd lived together a good many years and quarrelled
about everything else under the sun, and were running out of topics to
row over. A new topic of dissension sort of briskened things up for a
while.
Not having any kids of his own to lick, Hank lambasted me when he was
drunk and whaled me when he was sober. It was a change from licking
his wife, I suppose. A man like Hank has just naturally got to have
something he can cuss around and boss, so as to keep himself from
finding out he don't amount to anything... although he must have known
he didn't, too, way down deep in his inmost gizzards.
So I was unhappy when I was a kid, but not knowing anything else I never
found out exactly how unhappy I was. There were worse places to live
in than that little town, and there was one thing in our house that I
always admired when I was a kid. That was a big cistern. Most people
had their cisterns outside their houses, but ours was right in under our
kitchen floor, and there was a trap door with leather hinges opened into
it right by the kitchen stove. But that wasn't why I was so proud of it.
It was because the cistern was full of fish--bullheads and redhorse and
sunfish and pickerel.
Hank's father built the cistern. And one time he brought home some live
fish in a bucket and dumped them in there. And they grew. And multiplied
and refurnished the earth, as the Good Book says. That cistern full of
fish had got to be a family custom. It was a comfort to Hank, for all
the Walterses were great fish eaters, though it never went to brains
any. We fed 'em now and then, and threw the little ones back in until
they were grown, and kept the dead ones picked out as soon as we smelled
anything wrong, and it never hurt the water any; and when I was a kid I
wouldn't have taken anything for living in a house like that.
One time when I was a kid about six years old Hank came home drunk from
Bill Nolan's barroom, and got to chasing Elmira's cat, because he said
it was making faces at him. The cistern door was open, and Hank fell in.
Elmira wasn't at home, and I was scared. Elmira had always told me not
to fool around that cistern door any when I was a kid, for if I fell in
there, she said, I'd be a corpse, quicker'n scatt.
So when Hank fell in and I heard him splash, being such a little fellow
and awful scared because Elmira had always made it so strong, I supposed
that Hank was probably a corpse already. I slammed the door shut over
the cistern without looking in, for I heard Hank flopping around down
there. I hadn't ever heard a corpse flop before and didn't know but
what it might be somehow injurious to me, and I wasn't going to take any
chances.
I went out and played in the front yard and waited for Elmira. But
I couldn't seem to get my mind settled on playing I was a horse, or
anything. I kept thinking of Hank being a corpse down in that cistern.
And maybe that corpse is going to come flopping out pretty soon, I
thought to myself, and lick me in some new and unusual way. I hadn't
ever been licked by a corpse. Being young and innocent, I didn't rightly
know what a corpse is, except I had the idea there was something about a
corpse that kept them from being popular.
So after a while I sneaked back into the house and set all the flatirons
on top of the cistern lid. I heard some flopping and splashing and
fluttering, as if that corpse was trying to jump up and was falling back
into the water, and I heard Hank's voice, and got scareder and scareder.
When Elmira came along down the road she saw me by the gate crying and
blubbering, and she asked me why.
“Hank is a corpse!” says I.
“A corpse!” says Elmira, dropping the pound of coffee she was carrying
home from the general store and post-office. “Danny, what do you mean?”
I saw then I was to blame somehow, and I wished I hadn't said anything
about Hank being a corpse. And I made up my mind I wouldn't say anything
more. So when she grabbed hold of me and asked me again what I meant I
blubbered harder, as a kid will, and said nothing. I wished I hadn't set
those flatirons on the cistern lid, for it came to me all at once that
even if Hank had turned into a corpse I hadn't any right to keep him in
the cistern.
Just then old Mis' Rogers, one of our neighbours, came by, while Elmira
was shaking me and yelling at me and asking how it happened, and had I
seen it, and where was Hank's corpse.
“What's Danny been doing now?” asked Mis' Rogers--me being always up to
something.
Elmira turned and saw her and gave a whoop and hollered out: “Hank is
dead!” And she threw her apron over her head and sat right down in
the path and boo-hooed like a baby. And I bellered and howled all the
louder.
Mis' Rogers, she never waited to ask anything more. She saw she had
a piece of news, and she wanted to be the first to spread it. She ran
right across the road to where the Alexanderses lived. Mis' Alexander,
she saw her coming and unhooked the screen door and Mis' Rogers hollered
out before she reached the porch: “Hank Walters is dead!”
And then she went footing it up the street. There was a black plume on
her bonnet, nodding the same as on a hearse, and she was into and out of
seven front yards in less than five minutes.
Mis' Alexander she ran across the road to where we were, and kneeled
down and put her arm around Elmira, who was still rocking back and forth
in the path, and she said:
“How do you know he's dead, Elmira? I saw him not more than an hour
ago.”
“Danny saw it all,” says Elmira.
Mis' Alexander turned to me and wanted to know what happened and how it
happened and where it happened. But I didn't want to say anything about
that cistern. So I busted out crying all over again and I said: “He was
drunk and he came home drunk and he did it then, and that's how he did
it.”
“And you saw him?” she asked.