by her rules. Hers were sensible rules; they had worked for her; they would work for
me.
Oh, my rules were not exactly like my mother’s rules because our circumstances were
not exactly alike. For example, a major chore for my brothers was sawing and chopped
wood; my sons did not chop wood because our home in Kansas City was heated by a coal
furnace. But they did tend the furnace, fill the coal bin (coal was delivered to the
kerb, followed by the backbreaking chore of carrying ir a bucket at a time to a
chute that led to the coal bin), and clean out the ashes and haul them up the
basement stairs and out.
There were other differences. My boys did not have to carry water for baths; in
Kansas City we had running water. And so forth… My sons worked as hard as my
brothers had, but differently. A city house with electricity and gas and a coal
furnace does not create anything like the heavy chores that a country house in the
Gay Nineties did. The house I was brought up in had no running water, no plumbing of
any sort, no central heating. It was lit by coal-oil lamps and by candles, both
homemade and store-bought, and it was heated by wood stoves: a big baseburner in the
parlour, a drum stove in the clinic, monkey stoves elsewhere. No stoves upstairs…
but grilles ser in the ceilings allowed heated air to reach the upper floor.
Ours was one of the larger houses in town, and possibly the most modern, as Father
was quick to adopt any truly useful new invention as soon as it was available. In
this he consciously imitated Mr Samuel Clemens.
Father judged Mr Clemens to be one of the smartest and possibly the smartest man in
America. Mr Clemens was seventeen years older than Father; he first became aware of
‘Mark Twain’ with the Jumping Frog story. From that time on Father read everything
by Mr Clemens he could lay hands on.
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Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
The year I was born Father wrote to Mr Clemens, complimenting him on A Tramp Abroad.
Mr Clemens sent a courteous and dryly humorous answer; Father framed it and hung it
on the wall of his clinic. Thereafter Father wrote to Mr Clemens as each new book by
‘Mark Twain’ appeared. As a direct result, young Maureen read all of Mr Clemens’
published works, curled up in a corner of her father’s clinic. These were not books
that Mother read; she considered them vulgar and destructive of good morals. By her
values Mother was correct; Mr Clemens was clearly subversive by the standards of all
‘right-thinking’ people.
I am forced to assume that Mother could spot an immoral book by its odour, as she
never, never actually read anything by Mr Clemens.
So those books stayed in the clinic and I devoured them there, along with other
books never seen in the parlour-not just medical books, but such outright subversion
as the lectures of Colonel Robert Ingersoll and (best of all) the essays of Thomas
Henry Huxley.
I’ll never forget the afternoon I read Professor Huxley’s essay on ‘The Gaderene
Swine’.
‘Father,’ I said in deep excitement, ‘they’ve lied to us all along!’
‘Probably,’ he agreed. ‘What are you reading?’
I told him. `Well, you’ve read enough of it for today; Professor Huxley is strong
medicine. Let’s talk for a while.
How are you doing with the Ten Commandments? Got your final version?’
`Maybe,’ I answered.
`How many are there now?’
‘Sixteen, I think.’
`Too many.’
`If you would just let me chuck the first five -‘
`Not while you’re under my roof and eating at my table. You see me attending church
and singing hymns, do you not? I don’t even sleep during the sermon. Maureen,
rubbing blue mud in your belly button is an indispensable survival skill…
everywhere, anywhere. Let’s hear your latest version of the first five.’
‘Father, you are a horrid man and you will come to a bad end.’
‘Not as long as I can keep dodging them. Quit stalling.’
`Yes, sir. First Commandment: Thou shalt pay public homage to the god favoured by