Deadeye Dick Read Online Free PDF Page A

sides of the war.
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    Father and Mother also bought the enormous weather vane from the gatehouse of the von Furstenberg estate, and put it atop their cupola back home, making the studio taller than anything in the county, except for the dome of the county courthouse, a few silos, the Fortunes’ dairy barn, and the Midland County National Bank.
    That weather vane was instantly the most famous work of art in Midland City. Its only competition was a statue of a Union soldier on foot in Fairchild Park. Its arrow alone was twelve feet long, and one hollow copper horseman chased another one down that awesome shaft. The one in back was an Austrian with a lance. The one in front, fleeing for his life, was a Turk with a scimitar.
    This engine, swinging now toward Detroit, now toward Louisville, and so on, commemorated the lifting of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
    When I was little, I asked my brother Felix, who is seven years older than I am, and who used to lie to me every chance he got, to explain to me and a playmate the significance of the weather vane. He was in high school then. He already had the beautiful, deep purple voice which would prove to be his fortune in the communications industry.
    “If the Austrians hadn’t won,” he said in a solemn rumble, “Mother would be in a harem now. Father would be passing out towels in a steam bath, and you and I and your friend here would probably have our balls cut off.”
    I believe him at the time.

    5
    A DOLF H ITLER became chancellor of Germany in 1933, when I was one year old. Father, who had not seen him since 1914, sent his heartiest congratulations and a gift, Hitler’s watercolor, “The Minorite Church of Vienna.”
    Hitler was charmed. He had fond memories of Father, he said, and he invited him to come to Germany as his personal guest, to see the new social order he was building, which he expected to last a thousand years or more.
    Mother and Father and Felix, who was then nine, went to Germany for six months in 1934, leaving me behind and in the care of servants, all black people. Why should I have gone? I was only two. It was surely then that I formed the opinion that the servants were my closest relatives. I aspired to do what they did so well—to cook and bake and wash dishes, and to make the beds and wash and iron and spade the garden, and so on.
    It still makes me as happy as I can be to prepare agood meal in a house which, because of me, is sparkling clean.
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    I have no conscious memory of what my real relatives looked like when they came home from Germany. Perhaps a hypnotist could help me come up with one. But I have since seen photographs of them—in a scrapbook Mother kept of those exciting days, and also in old copies of the
Midland City Bugle-Observer
. Mother is wearing a dirndl. Father is wearing lederhosen and knee socks. Felix, although technically not entitled to do so, since he never joined the organization, was wearing the khaki uniform and Sam Browne belt, and the armband with swastika and ornamental dagger of the Hitler Youth. Even if Felix had been a German boy, he would have been too young to wear an outfit like that, but Father had a tailor in Berlin make it up for him anyway.
    Why not?
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    And as soon as those relatives of mine got home, according to the paper, Father flew his favorite gift from Hitler from the horizontal shaft of the weather vane. It was a Nazi flag as big as a bedsheet.
    Again: This was only 1934, and World War Two was still a long way off. It was a long way off, that is, if five years can be considered a long way off. So flying a Nazi flag in Midland City was no more offensive than flying a Greek orIrish or Confederate flag, or whatever. It was a playful, exuberant thing to do, and, according to Mother, the community was proud and envious of Father and her and Felix. Nobody else in Midland City was friendly with a head of state.
    I myself am in one