Summary
A cherubic hellion—petted, praised, and perpetually excused by a doting matriarch—detonates the etiquette of a sleepy micro-town like a cherry bomb in a baptismal font. He filches pies, torments mongrels, blackens the eyes of smaller boys, and leaves each misdemeanor wrapped in the invisible cotton-wool of maternal blindness. Yet every Eden breeds its own tribunal: one coppery dusk the neighborhood lads convene beneath the sycamores, faces hidden under hand-whittled white masks that glow like diminutive moons. Their verdict is swift, baroque, and ancient as a carnival: hot tar ladled from a tin pail, goose-feathers harvested from barn rafters, a public metamorphosis into a living totem of shame. The punishment backfires; the tar cools to an obsidian shell, feathers soldered like quills on a gilded porcupine. Banished from both hearth and campfire, the boy stumbles through moon-mottled fields, a nocturnal wraith mistaken for a restless spirit. At cockcrow he drags himself home, plumage rust-stained, voice cracked, ego fractured, swearing—this time with the solemnity of a deathbed vow—to abandon mischief forever.
Synopsis
In spite of the fact that he is "mother's angel," a boy stops at nothing that is naughty, until finally the boys of the neighborhood call a meeting, at which all wear white masks, and the bad boy is brought before them and sentenced to be tarred and feathered. When the tar is applied, and likewise the feathers, it is found to the consternation of the boys that they are there to stay, and so the bad boy wanders all night in his unhappy condition and is taken for a ghost. Finally he arrives home, vowing never to be a bad boy again.
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