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The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy, a novel by George W. Peck |
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Chapter 17 |
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_ CHAPTER XVII HE DISCUSSES THEOLOGY. MEDITATIONS ON NOAH'S ARK--THE GARDEN OF EDEN--THE ANCIENT DUDE--ADAM WITH A PLUG HAT ON--"I'M A THINKER PROM THINKERSVILLE"--THE APOSTLES IN A PATROL WAGON-- ELIJAH AND ELISHA--THE PRODIGAL SON--A VEAL POT PIE FOR DINNER. "What you sitting there for half an hour for, staring at vacancy?" said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he sat on a stool by the stove one of these foggy mornings, when everybody feels like quarreling, with his fingers clasped around his knee, looking as though he did not know enough to last him to bed. "What you thinking about anyway?" "I was wondering where you would have been today if Noah had run his ark into such a fog as this, and there had been no fog-horn on Mount Ararat, and he had passed by with his excursion and not made a landing, and had floated around on the freshet until all the animals starved, and the ark had struck a snag and burst a hole in their bottom. I tell you, we can all congratulate ourselves that Noah happened to blunder on that high ground. If that ark had been lost, either by being foundered, or being blowed up by Fenians because Noah was an Englishman, it would have been cold work trying to populate this world. In that case another Adam and Eve would have to be made out of dirt and water, and they might have gone wrong again and failed to raise a family, and where would we have been? I tell you, when I think of the narrow escapes we have had, it is a wonder to me that we have got along as well as we have." "Well, when did you get out of the asylum?" said the grocery man, who had been standing back with his mouth open looking at the boy as though he was crazy. "What you want is to have your head soaked. You are getting so you reach out too far with that small mind of yours. In about another year you will want to run this world yourself. I don't think you are reforming very much. It is wicked for a boy your size to argue about such things. Your folks better send you to college." "What do I want to go to college for, and be a heartless hazer, and a poor base ball player. I can be bad enough at home. The more I read, the more I think. I don't believe I can ever be good enough to go to heaven, anyway, and I guess I will go into the newspaper business, where they don't have to be good, and where they have passes everywhere. Do you know, I think when I was built they left out a cog wheel or something in my head. I can't think like some boys. I get to thinking about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and of the Dude with the cloven hoof that flirted with Eve, and treated her and Adam to the dried apples, and I can't think of them as some boys do, with a fig leaf polonaise, and fig leaf vests. I imagine them dressed up in the latest style. I know it is wrong, but that it what a poor boy has to suffer who has an imagination, and where did I get the imagination? This confounded imagination of mine shows me Adam with a plug hat on, just like our minister wears, and a stand up collar, and tight pants, and peaked-toed shoes, and Eve is pictured to me with a crushed-angleworm colored dress, and brown striped stockings, and newspapers in her dress to make it stick out, and a hat with dandelions on, and a red parasol, and a lace handkerchief, which she puts to her lips and winks with her left eye to the masher who is standing by the corner of the house, in an attitude, while the tail with the dart on the end is wound around the rain water barrel, so Eve won't see it and get scared. Say, don't you think it is better for a boy to think of our first parents with clothes on, than to think of them almost naked, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, with nothing but fig leaves pinned on? I want to do right, as near as I can, but I had rather think of them dressed like our folks are to-day, than to think of them in a cyclone with leaves for wearing apparel. Say, it is wrong to fight, but don't you think if Adam had put on a pair of boxing gloves, when he found the devil was getting too fresh about the place, and knocked him out in a couple of rounds, and pasted him in the nose, and fired him out of the summer garden, that it would have been a big thing for this world. Now, honest?" "Lookahere," said the grocery man, who had been looking at the boy in dismay, "You better go right home, and let your Ma fix up some warm drink for you, and put you to bed. You are all wrong in the head, and if you are not attended to you will have brain fever. I tell you, boy, you are in danger. Come I will go home with you." "O, danger, nothin'. I am just telling how things look to a boy who has not got the facilities for being too good in his youth. Some boys can take things as they read them, and not think any for themselves, but I am a Thinker from Thinkerville, and my imagination plays the dickens with me. There is nothing I read about old times but what I compare it with the same line of business at the present day. Now, when I think of the fishermen of Galilee, drawing their seines, I wonder what they would have done if there had been a law against hauling seines, as there is in Wisconsin to-day, and I can see a constable with a warrant for the arrest of the Galilee fishermen, snatching the old apostles and taking them to the police station in a patrol wagon. I know it is wrong to think like that, but how can I help it? Say, suppose those fishermen had been out hauling their seines, and our minister should come along with his good clothes on, his jointed rod, his nickle-plated reel, and his silk fish line, and his patent fish hook, and put a frog on the hook and cast his line near the Galilee fish-man and go to trolling for bass? What do you suppose the lone fisherman of the Bible times would have thought about the gall of the jointed rod fisherman? Do you suppose they would have thrown stones in the water where he was trolling, or would they have told him there was good trolling around a point about half a mile up the shore, where they knew he wouldn't get a bite in a week, the way a fellow of Muskego lake lied to our minister a spell ago? I tell you, boss, it is a sad thing for a boy to have an imagination," and the boy put his other knee in the sling made by the clenched fingers of both hands, and waited for the grocery man to argue with him. "I wish you would go away from here. I am afraid of you," said the grocery man. "I would give anything if you Pa or the minister would come in and have a talk with you. Your mind is wandering," and the grocery man went to the door and looked up and down street to see if somebody wouldn't come in and watch the crazy boy, while he went to breakfast. "O, Pa and the minister can't make a first payment on me. Pa gets mad when I ask questions, and the minister thinks I am past redemption. Pa said yesterday that baldness was caused, in every case, by men's wearing plug hats, and when I asked him where the good Elisha, (whom the boys called 'go up old bald head,' and the bears had a free lunch on them,) got his plug hat, Pa said school was dismissed and I could go. When the minister was telling me about the good Elijah going up through the clouds in a chariot of fire, and I asked the minister what he thought Elijah would have thought if he had met our Sunday school superintendent coming down through the clouds on a bicycle, he put his hand on my head and said my liver was all wrong. Now, I will leave it to you if there was anything wrong about that. Say, do you know what I think is the most beautiful thing in the Bible?" "No I don't," said the grocery man, "and if you wan't to tell it I will listen just five minutes, and then I am going to shut up the store and go to breakfast. You make me tired." "Well, I think the finest thing is that story about the prodigal son, where the boy took all the money he could scrape up and went out West to paint the towns red. He spent his money in riotous living, and saw everything that was going on, and got full of benzine, and struck all the gangs of toughs, both male and female, and his stomach went back on him, and he had malaria, and finally he got to be a cow-boy, herding hogs, and had to eat husks that the hogs didn't want, and got pretty low down. Then he thought it was a pretty good scheme to be getting around home, where they had three meals a day, and spring mattresses; and he started home, beating his way on the trains, and he didn't know whether the old man would receive him with open arms or pointed boots; but the old man came down to the depot to meet him, and right there before the passengers, and the conductor and brakemen, he wasn't ashamed of his boy, though he was ragged, and looked as though he had been on the war path; and the old man fell on his neck and wept, and took him home in a hack, and had veal pot pie for dinner. That's what I call sense. A good many men now days would have put the police on the tramp and had him ordered out of town. What, you going to close up the store? Well, I will see you later. I want to talk with you about something that is weighing on my mind," and the boy got out just in time to save his coat tail from being caught in the door, and when the grocery man came back from breakfast he found a sign in front:-- SHERIFF. _ |
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