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  Allie owned an enormous sponge, selected with much care for its unusual powers of absorption. Before dining out he would fill this sponge with dirty water. When his meal was served him, he would slide this sponge under his napkin, hold the napkin to his mouth, and…but need I say more? Suffice it to say that the sight of Allie staggering about in apparent agony, a horrible liquid spouting from his napkin, could empty a crowded restaurant in the space of five minutes.

  But I was about to speak of Ma’s—my grandmother’s cooking. And since I cannot use Pa’s descriptive terms, and no others are adequate, I am somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. I must settle, I suppose, for the statement that nowhere—in hobo jungles, soup kitchens, greasy spoons, labor camps—nowhere, I repeat, have I eaten anything as bad.

  The good woman was an omnivorous reader of farm-magazine food and health “authorities,” and her ideas changed with theirs from day to day. Salt caused hardening of the arteries—so that condiment might be omitted from a dish which had to have it. Baking powder “had been known to cause digestive disturbances”—so Ma, until she was advised to the contrary, would leave it out of her biscuits. On the other hand, a few drops of vanilla added to baked beans not only gave them an “unusually piquant” flavor but was “a certain safeguard” against pellagra. So you know what went into the bean pot.

  It made no difference to Ma that one might prefer unpiqued flavors, pellagra and even death to beans with vanilla in them. You got vanilla. At least you got it until she learned, say, that leftover chocolate custard made a “marvelous addition”—whatever that meant—to Boston’s favorite vegetable.

  The fact that Ma might not have any leftover chocolate custard was no deterrent to her compounding of such a recipe. She would make some and leave it over. Ma, need I say, had a decidedly literal mind.

  Mom, Maxine and I were in no position to complain, although, following Pa’s precepts, I often did to my eventual sorrow. But Pa protested enough for all of us. Insofar as he could, he stuck to a diet of meat, cooked by himself or eaten raw, and he encouraged us to do the same. But every meal-time brought on an outburst of profanity, table pounding and hurled dishes, as furious as it was futile. It was one of my regular after-meal chores to go out into the garden and bring in any dishes which had not been shattered.

  I think the fates must have provided Ma with a steel-lined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste. In no other way can I account for her ability to eat heartily and healthfully of her own fortunately inimitable cooking. As for the Thompsons, I think we certainly should have died except for Pa’s constant dosing of us with whiskey.

  Both on arising and retiring, we were required to take generous drinks of toddy. And when school was in session, we kids got another big drink upon our arrival home in the evenings. In winter, the whiskey was a cold preventative, to Pa’s notion; in warm weather, it served to “purify the blood.” In days to come, I was to regret this early acquired taste for alcohol. But, at the time, I do not believe we could have survived without it.

  While Ma could botch a meal quite capably by herself, it cannot be denied that she received considerable inadvertent assistance from Pa. For Pa was the official firebuilder, and he pursued this vocation more as an outlet for his tempestuous temperament than for any utilitarian purpose.

  Pa began the chore by opening all the drafts on the kitchen range, and walloping it fore and after with an extra-heavy-duty steel poker. This shook the soot out of it, so he said (and judging by the ineradicable carbon-hue of the kitchen there was no reason to doubt him). It also put him in the fine and furious fettle necessary for the task ahead.

  Removing every lid from the top of the stove, Pa piled in kindling, corn cobs, coal, newspapers and everything else handy with a wild indiscrimination that was marvelous to behold. Onto this pile, which normally extended a foot or so above the top of the stove, he dropped an incendiarist’s handful of burning matches. Then, snatching up a gallon can of kerosene, he emptied the better part of its contents into and over the range.

  No fire in the hell which Pa incessantly referred Ma to could have been more awe-inspiring. It didn’t just burn; it exploded. It groaned and panted and heaved, snatching at persons and objects ten feet away and leaping clear to the ceiling. By the time it had burned down enough for Pa to replace the stove lids, weird things were happening to its internal structure. Coal was smothering the kindling; half-burned newspapers were clogging the drafts. According to whim, it might go out entirely at the very moment Ma began her alleged cooking. Or, suddenly puffing smoke and sparks through every crevice in the range, it might begin to burn anew and with an intensity that made mock of the original blaze.

  Beyond beating it with the poker, which was ever ready to do, Pa refused to take any responsibility for the stove’s fractious actions. It wasn’t his fault if Ma didn’t know how to keep a good fire going. Anyway, as he pointed out with some truth, nothing short of taking Ma out and shooting her—a course he frequently recommended—could greatly improve the household cookery.

  7

  Very early one morning Pa poked me into wakefulness with his cane and presented the inevitable cup of toddy. I was to get dressed and come quietly out of the house at once. He was going to take me to see what “a bunch of goddamned fools look like.”

  I obeyed, of course, and as we strode away from the house in the dusky dawn, his calloused hand gripping my small one, Pa jogged my memory with a little jovial profanity.

  No revival meeting was complete in those days without a prediction from the preacher as to the date when the world would end. The preacher who had scared the daylights out of me had stated that six calendar weeks from the day of his departure the world would be no more.

  Very few of the townspeople had taken this nonsense literally—not sufficiently so, at any rate, to act upon it. But, silently, Pa had marked those few well, and shortly we were standing before the residence of such a family.

  Pa, who had known almost exactly what to expect, emitted an amazed and scornful snort, and loudly proclaimed that he would be goddamned. What, he demanded of me, as though I were personally responsible for the sight, were this man and his wife and their three children doing in their nightgowns? And why had they climbed upon the roof of their modest cottage?…Well, (having partially answered his own questions) why the nightgowns? Were they going to spend all their time in heaven sleeping? And why stand on the roof? Didn’t they think God could lift ’em all the way? Didn’t they know He could spot as big damned fools as they were even if they hid in the cellar?

  This indirect quizzing of the pious porch-perchers was just getting under way when, from opposite directions of the street, two furious clouds of dust appeared. They came parallel with us simultaneously, and from them there eventually emerged Pa’s son and son-in-law, respectively my uncles Newt and Bob. The two men joined us on the walk, and where Pa had left off in his razzing they took up.

  When the possibilities of the situation were exhausted, all of us hurried on foot around the town, “before the damned fools (could) come to their senses.” But I think I shall drop the curtain on that tour. While I tried to outdo my relatives in laughter that morning, I actually felt a strong sympathy for those we laughed at. I winced for them—and I still do. Perhaps because I have been a bigger fool so many times myself.

  Newt—we did not use titles such as “uncle” and “aunt” on my mother’s side of the family—was a better-educated version of his father without, however, possessing quite so much of Pa’s rough good humor. He had been farming on his own for only a few years when he came off second-best in a battle with a horse, and his left foot had to be amputated. And, possibly because he tried to walk without a crutch or cane (no one was going to make him a cripple!), the stump became infected.

  Periodically, thereafter, he had to be operated on. He had to submit to the gradual trimming away of his leg and the fitting of a succession of artificial limbs. He was in almost constant pain, and his
surgical expenses were enormous. Yet, as he went about the tilling of a large farm and the rearing of a big family, he never complained. There was a surly undertone to his laughter—but he did laugh—and he was apt to be painfully sardonic and sarcastic even in kindness—but he was kind.

  An Englishman of noble family, my Uncle Bob had settled in this small Nebraska town for reasons he never revealed. He began his business career there as a storekeeper, branched from that into dealing in land, and wound up as a banker. Although not a modest man in many ways, he took no credit for his success but attributed it all to the invention of the cash register. Except for that splendid device, he could not have trusted his affairs to employees, thus leaving himself free for increasingly larger and profitable ventures.

  Bob had an ironclad rule never to touch his capital for living expenses. He also insisted on making an annual and substantial increase in that capital. He was the local agent for dozens of items, ranging from patent flea-soap to gasoline lamps, and persons who borrowed money from him were apt to find themselves loaded with these things as a condition for receiving their loans.

  Most practitioners of the sharp deal are close-mouthed. Not so, my Uncle Bob. To anyone he could buttonhole, he bragged about how he had “stung” this person or “skinned” that one.

  Actually, as I came to learn in time, Bob’s avariciousness was a pose. His schemes and his jeers were simply his way of making small-town life bearable. Like Pa, Bob was far too big a man for his environment. The only way he could endure it was to dwell in a kind of tantrum. Secretly, Bob was one of the most generous men in town.

  Although we must have been aware of each other before then, I seem to have made almost no impression on him, nor he on me, until I was almost seven. The occasion was dinner at his house. He was seated at the head of the long table, and I at the foot, and in between were his wife, his six children, his four Persian cats and his two Airedale dogs. There was a long hickory ferrule at his side which he wielded throughout the meal, occasionally correcting a cat or a dog with it, but, more frequently, smacking his children when they erred in etiquette. Betwixt ferocious scowls at me he sent his offspring to the front room, by turns, to rewind the phonograph and replace one classical record with another.

  I was greatly awed. When, abruptly, he asked me if I knew what Brann’s Iconoclast was, I could scarcely gather my wits sufficiently to stammer out an affirmative.

  “Something to eat, isn’t it?” He beamed at me falsely. “Something like cornflakes.”

  “N-no,” I said faintly. “It’s a magazine.”

  Bob chortled sarcastically, wagging his head in ironic wonder. A magazine, eh? Oh, that was very good! I would tell him next—he supposed—that Shakespeare was not the name of a fountain pen! I would tell him that, would I? And he bared his teeth in so terrible a grimace that my hair literally stood on end.

  Nevertheless, I told him, even as he had prophesied.

  Bob snarled at me hideously, then suddenly threw out another question. “Who,” he said, “was Scoopchisel?”

  “S-scoop…? I don’t know,” I said.

  “You—don’t—know? You don’t know!” His face colored in a spasm of rage and bewilderment, and, for a moment, I thought surely that this was to be my end. But somehow, though the effort was obviously a drain on his innermost resources, Bob managed to bring himself under control. He addressed me at length and with patience, a fond glow coming into his fine gray eyes. And always thereafter, I discovered, I could move him into this benign mood by raising the subject of Scoopchisel. Scoopchisel, the greatest writer of all time, a man robbed of his proper due by his sneaky brother-in-law, Byron.

  It was Scoopchisel who had written the immortal lines:

  So get the golden shekels while you’re young

  And getting’s good.

  And when you’re old and feeble

  You won’t be chopping wood.

  But he was at his best when annotating the work of other poets. To Fitzgerald’s inquiry, “I often wonder what the vintner buys, one half so precious as the stuff he sells,” Scoopchisel had retorted, “Protection!” Anent Pope’s statement, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Scoopchisel had said, “Until you’re married, then it moves its nest.”

  I was so impressed with the works of Scoopchisel that even after Pop and the rest of us had reassembled and I was well advanced in grammar school, I quoted him. Which inevitably led, of course, to my inditing a pained and accusing letter to my Uncle Bob. He replied promptly.

  He would not advise me—he wrote—to accuse my teachers of ignorance, nor would he confess that Scoopchisel had never existed. He would only say that every man had to believe in something and that he liked to believe in Scoopchisel, and even though the latter had never lived he damned well should have. “In short,” Bob concluded, “keep your hat on and your head ducked. The woodpeckers are after you.”

  Newt and Bob had sons approximately the same age and some eight or ten years older than I was. Two more inventive, mischievous lads would be hard to find, and they stood always ready to supply any devilment which I could not dream up for myself. One of our more successful enterprises was the electrification of certain privy seats around the town. My cousins did the wiring, and supplied the dry cells. I, lying with them in a nearby weed patch, was allowed to throw the switch at the crucial moment. There are no statistics, I suppose, on the speed with which people leave outdoor johns. But I am certain that if there were, the victims of our rural electrification project would still be holding the record.

  I entered the first grade of school in this town, and shortly thereafter I had reason to complain to my two cousins that my teacher was picking on me. The good youths were seriously disturbed—or seemed to be. We retired to the loft of Newt’s barn to confer. There, after we had all had a good chew of tobacco and a swig from a purloined bottle of wine, they reached a decision.

  My teacher, they advised me, was suffering from a malady known as horniness. She “wanted some but didn’t know how to get it.” It was their suggestion that I linger in the schoolroom after the class had gone and jab her “where she lived.” This would show her that I was a “pretty gay guy” and my troubles would be well on the way toward their solution.

  Well, I had seen just enough of the mating antics of farm animals to accept this scheme as entirely plausible. I became so enthusiastic, in fact, that my cousins began to believe in the stunt. They fell for their own rib as hard as I had. Excitedly—and no longer joking—they repeated their instructions, adding a message for me to pass on to the teacher. I was to tell her that they were rarin’ to go, any time and place she suggested, that they would undertake to do their best for her and she would leave the trysting place relaxed and rejoicing.

  That was not the exact message, but it conveys the general idea. The words my cousins used, while considerably more graphic, were somewhat less polite.

  So I trotted off for school the next morning, silently rehearsing the scene I was about to play—convinced that happier days were just ahead. True to my instructions, I lingered behind at recess time. When I at last started out the door where the teacher was waiting impatiently, I triggered my forefinger and jabbed. Then, having proved I was a “gay guy,” I started to deliver my cousins’ message.

  I didn’t get as much as a word of it out before the teacher, an apple-cheeked German girl, affixed her hand to my ear and hauled me squawling toward the principal’s office.

  I was saved from I don’t know what unpleasantness by two circumstances. First, the teacher’s sense of delicacy prevented her from more than hinting at the nature of my crime. The strongest indictment that the principal could evince from her was the statement that I had been “pranking nasty.” Secondly, this principal, like many another person in the town, was in the financial clutches of my Uncle Bob and was reluctant to offend him—as he felt he would—by punishing me.

  So he gave me a mild talking-to, after the teacher had been sent on her way, p
lus a pat on the head and the suggestion that I pattern my conduct, in the future, after “that splendid uncle of yours.” Then, I was dismissed to the playgrounds. I looked up my two cousins, forthwith, and charged them with giving me some very bad advice. They, having lost much of their previous day’s enthusiasm, were vastly relieved to learn that I had not involved them, and they readily acquiesced to my demand that I give each a “swift kick in the arse.” Thus, the matter ended.

  Whether my teacher was any kinder to me thereafter, I don’t remember—probably she had been kind enough in the first place. I do recall that never again did she come within my reach. She was no fool, even if I was.

  These cousins of mine operated under a peculiar code of logic which, although it seemed entirely clear and sensible to them, was as maddening as it was incomprehensible to the outside world. Even I, a sympathetic participant in most of their stunts, was baffled and bewildered by them more often than not.

  One spring, when the boys had foresworn crime for several months—and there was a growing feeling that they might escape death by hanging, ending their existence with nothing worse, perhaps, than life imprisonment—their delighted families presented each with a handsome bicycle. I was on hand at Newt’s farm where the presentation ceremonies were held, and an impressive occasion it was.

  As head of the clan, Pa spoke first, punctuating his blood-curdling remarks with wild slashes of his cane which might well have brained less agile youths. Newt and Bob were the next speakers, in that order, brandishing their respective cane and ferrule. Then, with the air sizzling with profane threats, the ladies stepped forth wielding whips and switches. And while their vocabularies were free of curses, their lectures were nonetheless fearsome and awe-inspiring. The general feeling seemed to have been expressed by Pa’s declaration that the boys had better, by God, behave themselves and take care of their bikes or they would be nailed to the barn door and skinned alive.