Raising Demons Read Online Free PDF

I would most assuredly tell him that the little Simpkins boy was looking for him and wanted to know whether he would like to pack a picnic lunch and go on a nature walk. After fifteen minutes I closed the back door on the little Simpkins boy with a strong feeling of sympathy for Laurie.
    Laurie did not come home until long after the rest of us had finished lunch. When he came in he was in a hurry. He had a long scratch on his cheek, his shirt was ripped, and his nose had clearly been bleeding. He said no, he had not been fighting. He had met some fellows. One of them was named George. He had
not
been fighting. George had a catcher’s mitt and another one of the fellows had a bat and George knew where he could borrow a ball. There had been no fighting, and Laurie could not imagine why I should think there
had
been. He and George and the other fellows were getting up a game on the ball field down by the lake, and he promised not to fight any more.
    After two or three more fruitless attempts to interest Laurie in wild flowers the Simpkins boy gave up, and became a regular participant in the doll games his sister and Jannie played, with Sally tagging along. Laurie and George and George’s friends, who traveled in a pack like wild dogs, spent their long days at the ball field or at the riding stables or in the lake, displacing a hundred times their own weight in water. My husband and I told one another that the children had never seemed happier or healthier. My husband set up a horseshoe-pitching court at one end of our back yard, and in the cool evenings he and Laurie went out to pitch horseshoes while the girls and I sat on the grass and watched them and Barry slept, smiling, on the cool screened porch. After Laurie had won every game every night for four nights in a row my husband decided that he was going to teach me to pitch horseshoes, but it turned out to be almost impossible for me to learn, because the only way I could lift the horseshoes enough to throw was by using both hands. After the evening when I, throwing two-handed, put a horseshoe through the canvas back of one of our lawn chairs, my husband set up a badminton court, which was much more successful. For some reason Laurie could never learn to play badminton at all, and Jannie and I, who both liked the game, never were skillful enough to beat anybody except each other. My husband and I played a lot of badminton as the summer wore on. I refused, as I have been doing every summer since I can remember, to allow anyone to try to teach me to swim, and Sally and I made sand castles while Laurie tried to learn racing dives off the dam and Jannie learned from her father how to do the dead man’s float. After weeks of effort Laurie succeeded in teaching Sally a kind of rudimentary dog paddle. Several times the three older children and their father rented a boat and went off on picnic trips; I was always left behind as a punishment for not learning to swim, since, as Laurie explained severely, he and his father would have enough trouble with Jannie and Sally if the boat tipped over without having to save
me
, too. While they were gone on their boat trips Barry and I lay out in the sun and took long, lovely naps.
    Until mid-July, the possibility of entering actively into any demanding situation, much less the practical policies of the State Department of the United States, had not been anything we had considered extensively; although, as a family, we had always been reasonably dutiful citizens. We hung out a flag on Decoration Day, observed the Fourth of July with noisy cheer, paid our taxes with reluctance but on time, sent children to school with an eye to the truant officer, crossed the street with the green light, did not use the mails to defraud—we were sensible, citizenly folk, but not obtrusive. Our active participation in the operations of the government had been confined, not to put too fine a point on it, to voting. This complacent footing was