Truman Capote's Southern Years, 25th Anniversary Edition: Stories from a Monroeville Cousin

Chapter 10. The White Elephant

10 The White Elephant He leaped offthe stump, alld madefor the house, his loosened shirt-tail flying behind; run, run, run, his heart told him, and wham! he'd pitched headlong into a briar patch. ... the stinging briar scratches seemed to cleanse him of bewilderment and misery, just as the devil, in fanatic cults, is supposedly , through self-imposed pain, driven from the soul. TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms I think 1'd be giving Truman too much credit if I thought he'd planned this adventure like so many of the others we shared. But Truman was so quick-witted when events and circumstances developed that he could capitalize on them. He would psych us up to see what direction our actions would take. He did this so successfully, even he became infected with the phenomenon. By this time in our early teenage years, we'd figured out that Nelle was a girl, so she wasn't along on many of our adventures. She was still a great ally at school because she'd hit unerringly with her fist and without flinching. We boys respected this, but we'd begun to do things as a group, and we didn't want Nelle along when we were chasing girls after the Saturday movie or swimming in the creek. Truman spent a lot of time at our house when his school up North was over for the summer. He was fascinated by farm life-the horses and mules, the planting and gathering The White Elephant of peas and corn, the way we lived without a telephone, electricity, indoor plumbing, or running water. Not that Truman did any work while he was visiting us. While I picked peas or plowed, Truman squirreled up somewhere reading a book. That seemed to be all right with Mother and Daddy. Looking at Truman, you wouldn't think he was a boy who didn't work. He was a tanned, stocky, muscular youth with sun-bleached hair. It was his speech that gave him away. When he spoke, he used perfect English, even as a little boy. He never used slang or local expressions. Some interesting people lived near us, and they got caught up in our summer adventures. There was Dick Carter, no kin to us, a small, wiry boy who could break a bull calf, harness him, hitch him to a cart, and drive through the woods. He often came to get Truman and me to go swimming at Hatter's Mill. There was Buddy Ryland, a tall, boisterous, self-centered bruiser of a boy who picked on me unmercifully. When we walked to the school bus together, he was always trying to grab my fingers and bend them back, or looking for something to argue over. Buddy lived with his aunt and uncle a quarter of a mile up the road in a wood-frame house with a cemetery in the backyard. His mother was dead; his daddy was a doctor living in the little community ofEliska. Buddy ~ould visit his dad, steal some of his medicine, and bring it back to "doctor" on Fred Jones and his wife, Barna, the Negro couple who lived in a shack on the Ryland place. One time he "treated" old Fred until his fingernails turned black and fell off. Fred helped the Rylands and my family in the fields. His wife, Barna, helped my mother with the gardening and cooking. Barna was a tall, slender, light-skinned woman with high cheekbones and a thin nose. She spoke well and could write a beautiful script. Fred had built a fence of boards and bushes around his house to keep out stray animals and ward off demons and evil spirits. The only opening in the fence was on the south side, and this had a gate that could be closed. About a hundred yards behind Fred's house was a barbed-wire fence separating the Rylands' land from another farmer's. Near this spot was another graveyard, Emmons New Ground Cemetery , with trees so big we couldn't reach around them. In the winter, during let-out time when the cows roamed freely, they grazed over the graves and nibbled the limbs from the trees to about head-high. Occasionally we boys explored around the cemetery, which stood like a little island in the middle of a great pasture . Big cedars, hickories, and oaks towered...