The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald

with kids who can shoot as good as I do.”
    Mr. Kokovinis kept coming to the kitchen door every few minutes to watch with a big smile on his face. The smile became even wider when we stopped playing marbles and Tom began teaching Basil how to speak English. They sat on the steps leading to the kitchen.
    Tom pointed at his nose. “Nose,” he said.
    Basil pointed at his nose. “Nose,” he said.
    By the time Tom and I had to leave to go home and do our chores before super, Basil had learned the English names for most of the parts of his body.
    As I walked home with Tom I couldn’t help putting into words what I’d been thinking all afternoon.
    “Don’t you feel any shame at all?” I asked.
    “Shame for what?” Tom asked and looked surprised.
    “For unloading all your old junk on Basil and swindling him out of ninety cents,” I said.
    “It wasn’t junk,” Tom said, and there was anger in his voice. “It was all stuff American kids have. Take my old slingshot which I sold to Basil. Can his father make him one? No. Can Basil make one? No.”
    “But they could have bought a store slingshot for a dime,” I said.
    “How many kids in this town own a store-bought slingshot?” Tom asked. “If Basil bought one, it would make the other kids jealous of him.”
    It was true but I wasn’t through. “How about the secondhand marbles you sold him? You charged him as much as he would have had to pay for new ones at the store.”
    “I guess your little brain is too little to understand,” Tom said as if I’d stabbed him in the back. “I’ve taken on a task no other kid in town would touch — teaching Basil English and how to be a good American kid. You saw how happy I made Basil. You saw how happy I made his father and mother. Would you rather I abandon Basil and let the other kids in town make a fool out of him the way they did playing Jackass Leapfrog? I think you owe me an apology, J’D.”
    I was now the one who felt ashamed. Here my brother was doing a wonderful, kind, and generous thing and I hadn’t realized it.
    “I’m sorry, T.D.,” I said.
    Becoming an American kid was not an easy thing for Basil or for my brother Tom. The other kids made Basil the butt of jokes and the goat in any game they played when Tom wasn’t around. One day I found that Sammy Leeds and a bunch of kids had formed a circle around Basil on Smiths’ vacant lot and were shouting at him: “Greasy Greek from Greece!” When Tom found out that Sammy Leeds had started it, he gave Sammy a bloody nose and a black eye in a fight.
    That night after supper as Tom sat on the floor in the parlor, he looked up at Papa. “Why does Sammy Leeds hate Basil so much?” he asked. “Basil never did anything to him.”
    Papa laid aside a book he was reading. “He gets it from his father,” Papa said. “His father is always complaining about immigrants coming to this country and taking jobs away from Americans.”
    “But Sammy’s grandfather was an immigrant,” Tom said.
    “When you come right down to it,” Papa said, “we are all immigrants except the Indians. What men like Mr. Leeds fail to understand is that it is the mingling of the different cultures, talents, and know-how of the different nationalities which will one day make this the greatest nation on earth. All intolerant persons must have somebody or something to hate. Mr. Leeds is an intolerant person who hates immigrants.”
    “I’m sure if it wasn’t for Sammy the other kids would leave Basil alone,” Tom said. “Basil has got to learn how to fight so he can whip Sammy.”
    “But Sammy is older and bigger than Basil,” Papa said.
    “Sammy is older and bigger than me, but I can whip him,” Tom said.
    Papa just smiled as he picked up his book and resumed his reading.
    Tom and I were weeding the vegetable garden a couple of days later when Howard Kay came running into our backyard.
    “Sammy and his pals have got Basil down by the river and are scaring him to death!”