| OCR Text |
Show Mother cried out in pleasing alarm and she cleaned the wound. Father disinfected the cut and sewed it up. That hurt the worst. "You'd better quit the swimming," Father warned me as he bandaged the foot. Wanting to soften his injunction yet underscore it too, he joked, "Paddling around in that shallow water with that breast stroke of yours, you might commit 'harem scarem'!" That was our humorous phrase for hari kiri, Japanese ceremonial suicide by slashing the mid-section with a knife. Mother screamed at the picture of her only son spilling his in'ards over the bottom of a mud puddle, cut open on a bottle standing upright with jagged points from having the neck shot off with a bullet. So I did no more wading or swimming for a while. Instead I cobbled up a loose-jointed raft I'm sure Huck Finn would have scorned to use on the Mississippi: a couple empty five-gallon kerosene cans for buoyancy, an old half-rotted railroad tie, and bits of lumber left from our buildings. This tended to come apart in mid-pond as I poled it along in the waves of a high wind-^ and forced me to do some wading I failed to confess to the folks. I'd tie it together with baling wire, standard material on the desert for quick slipshod repairs. Everybody had a tangle of wire taken off hay-bales. Since we didn't raise hay or anything else, we imported alfalfa by train or wagon, bales or loose hay. Father saw my troubles with this awkward craft. It gave him a brilliant idea which he kept to himself. When he resumed work in the unfinished storage shed, behind a barred door, we thought the sawing, planing and hammering simply meant that he was installing shelves and storage bins. One evening he threw open the wide double door and shouted for me. He could hardly suppress his anticipation of my surprise and his pride in his workmanship. His blue eyes sparkled. |
