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stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us [an] old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead…. We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”
    Although he was not much appreciated by most of his contemporaries, he was an affectionate and beguiling child, this pocket Merlin, and if they did not take to him immediately, as Sook had done, Jennie and Callie soon did so. “I fear if there is such a thing, we all love him too much,” Callie confessed in one of her reports to Arch’s mother. “He is a darling sweet boy,” she added later. “We do enjoy having him. He is the sunshine of our home.” He was uncommonly bright, and Callie, the old schoolteacher, took pride in his budding mind, remarking that she and Sook read to him every night—and he to them. “I just love to see his little mind developing and taking in things,” she said.
    As the self-appointed guardian of morals on Alabama Avenue, Callie also assured his grandmother that he was doing well in Sunday school—had, in fact, been promoted with honors—and that he was receiving proper spiritual guidance at home as well. “We give him every pleasure that we can,” she wrote, “but of course we do try to teach him that there is a right way to have pleasure. I tried to get him interested in memorizing the 23rd. Psalm, also the Ten Commandments. So I told him (he almost knew it anyway) that it was a low standard of teaching, but if he would memorize the 23rd. Psalm perfectly, I would give him 25 cents—but not to do it just for the 25 cents, but for the love of God and the love he had for God. So he readily agreed that he would memorize it because it was right for him to do so. He did perfectly and I gave him the 25 cents and Sook added a bit to it. Now, he has commenced on the Ten Commandments. I told him just to take one each day and it wouldn’t seem so hard.”
    Despite Callie’s assurances, Truman was not happy. His own descriptions of his life in Monroeville are almost grim, and Callie might have been surprised at how unfavorably she was remembered. Compared with Sook, both Callie and Jennie were viewed as cold and unloving, as purse-mouthed and pinchpenny spinsters. He probably expected too much from them, or he may have been misled by Jennie’s gruff manner and wearied by Callie’s righteousness; his own memory of his religious instruction saw him constantly being marched off to church, with no more choice than the prisoners who worked in chain gangs on the roads outside town. Still, it is hard to imagine what more the Faulk sisters could have done for him. Although Lillie Mae and—on rare occasions—Arch paid most of his expenses, it was that peculiar family that actually took care of him.
    Truman’s complaint was not that Jennie was short-tempered, that Callie was a nag, or that there was not enough money for all the tantalizing things he saw in store windows in Mobile. It was that none of the Faulk sisters, even the beloved Sook, could take the place of his real parents. Lillie Mae, it is true, would appear occasionally from some distant place, her stylish, expensive clothes exciting envious glances from her friends. But she soon disappeared in a fragrant cloud of Evening in Paris, her favorite perfume. Truman was always desolate when she drove off; once, finding a perfume bottle she had forgotten, he drank it to the bottom, as if he could bring back the woman with her scent. On one visit he convinced himself that she was going to take him away with her. “But after three or four days she left,” he said, “and I stood in the road, watching her drive away in a black Buick, which got smaller and smaller and smaller. Imagine a dog, watching and waiting and hoping to be taken away. That is the picture of me