got a boy to write a letter to
him, in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the church,
and that the church seemed a blank without his smiling face, and
benevolent heart, and to please come back for her sake. Pa got the
letters Saturday night and he seemed tickled, but I guess he dreamed
about it all night, and Sunday morning he was mad, and he took me by the
ear and said I couldn't come no 'Daisy' business on him the second time.
He said he knew I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store
room and prepare for the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he
went down stairs and broke up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me
with. Well, I had to think mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got
a dried bladder in my room, one that me and my chum got to the slotter
house, and blowed it partly up, so it would be sort of flat-like, and I
put it down inside the back part of my pants, right about where Pa hits
when he punishes me. I knowed when the barrel stave hit the bladder it
would explode. Well, Pa he came up and found me crying. I can cry just
as easy as you can turn on the water at a faucet, and Pa took off his
coat and looked sorry. I was afraid he would give up whipping me when
he see me cry, and I wanted the bladder experiment to go on, so I looked
kind of hard, as if I was defying him to do his worst, and then he took
me by the neck and laid me across a trunk. I didn't dare struggle much
for fear the bladder would loose itself, and Pa said, 'Now Hennery, I am
going to break you of this damfoolishness, or I will break your back,'
and he spit on his hands and brought the barrel stave down on my best
pants. Well, you'd a dide if you had heard the explosion. It almost
knocked me off the trunk. It sounded like firing a firecracker away down
cellar in a barrel, and Pa looked scared. I rolled off the trunk, on the
floor, and put some flour on my face, to make me look pale, and then I
kind of kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on the stage, after
being stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and said, 'Pa you have
killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around, and frothed at
the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make foam. Well,
Pa, was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I have
broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die?' I kept chewing
the soap and foaming at the