Free The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald

now.
    Tom got up and ran to the kitchen door. “Mamma,” he shouted, “can we let the silverware go until we’ve seen Abie and his peddler’s wagon?”
    “All right, boys, but don’t stay too long,” Mamma said.
    We ran around to Main Street with Howard. Abie and his wagon were just passing in front of our house. There were a couple of dozen kids following it. We joined them and followed the wagon to a vacant lot owned by Calvin Whitlock, the banker, who always let Abie use it when in town. By the time we had arrived at the vacant lot there were about fifty kids with us. We waited patiently while Abie unhitched his team and staked them out in the lot.
    Abie was a small man with a gray beard and moustache. He wore a Jewish skull cap and his gray hair protruded from beneath it.
    “I think we are ready now, boys,” he said as he let down the tailgate of the wagon. “Get in line and don’t push, please.”
    Every year since I could remember, Abie had let us kids see the inside of the wagon first. This was only half of the treat when Abie came to town. He always stationed himself outside the wagon with a glass jar filled with jaw-breaker candy, the kind that lasts a long time. As we came out of the wagon each kid was given a jaw-breaker.
    Tom and I saw the inside of the wagon and received our jaw-breaker and then returned to our job of polishing silverware on our back porch. Sweyn was lucky. Mamma said he was too old to have to polish silverware anymore.
    When Papa came home that evening, he told Mamma he’d invited Abie for Sunday dinner. A Sunday dinner in our house without guests was unusual. Mamma always prepared for guests because half the time Papa forgot to tell her that he had invited people for Sunday dinner. One Sunday Papa had forgotten to tell Mamma that he’d invited Chief Tav-Whad-Im and the chief’s two sons and their squaws for Sunday dinner. The Indian was the chief of the Pa-Roos-Its band of the Paiute tribe that lived on the Indian reservation near Adenville. The chief’s name translated into English meant Chief Rising Sun, and you would have thought the way the chief and his sons and their squaws ate that Sunday that none of them ever expected to see the sun rise again. It was a good thing Mamma had prepared for guests that day.
    Sunday morning we all went to the Community Church. There were only two churches in Adenville, the Mormon Tabernacle and the Community Church. All the Catholics and Protestants in town went to the Community Church. Once in a while a Catholic missionary priest came to Adenville to baptize Catholic babies, marry Catholics, and hold Confessions and Mass in the Community Church. And once a year the Reverend Ingle came to town and held a revival meeting in a big tent on the campground, lasting one week. All the Protestants in town went to the revival meeting.
    When we returned from church, Tom, Sweyn, and I quickly changed into our old clothes. Then we waited on the back porch until Papa had changed clothes and come out wearing his overalls. This was the day of the week when we made ice cream, and everybody helped.
    We followed Papa down to our icehouse which was located next to our barn. Papa had our icehouse filled every winter with big cakes of ice two feet wide and four feet long, which were brought from a lake in the mountains. The ice was covered with two feet of sawdust so it wouldn’t melt during the summer. Papa took a scoop shovel from a nail on the wall in the icehouse and shoveled away the sawdust down to the ice. Then he used a crowbar to pry one of the big cakes of ice loose. Sweyn was ready with the two-man ice saw and helped Papa cut off a cake of ice for our icebox and a cake of ice to use to make ice cream. Tom and I used the ice tongs to drag the cakes of ice outside while Papa and Sweyn covered up the ice in the icehouse again with sawdust. Papa carried the cake of ice with ice tongs and Tom and Sweyn the other cake, to our backyard. We washed the sawdust