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

One night after we’d gone to bed, Mother was making the rounds of the house. She noticed, feeling absurd, that all the classic ingredients of a conventional horror story were present: she was all alone, a little nervous; it was Emily’s day off and the cook and butler slept in another wing; Father was in New York City rehearsing his new play, State of the Union; there was a storm raging outside, thunder and lightning, windows banging, floors creaking, and branches scraping the side of the house. On her way up to bed, she turned on the light in Bill’s room for a minute to make sure he was all right. He was lying in Grandfather’s big mahogany bed, sound asleep and covered with blood. Mother thought he was dead, murdered. In a second she had him in her arms. The pillow and sheets were blood-soaked, his scalp was scored with gashes, and there were tufts of hair all over the place; she looked around wildly and suddenly noticed, under a glass ashtray on the bed table, a bloody razor blade. She shook him awake. “Bill!” she shrieked. “What have you done to yourself? Why?” Bill looked at her with total calm. “Oh,” he answered, yawning, “I fell out of bed.” If there was anything that made Mother see red—like waving a flag in front of a bull, as she said—it was a lie. “I’ll give you one more chance to tell me the truth,” she’d say, “while I count to ten. Ready? Now think carefully. One, two, three, four …” In this instance Bill was as obstinate as she. He stood his ground, hoping that she would go away so he could go back to sleep, and wondering what would happen if she didn’t. She went to the bathroom and got his hairbrush. “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you,” she remonstrated, a line of dialogue that accompanied our spankings as inevitably as “Think of the poor starving children in China” went with dinner. Bill was resolute. He got his first spanking. Then he and Mother fell into each other’s arms and they both cried and he promised that he would never never tell another lie, and she said, “Now tell me the truth; what really happened?” And after thinking for a minute, he answered, “It was just an accident—I banged my head on the headboard.” She spanked him again. By this time, Bridget and I were sitting bolt upright in our beds across the hall, speculating in excited whispers about what crime our four-year-old brother—the treasure, the apple of his mother’s eye—could possibly have committed to produce such an uproar. The sounds coming from his room coupled with the sounds of the storm outside were horrendous. They went on for a long time. He held out for thirteen different stories and thirteen spankings. Bridget and I didn’t know that until the next morning at the breakfast table, when we also found out why he had lied. It was very simple. Buck Crouse and Howard Lindsay, the authors of State of the Union, had spent the previous weekend at our house. Bill, after watching one of them shave Sunday morning, had salvaged the used razor blade from the guest-room wastebasket for some useful future occasion, which came along sooner than he expected: Mother made the unpleasant announcement that he needed a haircut and she was going to give it to him. Bill, who had seen the damage that Mother’s scissors could do, waited until the night before the scheduled event, got out his secret razor blade, and hacked away at his locks in the total darkness, occasionally missing his hair and nicking his scalp. (“My big mistake,” he told us later, “was to hide the razor blade under the ashtray afterwards—I forgot it was glass and she could see through it the whole time.”) But what he then did to cap off the morning, that morning after thirteen spankings—an endurance record that left Bridget and me baffled, yet extremely proud of him—seemed so exquisitely perverse to us that he passed heroically into some eternal hall of fame. When Mother came into his room to say good morning as if nothing had happened the night before, she found the walls of his bathroom decorated with freshly squeezed toothpaste, tubes and tubes of it. “Bill,” she said, shocked, “why on earth did you make this mess?” “I didn’t mean to,” he responded, innocently widening his eyes; “it just happened. The toothpaste slipped out of my hand,” and Mother froze. “I’ll give you one more chance to tell the truth,” she began. “Here I go—one, two …” Bill had his fourteenth spanking before breakfast. He was unable to sit down for a week.

State of the Union, which opened in November, was a success. Father was away more and more, attending to business in New York and on the Coast. He would drive out to see us on weekends, trying, with as much good humor as he could muster, to disregard the menace of wild goldenrod, which bloomed crazily all over the place during the autumn months and which he felt was somehow deliberately bringing his hay fever to a peak. By staying indoors and never venturing out, he thought he could lick not only that problem but a new and even more fearful one that had unexpectedly presented itself: snakes. Copperheads had been seen sunning themselves near the house; Andrew had taught Mother how to pin them down with a pitchfork and deftly sever their heads. Once Father knew of their existence, he was in a state of panic. “God help us all,” he’d groan if the word “snake” was mentioned. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the lions don’t get us the pythons must.”

The best thing about living on a farm, said Mother, was being able to observe firsthand all the miracles of nature.