“Steve! Ben! Grover! Luke! You damned scoundrels: get up! In God’s name, what will become of you! You’ll never amount to anything as long as you live.”
He would continue to roar at them from below as if they were wakefully attentive above.
“When I was your age, I had milked four cows, done all the chores, and walked eight miles through the snow by this time.”
Indeed, when he described his early schooling, he furnished a landscape that was constantly three feet deep in snow, and frozen hard. He seemed never to have attended school save under polar conditions.
And fifteen minutes later, he would roar again: “You’ll never amount to anything, you good-for-nothing bums! If one side of the wall caved in, you’d roll over to the other.”
Presently now there would be the rapid thud of feet upstairs, and one by one they would descend, rushing naked into the sitting-room with their clothing bundled in their arms. Before his roaring fire they would dress.
By breakfast, save for sporadic laments, Gant was in something approaching good humor. They fed hugely: he stoked their plates for them with great slabs of fried steak, grits fried in egg, hot biscuits, jam, fried apples. He departed for his shop about the time the boys, their throats still convulsively swallowing hot food and coffee, rushed from the house at the warning signal of the mellow-tolling final nine-o’clock school bell.
He returned for lunch—dinner, as they called it—briefly garrulous with the morning’s news; in the evening, as the family gathered in again, he returned, built his great fire, and launched his supreme invective, a ceremony which required a half hour in composition, and another three-quarters, with repetition and additions, in delivery. They dined then quite happily.
So passed the winter. Eugene was three; they bought him alphabet books, and animal pictures, with rhymed fables below. Gant read them to him indefatigably: in six weeks he knew them all by memory.
Through the late winter and spring he performed numberless times for the neighbors: holding the book in his hands he pretended to read what he knew by heart. Gant was delighted: he
