Read Online A Far Piece to Canaan by Sam Halpern - Free Book Online

probably right. It bothered me though that there were tracks, because I had never heard of ghost tracks.
    To be on the safe side, I decided to ask LD how you made a cross. He gave me the measurements and told me to make it out of pine ’cause that’s what the wood was in theirs. I said it made more sense to make it out of oak because it would last a lot longer but he said it ought to be pine because all the crosses he’d ever seen was pine.
    I got on it that same day. The closest pine thicket was on Mr. Mac’s place and I traipsed over carrying Mom’s sewing machine tape, a handsaw, a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife for barking. Pretty soon, I had two sticks and it wudn’t nothing to nail them together. It was a good cross, boy. Trouble was it was sticky, being fresh-cut pine. No matter how much dust I rubbed it with to cut the stickiness, it was sticky again in no time. Sticky like that, I couldn’t put it in bed with me. I couldn’t put it under the bed either because Mom might see it, so I put it between the springs. I had some trouble with the pine smell because Mom couldn’t figure where it was coming from. I told her I’d been fooling around with pine and that was probably it. The cross worked great and in a few days I felt safe.
    It was a fine summer. Fred and me fished a lot and every now and then Lonnie and LD come down. Everything would’ve been perfect except Fred and me didn’t have slingshots. Something always come up that kept Dad from going to see his friend Ike. Lonnie and LD had their slingshots from the year before, and Fred was getting down in the dumps because we didn’t have anything to shoot. Finally, one Sunday, Dad said he had to go to see Ike about a heifer and promised to ask about an inner tube. What he brought home was a beauty.
    I had told Fred that Dad was going to see Ike the day before and when I got to the barbwire gap to tell him about the tube, he saw me and we started running toward each other, me yelling, “I got it! I got it! Whole inner tube. Grade A shapes.”
    â€œHot dog! Whooee!” he yelled, and it was like light shot out over his face.
    â€œYou got all th’ other stuff?” I asked.
    Fred started pulling pieces of rawhide and yellow Bull Durham twine out of every pocket. “Got it all ’ceptin’ th’ handles and we’ll cut some elm for them.”
    â€œWhere’d you get that much twine?” I asked.
    â€œPa and Uncle Charlie was a-savin’ hit for me ’bout six months now. That’s a purty good lot of smokin’, six months.”
    â€œHow come we got to use that? We got lots of white string at th’ house.”
    Fred shook his head. “Hun’ney, white string ain’t no good. Always use Bull Durham twine for slingshot bindin’. You make five, six wraps with Bull Durham twine and hit’ll stay ’til th’ cows come home.” He cocked his hands like he was holding a slingshot and said, “Bam, got that big old frog right between th’ eyes,” then he jumped up in the air and flopped down flat on his back with his head to the side and tongue hanging out. I flopped down too, and we laughed like fools and rolled around on the grass. In a few minutes, we stopped and set up.
    â€œWell?” I said, waiting for him to make the next move.
    He didn’t though. He just kind of grinned. Then he jumped up. “Well? Well’s a hole in th’ ground. Hun’ney, let’s git t’ work!” And we struck out for an elm thicket.
    On the way to the thicket we went around a low rim of the volcano hill. It was too steep to plow and was used mostly as a sheep pasture, and like any sheep pasture it was full of little paths about a foot wide. Sheep paths are all alike. Nothing grows on them, not even Bermuda and it’ll grow out of rock. This part of the trip was nice since the path was covered with fine dust that we could