I mumbled, “Pardon me,” to all the nice, candid, inquisitive, credulous faces. I grabbed my hat and pulled it over my eyes, and ducked out. Not that I imagined I’d get away from the consequences. I could already envisage how the ripples would spread. For a long while to come I’d get inquiries in the mail from literary clubs, collectors, compilers of biographical dictionaries. Probably there’d be a Howling Wolf Commemorative Society organized, and if I told them he was buried at the bottom of the Chicago Drainage Canal, they’d go and strew posies there. But this is not the story of Howling Wolf. It is the story of Grandma’s lie soap. When I first remember Grandma, back when I was one of the numerous grandchildren--my brothers, sisters, and assorted cousins who overran the old hill-country farm during vacations--she was already a dried-up little old lady who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, with a brown, wrinkled face and intolerant black eyes. She ruled the farm with an iron hand and my two taciturn uncles, who did the heavy work, moved silently about, tending to chores, crops, and stock in obedience to her orders. The farm thrived, too. Even in bad years, when other people’s corn was stunted and wells ran dry, nothing of the sort befell Grandma. Sometimes--though I didn’t know this until I was older--the neighbors muttered, and insisted, obviously out of envy, there was something queer about Grandma. Queerness they detected, I suppose, in her fondness for cats--which most of the country people tolerated without affection--and in her long walks in the woods by herself, gathering plants that she dried and kept in unlabeled jars. Too, a tradition had it that back in England in the seventeenth century one of her female ancestors had been accused of bewitching cattle by the celebrated witchfinder, Mr. Samson Broadforks, who fell ill shortly afterward of an ailment believed to be foot-and-mouth disease. Be that as it may, the ancestor in question emigrated to America around that time. But we children, of course, saw nothing odd about our Grandma. Childishly, we assumed that everybody had a grandmother who kept a piece of lie soap on the high shelf over the washstand. This was a chunk of strong brown soap, like all the rest of the boiled-fat products that Grandma made in the old iron wash-kettle after hog-killing. But it wasn’t ordinary soap. It was made separately and privately, from some of the herbs that Grandma had in her jars, from a recipe she kept in her head and nowhere else. Because, you see, another thing about Grandma was that she couldn’t abide being lied to. Not, I’m sure, out of any abstract devotion to Truth, but simply because the idea of anyone fooling _her_ made her furious. If somebody tried it, and that somebody was one of her own grandchildren, she knew what to do....