Ma looks down the row and tallies them up. Sure thing, nine kids and no Willie. I kind of wondered why Willie wasn't around. He's usually the first to eat and the last to stop. Ma looked worried.
"Well," I says. "Pass his plate. Don't want any food to go to waste." So, the plate is passed down to me. By the time it goes down the line of kids there's one porkchop left. I eat the porkchop and forget about Willie for a while.
Next morning, Joey comes up and says Willie wasn't home last night.
"So," I says. "Willie wasn't home last night. Where's breakfast?" Ma looks worried. Like I say Ma always liked Willie.
"OK, Ma," I pipes up. "We'll ask the neighbors. It'd be easy to spot Willie anywhere." That's what I figured. Even though I hate to say it about my own son, Willie was plumb peculiar to look at. He had a head that looked like it belonged on a man a hundred pounds heavier. It sat like a knob on the end of a scrawny, skinny body. A body too scrawny to be much use in farming.
He sure was dumb too, that Willie. If you put him out to plow a straight line, he'd plow a circle. If you wanted him to plow a curve, he'd plow a zig-zag line. He wasn't like the other boys. Willie got kicked out of school when he was eight. Not that the other boys finished school, but he got kicked out real disgraceful-like. Now Bennie, he set fire to the teacher's chair; Joey burned down the whole school building. But Willie, guldurn Willie, he read all the books he could get ahold of till he knew more than the teacher: so of course, the teacher had to kick him out to save her face. Take Willie to pull a trick like that. Asked her such fool questions that she had to close the school for a couple months to take a rest cure. That was Willie for you.
Sometimes I wonder myself why Willie don't mean as much to me as some of the other kids do. Maybe it's because I wasn't around when Willie was born. Just happened the draft, the war draft that is, called my number. That was for the second world war. Well anyhow they didn't want me. I guess the government didn't want to support my kids. Don't blame them though.
I go to the city and two weeks later I come back and there is Willie. He's just an ordinary baby, no hair and no teeth.
"Kinda homely," I says to Ma. But she doesn't seem to care, so I figure I don't care either.