Back at the corncrib I was distressed to realize all my efforts of the morning had brought down only six lengths of lath. Elementary math revealed I would be working till Easter unless I got the hang of this. I chose a junction of oak and lath and wedged the bar in.

A kid somewhere said, “Hey!”

He was in the corncrib, crouched and peeking through laths. I had a slatted view of a boy in a corduroy coat, a fat grinning boy with plugged nostrils. You could see what was plugging them, too.

“Who’re you?” I asked.

“Raymond.” He said it Raymod, the n getting detained up in nostril country.

“I’m Rube—why don’t you come out of there?”

“Whatcha doig?”

“Ripping this old thing down,” I told him. “Mr. Layton hired me. Come on out of there.”

Outside the corncrib he was more of himself. The coat was unbuttoned and showed layers of shirt. His cheeks were rubbed scabby and looked like sallow Texas grapefruits glazed with effluent. Raymond was much shorter, but I’m guessing he had me by thirty pounds.

“How old are you, Raymond?”

“Six.” He twisted around and waved at a house across the alley from Mr. Layton’s. “That’s Gramma’s, we live with her, Mob an’ Dad an’ me.” He looked at me fearlessly. “Can I watch?”

“What?”

“Watch you rip her dowd?”

Raymond was a good watcher. At first I didn’t want him there because I wasn’t adept at the work and feared notice. But Raymond was gifted in not noticing. He sat down in the deep snow and spoke wet, unrelated sentences. “We jus’ moved here las’ summer. Gramma’s house idn’t built good. My brudder heard a ghos’ last night—rhee, like a horse. My dad’s a buskrat trapper, got two hunderd buskrats last year.”

A lath sprang free from the crib. I managed to stay on my feet.

“I use to get beat up back hobe. There was a neighbor kid Pugger could bed his thub alla way back to here.” Poor Raymond, his passages were so obstructed he had his own dialect.

About this time I discovered a principle of physics. Mr. Layton’s crowbar had been broken off and resharpened and so lacked the slight angle a crowbar needs at the business end. In my ignorance I worked without fulcrum, a lousy way to pry, until finally a loose lath fell down of its own accord, wedging itself between bar and post. I shoved, and the lath I’d been worrying for ten minutes squealed loose instantly. Thereafter I worked with purchase and things accelerated. Raymond sat in the snow talking away. I never saw a boy better built for cold. His coat was open wing and wing but he was radiant with talk, and the wind blew over his big besmirched cheeks and exposed earlobes with no effect. He was like a small, hot, talkative planet.

“How strog are you?” he inquired bluntly.

I tore down a lath and flung it on the pile. “I’m tearing down a building, aren’t I?” Boy, it felt good saying that.

“You’re pretty strog.” Of course, he could’ve outpulled me in any contest you might name, but at six he was too kind to know it.

I said, “Well, I’m older than you.”

“Rube?”

“Yup.” I was wrestling a tough one.

“Is your brother a burderer?”

One of my mitts slipped and the crowbar dropped into the snow. Clawing it out I regarded Raymond for malice. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Well, he shot those big kids.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of self-defense?”

He shook his head. I oughtn’t have been so sharp; he was only curious.

“My dad said he was a burderer.” Then, “My dad’s really strog—I bet he could tear that shed down with his bare hads. Could your dad do that?”

“Sure—not right now, though, he’s got pneumonia.”

“Oh,” Raymond said. “I had a uncle with pneumonia. He died and had a funeral, but we didn’t go.”

* * *

That corncrib represented the hardest work I’d ever done; still, I suspect Swede had the tougher job back home. Not the cooking and washing and sweeping, which she’d been doing since we left school, but hearing Dad wrack and hawk and bits of his lungs hitting whang in the pan. When I arrived from Layton’s those late afternoons, brimming with my own success and breathing deep as I ever had, Swede seemed frighteningly burdened. Of course with Swede you got used to periods of deep thought, but this was different; for she was Dad’s nurse, and anyone knows a downhearted nurse signifies a sinking patient. This didn’t register with me right away—by the time I got home, Dad was usually sleeping quietly, which seemed a good omen—until I crept in one evening, hoping to find him awake. I don’t recall what I wanted to tell him, probably how well the corncrib was going, how much money I figured to earn off it, how generally strong and immortal I was feeling now. I stood beside him, wishing he’d awaken, a boy just wanting his dad’s attention; and then standing there I had the dreamlike thought that he’d become me—his breathing something you had to listen hard to hear at all. This was more terrifying than any night I’d spent battling my own lungs; I grabbed Dad’s shoulder and brought him awake.

“Reuben.” He was startled; his hands came up and took hold of my arms. “Is everything all right?”

I was startled right back. “Ah—you want me to boil some water and soda? Loosen you up?”

He sat upright and breathed as deeply as he could. Oh, but he was bound tight. “Look, Reuben. I don’t think steam’s the thing. Maybe you’d pound my back a little.”

So I sat on the edge of his bed and he braced up best he could and I whacked him between the shoulder blades—first as hard as I dared, never having touched my father in this strange way before, and then, as he nodded encouragement and his lungs began to respond, as hard as I could. How I whacked! His back was bony as a fowl’s, for the pneumonia had consumed his surplus; he couldn’t shore up against even my feeble thumping for more than a minute. But when he sagged back onto his pillow his breathing was discernibly easier. He smiled.

“That corncrib work is helping you, boy.”

* * *

I finished December 20, a huge day for me; the crib had a roof of sheet tin held tight by a thousand galvanized nails, and I had to haul the ladder in and hammer upward to loosen it. Deafness threatened. When finally the tin slid away and whuffed to earth, I tilted into a snowbank to rest. I wished Raymond would show up. Nothing remained of the crib but its black upright timbers, which for frozen steadfastness seemed a jury of puritans. I wasted some minutes heaving and grunting, then shoveled to bare earth and sheared them off flush with a crosscut saw. It took all afternoon. When the last post toppled I dragged it to the stack by Mr. Layton’s garage, missing Raymond’s six-year-old admiration for my modest strength. Had he flattered me then I’d have swallowed it whole. I stretched the day out long, picking nails and bits of lath from the snow and finally horsing the noisy sheet of tin up so the whole stack lay recovered by its own roof. Stars were appearing, Venus in the east. I seemed to breathe buckets of air, whole arctics of it! I set the crowbar over my shoulder, thinking of the great Crockett slinging up Betsy at the end of the day.

When I got home Swede was chafed beyond reason. She clattered out the bowls for supper, poured the cornflakes, made Dad’s hot water with a spoonful of lemon juice, and slapped it all on a metal tray. Recalling what Dr. Nokes had said regarding her bedside manner I said, “Are you mad about something, Swede?”