Little Big Man Read Free Page B

averting my eyes, I discovered the way to survive Mrs. Burr’s bad taste. Failing to elicit another sound from me, she at last replaced Crazy Horse’s bonnet in the cabinet and came back to the bedroom in what with her passed as a reflective mood.
    She seated herself heavily on the radiator cover. “Did I ever tell you when I worked on the staff of the old-folks’ home in Marville?”
    A more sensitive person would have taken my murmur as adequate discouragement, but Mrs. Burr was immune to subtlety.
    “Seeing them Indin things recalls that to my mind.” She cleared her throat with a disagreeable sound. “There was a dirty old man there, claimed to be a hundred and four years old. I will say he looked every bit of it, I’ll say that for him, nasty old customer, scrawny as a bird and with skin like wornout oilcloth, he couldna been less than ninety even if the other was a dirty lie.”
    In trying to reproduce Mrs. Burr’s speech I know I am quixotic: the best I can do is describe it as the vocalization of maximum ill will.
    “Anyways, the other thing he claimed to be was a cowboy and Indin-fighter from the olden time. They watch a lot of tellvision up there, old Westerns and such, and he was always saying that’s junk because he went through the real thing. Rotten old bum, used to just ruin it for them other old folk, if they paid him any mind, which they didn’t usually. He had wandering hands, I always used to say, the old devil, and you couldn’t come and tuck the blanket around his ancient legs in the wheelchair without he’d try to get one of them little birdie claws down into your boozum. Say, he had a pinch, too, if you bent over nearby to get a pillow off the floor. Imagine, with a woman of my age, although of course I was younger then, that being seven years ago, and the late Mr. Burr was known to say, when he’d had a few, that I never cut the worst figure. But to get back to the old repperbate at the home, he claimed to be at Custer’s Last Stand, which I happen to know was a durn lie because of having seen a movie of it in which all was killed in some fashion. I always say, the Indin is the only real American when you get right down to it.”
    So much for my nurse. Requiescat in pace . A week later she left my employ, and it was midway in the following month, I believe, that I read the notice of her fatal accident. I flatter myself that I am not the sadistic bore who so often writes our prefaces and uses them for self-indulgence. I see no reason to take the reader with me on every twist and turn of my search for the individual who proved to be the great frontiersman.
    For one thing, as soon as Mrs. Burr saw my interest in the “dirty old man who claimed to be an Indin-fighter,” etc., she led me on a long, squalid, and fruitless chase through the obstacle course of her memory. For another, none of the staff at the institution for the aged at Marville (where I went as soon as my nose had recovered its normal shape) had ever heard of the person in question, whose name Mrs. Burr had rendered as “Papp” or “Stab” or “Tarr.”
    Nor did the “cowboy” references ring a bell. And as to the alleged great age of my subject, the physicians laughed in my face; they had never known an inmate to survive past 103. I received the definite impression that they were determined to preserve that record and might give the quietus to any arrogant old codger who tried to better it—like all such institutions they were terribly overcrowded, and the wheelchair traffic was a real terror to pedestrians on the gravel walks.
    I was apprised by the state welfare bureau of the existence of similar facilities for the superannuated at the towns of Carvel, Harkinsville, and Bardill. I journeyed to each of them and held many interviews among both staff and aged—some of these would make good stories in themselves: I talked to one oldtimer, who had a bass voice and wore a bathrobe, for half an hour under the impression