Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

when they saw us, white-haired except for Findley, barefoot until the ground was frozen hard. They would shout and show off and dangle from the pump handle; they would deliberately raise storms of dust and chicken feathers in the yard.
    They did not go to the school in town. Their school was a mile or two through the bush, in another direction. According to Robina they were at all times the major part of the school population. I could imagine them making school more or less an extension of home, cupping their hands under the pump to get a drink and sitting on the roof to enjoy the view.
    This meant I came to them free, as somebody strange and new. With them I was not who I was. I wore my coat; they asked to touch the fur. I swaggered then. This was magic, it was intoxication. Listen , I said to them. I told them riddles. I taught them the rules of games, which I knew from watching. Red Rover. Take a Giant Step. Statues . They who were daring and quarrelsome but still scared of town, ragged but not envious, took me as their leader. I accepted. It seemed natural. Hide and Seek. Aunty Aunty over the Shanty . They had a rope-and-tire swing. They would climb anywhere, and so would I when I was with them. We put a board across an open well, and walked on it. I was unfailingly happy, or so I think now. The only problem I had was with the food. Robina who in my mother’s kitchen produced such complicated puddings, such moist black devil’s food, incomparable pastry, velvety mashed potatoes, thought nothing here of giving you a piece of bread with a greasy bit of bacon on it, and that nearly cold, barely cooked. The others would chew it and swallow it down in a hurry and want more; they were always hungry. I would have given somebody mine, but protocol made them turn it down.
    Jimmy and Duval were big boys, big as men but still playful, unpredictable. They might chase us and pick us up and swing us by the arms until we flew straight out. They would not say a word, and would look very stern the whole time. Or they would come and stand on either side of me and say, “Can you remember, is this the one who ain’t ticklish?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t remember if that’s the one.”
    “I think it is. I think it’s her.”
    They would nod heavily, considering. Then they would just have to move, as if they were about to close in, to make me break into screams of jittery pleasure. I did not scream just at being tickled, or at the threat of being tickled. My joy was at being recognized. This teasing did seem to me a recognition, and a reprieve; I was never afraid of Duval and Jimmy, despite their size. I never minded, when I understood by their solemnity that they were making fun of me. I thought them powerful, benevolent, mystifying, rather like clowns. They actually could do tricks, as clowns do. They sometimes performed silently, amazingly, in the dust of the yard, turning cartwheels, leap-frogging. Robina said they were good enough to go in the circus but they wouldn’t leave home, they loved their home. They did not go to school, either. They had not gone back since the day the teacher beat up on Jimmy for throwing the chalk-brush out the window, and Jimmy and Duval together—so Robina said—beat up on the teacher. That had been years ago.
    “Whose girl friend is she?” they said. Mine. Mine . And they play-fought over me, each of them grabbing me from the other and trapping me in a hard hug. I loved their smell, which was of barns and engines and Buckingham’s Fine Cut.
    They had enemies who could not be so readily disposed of as that teacher. There were the people in stores who had made accusations. There was Stump Troy. He was known to me as an enemy of Jimmy’s and Duval’s—and therefore, of course, of Robina’s—long before his son Howard become an enemy of mine. But I had not paid much attention till then.
    Robina said that Stump Troy had got the police on Jimmy and Duval for siphoning gas out of one of the cars that was parked in front of his place on a Saturday night. It was true all right that they were taking gas—this would be for the old car that was usually laid open on the gangway, not running—but it was from the car of a man who had never paid them for a job they did for him and it was their only way of getting back at him. Even before this time Stump Troy had been spreading lies about them, Robina said, and he was the one who paid a whole gang from Dungannon to wait for Jimmy and Duval