Bad Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

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