Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

Come on, sillies, don’t be afraid, just do exactly what I do. You’ll see, it’ll be fun!” she would urge us—and so she thought being sick, like everything else, should be as much fun as possible. To that end, she would get in bed with us herself and read aloud until she was hoarse, or show us how to crayon and watercolor and finger-paint, which we adored because not only was she talented at doing all of them herself, but at teaching us how, too.

Father was as fun-loving as Mother, but his idea of fun was not necessarily the same. It certainly wasn’t living in Connecticut. But he tried. He decided to take up baking bread. Sunday was Father’s bread-baking day and he spent most of it in the kitchen sprinkling flour everywhere and waiting for his dough to rise. “Now here comes the best part,” he would say, punching away at the contents of three or four gigantic bowls. “God, that feels good.” We would hang around the kitchen with him on the pretext of keeping him company, for which he was openly grateful; what we were really after, pushing and shoving each other from side to side (“Okay, kids, cut that out and make it snappy!” Father would say, snapping his fingers at us for emphasis), was the first look when the loaves came out of the oven and the first taste when they were cool enough to tear apart and slather with fresh butter. Bill, who was born during food rationing and had never seen butter before, used to eat it by the handful and considered the bread an intrusion. Father became such an expert at baking bread that he moved on to croissants and brioches. Popular demand, however, forced him back to the old plain white loaf.

He also had a brief fling at carpentry. Since one of the barns was a workshop, equipped with an assortment of every imaginable kind of tool, and since Father was naturally attracted to equipment and collections (although usually of a more sophisticated nature), one day he found himself out there puttering around. After several trips to the hardware store—to him, the most stimulating place within miles—for the purchase of some extraneous saws, he ambitiously started work on his first and last project: he tried to lower a side table he’d found in the barn to a reasonable coffee-table height. With measuring tapes and levelers and two sawhorses and a big vise and a splendid array of saws, he began; first one table leg and then another, around and around, down to the specified length; then, unable to get them exactly even, he sawed on, cursing, a quarter of an inch at a time, until the table leveled off without wobbling, two inches above the floor.

Father began to reach the point where, from tedium, he took desperate measures. One day Paul Osborn, who lived only five miles away (a blessing), came over for a visit and located Father on the screened porch, looking off into space. “Christ, I’m bored,” said Father. “Paul, do you want to have some fun?” “Yeah,” answered Paul, unable to imagine what Father had in mind. “Come on,” said Father urgently; they went upstairs and while Paul watched, Father systematically, bedroom by bedroom, took down all the flowered lace curtains, gathered them up in a huge bundle, carried them down to the laundry room, and stuffed them in the Bendix washing machine. He shut the door, which had a big glass observation window in it, pressed the button, and said, “Now watch—all hell’s going to break loose in a minute,” and the two of them stood there and watched while the wad of curtains was pumped round and round and round.

The more bored Father became with life on the farm, the more fervently Mother threw herself into every aspect of it: the vegetable garden, the flower garden, the apple orchard, the peach and cherry orchard, the maple trees and the squirrels in them, the welfare of the livestock, the pigs and chickens, the maintenance of the heavy machinery, barns, tools, the harvesting of corn and alfalfa, the making of butter and ice cream, the curing of beef and bacon, and even the lives of Andrew Tomashek, the Czechoslovakian farmer, and his eleven children.

Andrew was in charge of everything. He lived up on the main road overlooking the alfalfa field in a small, teeming, ramshackle house. Of his eleven children, Young Andrew, at twelve, was the oldest. Young Andrew, also his main assistant, was shyly omnipresent and well muscled; I immediately replaced the memory of Tarquin Olivier with dreams of Young Andrew, whose taciturn behavior I mistook for unspoken desire. Although Mother had hoped that eight-year-old Cyril Tomashek would be a good playmate for us, he scotched that possibility by committing, one pleasant morning, the most heinous act I had ever witnessed. I had a pet squirrel, Mr. Duchin, who fell, newly born, from a maple tree the day we arrived at Stone Ledges, in what was indisputedly a good-luck omen, and whom I had nursed to healthy maturity with the same maternal solicitude Bridget showed for her dolls. Mr. Duchin grew up to assume a position of lordly privilege and was given his own private screened porch to sleep on; the rest of the time he went everywhere I went, perched on my head or shoulder, scampering up and down my bare back and tracking it with fine white scratches, and begging for nuts as he clicked his sharp little rodent’s teeth, which amused everyone except Father. “Get that goddamn weasel out of here!” he’d exclaim as Mr. Duchin joyously leaped around the house, showing off; “you know I’m allergic to him.” Cyril Tomashek stopped by the screened porch one morning at feeding time to watch me idly scattering nuts and raisins around. We said hello; he was always aggressively shy with me, though fascinated. Remembering Mother’s instructions, and feeling, at that moment, as if I had