The People, Yes Page 8

  Of the sheep counter who was fast and accurate: “I just count their feet and divide by four,”

  Of the man so tall he must climb a ladder to shave himself,

  Of the runt so teeny-weeny it takes two men and a boy to see him,

  Of mosquitoes: one can kill a dog, two of them a man,

  Of a cyclone that sucked cookstoves out of the kitchen, up the chimney flue, and on to the next town,

  Of the same cyclone picking up wagon-tracks in Nebraska and dropping them over in the Dakotas,

  Of the hook-and-eye snake unlocking itself into forty pieces, each piece two inches long, then in nine seconds flat snapping itself together again,

  Of the watch swallowed by the cow—when they butchered her a year later the watch was running and had the correct time,

  Of horned snakes, hoop snakes that roll themselves where they want to go, and rattlesnakes carrying bells instead of rattles on their tails,

  Of the herd of cattle in California getting lost in a giant redwood tree that had hollowed out,

  Of the man who killed a snake by putting its tail in its mouth so it swallowed itself,

  Of railroad trains whizzing along so fast they reach the station before the whistle,

  Of pigs so thin the farmer had to tie knots in their tails to keep them from crawling through the cracks in their pens,

  Of Paul Bunyan’s big blue ox, Babe, measuring between the eyes forty-two ax-handles and a plug of Star tobacco exactly,

  Of John Henry’s hammer and the curve of its swing and his singing of it as “a rainbow round my shoulder.”

  “Do tell!”

  “I want to know!”

  “You don’t say so!”

  “For the land’s sake!”

  “Gosh all fish-hooks!”

  “Tell me some more.

  I don’t believe a word you say

  but I love to listen

  to your sweet harmonica

  to your chin-music.

  Your fish stories hang together

  when they’re just a pack of lies:

  you ought to have a leather medal:

  you ought to have a statue

  carved of butter: you deserve

  a large bouquet of turnips.”

  “Yessir,” the traveler drawled,

  “Away out there in the petrified forest

  everything goes on the same as usual.

  The petrified birds sit in their petrified nests

  and hatch their petrified young from petrified eggs.”

  A high pressure salesman jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and was saved by a policeman. But it didn’t take him long to sell the idea to the policeman. So together they jumped off the bridge.

  One of the oil men in heaven started a rumor of a gusher down in hell. All the other oil men left in a hurry for hell. As he gets to thinking about the rumor he had started he says to himself there might be something in it after all. So he leaves for hell in a hurry.

  “The number 42 will win this raffle, that’s my number.” And when he won they asked him whether he guessed the number or had a system. He said he had a system, “I took up the old family album and there on page 7 was my grandfather and grandmother both on page 7. I said to myself this is easy for 7 times 7 is the number that will win and 7 times 7 is 42.”

  Once a shipwrecked sailor caught hold of a stateroom door and floated for hours till friendly hands from out of the darkness threw him a rope. And he called across the night, “What country is this?” and hearing voices answer, “New Jersey,” he took a fresh hold on the floating stateroom door and called back half-wearily, “I guess I’ll float a little farther.”

  An Ohio man bundled up the tin roof of a summer kitchen and sent it to a motor car maker with a complaint of his car not giving service. In three weeks a new car arrived for him and a letter: “We regret delay in shipment but your car was received in a very bad order.”

  A Dakota cousin of this Ohio man sent six years of tin can accumulations to the same works, asking them to overhaul his car. Two weeks later came a rebuilt car, five old tin cans, and a letter: “We are also forwarding you five parts not necessary in our new model.”

  Thus fantasies heard at filling stations in the midwest. Another relates to a Missouri mule who took aim with his heels at an automobile rattling by. The car turned a somersault, lit next a fence, ran right along through a cornfield till it came to a gate, moved onto the road and went on its way as though nothing had happened. The mule heehawed with desolation, “What’s the use?”

  Another tells of a farmer and his family stalled on a railroad crossing, how they jumped out in time to see a limited express knock it into flinders, the farmer calling, “Well, I always did say that car was no shucks in a real pinch.”

  When the Masonic Temple in Chicago was the tallest building in the United States west of New York, two men who would cheat the eyes out of you if you gave ’em a chance, took an Iowa farmer to the top of the building and asked him, “How is this for high?” They told him that for $25 they would go down in the basement and turn the building around on its turn-table for him while he stood on the roof and saw how this seventh wonder of the world worked. He handed them $25. They went. He waited. They never came back.

  This is told in Chicago as a folk tale, the same as the legend of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the barn lamp that started the Chicago fire, when the Georgia visitor, Robert Toombs, telegraphed an Atlanta crony, “Chicago is on fire, the whole city burning down, God be praised!”

  Nor is the prize sleeper Rip Van Winkle and his scolding wife forgotten, nor the headless horseman scooting through Sleepy Hollow

  Nor the sunken treasure-ships in coves and harbors, the hideouts of gold and silver sought by Coronado, nor the Flying Dutchman rounding the Cape doomed to nevermore pound his ear nor ever again take a snooze for himself

  Nor the sailor’s caretaker Mother Carey seeing to it that every seafaring man in the afterworld has a seabird to bring him news of ships and women, an albatross for the admiral, a gull for the deckhand

  Nor the sailor with a sweetheart in every port of the world, nor the ships that set out with flying colors and all the promises you could ask, the ships never heard of again,

  Nor Jim Liverpool, the riverman who could jump across any river and back without touching land he was that quick on his feet,

  Nor Mike Fink along the Ohio and the Mississippi, half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator, the rest of him snags and snapping turtle. “I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, and out-fight, rough and tumble, no holts barred, any man on both sides of the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and back again to St. Louis. My trigger finger itches and I want to go redhot. War, famine and bloodshed puts flesh on my bones, and hardship’s my daily bread.”

  Nor the man so lean he threw no shadow: six rattlesnakes struck at him at one time and every one missed him.

  46

  The gang in its working clothes

  the picnic bunch in its best bib and tucker

  hicks from the sticks and big town hicks

  they sing whatever they want to

  and it may be The Old Rugged Cross

  or The Old Gray Mare or a late hit.

  They are hit by the hit songs.

  It’s a hit only when it hits them.

  They soon drop it like a hot potato

  or they hold on to it for keeps.

  And whenever they keep changing a song

  with tunes twisted forty ways

  and new verses you never heard of—

  at last then it’s a folk song.

  “Everybody is cleverer than anybody,”

  said a smooth old fox

  who once ran France with his left hand.

  Of the woman born deaf, blind and dumb, the vaudeville

  audience asked questions:

  “Have you ever thought of getting married? Why has

  a cow two stomachs? How much is too many? Do you
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  believe in ghosts? Do you think it is a blessing to

  be poor? Do you dream? Do you think business is looking

  up? Am I going on a trip?”

  And the woman enjoyed answering these questions from

  people born with sight and hearing:

  “I liked it. I liked to feel the warm tide of human

  life pulsing round and round me.”

  Her face lighted when a burst of handclapping and light

  laughter swept the audience.

  “How do you know when we applaud you?” they asked.

  And she answered the vibrations in the boards of the

  stage floor under her feet told her of every shading

  of applause.

  In the farm house passing another crock of apples,

  On the street car riding to the roller coasters,

  At picnics, clam-bakes, or the factory workbench

  They have riddles, good and bad conundrums:

  Which goes through the plank first, the bullet or the hole?

  Where does the music go when the fiddle is put in the box?

  Where does your lap go when you stand up? The same place your fist goes when you open your hand.

  What are the two smallest things mentioned in the Bible? The widow’s mite and the wicked flee.

  Who are the shortest people mentioned in the Bible? Bildad the Shuhite, Knee-high-miah, and the man who had nothing but from whom even that which he had was taken away.

  What was the last thing Paul Revere said to his horse on the famous ride? “Whoa!”

  “Did you hear about the empty barrel of flour?” “No.” “Nothing in it.”

  What is there more of in the world than anything else?

  Ends.

  They have Irish bulls timeworn and mossgrown:

  You are to be hanged and I hope it will prove a warning to you.

  I took so much medicine I was sick a long time after I got well.

  I can never get these boots on till I have worn them for a while.

  One of us must kill the other—let it be me. We were boys together—at least I was.

  If all the world were blind what a melancholy sight it would be.

  This will last forever and afterward be sold for old iron.

  They would cut us into mince-meat and throw our bleeding heads on the table to stare us in the face.

  On the dim and faroff shore of the future we can see the footprint of an unseen hand.

  We pursue the shadow, the bubble bursts, and leaves in our hands only ashes.

  “Ah there tootsie wootsie,” has its day

  till the good old summertime has gone

  with the kit and caboodle of its day

  into the second-hand bins, the rummage sales,

  and another whim emerges in, “Okay toots!”

  The people, yes, the customers,

  In short-order lunch rooms they read signs:

  If the ice-box gets on fire ring the towel.

  Don’t tip the waiters—it upsets them.

  Eat here—why go somewhere else to be cheated?

  Your face is good but it won’t go in the cash register.

  “There ain’t no strong coffee, there’s only weak people,” said one heavy on the java.

  The people is a child at school writing howlers,

  writing answers half wrong and half right:

  The government of England is a limited mockery.

  Gravitation is that which if there were none we would all fly away.

  There were no Christians among the early Gauls; they were mostly lawyers.

  47

  Who made Paul Bunyan, who gave him birth as a myth, who joked him into life as the Master Lumberjack, who fashioned him forth as an apparition easing the hours of men amid axes and trees, saws and lumber? The people, the bookless people, they made Paul and had him alive long before he got into the books for those who read. He grew up in shanties, around the hot stoves of winter, among socks and mittens drying, in the smell of tobacco smoke and the roar of laughter mocking the outside weather. And some of Paul came overseas in wooden bunks below decks in sailing vessels. And some of Paul is old as the hills, young as the alphabet.

  The Pacific Ocean froze over in the winter of the Blue Snow and Paul Bunyan had long teams of oxen hauling regular white snow over from China. This was the winter Paul gave a party to the Seven Axmen. Paul fixed a granite floor sunk two hundred feet deep for them to dance on. Still, it tipped and tilted as the dance went on. And because the Seven Axmen refused to take off their hob-nailed boots, the sparks from the nails of their dancing feet lit up the place so that Paul didn’t light the kerosene lamps. No women being on the Big Onion river at that time the Seven Axmen had to dance with each other, the one left over in each set taking Paul as a partner. The commotion of the dancing that night brought on an earthquake and the Big Onion river moved over three counties to the east.

  One year when it rained from St. Patrick’s Day till the Fourth of July, Paul Bunyan got disgusted because his celebration on the Fourth was spoiled. He dived into Lake Superior and swam to where a solid pillar of water was coming down. He dived under this pillar, swam up into it and climbed with powerful swimming strokes, was gone about an hour, came splashing down, and as the rain stopped, he explained, “I turned the dam thing off.” This is told in the Big North Woods and on the Great Lakes, with many particulars.

  Two mosquitoes lighted on one of Paul Bunyan’s oxen, killed it, ate it, cleaned the bones, and sat on a grub shanty picking their teeth as Paul came along. Paul sent to Australia for two special bumble bees to kill these mosquitoes. But the bees and the mosquitoes intermarried; their children had stingers on both ends. And things kept getting worse till Paul brought a big boatload of sorghum up from Louisiana and while all the bee-mosquitoes were eating at the sweet sorghum he floated them down to the Gulf of Mexico. They got so fat that it was easy to drown them all between New Orleans and Galveston.

  Paul logged on the Little Gimlet in Oregon one winter. The cook stove at that camp covered an acre of ground. They fastened the side of a hog on each snowshoe and four men used to skate on the griddle while the cook flipped the pancakes. The eating table was three miles long; elevators carried the cakes to the ends of the table where boys on bicycles rode back and forth on a path down the center of the table dropping the cakes where called for.

  Benny, the Little Blue Ox of Paul Bunyan, grew two feet every time Paul looked at him, when a youngster. The barn was gone one morning and they found it on Benny’s back; he grew out of it in a night. One night he kept pawing and bellowing for more pancakes, till there were two hundred men at the cook shanty stove trying to keep him fed. About breakfast time Benny broke loose, tore down the cook shanty, ate all the pancakes piled up for the loggers’ breakfast. And after that Benny made his mistake; he ate the red hot stove; and that finished him. This is only one of the hot stove stories told in the North Woods.

  48

  One of the Cherokees in Oklahoma, having a million or so from oil rights, went to a motor car dealer, looked over the different new makes, and in a corner of the salesroom noticed a bran new white hearse, embellished, shining, emblazoned. “This one for me,” he said, and he rode away, his chauffeur driving and himself seated inside the glittering white funeral car. They tell this in Oklahoma as a folk tale. It is.

  In Honolulu they have cockroach races and bet on the winner.

  In Japan they have grasshopper stables, each grasshopper in a little stall by himself.

  In Mexico they sit around a table each man having a cube of sugar and the first to have a fly sit on his sugar wins the money.

  Didn’t he belong to the people, that Gallic eater

  and drinker whose will was short and read: “I have

  nothing, I owe much, I leave the remainder to the

  poor”?

  And why shouldn’t they say of one windbag in

  Washington, D. C., “An empty taxicab drew up to<
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  the curb and Senator So-and-So stepped out”?

  “The hungry hog follows his nose to the warm

  swill,” said an old farmer.

  “He could live on the smell of an oil rag,” they

  said of an old sailor on a tramp steamer.