Every time I pick up a paper and read about the teenagers doing this and the teenagers doing that and some young maniac shooting people or beating them up for fun I have a hard time reconciling it with the fellows I knew when I was a teenager. In days not so dead teenagers meant somebody between twelve and twenty, but today it’s gotten to be a term that certainly connotes problem and may connote criminal.
When I hear “teenager” today I almost immediately think in terms of switchblade knives, zip guns, gangs, rebellion, violence, and psychologic difficulty. The emphasis we put on certain examples of adolescence certainly far outweighs the indisputable fact that there are millions of good kids in jeans, who have a lot of fun with and without their folks, who know wind from water and how to build a campfire, run a motorboat, or catch a fish.
The Old Man had a saying about young’uns. He said they were fit to bust with energy, and unless you let the energy loose they would bust. The trick, he said, was to channel that energy down some road that wouldn’t lead to window-breaking and car-stealing. He was a master at diverting energy and fetching the adolescent home so tired from the diversion that he didn’t feel like getting into trouble.
I think today, even more than thirty years ago, that an interest in and knowledge of all dangerous weapons, including knives and pistols—brought out into the open and carefully supervised—is a healthy deterrent to misuse of those weapons. Possibly this does not apply to some social structures in the greater cities, but it never did really.
As the Boy I owned a knife from the time I was six. “The knife,” the Old Man said, “is a tool, and a dangerous one. You ain’t supposed to carry it open, and when you cut, always cut away from you. Keep it sharp, because if it’s dull it ain’t any use for what it’s made for. But whittle away from you.”
Thirty-five years later I still bear two magnificent scars on my left thumb. After acquiring those wounds I heeded the admonition and collected no more scars.
We all carried knives—starting with the twenty-five-cent barlow and working up to things with really wicked ripping blades—for skinning animals and cleaning fish. There was also a special saw-toothed, fish-scaling-and-bait-cutting knife in the tackle box, and as we grew a little older a sheath knife that we wore proudly as a sign of our frontiersmanship. But I would rather have gone without my pants than my pocketknife.
There wasn’t a day when that dangerous weapon didn’t come into use a dozen times—just plain whittling, cutting some cane to make arrows for the bownarrer, fixing a leader on a fishline, opening a can, cleaning fingernails (not very likely) or once, in my case, performing a bit of impromptu surgery on my own foot. I expect if you asked a really expert outdoorsman to name the last weapon he would abandon in the wilds he’d say, “Knife.”
With a blade of sufficient temper there is nothing you can’t do with a knife except shoot. And you can even make an acceptable substitute for that. The old Boers of South Africa used to kill zebra and wildebeest for their hides, meat, and tallow by riding in among the herds and stabbing them in the withers, a rather risky business if the horse stepped into a pig hole.
You can make a bow and arrows with a knife. You can literally make a canoe with a knife, and you can make a shelter with a knife, merely by cutting down small trees and using anything from a strip cut off your shirt to some tough twisted bark to tie the saplings and the sheltering foliage—whether it’s palm frond or pine branches—together.
I reckon the stone knife was man’s first important tool. It really became a weapon when he cut down a short sapling, whittled it smooth, and tied the knife onto the end of it, so he could throw it straighter. In a way, it was kind of a Stone Age zip gun.
When I was last in New Guinea a benevolent gentleman of the modern Stone Age, a former cannibal, gave me a magnificent ax. The blade is of greenstone and sharp enough to fell a tree, split the skull of an enemy, kill a pig, or build a house. The handle is shaped like a big T with a curved top, and is made from a single root or branch of hardwood. The greenstone blade was whetted by a warrior sitting in a river and using sand and rushing water to bring it to an edge. It fits into one arm of the T and is balanced by the branch that forms the other arm. The whole thing is bound together by a decorative crosshatched sennit of the tough-barked pitpit palm, and is as tightly woven as cloth. The modern New Guinea Stone-Ager, discovered only in the mid-1930’s, depends on this ax as the foundation of his entire economy.
Point is, it was put together with a knife.
The greatest archers of modern time I know are the Kuku-kuku tribes of the New Guinea highlands. Their bow is a five-foot number made of black palm. It is strung with a fiber about half an inch wide. The arrows are unfletched, unnotched, untipped—merely fire-hardened. But they are deadly if only because of filth, and when fired in salvos they are something to see. I have watched one little black gentleman shove four into the air before the first one hit ground.
I have a spear from New Guinea and a shield made from a root. That shield will turn a bullet, unless it is centered dead on, and you can throw that spear entirely through a man’s soft section. The spear is not tipped—just plain fire-hardened wood. And I have seen knives of tempered cane that cut beautifully.
Here again the knife, whether of wood or stone, made the other implements and weapons.
This is how I first came to regard a knife as something you used to keep the wolf from the knife-made door, not as something to stick into a stranger for fun. As far as I can remember us kids fought as kids will, but nobody ever drew a knife on anybody.
The same respect applied to guns. We started out at about six with a Daisy air gun, and by the time we hit seven or eight we graduated to a single-shot .22, and at eight or nine we got a 20-gauge shotgun. The care and feeding of these weapons, as I may have mentioned before, was forcefully impressed by a stout, whippy stick on the seat of your pants. In a very short time we learned to respect the tremendous power for harm, as well as the tremendous power for fun and positive enjoyment. I think the worst hiding I ever got was when the Old Man caught me and some cousins playing cowboys and Injuns by shooting each other in the pants with air rifles. My stern tingled for a time, and not from a BB pellet either.
Respect for what could kill you was hammered into our hides. Every summer, when the upcountry people came to the beaches, there was always somebody being hauled out of the water, drowned or half-drowned, because of being swept off-shore by the vicious currents that were formed by tide and two inlets to the major island. There is no such thing as undertow, but there are these currents, dictated by wind and tide and inlet, from sea to sound, and the wise guys always managed to die in defense of not appearing chicken, as they call it today.
My tribe comes from a long line of seafaring folk, and the first thing the Old Man impressed on me when I was a nose-holding, feet-first-jumping moppet was that the big stretch of blue stuff out there could kill unless you kept an eye on it every minute.
“Be frightened of it,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight bigger than you are, and twice as ornery, twice as tricky.”
Perhaps I am not very clear here, but what I am getting at is that my teenage group possessed, legally, all the death-dealing, injury-wielding weapons that are now owned clandestinely by the “bad” kids. There was a certain pride in being trusted. My cousins and friends and I used to go off on a Saturday picnic into the local wilds with enough armament to conquer the county—rifles, shotguns, knives, scout axes—and were not regarded as a serious menace to the community. Or to each other.
It is perfectly true that we were free of the modern boons of child psychiatry, television, and progressive schooling. We denied ourselves much parental supervision, since we were out from dawn until dark. We cut Sunday school whenever possible, and the people we knew were rough—watermen, bush-rangers, and city toughs. Mostly we came from medium-poor to poor families.
Why aren’t we all in jail? I confess I have raided other people’s watermelon patches and learned to chew tobacco at a very early age. I once jacklighted a deer and got into terrible trouble. But that seems a minor list of sins when you remember that I—and my chums—were all possessed of formidable killing machinery. And if it came to racial tensions, God knows there were enough people of another color around to work out on.
We never traveled in packs. Cliques—yes. Three or four boys of an age group generally hunted and fished, and, when we were older and the sap began to rise, dated together. But the cliques never fought one another. Moonshiners and boot-leggers I knew by the score, yet they never taught me any nastiness. And then we came out of the teens in the teeth of the depression, which, Lord knows, showed a glistening set of fangs.
A moral is not intended here. I know a flock of modern kids with a cut of jib similar to ours, and they have been handicapped by all the helpful aids to growing up that prevail in this decade. They still remain good kids, and do not run around killing each other for kicks.
...all of which leads me to the fact that during the summer they bagged John Dillinger in front of that Chicago theater everybody was making a lot of noise about this brave Robin Hood of the underworld and The Lady in Red and a lot of similar nonsense. You would have thought this thug was a combination of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, and that his contemporaries—Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker and her brood—combined the nobler portions of Dan’l Boone and Hannah Somebody, who stood off the Injuns in the blockhouse raid.
I didn’t take much stock in all the hullabaloo. The Old Man’s memory was a bit too fresh—that and a dressing down he gave me one time when I did something bad. I disremember exactly what sin against the commonwealth I had committed, but the Old Man narrowed his eyes and sort of sneered.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked. “Judge Roy Bean? The law west of the Pecos? You make your own rules?”
“Who? What? No sir,” I said.
“Your ignorance of your country’s folklore is lamentable,” the Old Man said, coming even closer to a sneer. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Joaquin Murieta or Billy the Kid or even Jesse James”
“I heard about Jesse James,” I said. “He was an outlaw. He robbed the rich to give to the poor, and he was shot down in a dastardly fashion.”
“Oh my God,” the Old Man said, and clapped his brow. “In a dastardly fashion.’ A dastardly fashion. You know what dastardly means?”
“No sir,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”
“You get a dictionary for Christmas,” the Old Man said grimly. “But right now you get a little lecture.”
I settled down for the long winter.
“I called you Roy Bean because there was a hanging Judge by that name one time, when the West was rough and they were building railroads with a lot of ignorant riffraff. There was so much murder and mayhem about that there was a saying: ‘No law west of the Pecos.’ So a scallywag named Roy Bean—a gunfighter, drunk, cowpoke, blockade runner, and saloonkeeper—set up shop in a place called Langtry, Texas. He opened a saloon called ‘The Jersey Lily’ after Lillie Langtry, and got appointed justice of the peace. He held court in the saloon, and announced that he was the ‘law west of the Pecos.’ In a way he was, because he would try you, fine you, and hang you all in the same motion. He set himself up as law, and justice didn’t enter into it.”
The Old Man snorted through his mustache.
“This bum was a hero when I was a boy,” he said “We are a peculiar people, us Americans. All a fellow has to do is take the law in his own hands and we make a hero of him. Like this Billy the Kid. A nasty little bucktoothed rat, who’d shoot his mother in the back, who wasn’t even a very good murderer, and who got killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett when he was twenty-one. Now they got songs about him.
“And this California bandit, Murieta. He is still famous, since 1853, but they ain’t even certain it was him they killed and cut the head off of to exhibit around at the fairs. There was about five Joaquins—all bums, all rustlers and back-shooters—working at the time, and they seized onto the first Mexican they could bushwhack who looked like his name might of been Joaquin.
“One thing you will find running through all these tall stories about bandit heroes. They were all supposed to be kind, generous, handsome, happy, chivalrous, kind to women and children. They were all supposed to be forced into a life of crime because of some outrage society dealt ‘em off the bottom of the deck. I don’t know what it takes to make a legend, but honesty, decency, and a reasonable obedience to law and order don’t seem to qualify.”
“How about Robin Hood, from the olden days?” I ventured. “I read a lot about him, how he robbed the rich to give to the poor.”
“Fiddlesticks,” the Old Man said. “There never was a highwayman would give a plugged nickel to a blind beggar. As for Mr. Robin Hood, he got in trouble first because he was a poacher—a rustler, if you will—and stayed in trouble because he couldn’t keep his paws off other people’s pokes. His pleasing personality was an invention of time and people with vivid imaginations.”
“How do you know all this, for sure?”
“I don’t,” the Old Man said, “but it figures. When a man sets himself up bigger than the society he lives in anything he had nice for a start wears off him as he goes along, and he winds up a rat in a hole until somebody removes him from serious consideration.”
“There must of been somebody from the last hundred years you admired,” I said, figuring that the Old Man was so mad at Roy Bean and Billy the Kid and Robin Hood that I was off the hook for my own misdemeanor.
The Old Man smiled. “I kind of fancied a couple folks,” he said. “I reckon I would go along with Jim Bowie. He was wild but he wasn’t no outlaw, and he died with the knife he invented in his hand in the battle of the Alamo. Like everybody else in the fort. You must of read about that in the history books, General Santa Anna and the siege and all?”
“Yes sir, we had a chapter on it.”
“Well, that chapter didn’t tell all about Bowie, not by a durn sight. This was a cold-eyed, soft-voiced gentleman, from all accounts, and a real ring-tailed wildcat. He was born gentle and raised rough. He rode alligators for fun in Louisiana, and he had slave dealings with Jean Lafitte, the pirate, on Galveston Island. He was a colonel under Andy Jackson. He ran wild cattle and speared them, and he was a great dark-room duelist with that wicked knife he thought up. He was maybe the greatest Injun fighter of them all. One time a hull flock of Comanches aimed to ambush him, and he and ten men accounted for fifty dead and thirty-odd wounded, against one white man dead and three hurt. The books say there was a hundred and sixty-some Injuns against the eleven whites. He was a sick man at the siege of the Alamo, but they say there was Mexicans stacked up like cordwood alongside his bunk before they finally got him.
“No man I ever heard about lived as big as Jim Bowie. He married the prettiest girl in San Antonio, a Spanish gal, daughter of the vice-governor when the Mexicans still had Texas. He went out and got himself adopted by the Lipan Apaches. These Lipans did a heavy traffic in silver at the trading posts, and Bowie had himself a keen eye for old Spanish treasure.
“He worked hard at being a good Injun. He was a fine shot and he killed a lot of buffalo and fought a lot of the Lipans’ enemies. He stood so high with the chief and the tribe that they finally showed him their treasure. The historians don’t quite agree as to whether they showed him a galore of smelted Coronado ore or an ocean of natural veins. But they showed him something that drove him mad, and he spent the rest of his life trying to locate the lost San Saba mine.
“Some think he found it, but didn’t have time to exploit it, or else he was biding his time until he could work it without cutting the country in half. But the Texas War of Independence came along and Jim Bowie died with all the other men in the Alamo. Even today the Texas people around Santone think he died knowing the whereabouts of the San Saba treasure, whether it was smelted ore or natural vein. And they’re still looking for the lost mine.”
“Your Mr. Jim Bowie sounds about as raunchy as the others you’re so down on,” I said. “I mean he was a killer and a slaver and a real roughneck.”
“There’s a difference,” the Old Man said. “Bowie was a gentleman and most of his legend is founded on fact, not on what a bunch of latter-day sentimentalists and maudlin outlaw-worshippers wove around some drunk cowpoke, who managed to shoot six Mexicans and make himself a reputation as a bad hombre. Most of the Kids and Jameses were just murderers and stick-up artists, before they hung halos on ‘em. There’s been more lies told about the olden days and the tough guys that inhabited those days than I like to think about. Seems like all a fellow’s got to do is die with his boots on and he gets to be an archangel, when all the time he was just some ignorant bushwhacker with a mean streak.”
“How do you account for all the hero worship then, in modern times, if they’re all so no-account?”
“Son,” the Old Man said, “a fellow named Thoreau once remarked that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. The average fellow is stuck so firm under the thumb of his wife and his family and his job that even a hyena sounds romantic, if it happened to holler yesterday. These hairy ruffians would have seemed pretty commonplace, disgusting, and possibly full of lice if you’d lived in the same neighborhood with ‘em. When they got drunk you ducked out of their way, and wished they’d move off someplace else.”
“All the same,” I said stubbornly, “I would like to have lived in those days.”
“I do not doubt it in the least,” the Old Man said. “You would have been one of the first victims of the James boys or of Billy the Kid, due to being a basically law-abiding type and a little slow at fanning a gun.”
About that time a female voice sounded strong on the evening breeze.
“That’s your grandma requesting that we wash up for supper, Judge Roy Bean,” the Old Man said. “I’ll say one thing. If she’d of been around in those days, there would have been law west of the Pecos, and they wouldn’t have made a legend out of your namesake. She’d have made a great peace marshal without firing a shot.”