Read Barley Patch for Free Online Page A

was older than most of his siblings, whereas my mother was younger than most of hers. I had hardly any dealings with my cousins on my father’s side, who were mostly much younger than myself. As a boy, I visited many of my cousins on my mother’s side and even stayed sometimes overnight in their homes. Not once during all my childhood did a girl-cousin of mine approach me as though she had in mind any sort of serious discussion between the two of us. A few girl-cousins even gave me to understand that they disliked my company. And yet, for year after year, I remained hopeful. On some or another sweltering afternoon in the coming summer holidays, I would surely find myself alone with a girl-cousin in some or another shed on her parents’ farm. There would be between us such an understanding as had never yet existed between myself and a female person. We would neither of us feel urged to prove ourselves worthy of the other. Nor would we live in fear of losing the other’s regard. Our mood would be relaxed, light-hearted even. Our business together would begin with questions and answers. We would ask at first trivial or even flippant questions, as though nothing was at stake. Later, our questions would be such as had for long bothered us or even tormented us. We would answer each other with frankness, each marvelling at how easily we dispelled doubt after doubt or mystery after mystery. It was always possible that our honesty would oblige us to undress or even to make free with one another’s body, but I never supposed that anything we might do together would be done for any less serious purpose than to learn what it was that our parents and aunts and uncles seemed anxious that we should not learn.
    In my well-off uncle’s backyard, I spent most of my time in front of his aviaries, especially the breeding cages. Each of these contained a male-bird and a female-bird and a nest, which was an empty Fisher’s Wax tin that the birds lined with straw and feathers. The nesting-tin was always nailed to the wall of the cage but too high up for me to see into. I often saw part of an adult bird that was sitting in the nest. Sometimes I heard the cries of baby-birds from inside the nest. Sometimes I saw a parent-bird reaching down to feed its young from its own mouth. I never actually saw into a nest. Each breeding-cage had a small door through which a person might have looked into the nest-tin, but the door was always fastened with a padlock. I once asked my uncle if I could look through one of the doors, but he told me that even my looking in on them might cause the birds to abandon their eggs or their young.
    My glimpses into my aunt’s kitchen on those Sunday afternoons in the 1950s may have been among the first causes of my aversion during all my later life to meals prepared by persons other than myself. My aunt and her woman-helpers prepared two dishes: a salad and a trifle. The ingredients of the salad seemed to require much handling. Leaves of lettuce had to be folded over and sliced—and then folded and sliced again until they made up a bowl of what was called shredded lettuce. Stray bits of lettuce that clung to the slicers’ palms or got stuck under their fingernails were scraped or plucked free and then dropped into the bowl. Likewise, when a cluster of tomato-seeds fell away from a newly severed slice, the woman-slicer picked up the blob between the knife-blade and two or three fingertips and then dropped the seeds and the adjoining jelly into a bowl where pieces of tomato and discs and hoops of onion were submerged in vinegar. I cannot claim that I was revolted by the preparation of the beetroot, but the sight of the purplish stain from its juice on the tablecloth at mealtime would always remind me of the offensive sights that I had seen from the kitchen doorway during the afternoon. The worst of those sights were of women putting fingers into mouths. Most of the women removed sticky and greasy substances from their