112 MEMORIES OF A SCULPTOR’S WIFE
through in that short time, the helper, James Landigan,
taking care of it in a few hours each week.
Dan was never greatly interested in farming, but he
worked at it steadily enough, and the only thing I have
ever known him to lay up against his father — and that
only in a half-humorous way — was that he was obliged to
get up and work before breakfast. It always made him
feel mean, he said, and the older man could never quite
understand why.
I have also heard him tell how upon one occasion his
father came into his room in the middle of the night, and
a thunderstorm, and asked him to go out and see to the
barn door which was flapping in the wind. So he dressed
himself and went out through the sheds into the barn. The
first thing he did, of course, was to bang into the hayrick,
and he went back fairly disgruntled. The next morning at
breakfast his father told him that he had lain awake and
listened to the barn door banging, realizing what havoc it
would make if torn off its hinges, and thinking that in a
moment he would get up and go and see to it himself.
Finally, he decided that it was hardly dignified that he
should go prowling around in the dark and rain, with a
seventeen-year-old son asleep in the house.
He was always fond of his joke, and once when the two
were putting on a storm door, the younger man at the top
of the ladder paused suddenly — there seemed to be an
alarming discrepancy between the end of the door frame
and his foothold.
‘Oh, go ahead, Dan,’ cheered his father, ‘it’s safe, and
anyhow I’d trust you where I wouldn’t trust myself.’
The adolescent artist was fond of his life in the country,
of stuffing birds, of hunting birds’ eggs, of wandering in
through in that short time, the helper, James Landigan,
taking care of it in a few hours each week.
Dan was never greatly interested in farming, but he
worked at it steadily enough, and the only thing I have
ever known him to lay up against his father — and that
only in a half-humorous way — was that he was obliged to
get up and work before breakfast. It always made him
feel mean, he said, and the older man could never quite
understand why.
I have also heard him tell how upon one occasion his
father came into his room in the middle of the night, and
a thunderstorm, and asked him to go out and see to the
barn door which was flapping in the wind. So he dressed
himself and went out through the sheds into the barn. The
first thing he did, of course, was to bang into the hayrick,
and he went back fairly disgruntled. The next morning at
breakfast his father told him that he had lain awake and
listened to the barn door banging, realizing what havoc it
would make if torn off its hinges, and thinking that in a
moment he would get up and go and see to it himself.
Finally, he decided that it was hardly dignified that he
should go prowling around in the dark and rain, with a
seventeen-year-old son asleep in the house.
He was always fond of his joke, and once when the two
were putting on a storm door, the younger man at the top
of the ladder paused suddenly — there seemed to be an
alarming discrepancy between the end of the door frame
and his foothold.
‘Oh, go ahead, Dan,’ cheered his father, ‘it’s safe, and
anyhow I’d trust you where I wouldn’t trust myself.’
The adolescent artist was fond of his life in the country,
of stuffing birds, of hunting birds’ eggs, of wandering in