Fields of Home (32 page)
Saturday morning was frosty and clear. Grandfather came to the tie-up while Bill and I were milking, paced up and down the runway, and snapped, “Stir your stivvers! Stir your stivvers, Ralphie! It’s nigh onto sunup a’ready and time flies! Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive! Ain’t been an old-time barn-raising hereabouts in I-don’t-know-when. Ain’t many men left that knows how to frame a barn solid a-laying down, and fetch it up all-standing. By thunder, I wisht Father could be here to see it.” Then he locked his thumbs behind his back, walked up and down a few more times with his head bowed, and left the tie-up. We’d hardly finished the chores when the first neighbors drove into the dooryard. By eight o’clock, a dozen wagons were lined up by the long rows of cordwood along the yard wall, the horses unhitched, and toolboxes unloaded.
Three of the strongest teams were picked to do the pulling on the tote rope. The heaviest pulley block was anchored to the peak of the main barn, ropes were run to the gable point of the new center-frame, and pointed irons were driven into the ends of long pike poles. Twenty men were standing ready with pikes and mauls when Grandfather called, “
Histe!
” and the horses leaned into their collars. With a squeal of turning pulley wheels, the tackle ropes came taut, and the peak of the forty-foot frame lifted from its cradle. Slowly, slowly, like the turning hand of a clock, the great uprights rose, hinged on the wide tenons at their bases. Men with heavy wooden mauls hammered the timbers to bring the tenons exactly in line with the sill mortises, and those with poles jabbed their pikes into the uprights to steady them. As the frame came straight up, there was a screech of tight-binding dry wood, the great tenons wedged down into their mortises, and the frame stood alone.
Grandfather and Uncle Levi each had a crew of men ready at the side walls; telling them which timber to put in place first, and giving each man his own part of the job. The foot-square side beams were lifted into place, their tenons set into the mortises in the main barn frame, and cross-braces and center uprights fitted into place. Then the pike men rocked the center-frame back just enough to let the tenons of the side beams and rafter joists slip into their mortises. The two-inch-round treenails were driven, and the sixteen-foot section of the ridgepole pegged into position. By noon, the framing was all finished, the plank floor laid, and men were putting up scaffolds for the sheathing and roofing.
As soon as the floor was laid, Bill and I set up plank tables and benches, and the women brought pots of beans, brown bread, big roasts of veal and pork, a dozen pies, and pitchers of cider. When Millie called, “Victuals is ready,” there were thirty-eight hungry men washed up and ready to eat. Everyone was laughing and joking, and Millie and Annie ran back and forth between the table and the kitchen, bringing more pitchers of cider, tea, milk, hot johnnycake, and more pie.
The first spikes were driven when the three-by-six wall studs were fitted into place between the cross-braces. As fast as a section was studded, other men put on the sheathing, and still others followed with the clapboards. While the last shingles and clapboards were being nailed on in the afternoon, Uncle Levi, and some of the men who were the cleverest with tools, put up the door track, hung the big rolling door, and fitted the window sash. When the last nail was hammered and the last screw driven, Grandfather climbed to the peak of the new addition, and set the story pole for a flagstaff.
The sun stood just above the tops of the pines on Lisbon ridge when the last neighbor drove out of the dooryard, and I started for the pasture to get our cows. I’d only reached the barnyard gate when Grandfather called, “Wait up, Ralphie! Wait a minute, and your old grampa’ll walk along with you, boy.” He slipped his arm under mine as I stood holding the gate open for him, and said, “Leave us go for a walk about the fields afore night comes on. Cal’late I’d like to look down on the buildings from atop the orchard hill. Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie! Never thought I’d live to see the day.”
We did walk the fields and the woods, and there was hardly a rock, a stump, or a tree that didn’t have a story connected with it. At sunset, we stood together on the granite outcropping that crowned the pasture hill. “Hark, Ralphie,” Grandfather whispered, “the woods is about to talk; they always do, come sunset, and I never tire of hearing ’em.” As we stood there listening, the liquid, throaty song of a wood thrush came from the hemlocks, a fox barked from somewhere deep in the woods, and a crow taunted back at him from high on the ridge. In a moment or two, a whippoorwill’s lonely call rose from the hackmatack thicket near the brook, and Grandfather whispered, “Pretty, ain’t it, Ralphie?”
