Deadeye Dick Read Online Free PDF

picture in the paper. It is of our entire family in the street in front of the studio, looking up at the Nazi flag. I am in the arms of Mary Hoobler, our cook. She would teach me everything she knew about cooking and baking, by and by.
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    Mary Hoobler’s corn bread: Mix together in a bowl half a cup of flour, one and a half cups of yellow corn-meal, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and three teaspoons of baking powder. Add three beaten eggs, a cup of milk, a half cup of cream, and a half cup of melted butter.
    Pour it into a well-buttered pan and bake it at four hundred degrees for fifteen minutes.
    Cut it into squares while it is still hot. Bring the squares to the table while they are still hot, and folded in a napkin.
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    When we all posed in the street for our picture in the paper, Father was forty-two. According to Mother, he had undergone a profound spiritual change in Germany. He had a new sense of purpose in life. It was no longer enoughto be an artist. He would become a teacher and political activist. He would become a spokesman in America for the new social order which was being born in Germany, but which in time would be the salvation of the world.
    This was quite a mistake.
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    How to make Mary Hoobler’s barbecue sauce: Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender. Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder.
    Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.
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    So for two years and a little bit more, Father lectured and showed films and lantern slides of the new Germany all over the Middle West. He told heartwarming stories about his friend Hitler, and explained Hitler’s theories about the variously superior and inferior human races as being simple chemistry. A pure Jew was this. A pure German was that. Cross a Pole with a Negro, you were certain to get an amusing laborer.
    It must have been terrible.
    I remember the Nazi flag hanging on the wall of our living room—or I think I do. I certainly heard about it. Itused to be the first thing that visitors saw when they came in. It was so colorful. Everything else was so dull by comparison—the timbers and stone walls, the great tables made of carriage-house doors; Father’s rustic easel, which looked like a guillotine, silhouetted against the north window; the medieval weapons and armor rusting here and there.
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    I close my eyes and I try to see the flag in my memory. I can’t. I shiver, though—because our house, except for the kitchen, was always so cold in the wintertime.
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    That house was a perfect son of a bitch to heat. Father wanted to see the bare stones of the walls, and the bare boards that supported the slate roof over the gun room.
    Even at the end of his life, when my brother Felix was paying the heating bill, Father would not hear of insulation.
    “After I am dead,” he said.
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    Mother and Father and Felix never used to complain about the cold. They wore lots of clothes in the house, and said everybody else’s house in America was too warm, and that all that heat slowed the blood and made people lazy and stupid and so on.
    That, too, must have been part of the Nazi thing.
    They would make me come out of the little kitchen and into the vast draftiness of the rest of the ground floor, so that I would grow up hardy and vigorous, I suppose. But I was soon back in the kitchen again, where it was so hot and fragrant. It was comical in there, too, since it was the only room in the house where any meaningful work was going on, and yet it was as cramped as a ship’s galley. The people who did nothing, who were merely waited on, had all the space.
    And on cold days, and