liver, and made Pa believe she couldn't live, and got the doctor to
prescribe a fur lined circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has
improved awfully. Her cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was
the one that was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again,
and get him to stop drinking, so I 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 I 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 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 saw 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