Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell Read Free Book Online

We’ve got to get busy doing something else right away.”
    “Why, Pa?” I asked. “Why can’t we go fishing?”
    “Mr. Morris,” Handsome said, standing up in the cart, “I done dug a heaping-big can full of the biggest fishing worms you ever saw. They’ll be a big loss if we don’t go down to the creek and use them. They’re mighty fine worms, Mr. Morris.”
    My old man started off toward the backyard waving his hand at us and making motions for us to come along. We climbed out of the cart to see what he was going to do.
    When we got to the backyard, I saw Pa get down on his hands and knees and crawl under the porch. I didn’t know what he was doing under there, so I crawled under behind him.
    “What are you looking for under here, Pa?” I asked him. “What’s under the house?”
    “Pieces of old iron, son,” he said. He began raking the dry, dusty earth with his fingers. In a minute or two he brought up a piece of rusty iron that looked like a wheel from an old sewing machine. “There’s any number of pieces of old iron laying around the place, and now’s the time to get them together. There’s a man downtown buying up all the old scrap iron folks bring him and he pays good money for it, fifty cents a hundred pounds, I can’t afford to let a chance like this go by without doing something about it. The man might not ever come back to Sycamore again, and it would be a big loss not to be able to make all this easy money. Let’s get busy and pick up all the old pieces of iron we can find.”
    I turned around and saw Handsome crawling in behind us on his hands and knees. “What we doing here under the house like this, Mr. Morris?” he asked.
    “Picking up old scrap iron,” Pa said. “Get busy and help out.”
    “Who wants to waste time picking up old pieces of iron,” Handsome said, “right when we’s ready to go fishing?”
    “Shut up, Handsome,” Pa said. “Don’t you talk back to me like that. Get busy and do like I said.”
    Handsome crawled off under the main part of the house mumbling to himself. I could see him stop every once in a while and feel around in the dust for iron, but he didn’t look as if he cared whether he found any or not.
    “Can we go fishing when we finished picking up the old iron, Pa?” I asked.
    “We’ll go as soon as we get it all picked up and sold,” he said. “If everybody’ll pitch in and work hard, we’ll finish in no time. We still have the better part of the day to fish in before your Ma gets back tonight.”
    We found three or four pieces of an old cookstove, and an old iron tire from a wagon wheel. We carried everything out into the yard and threw it in a pile beside the fence. After that we found a lot of pieces of old iron in the woodshed, and Handsome found an old washpot under the porch steps. Pa found a heavy iron wheel and dumped it on the pile. We worked away as hard as we could for almost an hour after that, turning over the trash pile, collecting all the old horseshoes Ida had worn out, and looking everywhere we could for things made of iron.
    In the middle of the morning Pa stopped and looked at the pile we had collected.
    “There ain’t near as much old iron around the place as I estimated at the start,” he said. “We’ll be lucky if all the scrap in that pile weighs two or three hundred pounds. We need about a thousand pounds to bring us some real money. A thousand pounds would bring five dollars when we sold it to the man.”
    “Maybe it ain’t worth the trouble fooling around with, Mr. Morris,” Handsome said. “We still got plenty of time to go fishing, though.”
    “Shut up, Handsome,” Pa said. “I’ve made up my mind to make some money selling the man scrap iron, and I’m going to do it. Now, shut up and look some more.”
    He sent us around to the front of the house to look again, and while we were gone he walked out the back gate into the alley. Handsome and I had found some old rusty door hinges under the front