The July of Fourth

Hosea Husted, a somewhat overweight ten-year-old, loved the 4th of July. To this precocious Pennsylvanian, it was the most exciting day of the year ... a day full of cherry pie and cherry bombs, malted shakes and coiling snakes, Rocket salad and sky rockets, canards and petards, baked cod and punk rods, string beans and string salutes, Romano-cheese spaghetti and Roman candles, tomatoes and torpedoes, bottled pop and bottle rockets, soda crackers and firecrackers, M&M’s and M-80s, lady fingers and lady-finger salutes ... a day to indulge one’s passions to the fullest. And the devil take the forequarters.

Food and explosives were Hosea’s fixations. He was a budding cook and an accomplished chemist. “Hosey,” his mother’s nickname for him, loved to fiddle in the attic with his Mr. Science set, augmented with chemicals he had bought at the local drug store, cadged from the High School lab, and cajoled from the local farmer’s supply store. He had fulminate of mercury. He had lots of nitric acid, the starting point for most explosives. From this he could make gun cotton (nitric acid and cotton balls), TNT (nitric acid and toluene), nitroglycerin (nitric acid and soap). He had blasting caps (with which his cousin Harry had blown out an eye.) He had sulfur flowers ... from which he made stink bombs. He had aluminum, iron, and copper powders for his sparkling fountain displays. He had metallic sodium and potassium, kept airless by immersion in mineral oil. With either of these (and some water), he could burn a hole through a car hood.

While his grade-school buddies played with whistlers, grow worms and sparklers, Hosey liked to play with dynamite (nitroglycerin contained in diatominous sand for safety’s sake). He made, and often sold, a full range of fireworks, but his specialties were ash cans (a small amount of potassium nitrate and powdered charcoal in a silvery tube with a belly-button wick) and torpedoes (the same mixture but in a gold-painted ball without the wick ... exploded by the spark from two BB’s struck together when thrown against a hard surface.) From this commerce, he thus got the money he needed to buy more volatile chemicals and his favorite foodstuffs.

On this particular nation’s birthday, Hosey awoke early and spent the morning in the kitchen and the attic. He was making a special ice-cream cake for the Elk’s club outing at Centennial Park. This was a bring-and-share picnic where most of the town families came together to engage in minor competitive sports, ate themselves into a stupor, and, finally, lazily laid on their blankets watching the dusk’s fireworks (over half of which being constructed in Master Husted’s pyrotechnics lab). Hosey made this iced, icy, spheroid dessert with a thin smile on his face ... as he remembered how he and his father had been cheated out of the blue ribbon in last year’s three-legged race. This would have been the first award that the male Husted’s had ever won, but the antlered judges had decreed that their leg binding had come loose as they crossed the finish line. Both senior and junior Husted left last year’s festivities seething, ... well before the fruits of Hosea’s labor were hurled up and burned up in the evening sky.

Now, Hosey brought this concoction to the park packed in dry ice at the same time he delivered five wooden cases full of display rockets. He placed this cake in the middle of the primary picnic table among the potato salads, the apple-crumb cakes, the coleslaws, the fried chicken, the head cheeses, the baked hams and picnic shoulders, the herring salads, the green and orange Jell-o molds (with marshmallows), the chili and beans, the Shoo-fly pies, the Swedish meat balls, the miniature franks bathed with a mixture of catsup and grape jelly, and the pot roasts slo-baked in a melange of mushroom soup and powered onion soup. These were pretty much the limits of culinary creativity for the matrons of this Keystone hamlet, so Hosea’s contribution stuck out like a Mercurochromed thumb. When asked what it was, Hosey said that he had found the recipe in a French cook book and that it was called a bombe extraordinaire.

Now you, kind reader, have probably jumped to a conclusion as to what was buried inside this confection. To do so would be wrong. Except for the slightest taste of Cordite, everyone enjoyed this bombe to a fair-thee-well without consequence. However, when Hosey’s sky rockets were set off later that evening, instead of spectacular displays of multi-colored stars and echoing reports, the spectators were showered with Castor sugar, sifted flour, Dutch-processed cocoa, granulated yeast, and Calumet baking powder. You see, as I neglected to tell you earlier, Hosea Husted was also quite dyslectic.

© George W. Potts