My father played the fiddle, and while “Over the Ocean Waves” was his favorite, he played equally well another tune called “Money Musk.” He would entertain his family in the home of evenings with his old-time fiddling. We reached home about dusk, purposely timed. My father and Thuse were both increasingly worried. Thinking that it might be more satisfactory to let father face his problem alone, or with only Thuse present—and for other reasons—Charley and I went out to the woodpile and stalled around a bit. Old Piute and Queenie came out of the doghouse to greet us. Father never took the dogs along when running his trap line. My mother came to the door and called in her gentle, sweet voice—she was always gentle and sweet with her boys—”Come on in here, you little stinkers, and get your suppers!” My father was not at the festive board that Sunday night. He was nowhere about the house, that we could see — and we ate our supper in comparative silence. Occasionally, my mother would sniff at us, but she offered no protest. Doubtless her two darling boys carried more than a suspicion of the polecat’s pollution, but, having just had a whiff of those two Willies, her keen nose was unable to separate the real from the imaginary. It was almost two hours later when father came home. Methuselah was with him. They were both appreciably slicked up—but not really so good. Father was, more or less, shorn of his beard, and looked “funnier” than his boys had ever before seen him. And, would you believe it, the first thing he did was to pick up his fiddle and play Money Musk. I looked at my mother—then turned to Charley, giggled, and whispered, “I don’t believe it’s going to work.” Charley giggled, too, and said out loud, “I betcha I could name some slick skunk-skinners who are maybe going to have to sleep out in the doghouse tonight.” Sitting ramrod straight on the edge of her chair, with a hitherto wordless dead-pan expression, my mother said, “You tell ‘em, kid.” That did it. Dad snapped, “You don’t smell so darned nice, yourself, young man!” William Peters could play the fiddle almost as well as father. They teamed well in furnishing music for the town dances, in the old days. They now played as if there was urgent need for prolonging the agony. Nero blithely fiddled while Rome burned. And likewise those two Willies fiddled well into the night while my mother stewed. GONE WITH THE WIND Published in Wetmore Spectator, January—1943. By John T. Bristow