patients not to get sick that week – or see Dr Chadwick, his exchange). We sat in
the stands and cheered ourselves hoarse… although Father seldom finished in the
money. Then came Halloween and Thanksgiving, which brings us up to Christmas again.
That’s a full month of special days, every one of them celebrated with noisy
enthusiasm.
And there were non-special days when we sat around the dining table and picked the
meats from walnuts as fast as Father and Edward could crack them, while Mother or
Audrey read aloud from the Leatherstocking Tales or Ivanhoe or Dickens – or we made
popcorn, or popcorn balls (sticky all over everything!), or fudge, or we gathered
around the piano and sang while Mother played, and that was best of all.
There were winters when we had a spell-down every night because Audrey was going for
it seriously. She walked around with McGuffey’s speller under one arm and Webster’s
American Spelling Book under the other, her lips moving and her eyes blank. She
always won the family drills; we expected that; family competition was usually
between Edward and me for second place.
Audrey made it: first place in Thebes Consolidated Grammar and High School when she
was in Sixth Grade, then the following year she went all the way to Joplin for the
regional – only to lose to a nasty little boy from Rich Hill. But in her freshman
year in high school she won the regional and went on to Jefferson City and won the
gold medal for top speller in Missouri. Mother and Audrey went together to the state
capital for the finals and the presentation – by stage coach to Butler, by railroad
train to Kansas City, then again by train to Jefferson City. I could have been
jealous – of Audrey’s travel, not of her gold medal – had it not been that by then I
was about to go to Chicago (but that’s another story).
Audrey was welcomed back with a brass band, the one that played at the county fair,
specially activated off-season to honour ‘Thebes’ Favourite Daughter’ (so it said on
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Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
a big banner), ‘Audrey Adele Johnson’, Audrey cried. So did I.
I remember especially one hot July afternoon – ‘Cyclone weather,’ Father decided,
and, sure enough, three twisters did touch down that day, one quite close to our
house.
We were safe; Father had ordered us into the storm cellar as soon as the sky
darkened, and bad helped Mother down the steps most carefully – she was carrying
again… my little sister Beth it must have been. We sat down there for three hours,
by the light of a barn lantern, and drank lemonade and ate Mother’s sugar cookies,
thick and floury and filling.
Father stood at the top of the steps with the slant door open, until a piece of the
Ritters barn came by.
At which point, Mother was shrill with him (for the only time that I know of in the
presence of children). ‘Doctor! You come inside at once! I will not be widowed just
to let you prove to yourself that you can stand up to anything!’
Father came down promptly, fastening the slant door behind him. ‘Madam,’ he stated,
‘as always your logic is irrefutable.’
There were hayrides with young people of our own age, usually with fairly tolerant
chaperonage; there were skating parties on the Marais des Cygnes; there were Sunday
School picnics, and church ice-cream socials, and more and more. Happy times do not
come from fancy gadgets; they come from ‘male and female created He them,’ and from
being healthy and filled with zest for life.
The firm discipline we lived under was neither onerous nor unreasonable; none of it
was simply for the sterile purpose of having rules. Outside the scope of those
necessary rules we were as free as birds.
Older children helped with younger children, with defined responsibilities. AI] of
us had assigned chores, from about age six, on up. The assignments were written down
and checked off-and in later years I handled my own brood (larger than my mother’s)