Week 9 Story: The Know-It-All Little Brother

Bibliography: This story was inspired by 'The Younger Brother Who Knew More Than The Elder' in the Congo Unit from Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort by Richard Edward Dennett (1898).

Photo by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash

There were two little boys who were brothers that hardly got along. The younger one, Sammy, was always making a mess of things and getting away with it. Henry, the older brother, could hardly understand why his parents so easily forgave the seven-year-old when he could not have done the same things when he was younger. This frustrated Henry, and in turn it caused a great distance between the brothers. To add to it, Sammy was such a know-it-all and loved to boss Henry around.

One day, the brothers were collectively working on a lemonade stand while their father sat in a lawn chair and 'supervised.' Had their mother known the children were using hammers and nails without guidance, she would have sent her husband to the grave. They were following an instruction sheet to put the wood pieces together, as Henry read the instructions and Sammy arranged the pieces. After a short while, Henry noticed that Sammy had arranged the pieces wrong.

"No, no," Henry said. "You've got them all wrong. Look, it says here that piece goes over here with this one, and this other one here."

"No," said Sammy, "you've got it wrong. Look at the picture, dummy. Can you even read?" He said this despite himself still learning to read.

Henry immediately flushed red in the face in annoyance. "Are you kidding me? You're seven. What do you know, huh? I'm literally reading the instructions to you; you've barely learned to read. So quit acting like you're so much smarter than me."

And with that he stomped away, and Sammy sat there angrily, thinking he doesn't need his brother anyway. He could do it without Henry's help.

And so Sammy got to work on the lemonade stand. He held up the instruction manual and eyed it carefully, but almost all the words were foreign to him. He could barely say some of them, let alone understand them. After awhile of struggling, he gave up on trying to read it himself and instead resolved to just follow the images.

But those, too, were unclear. The first couple of images were pretty simple, but then it seemed as if it skipped a step. How did the one board get attached there? Where did that nail go?

Sammy sighed heavily and put down the manual. He laid on the driveway and watched the clouds float by for awhile. He thought through his earlier conversation with his brother, thinking he could have used Henry's help after all. Was Henry right about him? Was he acting as though he were smarter? Some self-reflection revealed that indeed he had, and he felt very guilty for it.

Sammy stood up and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of orange juice - Henry's favorite. He gently knocked on Henry's bedroom door and entered to find his brother laying on his bed reading a book.

"Go away," said Henry.

"I got this for you," replied Sammy, giving Henry the glass of orange juice. Henry hesitantly took it. "So, I was thinking.." he started. "I'm sorry for acting like a know-it-all. You know a lot more than me. I can't even read. And I can't finish the lemonade stand without you." He looked at the floor.

Henry was warmed to hear this and gave his brother a hug. "I forgive you," he said. "Thank you for your apology." Sammy smiled up at his brother. "Now, let's go finish that lemonade stand, yeah?"

And the two brothers went back outside and worked together to finish their lemonade stand, the younger brother following the instructions of his older brother.

Author's Note: In the original story, the relationship between the brothers was very similar. The younger one acted like he knew better than the older brother and stormed away. But while he was away, he got into a bit of trouble and his older brother ended up having the advice to help him. I wanted to put the story into the perspective of two little boys, a sibling relationship I'm sure many of us can relate to on some level. Instead of the older brother rescuing the younger one by chance, though, I had the younger brother come to his senses and apologize for him to receive the help.