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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
    V ery 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