7. The Old Home

It was nearing summer’s end when we arrived at the old home. About this time, for no particular reason that anyone could explain, frail little Clyde, whose digestive difficulties had kept him housed quite often, began to pick up. He ate like a lumberjack, grew taller, took on weight, shook off the troubles that had dogged his uncertain footsteps, and made up for lost time by setting a new pace for his big brother.

Mama was so delighted over his recovery that she offered no objection to our excursions and adventures. This gave me more freedom from maternal supervision than I had enjoyed previously. Clyde and I were constantly on the go, from morning to night. Luckily for us, there were but few chores to do. School did not “take up” at the little red brick schoolhouse until early in October. The gardening season was over. As yet, we did not own a cow. Mama looked after our two dozen hens.

Clyde and I explored every square inch of our small domain. We trapped wild rabbits in the near-by woods. We brought home big buckets of huckleberries from marshlands miles away. We went fishing. The latest occupants of our property had left Uncle Worth’s leaky fiat-bottomed boat, chained to the same old weeping willow where I had last seen it. We labored it out onto the bank, bailed it, calked it, and made it seaworthy. Every afternoon but Sunday we were paddling about among the lily pads and cattails, catching blue-gills, rock bass, perch; and, as the nippy days and frosty nights of November came on, my brother and I caught many three-pound catfish that were cold and hard and lively as trout.

I am now about to sell you a nice large mess of catfish, which may take some doing, for the catfish is held in low esteem by many accomplished epicures. I cheerfully concede that the catfish tugged up out of the bottom of a pond on a hot day in July is unfit for food; but so is any other fish caught under these conditions.

The catfish has two strikes against him because of his appearance. He is an ugly creature with a head disproportionate to his tapering, black-skinned body. He has large, wide-set eyes, and habitually wears a sinister scowl. He has a cruel mouth, turned down at the corners, and filled with three rows of sharp teeth, slanted inward. Two long, needle-sharp horns form the places where his ears ought to be. It is said that a stab by one of these thorn-like horns is poisonous. That could be so, but I have often felt the prick of them without getting into any trouble.

Your catfish is a greedy, foolhardy rascal who does not content himself with merely tasting your bait and thereby becoming involved with your hook. No, sir; he swallows bait, hook, line and sinker at one gulp; and seeing that your hooks are to be had at four for a penny you had better not try to extract one from his stomach’s pyloric orifice. Get out your jackknife and let him keep what he thought he wanted; for if you try to salvage your tackle he will either bite you or snag you with one of his sharp horns.

The business of dressing him out for the skillet is tricky, too. When you are through fishing for the day, and have brought your catch to that big oak stump behind the barn, detach your catfish (at least a half-dozen of them, I hope) from the stringer, pick him up with a pair of pliers, and drive a ten-penny nail through his head and into the top of the stump. Slit the skin back of his head; and, with your pliers, pull his shirt and pants off. It is a messy business, but it can be done if you like catfish.