"Who are you? What do you want?"
"I'm your son—Johnnie!... and I've come back to take care of you."
"Johnnie is away ... far off ... on the sea ... in a ship."
And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about, changed and furious. He rose to a sitting posture ... swung his legs out, bringing the bed-clothes a-wry with him....
"You are an impostor ... you are not my son ... I tell you again, he is away ... has been away for years ... as long as I can remember ... perhaps he is dead ... you are an impostor."
He leaped up, full of madness, and seized hold of me.
"Stop, Father, what are you trying to do?"
As I grappled with him, trying to keep him from hurting me—and he was quite strong, for all his emaciation—the horror of my situation made me sick at the stomach, quite sick ... and my mind went ridiculously back to the times when my father and I had eaten oyster-fries together ... "that is the only thing you and this man have in common ... oyster-fries," remarked my mind to me. All the while I was pinning his wrists in my grasp ... re-pinning them as he frantically wrested them loose ... swearing and heaping obscenities on my head ... all the while, I thought of those oyster-fries ... we had saved up a lard-tin full of bacon grease to fry them in ... and fry after fry had been sizzled to a rich, cracker-powdered brown in that grease ... a peculiar smell waxed in the kitchen, however ... which we could never trace to its source ... "a dead rat somewhere, maybe," suggested my father.
When we had used a third of the bacon grease, the dead rat's foot stood up ... out of that can.
We discharged the contents of our stomachs in the sink.