thimble shovels. They waved handkerchiefs to each other, some left-hand handkerchiefs, and some right-hand handkerchiefs. They sat looking till the smokestacks with their monkey wrenches wrenched each other all to pieces.”

Then Googler and Gaggler opened the heavy gunnysacks. “Here,” they said, “here is a left-handed monkey wrench, here is a right-handed monkey wrench. And here is a monkey wrench with a monkey face on the handle—to scare with.”

Now the father and mother of Googler and Gaggler wonder how they will end up. The family doctor keeps on saying, “They will go far and see much but they will never sit with the sitters and knit with the knitters.” And 85sometimes when their father looks at them, he says what he said the Christmas Eve when the two-for-a-nickel candles stood two by two in the windows, “Twice times twice is twice.”

85

87

How Johnny the Wham Sleeps in Money All the Time and Joe the Wimp Shines and Sees Things

Once the Potato Face Blind Man began talking about arithmetic and geography, where numbers come from and why we add and subtract before we multiply, when the first fractions and decimal points were invented, who gave the rivers their names, and why some rivers have short names slipping off the tongue easy as whistling, and why other rivers have long names wearing the stub ends off lead pencils.

88The girl, Ax Me No Questions, asked the old man if boys always stay in the home towns where they are born and grow up, or whether boys pack their packsacks and go away somewhere else after they grow up. This question started the old man telling about Johnny the Wham and Joe the Wimp and things he remembered about them:

88

Johnny the Wham and Joe the Wimp are two boys who used to live here in the Village of Liver-and-Onions before they went away. They grew up here, carving their initials, J. W., on wishbones and peanuts and wheelbarrows. And if anybody found a wishbone or a peanut or a wheelbarrow with the initials, J. W., carved on it, he didn’t know whether it was Johnny the Wham or Joe the Wimp.

They met on summer days, put their hands in their pockets and traded each other grasshoppers learning to say yes and no. One kick and a spit meant yes. Two kicks and a spit 89meant no. One two three, four five six of a kick and a spit meant the grasshopper was counting 

 Prev. P 24/61 next