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Show My three weeks as a home-wrecker tinctured my life from the time I could hear, because, whenever my mother sat by the kitchen table with her apron to her eyes, enumerating my father's indignities to her (like absently appropriating the chair she was lowering herself into at a party) with me round-eyed and sympathetic, she always wound up by saying directly to me. "And what's more, your father never spoke to me for three weeks after you were born! " This information added to my store of grievances and afforded me not a few tears of self-pity, even a little outraged romance during the period when I was sure I was a foundling, judging from the way I was treated at home (if you ignored my natural rebellion and my ability to "sass") as against the way my brothers and sisters were treated. It was not until just before Mama died at seventy-nine that I learned, from her, the true story about Papa's self-imposed Zacharian affliction. It seems I was not the only baby expected in our little farming community that fall. Charley Shelton's wife and Snow McDonald's wife were "expecting" about the same time. Snow's wife had already presented him with a son and thereby set up a standard to be reached. You couldn't top that, of course, unless you had two boys. Farmers complain that their hens are all roosters, their heifers all steers, their sows all boars and their boys are all girls. From a stockman-farmer's point of view all these presentations are equally calamitous, Boys not only grow up to be farm-hands, but in some |
