everyone including Father went to morning church.
Father stayed out of the kitchen. Mother never entered the clinic and surgery even
to clean. That cleaning was done by a hired girl, or by one of my sisters, or (once
I was old enough) by me.
By unwritten rules, never broken, my parents lived in peace. I think their friends
thought of them as an ideal couple and of their offspring as ‘those nice Johnson
children’.
Indeed I think we were a happy family, all nine of us children and our parents.
Don’t think for a minute that we lived under such strict discipline that we did not
Nave fun. We had loads of fun, both at home and away.
But we made our own fun, mostly. I recall a time, many years later, when American
children seemed to be unable to amuse themselves without a fortune in electrical and
electronic equipment. We had no fancy equipment and did not miss it. By then, i89o
more or less, Mr Edison had invented the electric light and Professor Bell had
invented the telephone but these modern miracles had not reached Thebes, in Lyle
County, Missouri. As for electronic toys the word `electron’ had yet to be coined.
But my brothers had sleds and wagons and we girls had dolls and toy sewing machines
and we had many indoor games in joint tenancy-dominoes and draughts and chess and
jackstraws and lotto and pigs-in-clover and anagrams…
We played outdoor games that required no equipment, or not much. We had a variation
of baseball called ‘scrub’ which could be played by three to eighteen players plus
the volunteer efforts of dogs, cats, and one goat.
We had other livestock: from one to four horses, depending on the year; a Guernsey
cow named Clytemnestra; chickens (usually Rhode Island Reds); guinea fowl, ducks
(white domestic), rabbits from time to time, and (one season only) a sow named
Gumdrop. Father sold Gumdrop when it developed that we were unwilling to eat pigs we
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Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
had helped raise. Not that we needed to raise pigs; Father was more likely to
receive fees in smoked ham or a side of bacon than he was to be paid in money.
We all fished and the boys hunted. As soon as each boy was old enough (ten, as I
recall’) to handle a rifle, Father taught him to shoot, a .22 at first. He taught
them to hunt, too, but I did not see it; girls were not included. I did not mind
that (I refused to have anything to do with skinning and gutting bunny rabbits, that
being their usual game) but I did want to learn to shoot… and made the mistake of
saying so in Mother’s hearing. She exploded.
Father told me quietly, ‘We’ll discuss it later.’
And we did. About a year later, when it was established that I sometimes drove
Father on country calls, unbeknownst to Mother he started taking along in the back
of his buggy under gunny sacks a little single-shot .22… and Maureen was taught to
shoot… and especially how not to get shot, all the rules of firearm safety. Father
was a patient teacher who demanded perfection.
Weeks later he said, ‘Maureen, if you will remember what we taught you, it may cause
you to live longer. I hope so. We won’t tackle pistol this year; your hands aren’t
yet big enough.’
We young folks owned the whole outdoors as our playground. We picked wild
blackberries and went nutting for black walnuts and searched for pawpaws and
persimmons. We went on hikes and picnics. Eventually, as each of us grew taller and
began to feel new and wonderful yearnings, we used the outdoors for courting –
‘sparking’, we called it.
Our family was forever celebrating special days – eleven birthdays, our parents’
wedding anniversary, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, Washington’s
birthday, Easter, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July (a double celebration, it
being my birthday), and Admission Day on the tenth of August. Best of all was the
county fair – ‘best’ because Father drove in the harness races (and warned his