by James Thurber
I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio,
was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation
(unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five
or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost
necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like
a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what
is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.
It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the
attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed
the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there
was unsafe- it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash
down on father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There
was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed
the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs.
We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather,
who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared
some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six
or seven days and returned growling and out of temper, with the
news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads
and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than
a fiddler's bitch.)
We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine
named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing
when he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened
every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had
been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals
until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in
my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if
anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake
Instantly. He tested me the first night-which I had suspected
he would by holding his breath after my regular breathing had
convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called
to him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the
precaution of putting a class of spirits of camphor on a little
table at the head of his bed. In case I didn't arouse him until
he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful
reviver.
Briggs was not the only member of his family who had
his crotchets. Old Aunt Alelissa Beall (who could whistle like
a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the premonition
that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she
had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street.
Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night
without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform
under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity -for she
was in greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household
goods-she always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables
in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading,:
"This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform,
as this is all I have." Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar
phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident
that burglars had been getting into her house every night for
four years. The fact that she never missed anything was to her
no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them
off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the
hallway. When she went to bed she piled, where she could get at
them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes
after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and
say "Hark!" Her husband, who had learned to ignore the
whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep
or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond
to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise,
tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the
hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other
direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a
couple of pair.
But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place
during the night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were
all in bed. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their
occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred.
In the front room upstairs (just under father's attic bedroom)
were my mother and my brother Terry, who sometimes sang in his
sleep, usually "Marching Through Georgia" or "Onward,
Christian Soldiers." Briggs Beall and myself were in a room
adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall
from ours. Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.
My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide
enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the
middle section, the two sides which ordinarily hang down like
the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up,
it is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot
is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole bed down
on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact,
is precisely what happened, about two o'clock in the morning.
(It was my mother who, in recalling the scene later, first referred
to it as "the night the bed fell on your father.")
Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs),
I was at first unconscious of what had happened when the iron
cot rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me. It left me
still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me
like a canopy. Hence I did not wake up, only reached-the edge
of consciousness and went back. The racket, however, instantly
awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate
conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed
upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, "Let's
go to your poor father!" It was this shout, rather, than
the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same
room with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent
reason, hysterical. "You're all right, Mamma!" He shouted,
trying, to calm her. They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps
ten seconds: "Let's go to your poor father!" and "You're
all right! " That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious
of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize
that I was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening in
the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the
quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all
trying to "bring him out." With a low moan, he grasped
the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and instead of sniffing
it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. "Ugh,
ugh," choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost
succeeded in stopping his breathing under the deluge of pungent spirits.
He leaped out of bed and groped toward the open window, but he
came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out
the glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway
below. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had
the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me. Foggy with sleep,
I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made
in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of
and perilous situation. "Get me out of this!" I bawled.
"Get me out!" I think I had the nightmarish belief that
I was entombed in a mine. "Ugh," gasped Briggs, floundering
in his camphor.
By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still
shouting, was trying to open the door to the attic, in order to'
go up and get my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was
stuck, however, and wouldn't yield. Her frantic pulls on it only
added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were
now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking.
Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this
time been awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided
that the house was on fire. "I'm coming, I'm coming,!"
be wailed in a slow, sleepy voice-it took him many minutes to
regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught
under the bed, detected in his "I'm coming!" the mournful,
resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker. "He's
dying!" she shouted.
"I'm all right!" Briggs yelled to reassure her. "I'm
all right!" He still believed that it was his own closeness
to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch
in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others
at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped
for him assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going
on and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father
crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open,
with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and
irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she
saw him. Rex began to-howl. "What in the name of God "s
going on here?" asked father.
The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jig-saw
puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare
feet but there were no other bad results. "I'm glad,"
said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, "that
your grandfather wasn't here."
GLOSSARY
- high-water mark.
- recitation
- verisimilitude
- dissuading
- "passel of blockheads
- fiddler's bitch
- crotchets
- canopy
- gloat: a look of malice or greed.
- institution: a mental institution, an insane asylum.
- moral: in this context, the "lesson" of the story.
- mythical: relating to a myth, hence not real.
- psychiatrist: a mental doctor
- solemn: grave or serious
- strait-jacket: an armless belted jacket used to confine the violently insane
- subdue, subduing: capturing, seizing
- unicorn: a mythical beast which looks like a horse with a horn in the center of the head.
More about the author James Thurber