THE SCOUT MASTER
375
pected more than your father ... I declare I don't know any other
parents these days who live as much for their children as yours do.
It's always looked to me like they each learned secrets of happiness
from their parents that none of the rest of us did ... You children
are their whole life, and you ought to remember that."
After such a speech not one of us was able to speak. Virginia
Ann's eyes would always fill with tears. And one evening Uncle Jake
went so far as to say that Mother and Father were just the sort of
parents that his and Father's own had been and that he sometimes
woke
in
the night and wept at the realization that his parents were
actually dead and that he could never, never make amends to them
for the little worries he had caused them.
And that night Virginia Ann did burst right out crying. She
wept in her napkin and I thought she sounded like a little kitten
begging to get out of the cellar or to get in the house when it was
raining. I almost cried myself to think of poor Uncle Jake in his room
crying, and I swore that I should not postpone making my amends
to my own mother and father even till the next morning. (I waited,
in fact, all that evening in the living room for them to come in, lying
on my stomach before the fire. But I dropped off to sleep with my
eyes set on the orange glow of the coals, and when I awoke it was
morning. I was in my bed with Brother where Uncle Jake had
placed me.)
Whenever all the family were at the table Uncle Jake would
often talk of the saintly nature of Uncle Louis who had died at the
age of twelve from parrot fever. Neither he nor Father could remem–
ber ever having heard Uncle Louis speak an unkind word or remem–
ber his misbehaving in any manner. Once their father- the two of
them would recall-had come through the strawberry patch behind
the old house on the Nolansville Pike and found Uncle Jake and
Father playing mumble-the-peg while Uncle Louis did all the berry
picking. And when Uncle Louis saw his father stripping off his belt
to give
his
brothers a whipping he ran to him and told him that he,
as the elder brother, was to blame for not making them work and
that he should receive the punishment. My grandfather had turned
and walked to his house without another word.
Whenever Father and Uncle Jake talked about that incident
Father would say that Grandfather walked away in disgust. But Urn:le
Jake would say that he walked away toward the house in order that
they should not see how moved he was by Uncle Louis' brotherly
love and spirit of self-sacrifice.
