The Scout Master*
PETER TAYLOR
THAT YEAR
all the young people in Nashville were saying, "Don't
tell me that, old dear, because it makes me
too
unhappy."
It
was
the
answer to almost anything that could be said.
You could hear Virginia Ann saying it to her beaux in the parlor
np in front . She had her own special way of saying it and would
sometimes give new emphasis to the irony by saying "too, too, too
unhappy" or by beginning with "Please, please don't tell me that."
Whenever she said it loud enough for Father to hear her all the way
back in the sitting room, he would say that he could not bear to heal\
her using that expression, though he said he didn't know why he could
not. "I can't abide it," he would say. "That's all there is to it."
In the hall there was a picture of Father at the age of six, still
wearing what he called his kilts but large enough to be holding the
reins of a big walking horse on the back of which was seated Uncle
Jake. My Uncle Louis, too, in his first pants, was in the picture. He
was seated on the grass underneath the horse's belly with his arms
about the neck of a big Airedale. (But Uncle Louis had died of parrot
fever when he was only twelve.) Virginia Ann would show the pic–
ture to her beaux as they were leaving at night. It was always good
for a laugh, especially if it was a new beau that had just met Father
or Uncle Jake, who was living at our house then. "Really," she would
say, harking back to the thing that all the young people had said last
year, "I think that picture is
truly
a sugar." And she would point out
Father's long curls and the lace on the hem of Uncle Jake's dress.
Father would say that he could not abide that expression either.
I used to hear Uncle Jake asking Father very gently why he was
so "hard on" Virginia Ann and asking if he didn't know that all
"modern girls" were like that. And I would sit and wonder why he
was so hard on her. Father would say sometimes that he couldn't
explain it even to himself.
Mother found just as much fault with Virginia Ann, but she
never worried about explaining what it was that was wrong. She would
tell Uncle Jake and Aunt Grace (who was not Uncle Jake's wife but
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"The Scout Master" is one of the two novelettes awarded third prize in the
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