JOHNTOWN. TENN.
393
had taught the children, long back:
God is great, God is good, make
us thankful for this food.
His tears stop. He reaches down and lays
his right hand on his genitals.
Old Jack Harrick, who had helled over half the ridges and up
half the hoot owl hollows from Chattanooga to Nashville and as
far over as Abingdon, Virginia, sits in the wheel chair. For nigh
forty years Old Jack had dragged jugs dry, whipped his box till folks
fell down from dancing, cracked jaws with his fist like hickory nuts
under a claw-hammer, and tore off drawers like a high wind in Oc–
tober stripping a sycamore to bare-white, all over Kobeck County,
counties adjacent and contiguous, and other points of the compass
wherever a farm wasn't too perpendicular or a cross-roads store too
cant-wise to allow a fellow foothold for one punch to the head, or
wherever there was enough shade-privacy for a maiden's shame-fun,
enough grass so gravel wouldn't put a crick in a lady's backbone, and
ground wasn't so tilted you didn't have to use one hand to hold on
to a sapling to keep from rolling downhill to the settlement and ad–
vertise fame, envy, and consternation before you could get undamped.
Not that a little tilt, as the old folks reported Old Jack to have
said when young, didn't spice sport, and they reported that after a
certain set-to the boys found what had been good pasture-grass and
clover looking for fifteen feet like where oxen had passed dragging
a log from logging operations.
That was the way the old ones talked, dreaming back, the ones
left, especially Old Jim Duckett, back-broke, butt-sprung, and gut–
shot, smelling of corn likker, ambeer streaked down his whiskers, no
good and never had been, sitting in front of the harness shop, in the
shade, reaching out to snag the Harrick boy by the sleeve, saying:
"Durn, if you ain't Ole Jack Harrick's boy-Boy, you made like
him?"
Then
hee-heeing
in an awful old-man snicker, before launching
into the praise that somehow was intended to make the praiser the
peer of the praised: "Yeah, Ole Jack, he was a heIler. He was ring–
tail. Hard-working between times and made that anvil sing, but
when he tuk over the ridge, he was shore Hell's own unquenchable
boy-chap-yeah, a pearl-handle .38 in
his
hip-pocket, and one but–
ton of his fly unbuttoned to save time and didn't give a durn which
he might git aggervated to use fust, pistol or peeker. I'm a-telling you,
