Chapter III A Night with Captain Skipper
Blessed is that man who is born with the saving grace of humor! Blessings on the memory of my Celtic sires!
One night when Eloise and the twins were away, I rode over to spend the night with my brother Ned. He had been elected to Congress from the Hermitage District, and together we were to frame a Forestry Bill—the first of that series of acts which have steadily legislated toward the Conservation of our national resources, and which will yet lead on to greater things; first and foremost of which, and most vital, will be the taking over for preservation by the national Government of the entire Appalachian mountain range, the forests of which are at the headwaters of nearly all the Eastern half of our country.
My brother was not home, but the others were, and to my great delight a girl baby as much like her mother as two turquoise shells. Little Sister had grown into a slim, pretty girl, and Captain Skipper, more positive than ever, began early begging his mother, since his father was away, to let him sleep with his Uncle Jack that night.
“Oh, do, Thesis,” I said, after supper. “Let him have his way.”
“And that’s where you’ll drop your candy,” said Little Sister in her serio-quaint way.
Thesis, who is so good that she says only what she thinks and is so honest that she never suspects others of diplomatic pretenses, took me at my word. Captain Skipper should sleep with his dear Uncle Jack that night!
You who read this, did you ever sleep with a boy? I don’t mean one of those good boys that you read of in Sunday-school books—the impossible kind—who lives like a saint every day and says his prayers and retires like a gentleman at night: but one of those lusty, growing young devils, born with a spring in his back, who howls out the first year, sleeps out the second, and by the time of the third is ready to chase the cat around and fight brave battles with the hen folks. At four he is ready for the birds’ nests and tin cans for the dogs’ tails, and a little later he breaks every colt that tries to keep the Sabbath in the meadow by the still waters.
When night comes—ay, there is the rub! He howls away the twilight hours and spends the night kicking, coughing, rolling out of bed or having fits, and yet sleeping through it all like a cub in winter quarters.
The weather that night was warm, one of those hot April nights that lies humid and close. “The dear little fellow will be so proud to sleep with his Uncle Jack,” said his fond mother, when she kissed him good night; “and he does sleep so sound and quietly.”
Never having owned a boy, I believed all of this. Did you ever try to undress a lad of four that had chased the cat around until he was hot? His clothes stick to him like a plaster. Being a novice, I got everything unbuttoned and then skinned him, peeled them off. To my surprise—and I found later that there were all kinds of surprises in that boy—in fact, that he was made out of surprises—he insisted upon saying his prayers! But I never saw anything go more promptly to sleep at his devotions. I had to derrick him up into the bed.
One of the strange things about a boy is that when he starts to wiggle around over the bed in his sleep he does it diagonally. I pulled him back on his own side of the bed five times within the next hour. Then I would hear him scuffling and flopping about, always ending in a long-drawn, dismal and dreary sigh, that would have made his fortune as Romeo. It always ended in his rounding up against the footboard in the opposite corner, flat on his back, each limb and arm pointing to its own cardinal point of the compass, his nightgown rolled up in a wad under his neck, and his body looking like that of a young bull frog in a Kentucky horse-pond.
If there is anything more absurd than a boy in this attitude I have never seen it. I tried to awaken him and get him back, but he only sighed one of those long sighs, unlimbered and slept on. I went back to my window and began to work on my bill, but my thoughts were soon dispelled with a start. I heard a choking, gasping, frightfully suffocating sound, mingled with a dolorous wheezing: “O-woo,—oo—oo—wow—O-woo—oo!”
I was at his side in an instant, this time frightened. He was sitting stolidly up in bed, a strange gaze in his wide-open eyes, his face beaded with a clammy moisture, his face drawn in a spasm. I had seen a boy have a fit before and I went upstairs after his mother, two jumps at a time.
“Quick,” I cried, “hurry down! He’ll not live until we can get the doctor!”
She was rocking the baby to sleep. She did not become excited, but smiled and whispered, “He isn’t dying, Jack, it is just poor circulation. Don’t notice him at all.”
This made me cynical, bitter.
“Poor circulation?” I said in disgust. “He has the best circulation I ever saw; he has circulated all over that bed three times already. Not notice him? It would take the mental aberration of a stone man to do it.”
I fear I was a bit satirical, for it is not pleasant to be made a laughing stock of by a boy who was not even awake. I was not assured, however, and half expected to find him dead when I got back. But I was disappointed. He had flopped across his pillow on his back, his arms and legs curled up. And sleeping! No ground-hog in mid-winter ever surpassed it.
I spent the next hour planning how I would like to fix him so as to keep him on his side of the bed and let me go to sleep. In fact, I quit everything else and thought. If there is anything I like to do it is to sleep when the time comes. These are some of the stunts that boy did in that hour: Fits, three;—very distinct and prolonged: snorts,—one every ten minutes: choking spells, at intervals: kicked the pitcher off of the table near the bed twice: jumped up and talked perfectly naturally—so naturally that I felt that he was awake,—but he was not. More snorts; and then: “Catch him! There he goes in that hole—hooray!”
I would have sworn then that he was awake, and examined him closely, cuffing and shaking him. But he was not. He sighed and slept on....
The brilliant plan I finally settled on was to put the pillows between us. It was nearly midnight before I had courage enough to retire at all. I pulled him up on his side, straightened him out and put the barrier between us, and then crept gingerly in. I lay still for a while listening. My success was so complete I wanted to stay awake a while and enjoy it. He would start out on his journey across the bed, but would wind up suddenly against my barricade. There he would lie a while, and I could feel his thumps against it.
In my vanity I chuckled.
I had dozed off in this state of self-conceit when I felt something rammed into my mouth. I thought at first that burglars had entered and that I had been chloroformed and gagged. It was not so. That boy had shot his foot through under the pillow and popped me square in the mouth. I had been told that it was not well to sleep with one’s mouth open—now I knew it.
When people treat me that way, asleep or awake, I resent it. I fight. I boxed that boy’s ears. I pounded his head against the headboard so that I would awaken him. I shook him, kicked him, and used words I should not have wished his mother to hear. When I had finished, he quietly sighed another of his long, peaceful, happy sighs, and slept on.
Sleep was not for me after that, and I spent the next hour lying awake and cataloguing the different things he would do. These were only a few of them:—Another fit; seeing cats, and wolves and dragons around his bed; chasing rabbits; talking in his sleep; telling of seeing a bear ride a bicycle down the pike; breaking a colt; swimming in the creek; fighting another boy; wheezing and thumping and making strange noises; dreaming he was an infant again and imbibing from an imaginary bottle; smacking his lips so loud that the noise could be heard all over the house.
It was three o’clock before a bright idea entered into my head. I remembered that the only request that his mother had made of me was to see that he did not fall out of bed. I remembered that in all his circulations and maneuverings, this was the one thing that he never did, like a runaway mule he knew how to take care of himself even in his sleep. I began to anticipate him. I determined to humor some of his little whims. I put a pitcher of ice water by the bed. I got a link of the garden hose that felt clammy and looked like a snake. I doubled up my pillow so I could strike hard with it. Then I sat up and waited. I would make him realize all he dreamed.
I did not have long to wait. This time he was falling from a tree or down an endless precipice, for he sat on the edge of the bed, yelling: “Catch me—catch me—I’m falling!”
I let him fall. In fact I helped him along. I put a lot of force into that pillow and it caught him squarely under the ear. He went out of the bed, hitting the floor in a heap. It wakened him. “Where am I, mamma? O, mamma?” he called.
“Come to your mamma,” I said softly; “dear little boy, you have fallen out of the bed. Be careful how you roll.”
He was asleep before he touched the pillow. But in the next half hour he did not roll any more, and so I learned that a boy may be taught things even in his sleep if only the proper implements are used.
But he was not yet cured of swimming in his sleep, for, just as I began to doze off, thinking that he was properly broken, he began to splash around in the bed, lamming me on the head and stomach, and shouting: “Look out! There’s a snake—pull for the shore!”
This gave me my cue. Seizing a water pitcher I turned it over on him, at the same time wrapping the clumsy hose around his leg.
“Snakes,” I cried in his ear, “dive for the shore!”
He gave a wide-awake yell that time, and rolled backward out of bed. One jump and he had cleared the room, going up stairs yelling: “Snakes, mamma, s-n-a-k-e-s!”
I let him go. Nay, I locked the door behind him and went to sleep.
The breakfast bell rang twice, but I did not hear it. Little Sister had to come to awaken me. They were all at breakfast when I came down, Thesis, the baby, and the boy.
“How soundly you must have slept!” she said, smiling. “I forgot to tell you that the dear little fellow sometimes walks in his sleep; and do you know, this morning I found him fast asleep on the first stair landing?”
Little Sister, however, was wiser. She looked at me in her quaint way and said, funnily: “Uncle Jack, you look real tired; like you’d dropped your candy last night, sure enough.”