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

Chapter 9. Boss

9 Boss Talk about mean! Odd Henderson was the meanest human creature in my experience. And I'm speaking of a twelveyear -old boy, not some grown-up who has had the time to ripen a naturally evil disposition. At least, Odd was twelve in 1932 when we were both second-graders attending a smalltown school in rural Alabama. All the kids feared him, not just us younger kids, but even boys his own age and older. TRUMAN CAPOTE. "The Thanksgiving Visitor" I suppose our lives would have been almost perfect had it not been for a big bruiser of a boy named Boss. He was about the size of Truman, Nelle, and me put together. He had a shock of dark hair, crooked teeth, and a layer of flab over some mighty impressive muscles when he flexed them to show off. Everybody, including we three, tried to stay out of his way. But sometimes that wasn't so easy, because whenever a crowd of kids gathered, Boss and his cronies were in the middle of them. Ordinarily he would have hung around another part of town, but after we convinced Jenny to build us our very own swimming pool, kids were drawn to it like flies to honey. We could hardly enjoy ourselves without Boss and the other kids coming over and hogging it away from us. There were times when Truman, Nelle, and I would slip off early in the morning just so we wouldn't have to put up with Boss in case he decided to come over for an early swim. Boss QIi 143 We'd go over to the Rallses' house and pester their mule and eat some of Mrs. Ralls's good food-mostly sweets and cakes. Truman liked cooked greens, fresh peas, and okra more than he did sweets, but at Mrs. Ralls's house he'd eat cakes and drink coffee with Nelle and me. It probably had more to do with the fact that coffee was forbidden by Jenny, and that Mrs. Ralls treated us like special guests. So we'd have something good to eat, then while Mrs. Ralls washed the dishes, we'd go out to their mule lot. Old Mr. Ralls (our name for him because he looked old as the hills and had cracks in his face) had a barn behind their house where he kept a one-horse wagon. His job every day was to hitch the mule to the wagon and go out to the farm he rented from our cousin, Mary Salter. Since Mr. Ralls didn't stir around until nine o'clock in the morning, this meant that the mule would be in the lot, mean and cranky, waiting on his basket of corn. Nelle was fascinated by that old brown mule. She liked nothing better than taking a stick and pestering the life out of him by punching him in his sides. She'd crawl on the lot fence and as soon as the mule saw her, he'd lay back his ears, then turn his hind end around, which meant he was about to kick. Nelle would stand at his side and punch him with the stick. He'd whinny a little bit and she'd say, "Look, Truman and Big Boy. I can make him lay back his ears!" One day Jenny caught us leaning over the fence pestering the mule. She came out of her house on the way to her store and heard the mule whinny. Not one to let something suspicious pass her by, especially when we were nowhere in sight and she heard the commotion from the Rallses' house, Jenny hurried across the street and caught Nelle at her prank. "That old mule is going to kill you children," Jenny yelled. She grabbed Truman and pulled him off the fence. Then she shook her finger in Nelle's face. "Don't you do that anymore ," she said. We left the Rallses' house and walked to our farm for breakfast. It took us about an hour to get there, considering the time we played along the road, picked dewberries, and talked. We almost talked ourselves into turning around and going back to Nelle's house and opening some cans of Vienna sausage, but we decided that Mother probably had fried sowbelly, grits, eggs, and biscuits. And by that time we were starving. We didn't...