• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Well, I’m not.”

“Must be.”

“Well, Arthur, I swear to God it’s true.”

This would cause an immediate stunned silence.

“You’ll go to hell for saying that if it’s not true, you know,” Jimmy would remark, but quite unnecessarily, for you knew this already. All kids knew this automatically, from birth.

Swearing to God was the ultimate act. If you swore to God and it turned out you were wrong, even by accident, even just a little, you still had to go to hell. That was just the rule and God didn’t bend that rule for anybody. So the moment you said it, in any context, you began to feel uneasy in case some part of it turned out to be slightly incorrect.

“Well, that’s what my brother said,” you would say, trying to modify your eternal liability.

“You can’t change it now,” Bergen—who, not incidentally, would grow up to be a personal injury lawyer—would point out. “You’ve already said it.”

You were all too well aware of this, too. In the circumstances there was really only one thing to do: give Milton Milton a knuckle rub.

Only slightly less threatening than poison sumac were pulpy red berries that grew in clumps on bushes in almost everybody’s backyard. These, too, were slightly vague in that neither bush nor berry seemed to have a name—they were just “those red berries” or “that bush with the red berries”—but they were universally agreed to be toxic. If you touched or held a berry even briefly and then later ate a cookie or sandwich and realized that you hadn’t washed your hands, you spent an hour seriously wondering if you might drop dead at any moment.

Moms worried about the berries, too, and were forever shouting from the kitchen window not to eat them, which was actually unnecessary because children of the 1950s didn’t eat anything that grew wild—in fact, didn’t eat anything at all unless it was coated in sugar, endorsed by a celebrity athlete or TV star, and came with a free prize. They might as well have told us not to eat any dead cats we found. We weren’t about to.

Interestingly, the berries weren’t poisonous at all. I can say this with some confidence because we made Lanny Kowalski’s little brother, Lumpy,*3 eat about four pounds of them to see if they would kill him and they didn’t. It was a controlled experiment, I hasten to add. We fed them to him one at a time and waited a decent interval to see if his eyes rolled up into his head or anything before passing him another. But apart from throwing up the middle two pounds, he showed no ill effects.

The only real danger in life was the Butter boys. The Butters were a family of large, interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would all go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their speciality was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn’t, or possibly just didn’t, speak. (It was never clear which.) Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited