Boys will be boys

Grandma came fussing out the door when she saw her grandsons fighting in the yard. “Make them stop,” she turned to my father helplessly. He looked at the elementary aged cousins tousling in the yard, remembered being a kid with his twin brother and said, “They’re all right. Boys will be boys.”The fight finished and the boys went off to play together.Grandma saw boys wrestling and pounding on each other. Dad saw boys determining their strength and pecking order with typical boy behavior. The country teacher saw the same thing in the autobiography “Little Britches” by Ralph Moody. Against the new neighbor’s advice, for the first day at the one-room country school Ralph’s mother insisted he would be a gentleman and wear the Buster Brown outfit she had made for him instead of overalls like the other boys. As the teacher enrolled Ralph and his sister Grace the other ten students watched and waited for recess.“Recess did not go well for me,” Ralph recalls. The problem began before school when his mother promised him a spanking if he got in a fight. “And Grace, you tell me if he lifts a hand against anyone.”Recess began with Freddie asking him, “You wanna fight?”Ralph did, but he saw his older sister, Grace, watching, so he declined. Freddie attacked anyway. Ralph did not respond. His Buster Brown suit needed repairs that night. The teacher sent a note home saying that Grace had adjusted nicely and she was sure Ralph would, too. She did suggest that Ralph wear overalls to the school like the other boys.His mother absolutely refused to let him wear overalls. “I will go and talk with the teacher!” she declared. Ralph could hear his parents talking late into the night. The next day his mother did not go to talk with the teacher, but he still had to wear his Buster Brown outfit that day and the rest of the week. Finally on Friday, when Freddi yanked his britches so hard that all of the buttons popped off, Ralph decided he did not want to be a gentleman any longer. He plowed into Freddie with both hands. The two fought fiercely as the other children, including his sister Grace, surrounded them shouting, “Hit him hard!”Expecting the bell to ring for recess, Ralph glanced at the school and saw the teacher peeking out the window. She did not ring the bell until the fight ended and had pinned his britches back into place. The teacher told Grace, “Tell your mother I think Ralph has made his adjustment now.”His mother cried when she saw his black eye and cried when she spanked him for fighting and sent for his father.Ralph’s father gave him an errand before talking with his wife. His father said nothing about the fight until the weekend as they worked on a carpentry project. As Ralph held wood in place, his father turned to get some wood and said, “I hear you had a fight.”“Yes, sir.”“Did you lick him?”“Yes, sir.”“Good.” His father never mentioned it again.The next week, Ralph wore overalls to school on Monday. He knew he and Freddie would fight again.Other boys joined the fray. It ended when Freddie put both arms over his face and said, “I can’t lick him. He’s just a sackful of old spikes, and I hurt my own hands wors’n I hurt him every time I punch.”That ended the fight and established Ralph’s new name, “Spikes.” As the teacher said, “he had made his adjustment,” even if it meant she stayed inside the school while she let boys be boys.