We drove home as fast as we could and hustled the churn into Atkins &
Phillips’s store. Jack was in the other room working on some drawings,
and he came in to see what the racket was.
“What you got there?” says he.
“Churn,” says Catty.
“What you going to do with it?”
“Goin’ to churn the Atkins family respectable with it,” says Catty, and
neither of us had the least idea what he was talking about, then, but we
knew later. “Where’s Dad?” says Catty.
“He heard there was a big painting job out at Briggsville, and he
hustled right over to land it.”
“What!” says Catty, and his eyes got all shiny. “What was that there
word?”
“Hustled,” says Jack.
“He never hustled before,” says Catty, “never. Jack, do you calc’late
he’s really takin’ a interest in this business?”
“I know he is,” says Jack. “He’s been taking a real interest in it for a
long time, too. He hates to let on, but you just think back for weeks
and see how hard he’s worked. Why, Catty, you wouldn’t think your father
was the same man! He’s got a head, too.”
“Dad always had a head when he wasn’t too shiftless to use it,” says
Catty.
“I’d tell you something else, too, but I sha’n’t,” says Jack. “I’ll let
him show you himself. But what about this churn? Going into the butter
business?”
“Jack,” says Catty, “I hain’t got no business in the world but gettin’
Dad and me respectable. After we git _that_ then I’m really a-goin’ to
git to hustlin’ in a business way. But so far I hain’t done a thing but
work on the respectable end.”
“You’ve done a lot, I should say. But that doesn’t explain the churn.”
“Wait till Dad comes and we’ll tell you about it,” says Catty, and just
then Mr. Atkins came in and he was looking pleased.
“Landed the job,” says he. “Five-hundred-dollar contract. We kin work it
in with what we got to do, easy.”
“Fine,” says Jack, but Catty he didn’t say a word. He just looked at his
Dad in a way that made me feel kind of messy in the throat, because it
was a glad kind of a look, and a proud kind of a look, and a hopeful
kind of a look all rolled into one. Then, in a minute, he says, “Dad, it
looks like we were goin’ to make a go of it, don’t it?”
“Sonny, I’m kind of ashamed to own it up, but dummed if I hain’t kind of
gittin’ attached to work. Don’t seem right nor possible, but you kin
sell me for a cent if I hain’t kind of enjoyin’ myself—all but the
decorum book. Looks like that was a sort of a pest.”
“It won’t be when you git it learned by heart,” says Catty.
“I contend,” says Mr. Atkins, “that pie wasn’t never made to eat with a
fork. No, sir; it’s shaped and built on purpose to slide a knife under.
There’s things, and I admit it, that can be speared with a fork, but
when it comes to pie and mashed pertaters, why, book or no book, the
best and easiest way to eat ’em is with a knife.”
“But ’tain’t manners, Dad.”
“How if some feller come along and made it up that it wasn’t manners to
use a putty-knife when you’re handlin’ putty, but that it was polite to
put it on with a feather. How much work d’you calc’late a feller’d git
done? No, sirree! it’s the tool that works best a feller ought to use,
and no one that somebody says is the pertiest.”
“But you _got_ to use a fork, Dad.”
“I’ll use her, all right, seein’ as you’re set on it, but I warn you,
Catty, if ever you try to git your Dad to give up usin’ a putty-kjnife
for puttyin’ then you and me is goin’ to have an argument.”
All at once he caught sight of the churn and went over to it and turned
the crank and fussed around with it. “This here,” says he, “is a
ree-markable handy contraption. Got up right,” he says. “Churn, hain’t
it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it a-doin’ here?”
“If you and Jack will come back into the back room, Wee-wee and me ’ll
tell you about it.”
So we went into the back room and Catty told them all about the thing
from beginning to end, not as if he had done it all alone, like he
really did, but givin’ me a full halfshare in it. He wasn’t the kind of
a fellow to hog the glory if there was any, and I felt called on to tell
them that I didn’t have much to do with it except to watch and do what I
was told. Jack Phillips was so surprised he couldn’t hardly wiggle, and
he says:
“D’you mean you kids figured out this thing and worked it all the way
through by yourselves—without help?”
“It was jest exactly like I told it,” says Catty.
“Well,” says Jack, “I guess I tied up to the right firm. The day’s
coming when Atkins & Phillips is going to amount to something in this
neck of the woods. Catty, my hat’s off to you.”
“Jack,” says Catty, “Dad’s got a heap more brains and ability than what
I got. I was jest patternin’ after him, and doin’ like I figgered he’d
do if he was in my place.” Jack didn’t say anything for a second, and
then he says, kind of slow and still, “Atkins,” says he, “if I had a son
that thought as much of me as yours does of you, I’d figure I was the
richest man in the world.”
Mr. Atkins scratched his head. “Me and Catty gits along splendid,” says
he, “but there’s times when he’s hard to live up to, what with his
spoons and forks and liftin’ your hat, and sich. But I guess he’s got me
tamed. Seems like there hain’t much shiftlessness left into me.”
“And when we git through with that churn,” says Catty, “this whole town
is goin’ to stand on its hind legs and cheer for you. Dad, we’re
totterin’ right on the edge of bein’ awful respectable here.”
“It ’ll be painful,” says Mr. Atkins, “but I guess I kin put up with it
if you’re so set on it.”
“Now,” says Catty, “let’s talk about the job I got figgered out for
you—the churn job.”
“Eh? Got any manners in it? Nothin’ where I got to wear a plug-hat, is
it?”
“You’ll have to look the best you kin,” says Catty, “and talk the best
you kin.”
Mr. Atkins groaned, but I guess he was sort of joking about it. “Let’s
have the worst,” says he.
“You got to upset Kinderhook’s applecart,” says Catty.
“Me? How? Why?”
“First reason,” says Catty, “is that I want you should git all the
credit for savin’ the folks’ money. There hain’t nothin’ will make folks
think so much of a feller as to have him save some money for them.
You’ll be helpin’ the folks here to hang on to a awful lot of it, and
the more there is the more they’re bound to be obliged to you. After
you’ve done it they jest _can’t_ say you hain’t respectable, nor refuse
to give you jobs, nor look down on you. That’s the big reason. The next
reason is that a man’s got to do it because nobody would pay any
attention to us kids.”
“He’s right, Atkins,” says Jack. “The first reason is enough, but I’m
here to say that it took a pretty big kid to give up the glory of doing
it himself. Catty, I’m right proud to know you.”
“Well,” says Mr. Atkins, kind of resigned, like a man that’s just been
told he’s going to be operated on for his appendix, “if I got to, why, I
got to. What ’ll I do and how ’ll I do it?”
So Catty went to work and told us about what he thought ought to be done
and how to go about it. He had it all thought out and anybody could see
right off that it was a corking good scheme. We talked it over and over
and over, and there was suggestions and improvements made, too, but the
main scheme was Catty’s.
When we were done there wasn’t anything to do but to wait for the
demonstration.
Next day—a Thursday—we heard the demonstration was to be held on
Saturday afternoon, and the place was to be the band-stand in the
square. Kinderhook was having it all decorated up with flags and
bunting, and he was going to have the band play and make a regular
celebration of it. That made Catty and me laugh some, because he was
going to get a different kind of a celebration from what he planned.
We could hardly wait for the day to come around, but after a while it
got there. Folks are always interested in any kind of a celebration,
especial if the band’s going to play, and the farmers began driving in
from miles around and hitching their automobiles to all the
hitching-posts in town. It was ’most like a Fourth of July. The real
show was set for two o’clock in the afternoon, but there was quite a lot
going on all the morning, and we didn’t miss any of it, you can bet.
Catty and I had a lunch fixed up and we ate it together under the trees,
but right after lunch we went to Atkins & Phillips’s to see Catty’s Dad.
Jack was sort of standing around in the store, but Mr. Atkins wasn’t in
sight.
“Where’s Dad?” says Catty.
“Back in the bedroom,” says Jack. “Combing his hair, I guess.”
“I’m goin’ to look him over,” says Catty.
“I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you,” says Jack.
“Why?”
“Well, I just wouldn’t. I sort of guess your father would rather you
waited till he came out.”
Catty looked worried, because he figured maybe his father had got
frightened or something, and, anyhow, Catty was the kind that had to
oversee things. If he was in anything he had to see to it personal that
it went off all right, and if he didn’t have his fingers on everything
that was mixed up with it he sort of worried for fear it would go wrong.
But he wouldn’t have hurt his father’s feelings for a lot, and if he
thought his father didn’t want him to go into the bedroom, he wouldn’t
have gone if there never was any celebration, and if Mr. Atkins never
did what it was planned for him to do.
We didn’t have more than ten minutes to wait, though, and then the door
opened and we turned around. I thought I’d swaller my tongue. There was
a man standing in the door that looked kind of familiar in a few spots,
like his nose, but that didn’t look like anybody I ever seen before in
any other spot. He was smooth-faced, without a whisker or a mustache or
anything, and he was kind of handsome, too. Yes, sir, he was a mighty
fine-looking man, with one of those kind of slender faces that look like
the man that has them has got brains, too, and maybe is _somebody_. You
know what I mean. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear he was anything. And
he looked young. Why, this man looked younger than my Dad, and my Dad
don’t look hardly old enough to be out of college. Come to find out,
this man wasn’t forty yet. That’s the truth, and I always sort of
thought he was maybe fifty.
But that wasn’t all. He had on clothes. Not just cloth that sort of
covered him up, but clothes like you see on men that come from New York
or Boston or some place. You could tell in a minute they was made on
purpose for him and nobody else, and he had on a hat that was _swell_,
and shoes, and his cuffs was just showing below his sleeves and there
was a necktie tied like you see them in pictures, with a pin sticking in
it. Say, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to hear this man was
president of a college or a senator or ’most any kind of a man—but he
wasn’t. He was Mr. Atkins, Catty’s father!
I looked at Catty, and Catty was looking at his father, and there were
tears running down his cheeks. Honest, there was. I kind of blinked
myself. Then Catty says kind of quiet, “Dad, honest Injun, is it you?”
“I calc’late it is, Catty,” says his father. “Dad,” says Catty, “I’m
awful proud—awful proud. I always knowed I had the _best_ Dad there was,
but I never knowed till this minute that I had the best lookin’.”
“I hid my beauty under them whiskers,” says Mr. Atkins.
“And we was tramps,” says Catty to himself. “_He_ was a tramp. Honest,
he was a tramp.... But look at him now!” I don’t wonder Catty was
flabbergasted, because I was kind of keeled over myself. There hain’t a
bigger change between a cocoon and a butterfly than there was between
the old Mr. Atkins and this new one—not that he was a butterfly, you
understand, but the change was like that.
“Think I’ll look all right, eh?” says Mr. Atkins.
“Dad,” says Catty, “nobody ever looked as good as you do since King
Solomon.”
“Well, then, we better git started,” says Mr. Atkins. “I kind of wish I
had more good language to talk with, but what I got will have to do.”
“Right after this demonstration,” says Catty, “I’m a-goin’ to see that
your language gits looked after. I’m a-goin’ to sick Jack Phillips onto
you, and he’s got to teach you to talk like they do in college.”
Mr. Atkins made a face. “Life’s awful, hain’t it?... Well, Catty, so
long’s you’ve started out to tinker with me, you might as well make a
full job of it.”
“You kin bet I’m a-goin’ to,” says Catty, with that kind of a determined
look around his mouth. “I’m goin’ to make you so respectable that the
man that wrote the book ’ll be comin’ around to you for pointers.”
“I calc’late,” says Mr. Atkins to Jack, “that he means it. I hain’t
never goin’ to have another peaceful, shiftless hour.”
_“You bet you hain’t!_” says Catty.