PRICE AND PLEASURE
by
Michael Allender
Copyright 2014 Michael Allender
(The fifth in a series of fourteen stories)
Price and Pleasure
(Story # 5)
An art show and a lesson in family history weren't exactly what we had on our minds for the weekend. My brother Ben and I wanted to slip our boat onto the muddy waters of Peach Creek and float a few miles down to the Navasota River. Not exactly an epic voyage, but kids know various ways to slow time and travel. It was the autumn of 1952, and we had a new tandem canoe—new to us, anyway—and we were eager to try it on the little brown creek that cut a ragged corner off the bottom half of our farm.
"Abbie, we've had that boat on the catfish pond a week now," Ben complained to me. "I'm tired of going in circles. What say we try the creek?"
I figured I was up for it, and Dad had no objection, but his chores would keep him from picking us up at the end of the day.
"Could walk back if you wanted to," he said, as he examined his hay baler. "Price Walker, though, I'd wager he'd give you a ride in his wagon if you stopped to visit for a spell. Pleasure's home-bound and they're always hungry for a bit of company."
Pleasure was Mr. Walker's wife of at least sixty years. The four miles they lived from us lay down the long hill to the west, then around the first bend just beyond the bridge over the Navasota River. Of course we could have walked it, but neither of us was keen on an uphill slog, and we'd have to leave the canoe for later. Still, we were both pretty shy, and it would mean going up to the old couple's home and asking for a ride. It’d be unannounced, and everything, and we'd have to sit and listen to some rambling talk about how things used to be, like, "And this here's a picture of my nephew on my mother's side..." There's nothing wrong with that, but we were just kids. You know.
"Take a look at his sculpture while you're there," Dad suggested, as a bit of added enticement. "He's quite an artist." We'd heard about it before, but not the specifics. Mr. Walker, the Navasota artist. Ben had his own ideas about Mr. Walker's art.
"Art?" Ben's mouth hung open and his eyebrows reached for his hairline. He grinned and fingered a shock of sandy hair out of his eyes. "Come on, Dad. Mr. Walker collects junk in his wagon. You can't make art out of junk."
"That so," Dad said, and then took another turn on a wrench as he tightened up the gearbox.
Ben had the credentials here. He had just begun walking the halls of higher education—the seventh grade—and was even taking a course in art. Or art history, perhaps. Being his adoring sister and two years younger, I started to agree, but something about the weight of Dad's words stopped me. "That so". Which means, of course, 'You dunderhead, you have a lot to learn'. Then he added the clincher.
"Whatever you say." He said it without looking up from his work, a big verbal sigh of resignation at having to live with such ignorance. "If you go, take along a little something. Cookies for Pleasure, maybe, and a mess of catfish. He loves those."
We had our doubts, but the float trip was the main thing. And a ride in Mr. Walker's horse and mule drawn wagon? That wasn't so bad. Ben and I argued over who would fetch the catfish and who would bake the cookies, but it was my turn to feed the fish so I got the best job. Besides, Ben knew his way around the kitchen table well enough. It was high time he leaned about something beyond eating. I saw to the catfish while he baked up a batch of what I'd call some really hearty cookies. Rolled oats and chunks of pecans protruded from them like bits of gravel in fresh pavement.
Mr. Price Walker, artist. I always liked his name, and I felt it deserved a title. It was an unusual handle, one certainly worthy of an artist. A gangly black man, he had skin the color of unsweetened chocolate with the fine-grained texture of work-worn leather. He had what might pass for a uniform—denim overalls loosely hung over a bright red shirt, or maybe it was his BVD's. A small can of oil usually peeked out from a front pocket and a big adjustable crescent wrench hung from the tool loop on his leg. He was ready for a fast unbolting. An eccentric, is what Dad called him. Sort of a junk man, like a crow showing up at a winter-kill. He scavenged anything.
But unlike crows, I don't recall ever seeing him in a quarrelsome mood, even once. He had something of a permanent smile, stuck about halfway between kindliness and gap-toothed mischief. I could tell he had a special liking for us, which I didn't understand, not while he was alive, anyway. We didn't see him enough to be what you'd call close, and I'd only talked with Pleasure twice, once at our house and another time down at the store. She and Price were buying yarn and lantern oil there, and I could feel her watching us as Ben and I eyed the candies in the square glass jars on the counter. After studying us a moment, she had Perk Crawford—the store keeper—fetch Ben and me two little bricks of peanut brittle. Which was just right. She made all four of us smile. I never knew my grandparents, but I imagined they were much like the Walkers: always old, always kind.
I mentioned he was a junk man. Most farms look like junk grows there. Farmers, unlike city folk, have to dispose of their own castoffs, and heavy machinery is forever breaking down. Or it becomes obsolete and just rusts away. No matter how dilapidated a tool or machine might appear, though, there is usually something on it that might someday, with a little imagination, come in handy. Frugality was invented on a farm. The end result is an ever-growing crop of stuff. Junk. With most farmers it's a love/hate relationship. With Mr. Walker, love held no greater ambition than junk.
Dad took endless machines to him for repairs, those wounded by rough earth and impatient farming. Some things were beyond repair, so Dad, like other farmers faced with retrieving and disposing of a machine that had outlived its usefulness, would just tell Mr. Walker to keep it for his trouble. It wasn't like he was dumping things on him, though. Mr. Walker welcomed it with a big grin, open arms and usually something else, like a home canned jar of peaches or a bottle of his infamous dewberry wine.
Though neither Ben nor I had ever been in their home, Mr. Walker had been on our farm a number of times to help with the difficult birthing of our dairy calves. We often saw him working his fields behind his two mules or playing a game of checkers at the local country store. The first time I met him he brought us a sack of corn. He hadn't arrived in his wagon—just walked up the road with the gunnysack slung over his shoulder. Said walking was in his name. Dad fidgeted around as though trying to think of something to offer in return, but Mr. Walker beat him to it. He spied a pile of rubble that had been a former shed and strode right over to it. We were fixing to take what was left out to our private dump, and he pulled out a piece of beat up corrugated tin about two feet square.
"Could you spare it?" he said, like there was a real question about it.
"Price, you can take the whole pile if you're a mind," Dad told him, "but lord, what on earth can you use the tin for?"
Mr. Walker reflected on that, and said he didn't rightly know. Then he grinned and said, "I reckon I can cover a rat hole with it." I got the impression there was nothing he would refuse.
He had one trait I always thought especially nice. Whenever he came to visit he always brought an offering, some little gift. It might be a few stalks of fresh asparagus in the spring. Summer would usually find him with a bouquet of flowers hidden behind his back, and he'd bring them out with a magician's flair and his broad, gap-toothed grin. His bottled apple juice, unsweetened and still warm from the canning pot, was a special treat in the autumn.
It was autumn now, and Peach Creek, low on water, didn't offer much in the way of excitement or rapids, but that was okay. We were only about nine and eleven years old, and those were the early days of our padd
ling together. A kid's imagination creates its own excitement. We worked our paddles hard that day, filling our minds with visions of the wonders that lay beyond the muddy shore to our left. The wild side of the river was what it was, wilderness all the way through Sam Houston National Forest, east through the Big Thicket to the Sabine River and Louisiana. A few towns lay scattered through that wild, and the occasional road, but never mind that. We paused at every riffle, poking our bow into each little backwater where something of interest might hide. Time flew too swiftly and a few hours later we were done, our boat pulled out of the water alongside a rickety dock where the Walker's property began.
We grabbed up the bag of cookies and the catfish on the rope stringer.