“Keep away from him! Let him alone! Never go near him! Burn his letters without reading them. You now have an ideal of your father. This man knows him as just a plain, common man, probably with most of the faults of humanity. Let him alone! If at your age God has permitted you to retain an ideal of any human being, keep it pure. Take no chances of having it blackened!”
I took his advice, and have always been glad that I did so. It has been my experience that deaf men are able to hold their ideals longer than those who can hear; probably this is another part of our compensation. I would advise every man of the silent world to build up a hobby and gain an ideal. One will serve to keep hand and brain busy, the other helps to keep the soul clean. I heard one deaf man say that clean ideals mark the difference between a “grouch” and a gentleman.
My father came slowly to the bed where we lay, tuning his voice as nearly to a growl as the nerves between the vocal chords and the heart-strings would permit.
“I’ll attend to your case, young men! I’ll teach you to mind your mother!”
Then he began to strike the pillow with his hand, growling as before.
“Now, will you mind your mother when she speaks to you?”
It was one of those cases of thought suggestion which I have mentioned. My brother and I understood. No one can prove that father told us to cry and help him play his part. Like the horses in the pasture, we understood. We screamed lustily as father spanked the pillow, though we had fully agreed between us that we would endure it all without a sound. In fact, we carried out our part so well that mother, listening below to see that father did not shirk his duty, finally came running upstairs to defend her brood.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Joseph, to hurt those little boys so! They did nothing so very bad!” And there was a great loving time, with mother holding us close and making little crooning sounds as she swayed back and forth with us. Father stood by, trying to act the part of stern parent, with indifferent success. And then he carried us downstairs, a reunited family, where we boys each had a doughnut with our bread and milk.
That was nearly sixty years ago, and I have been forced to stand up and take punishment for many sins and omissions. If father had lived, it is not likely that we would have discussed this little deception, but it still would have been a beautiful memory. My wife, who was once a school teacher, strong in discipline, says it was a great mistake on father’s part. Perhaps I show this in defects of character. He should have taken a shingle to us, she says. Perhaps so; yet after all these years (and what test can compare with time?) I am glad he acted as he did. If I were starting on his long journey, I should be likely to treat my children in the same way.
I have often been asked if deaf people of middle-age can safely be entrusted with the bringing up of a little child. That depends—both on the grown people and the child. Generally speaking, I should not advise it. Deaf people are likely to be obstinate in their opinions, rather narrow in thought, and slow to understand that the habits and tendencies of society grow like a tree. Many of them have made a brilliant success in certain lines of work, but they are apt to be narrow as a board outside of their limited range. In rearing a child it is a great disadvantage not to be able to hear its little whispered confidences; if the little one has no reliable confidant it will grow up hard and unsympathetic, or it will go with its confidences to the wrong person. I know deaf people who regret bitterly that they can only give financial aid and reasonable example to their children, while they long to enter into that part of child life which can only be reached through sound.