It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Read Free Page B

thing, sonny boy,” he said, tipping Charlie off by use of the diminutive that he was really angry at someone else, “if those clippings aren’t gone by lunchtime, I promise to run you through ’em at the end of my belt. Now if you will excuse me, Willa, I have to buy some brushes and thinner.” And Charlie’s dad stalked out of the house, having threatened a punishment he would not dream of fulfilling.
    Now Charlie knew where most of his father’s irritation lay. Both parents normally called each other “honey.” When they didn’t, they were prissily formal; and when formal, they were either angry or at a church picnic.
    Willa Hardin knew that correcting her husband in the boy’s presence had “tipped Coleman’s madbox over.” If Coleman was the best of husbands and fathers, like many others he had emerged from the recent national depression so thin-skinned in a few places that an unwary wife could poke a hole clear through him. Many a breadwinner still waked in the night shivering with sweat from a remembered nightmare in which he slumped at a breadline or swung a pickax eighty-four hours a week for a twelve-dollar paycheck. When a man has so recently escaped an era when his pride was all he owned, he is likely to keep that pride oiled and polished and automatically functioning far too long for his own good.
    So it was that the Great Depression made Charlie spend much of that Saturday forenoon armored by shoes and shirt hauling mesquite to the neighborhood dump, which was only a sinkhole in a vacant lot near the creek, where locals disposed of such things. From time to time Charlie greeted other boys, all of them gloriously unemployed. A few times, he tried to make it appear such fun that any sensible person would rush to help, but apparently every boy in Austin had read the same books as he. As one said in parting, “Don’t hand me that Tom Sawyer crud, Charlie.”
    It was only a block or so to the sinkhole, and the total weight of those clippings would not have outweighed the boy. Yet any opinion that Charlie’s job was an easy one can be held only by one who lacks intimate experience with mesquite. When God made the world and found it good, He rested. It was while He was resting that someone noticed that He had left the Southwest without any truly spiteful trees. God chose not to bother further with such things. And that is how the devil inherited the job of inventing mesquite.
    In crusted caliche desert, mesquite keeps its head down and seldom rises higher than a shrub. But when it can steal enough water to wet its whistle, a mesquite tree will tower over a four-story building. Its leaves divide into slender leaflets the size and usefulness of a broken shoestring, and if they promise shade, they lie. Its beanpods can be fodder for a determined cow of an experimental turn of mind, but since the Texas longhorn was the result of this research, it merits no applause.
    More: the unwary dude who sits under a mesquite for long will go away gummier and wiser; the demon tree drips a useless sap. And all of this evil intent grows pale beside the main feature of the mesquite, for it is the grand champion porcupine of the vegetable kingdom, a living snarl of barbed wire. A mesquite branch as long as a boy’s arm grows thorns as long as his finger. None of your spindly undernourished thorns, either; at its base, the thorn is as thick as a pencil, honed to a point that can penetrate a truck tire. Tell an Austin boy that an army tank sustained thirty-six flats driving over a mesquite and he will believe it.
    No wonder, then, that Charlie piled branches on his old Radio Flyer wagon with such respect, and why his black and white fox terrier, Lint, could not be coaxed into pulling the contraption. Lint liked a good joke as well as the next dog but a stray mesquite thorn was outside the joke category. It took Charlie two hours to deliver the last of those clippings to the sinkhole.
    And ten seconds to realize that he had