It was the day of my first dancing-school party, and I meant to be as ravishing as possible. In fact, I had just quietly snitched a handful of my mother's bath salts, when I discovered that the tub was already occupied by two fish. My ten-year-old brother Bobby had caught them that afternoon in a creek about a mile from our house. As bass go, they weren't very big, but even a middle-sized bass can look rather large in a bathtub, especially if you come upon it suddenly. Bobby had managed to bring the fish home alive, and he meant to keep them there until father got home from the office and could observe the catch at its fullest glory. To do Bobby justice, he honestly tried to be helpful. "Go ahead, you can get in the tub with them,' he told me. "Even if they sort of nibble at you, it won't hurt."

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The Evans back yard was on the bank of French Creek, a few hundred feet from the spot where a young surveyor named George Washington crossed in December of 1753. Of course he crossed the Delaware too, but the difference is that he didn't fall in there. He fell into French Creek when his canoe overturned in the icy water, and it's a wonder that we didn't lose the Father of Our Country right then and there, at the downy age of twenty-one.

He had been sent to western Pennsylvania by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to find out what the French were up to, in their forts of LeBoeuf and Presque Isle (later Erie) sixty miles above Franklin, and he was on the way there when he got the dunking in French Creek. He dried out his clothes and spent the night in the only cabin in Franklin. It had been built a few years before by an English gunsmith, John Frazier, who traded with the Seneca Indians and kept records of sales that slangily up to date now: "Sold Eight Bucks worth of Goods Today." It's still good deer country.

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Drillers' apprentices, tool dressers-- toolies-- wore railroad boots that cost $1.50 and could thump to a fiddle and foot a fast hoedown to the music of "Chase the Squirrel" or "Money Musk." Most of the toolies were as lively and agile as monkeys; one of their chores was to climb to the top of a derrick to grease the crown-pulley, and it was toolies who rigged up the penants that floated and flapped above the derricks derisively: Big Bologna, Old Misery, Scared cat, The Vampire, Sleeping Beauty.

Toolies made $2 to $3 a day, for a twelve-hour shift, and spent it as freely as oil. To accommodate the day and night shifts, saloons kept jumping around the clock, and there were always self-styled ladies handy, in what a preacher called "suspicious houses." But the soiled doves's patrons-- rig-builders, toolies, teamsters, drillers-- even when they came away with cleaned-out pockets, weren't suspicious; they seemed to feel they'd got their money's worth, and they drowned out Methodist dissenters with their roar of approval:

"The Oil Creek girls are the dandy girls
For their kiss is most intense.
They've got a grip like a rotary pump
That will lift you over the fence."

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

I am also a little weary of explaining to people that even though my name is Dutch and I was born in Pennsylvania, that doesn't make me Pennsylvania Dutch, by a long shot. Up in Western Pennsylvania we have none of those fast and loose phrases such as "The pie is all" and "Papa goes already yet." It's true that we talk of "redding up the room," meaning to empty ash trays, pick up the newspapers, and flick a dust cloth over the most noticeable pieces of furniture. When I came to New York years ago, this phrase was soon knocked out of me, but I've regretted it ever since. How else can you say so much for so little? Besides, to "tidy up a room" sounds prissy, and "to clean a room" implies more than I am prepared to give. The Dutch who scour all surfaces with sand are not my branch of the family. Therefore, even though I may not say it out loud, I still redd up.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The small hinged door in the side of the porch foundation was approximately three feet high. Addison Stubbs was approximately six feet three inches, and at the age of thirty-five he still had a harried resemblance to n adolescent who is growing faster than his clothes. Somehow he managed to crawl through the opening, drag his feet in after him, and push the door shut. There was room to lie luxuriously at full length, beside the bag of cement. One hand reached out and patted the bag weakly, with affection. He lay with his cheek against the damply cool ground.His head pounded so violently and his inside heaved so ominously that it felt as if the earth under him were lurching. He grabbed at the sack of cement, to steady himself and the earth. Hilaria's voice came from the walk right beside him, but it seemed to be much further away. "Addison," he heard her call. "Addison, where are you?" Because he has always answered when she called, in all the nine years of their marriage, instinctively he raised his head and opened his mouth ready to say, "Here. I'm under the porch." Raising his head made the earth lurch even more sickeningly. He fell back to the ground and lay very still. If Hilaria went on calling him, and saying aloud with resentment, "He must have run all the way down to the corner, to get out of sight so fast," Addison never heard. He had blacked out. It was 6:59 daylight savings time, of a gentle June twilight.

--from The Husband Who Ran Away (1948)

For a week or so, Freda paid very little attention to me. When I begged for more work to do, she tossed me a few minor bits of copy to write. "Lay off the cat-licked adjectives," she said. "In home-furnishings copy, you have to give facts. If you're selling a housewife on the idea of buying a mattress and springs at thirty-nine-ninety-five, you have to tell her what percentage is horsehair and what's hog, and how the coils are tied, and whether the springs are open or inner."

My blank look betrayed me.

"But everybody knows the difference between open and inner springs," Freda said. "You've made a bed, haven't you?"

I said apologetically that I'd never noticed the springs. Freda quizzed me more and more incredulously, and soon she knew the sum of my home-furnishings knowledge: Mahogany is reddish brown. Oriental rugs have designs on them and broadloom doesn't. A long stuffed thing is a sofa.

--from "Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs" (1951)

Chester Humboldt got there a few minutes late, so he missed the alert on earwigs and Alicia Thorne. He wouldn't have cared anyway; his gardener coped with bugs and he had never heard of Alicia Thorne.

He sat down in the empty back row, on one of those folding chairs unstacked for funerals. It was so inadequate for a tall, well-built man who did push-ups every morning that it made him feel at once uncertain and too big for his britches.

from Heat Lightning (1969)