Jibby Jones

I

Oliver Parmenter Jones

Everybody knows that the Mississippi River is just about the biggest river in the world, and we boys who live on the shore of it are mighty proud of it—proud of the river and proud of living on the edge of it, where we can swim in it and look at it and fish in it and row boats on it. If we wanted to we could say to each other, “Come on! Let’s go down and swim awhile in the biggest river in the world, or, anyway, the almost biggest!”

We could say that, but we don’t. I guess the reason is that, when a boy wants to go swimming, he thinks about swimming and not about the bigness of the river he is going to swim in, because that is sort of geography and he gets more than enough geography in school, without thinking about it when he wants to go swimming. So we generally just hold up two fingers and whistle, and, if the other fellow says he can’t come, we say, “Oh, come on, why don’t you?” and leave the length of the old Mississippi and where it rises and where it empties and what States it bounds, and all that sort of nonsense, until some other time.

But, anyway, I guess we Riverbank boys have the very best of the old Mississippi River, because there must be pretty near a thousand miles of it above Riverbank and more than a thousand miles of it below Riverbank. So we must be about the middle of it. And that ought to be the best, any way you look at it.

Now, it isn’t very often that we boys can find a boy we can brag about the Mississippi River to. The reason is that not many new boys come to Riverbank and all of us Riverbank boys have an equal share in the river—as you might say—and it doesn’t do me any good to brag about the river to Tad Willing or Skippy Root or Wampus Smale, because they know as much about the river as I do, and they would laugh at me. So, in one way, it was fine to have a new boy—one that had never seen our part of the river—come to town. That was Jibby Jones.

I am not exactly right when I say Jibby Jones came to town, because he did not exactly come to Riverbank. He did not stay in Riverbank. He got off the train at Riverbank, with his father and mother and his twin sisters and his little brother—and two or three trunks—but the whole caboodle went right down to the Launch Club float and got aboard Parcell’s motorboat and went up to Birch Island. Birch Island is four miles up the river. There are about twenty cottages on it and some of the Riverbank folks spend the summer there. Our folks do—mine and Tad’s and Skippy’s and Wampus’s folks.

The cottages on Birch Island stand along the edge of the island and they are all set up on stilts. In the spring the old Mississippi is apt to get on a rampage and flood over the whole island, and that is why the cottages are on stilts. If the cottages were on the ground, the river would come in at the cottage windows when it was high, or wash them away and destroy them.

This year all our folks—Tad’s and Skippy’s and mine and Wampus’s folks—went up to the island early in July. Our folks own cottages there and we all love it; we get up there as soon as we can; we have been up there every summer for I don’t know how long.

Well, we hadn’t any more than got settled—got the boats out from under the cottages and the mosquito screens patched and the tall grass and weeds cut—than the Joneses came, and this funny-looking Jibby Jones with them. They took the two-story cottage that is called Columbia Cottage. It stands on eight-foot stilts and it is a pretty good cottage—as good as any on the island.

Tad and Skippy and Wampus and I were down by the river in front of Wampus’s cottage trying to see what was the matter with the motor of Wampus’s motorboat when this Jibby Jones came walking up along the path and stopped to look at us.

“Good morning,” he said, in a sort of lazy drawl, and we looked up and decided we did not like him. We thought we hadn’t much use for another fellow, anyway, because we four were enough. We four always hung together and had good enough times by ourselves. So we looked up and thought, “Well, we don’t want you around!” but he had said “Good morning!” so we had to say something. So we said “Hello!” but not as if we meant it. We thought we didn’t want to have anything to do with a fellow that said “Good morning!” when he might just as well have said “Hello!” in the first place.

We went right on fixing the motorboat. We thought we would let him stand there until he was tired of it, and then perhaps he would go away. By and by he said:

“Are you mending the motorboat? Doesn’t it go?”

We wondered what he thought we were fussing with it for. It seemed about as foolish a question as any question he could have asked us. So I said:

“Sometimes it goes; what do you think a motorboat is for?”

Jibby Jones did not answer right away. He seemed to be thinking that over. It seemed to take him quite a while to make up his mind what the answer was, and we had a good chance to look at him.

He was queer-looking. That is about the only way I can say it—he was queer-looking. He was about as old as we were, but at first you thought he was quite a lot older. That was because he was so tall; he was almost six feet tall; he was taller than my father or Tad’s father and almost twice as tall as Wampus’s father, who is short and fat. He was just about as tall as Skippy’s father. I never saw such a tall boy for his age.

Another thing that made him look oldish was his spectacles. He wore spectacles with big, round glasses in them and tortoiseshell rims and handles—if the things you put behind your ears are called handles. But the thing that made him look the queerest was his nose. It was the biggest nose I ever saw in my life, or that Tad or Skippy or Wampus ever saw. They said so. It was bigger than any nose I ever saw on a man, and the funniest thing about it was that when you looked right straight at Jibby Jones from in front it did not look like a big nose at all; it only looked like a big nose from the side. This was because his nose was not thick or wide, but only long and much. It was straight enough, but it started too far up on his forehead and went so far out into the air in front of him that it was a long way back to his face again. The thing it made me think of was a rudder, or the centerboard of a boat, only, if it had been a rudder, it should not have been on the front of his head, but on the back of it.

So this Jibby Jones stood thinking, because I had said: “What do you think a motorboat is for?”

After a while he nodded his head as if he had thought enough and said:

“That’s a good question. I never thought of that question before, but, when you think about it like that, motorboats are used for different things, aren’t they?”

“Yes; for climbing church steeples,” Skippy said, joking him.

Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully.

“I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great many people tease me. It is because I look stupid. But I am not as stupid as I look.”

Wampus nudged me.

“Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones.

“My father told me,” Jibby Jones said, and he did not even crack a smile. He was in dead earnest. “My father has said to me, several times, ‘Son, you are not as stupid as you look.’ ”

“Well, he ought to know,” Tad said.

“Yes, that’s what I think,” Jibby Jones said. “I always think my father ought to know, because he is an author and writes books. An author who writes books has to know a great many things.”

Well, Tad put down the wrench he was using then and looked at Jibby Jones again, and I guess we all looked at him. We had heard that some author man was coming to Birch Island, and we knew this must be the author man’s boy. So we took a good look at him. I don’t know what we would have said next, or whether we would have said anything, but Jibby Jones spoke:

“What I was thinking, when I said motorboats were used for various things, was that I saw one used on the Amazon as a coffin. A man father knew was bitten by a snake and died and the natives used his motorboat as a coffin to bury him in. That was what I meant. I have never seen a motorboat used to climb church steeples. I mean actually to climb them. The nearest I have come to seeing that was in Nebraska when they used a motorboat to ring the fire-alarm bell.”

Tad was just going to pick up his wrench again, but he did not do it. He let it lie. He looked right straight at Jibby Jones.

“To ring a fire-alarm bell!” he exclaimed.

“It was at Europa, Nebraska,” said Jibby Jones, as if he was saying the commonest thing ever, “when the Missouri River went over the levee and swamped the lower part of the town. They used the bell in the steeple of the Methodist Church as a fire alarm and a house in the upper part of the town caught fire—up on the hill, you know—and they had to give the alarm, because it was at night. And the church was entirely under water, except the bell and the steeple. So my father and another man took a motorboat and went to the church steeple and rang the alarm bell. But I never really saw a motorboat used to climb a steeple.”

We couldn’t say anything. We were stumped. He was too much for us. But he went right on:

“I don’t mean to say it could not be done,” he said. “I suppose a motorboat could be fixed with cog wheels or claws so it could be used to climb steeples. I expect that is what you meant.”

“Oh, yes!” Skippy said. “That’s what we meant, of course!”

He said it as sarcastical as he could, but this Jibby Jones did not turn a hair.

“I suppose so,” he said. “I make it a rule never to doubt anything anyone says, because such strange things can be done. I remember when I was on the St. Lawrence River—”

“Don’t you mean the Nile?” interrupted Skippy. “Don’t you mean they used motorboats to hunt hippopotamuses on the Nile?”

“I suppose they do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I did not see them doing it when I was on the Nile. I was only going to say I saw them use a motorboat to save one ninth of a cat on the St. Lawrence.”

“One ninth of a cat!” cried Wampus, and began to laugh. “How would you save one ninth of a cat?”

“It was starving to death,” said Jibby Jones, quite seriously. “We were at Clayton and someone brought news to father that a cat was on one of the Thousand Islands. They said it was so wild no one could get near it, but father loves cats and cats love father, so he said he would go in a motorboat and save the cat from starving. So he did. He got the cat and brought it back to Clayton.”

“But that was the whole cat,” said Wampus.

“No,” said Jibby Jones quite seriously, “it was only one ninth of a cat. You know a cat has nine lives. And father said there was no doubt that cat had already lost eight of its lives by starvation, so, of course, what he saved was only one life, and that was only one ninth of the cat. I am sure that is right because we kept the cat for years and we always called it Ninth. That was the name father gave it, because it was only one ninth of a regular cat. We kept it until it was drowned in the Rio Grande.”

He pronounced it Ree‑o Grandy, but we knew what he meant. It is the river that is between Texas and Mexico. Tad drew a deep breath.

“You must think you have been on nearly every river in the world, don’t you?” he asked.

“I have, nearly,” said this Jibby Jones. He did not say it in a bragging way, either. He said it as if it was so.

“Have you ever been on the Mississippi before?” Tad asked him.

“Not this part,” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve been on the upper Mississippi, and on the lower Mississippi, but father saved this middle part of the Mississippi until last.”

Tad picked up his wrench and tapped on the side of the motorboat sort of carelessly.

“Well,” Tad said, winking at us, “I’ve not seen many rivers. I’ve seen the Cedar River and the Iowa River and the Rock River, and that is about all, but I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you this: this middle part of the Mississippi is the greatest old river in the world. That lower Mississippi is too big, and that upper Mississippi is too little, but this middle Mississippi is just right. And it don’t make any difference what you think you know about other rivers, it don’t do you any good when you come to our old Mississippi. This is a real river. It’s different.”

“So father said,” said Jibby Jones.

“Yes,” said Tad, “and this is no river for a raw boy to monkey with until he learns about it. What is your name?”

Then Tad winked at us again, but Jibby Jones did not see him wink and he answered as sober as a judge.

“My name,” he said, “is Oliver Parmenter Jones, but nobody calls me that. Nearly everyone calls me Jibby. They call me that because of my nose; it is like the jib on a sailboat, you see. Don’t you think it is?”

He turned sideways so we could see that his nose was like the jib of a sailboat! I never saw such a fellow! He did not merely pretend to be proud that his nose was like the jib of a sailboat; he really was proud of it. Later we learned he was proud of his nose because it was like his Grandfather Parmenter’s nose. Jibby was the only one in his family that had the Parmenter nose. I thought it was a queer thing to be proud of.

“So you can call me Jibby, if you want to,” Jibby Jones told us, just as if he did not doubt we would want to call him something. “I rather like Jibby,” he said; “it sounds nautical. But you can call me Main Mast if you’d rather. Quite a few call me Main Mast. That’s because I’m so tall. Father and mother call me son, but you wouldn’t like to do that. And the twins and brother call me Wally. I don’t like that so much. It suggests a walrus. Do you mind if I help you with the motorboat? I know quite a little about motorboats.”

Well, he did! He came down the bank and in two minutes he had the motorboat chugging away like an old-timer!

“Father says I have a nose for motor troubles,” he told us.

After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t be really mean to a fellow like that; he was too good-natured and willing, and too much fun, too. He was the queerest boy we ever knew. One day he came out in an old suit that was so small for him that the pants came halfway to his knees and his sleeves came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look funny! But we did not say anything; a fellow don’t care much about clothes. Jibby Jones said it. He said:

“I don’t like this suit anymore. I like my small suit better.”

We could not believe we heard him correctly.

“Your small suit!” I said. “You mean the big one you have been wearing. I should think you would call that your big suit and this one your small suit. That one is twice as big as this one.”

“No,” he said, “this is my big suit. I got this suit two years ago and we all call this my big suit because when I got it it was too big for me. And the other was a little small for me when I got it this spring; so it is my small suit.”

That was how he figured it out, and nobody could make him believe the small suit should be called the small one. It had been the “big suit” once, and that was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” We thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not when you came to find out. He looked at things a different way from the rest of us, that was all.