Hogshead Cap

The man in the hat had never read the Cat in the Hat or anything that made animals into humans. He preferred Reader’s Digest, Popular Mechanics and National Geographic. He read folios and book chapters devoted to tightrope walking and circusry, how-to books and anything remotely concerned with weighs and balances. He read articles on scouting and beetroot and editorials that championed the use of sulfas for trench-foot. He liked to drink clam juice cocktail and chew Black cat chewing gum while reading, the gum adding anise tartness to the clam juice. He read for such long stretches that he went blind, his eyes pebbly and course with salt and tears. His sight would reappear, but only after he’d applied a beetroot sulfa with a dampened rag, or forced himself to squint for 27 ½ minutes without stopping. He knew a man whose eyes were so milky with cataracts that he had to wear a cardboard cutout over his face. When he took off the cardboard cutout to wipe sweat from his brow, which he did sparingly, the man in the hat saw that his eyes were pinpricked with tiny white perforations, some no bigger than the head of a pin, others the size of small polka-dots. He used a cane made from briar root, shinnied smooth and scalloped round the hilt, with a silver hogshead cap that he twiddled between his forefinger and thumb.