THE SCOUT MASTER
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of being very realistic about his dealing with people. His real calling,
his real profession is, you know, that of the Scout Master. It's during
those Thursday night Meetings with the boys that poor Jake fulfills
himself. I always knew that he'd never make a great go of it in busi–
ness, and sometimes when he tells me that he should have held on to
the homeplace and farmed it, I can barely keep from telling him that
somebody would have gotten it away from him and that he would
have ended up as the tenant, forever recollecting the good-old-days,
y' know, when it was our own." Mother would say that she didn't
understand how he had done even as good a job of raising poor Presh
as
he did.
"Presh's religious mania, it's always seemed to me," Mother would
say, "began as very much the same sort of thing as Jake's nostalgia.
It was all tied up with notions of her mother's existence in Heaven.
Toward the last her social work consisted mostly of preaching to those
wretched poor people in East Nashville about her mother in Heaven.
She could just not be bothered with any real view of things."
Father would speculate concerning Uncle Jake's fate and what
it might have been if his wife had not died when Presh was only half
grown:
"If
only Margaret, herself, had lived to make him and Presh
a home, he might not have forever been looking to the past and being
so uncritical of things in the present. He might have taken hold of
himself." Here Mother would disagree. Men's natures weren't changed
by circumstances, she contended. And the discussion would continue
thus long after my interest had lagged.
At last I would hear Mother saying, "My Love, you simply have
those age-old illusions of the male about Character and Fate. You've
never really been Christianized." To which Father's favorite reply
was:
"I think you mean I've never been Calvinized." Or he would
say, "The female is the cynic of the species."
Then if it were bedtime they would go about the house together
locking-up, shutting-down, turning-off, putting-out, arranging every–
thing for the night. And I would hear them in their bedroom still
talking as they undressed and went to bed.
Father would never help us celebrate the Fourth of July. He
said that it was because Vicksburg had fallen to the Yankees on the
fourth. And Uncle Jake would stand behind him and say he was
exactly right, though Uncle Jake would, himself, come and help us
set off the fire crackers in the back yard.
But Mother, as she and Father sat playing Russian Bank on the
screened porch, would denounce Father as a hypocrite and remind
J
