8
New Tricks
T
HE
next morning I did the chores just the way I’d done them every morning since I’d been at Grandfather’s. First, I slopped the sow that had the little pigs, fed and watered the hogs in the barn cellar, and curried the bay mare while she ate her corn. Then I tackled the yella colt.
While I’d been dressing I’d decided that I wouldn’t start to Colorado for another day or, maybe, two. Before I went, I wanted to let Uncle Levi see that I wasn’t quite as useless as Grandfather had told him I was. I couldn’t show him very well with a scythe but, if I could keep the yella colt under control, I could show him with the horses.
Maybe I was thinking too much about keeping the yella colt under control when I went into his stall that morning, and maybe I was a little too rough with him. He fought me harder than he ever had, and there were times when I was really frightened before he stopped kicking and put his head down for the bridle. I’d just slipped the bit into his mouth when, from the stall door, Uncle Levi said, “Sort of early to be harnessing up, ain’t it?”
I tried to act as if I’d known he was there all the time, but my voice sounded a little shaky when I said, “I wasn’t harnessing him for work, but I’ve got to teach him to stand for harnessing without an hour’s fight every morning. As soon as he understands that he won’t get any breakfast till it’s all over, he’ll learn quick enough.”
“Kind of hard to learn an old dog new tricks, ain’t it?”
“Yes, but he’ll learn,” I said. “How old is he, anyway? His mouth looks as smooth as a range bull’s.”
“Been smooth more years than you be old. Let me see. I was sixty-four last spring, and I fetched Old Nancy home the day I turned thirty. Seems to me she didn’t have a colt that next year, and foaled the yella colt the following spring. Might be a year later. I ain’t real sure. By that time I was off to Dakota, homesteading. How old would that make him?”
“Thirty-one or -two,” I said.
“Great day of judgment! Cussed contrary old critter! Born ugly, and never got over it. Calc’late we better get at the rest of the chores afore we have Thomas out here to boss the job. Thomas, he’s a little long on the bossing sometimes. Like as not he learnt it when he was a sergeant in the rebellion.”
“They’re all done, except milking one cow and feeding the calf,” I told him, “and Grandfather doesn’t want the milking done till six o’clock. I wonder why he doesn’t milk the other three cows instead of letting those big calves run with them.”
“Thomas?” he said. “If ’twas left for Thomas to do, there wouldn’t be no milking. Never heard tell of him milking a cow. Womenfolks always done it. Millie gets her back up at more than one cow to milk. Cussed good girl, Millie. Don’t know how Thomas would get on without her.” As he spoke, Uncle Levi took his big gold watch out of the bib pocket of his overalls, untied the little leather pouch he kept it in, and said, “Right on the button. Six o’clock, straight up.” Then he followed me into the tie-up.
The milk was still ringing off the bottom of the bucket when Uncle Levi brought a little wooden firkin and sat down behind Clara Belle. In a couple of minutes, Old Bess came in and sat down beside him. Then, from one direction and another, the three cats came and sat beside Bess. For two or three minutes, the only sounds were the occasional mewing of a cat and the whisper of the milk streams as they plunged into the foam. The bucket was a third full when I remembered that I hadn’t shot the usual squirt of milk at Bess. I reached high on the milk-bag, brought down a big teatful, and turned my fist up toward Bess’s head. As the white stream came toward her, she opened her mouth wide and caught it. “There’s an old dog that’s been taught a new trick,” I told Uncle Levi. “She didn’t know how to do that when I came down here.”
“Clever, ain’t she?” was all he said for a minute. Then, “How you and Thomas getting on, Ralphie?”
“Not very well, I guess. Mostly, I’ve only had hand mowing to do, and I’m not very good at it. Especially, right-handed. I never tried to use a scythe before I came down here, and I can’t always make it go right where I want it to. He says I’m more hindrance than help to him, but I worked for a good many different men in Colorado, and they’d all hire me back again. I could always get jobs when most of the other kids in Littleton couldn’t.”
“Mmmm Hmmm. What’s this business about the strawberries and tomatoes?”
“Oh, that? I don’t know why he got mad about that. I just told him that I worked for a man in Colorado who raised strawberries and tomatoes.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’d you get along with him?”
“You mean the man that raised the strawberries and tomatoes?”
“Mmmm Hmmm.”
“Fine, but I only worked for him when there weren’t any cattle jobs. We had a horse, and I could make more driving cattle.”
“What did you do for the man?”
“Oh, quite a few different jobs: like picking fruit, and setting out tomato plants in the spring, and setting the new runners on the strawberry plants over for the next year’s rows. You know, you don’t have to set out new strawberry plants every year. Little new leaves come at the ends of the runners, and you just move them over like wires to where you want the next year’s row. Then you put a handful of dirt on the runner—right near the little leaves, but so you don’t bury them—and, after the field is irrigated, roots grow down from the new leaves, and then you’ve got a new plant, and when fall comes you can plow up the old row.
“The man I worked for had a high warm field: just like the one up beyond the orchard that has all the stones on it. It never got late frosts in the spring, and we could set his tomato plants out two weeks earlier than anybody else could set theirs out. So his tomatoes were always the first ones to ripen anywhere around Denver, and he used to get as much as ten cents a pound for them.”
I was going to tell him why we always had the earliest strawberries too, but he said, “You done pretty good with the yella colt this morning. Who learned you to handle hosses?”
“Oh, Father and quite a few other men; Hi Beckman, and Mr. Batchlett. Hi taught me how to break and train a cow horse, but Mr. Batchlett was more of a trader. He taught me some of the tricks about balky horses, and I’ve been using one of them on the yella colt. It works all right. I just tie his ears together good and tight with a piece of soft wire. Then, after I’ve let him stand and shake his head till he’s only thinking about his ears, and has forgotten he’s balking, I cluck to him and he walks right along. I think I’ll have him cured of balking altogether pretty soon.”
“Shame the Almighty stood a man’s ears on his head the way he did, ain’t it? Makes ’em so cussed hard to wire together. Here’s the pan for your cat’s milk; you been dry-stripping there for the past five minutes.”
By the time I had the calf fed and had gone to the house, breakfast was all on the table. The spicy smell of frying sausage met me at the door of the summer kitchen. Millie was whisking a pan of hot biscuits out of the oven, and called to me to get my face and hands washed as fast as the Lord would let me. Grandfather and Uncle Levi were already in their places at the table when I’d finished washing, and Uncle Levi was curling the ends of his big mustache, and smacking his lips the way Mother did when she was tasting her new batch of mincemeat.
The breakfast was really something to smack your lips over. Instead of the oatmeal and fried salt pork we’d had every other morning, there was a platter loaded with fried eggs and good big sausage cakes, a nappy of fried potatoes, a plate of hot biscuits, and a jar of wild strawberry jam. Most of the talk during breakfast was about people Uncle Levi knew but hadn’t seen for a long time. I’d never heard of any of them, so I paid most of my attention to biscuits, sausage, and eggs. Just as I was finishing my fourth egg and sixth biscuit, Millie got up and opened the oven door. As she gathered up the corners of her apron for holders, and brought out a high crusted pie, she snapped, “There’s your devilish old apple pie, Levi! Never seen a man that sot such store on pie for breakfast. It don’t look to be up to my usual.”
Millie sounded as cranky as she did sometimes when she was scolding at me, but it didn’t worry Uncle Levi. He bounced out of his chair as if there had been a spring in it, threw both arms around Millie’s neck, and danced her around in a circle. “Levi! Levi!” she kept squawking. “Good Lord sakes alive, what ails you? You ain’t been nipping at that bottle a’ready this morning, have you? Leave me be, Levi, afore you get my hair a-looking like a rat’s nest.”
Uncle Levi took one arm loose, pulled Millie up tight against his hip, and spanked her a good sharp one. “That’ll learn you not to sass your elders,” he told her as he swung her around again, but they were both laughing when they came back to the table.
If there was anything the matter with the apple pie, I didn’t find it, and nobody else seemed to either. Grandfather was only half finished with his sausage and eggs, but he pushed his plate right back, and dished a big slab of hot pie onto his tea saucer. He seemed to have caught some of Uncle Levi’s excitement and, as he waved his knife with a mouthful of pie on it, sang out, “By gorry, Levi, we’ll make the hay fly now! With three stout hands of us, we’ll have it all fetched into the mows come Sunday fortnight. I and Ralphie’ll grind the scythes whilst you’re putting new teeth in the handsweeps.”
I’d never seen handsweeps, and I didn’t think much of them when I did see them. They were hay rakes about four feet wide, with eight-inch wooden teeth, and a handle that looked like a short, slim wagon tongue. The ones Grandfather had must have been a hundred years old. The handles had been worn thin, they were weathered almost black, a quarter of the teeth were broken, and, where bolts were missing, they were hitched together with rusty wire. When Grandfather got them down from the carriage house attic, Uncle Levi’s mouth went the way it did when he was looking at the breakfast, then he almost hollered, “By hub, Thomas, why in tarnation don’t you take a little care with your tools? It’s a God’s wonder they hold together ’twixt one time and another when I come down here.”
Grandfather yelled back from the attic, “They held together all right whilst you was off homesteading in Dakota. By fire, if you don’t want to fix ’em, go off and do something else. I and . . . ”
I didn’t want to be there if they were going to fight, so I wandered off toward the barn. The blisters on my hands were pretty sore, and I didn’t feel as if it would be a bit of fun to drag one of those handsweeps all around the orchard. I’d noticed a couple of broken-down old horserakes lying with the other junk machinery out behind the sheep barn, and I went down there to look them over.
One of them was a complete wreck. It looked as if it had been run over by a freight train, but the other wasn’t too bad. One of the wheels was smashed, the tongue was broken, five or six teeth were missing, and it had been robbed of nuts and bolts. I looked it all over carefully, and there didn’t seem to be much the matter with it that couldn’t be fixed in a few hours. One of the wheels on the wrecked one was in pretty good shape; just bent a little, but it could be heated and hammered straight. The funny thing was that the lift handle was missing from both machines, and somebody had taken the trip gears off the better one and put them back onto the wrong ends of the axle.
When I went back to the carriage house, Uncle Levi had split a maple block into little sticks that looked like kindling. He’d pushed the junk on the bench back a way from the vise, had one of the little sticks in it, and was shaping it carefully with a spoke shave. Grandfather had driven the broken-off teeth out of the sweeps and, just as I came into the carriage house, he snapped, “Let be! Let be, Levi! Time flies! Just whittle the shanks down a dite and drive ’em home tight!”
I only let Uncle Levi get as far as, “Thomas, it’s a God’s wonder . . . ” before I said, “Couldn’t we fix up one of those old horserakes down by the sheep barn about as easy as to make new teeth for the handsweeps? There’s one of them down there that doesn’t look too bad, and . . . ”
“Worthless! Worthless!” Grandfather hollered at me. “Ain’t nothing but junk!” Then he let his voice down, almost to a whisper, and his whiskers moved up so I knew he was smiling. “Got ’em to boot in a couple of heifer trades. Cal’late they’ll fetch five–six dollars from a junk peddler.”
Uncle Levi laid the spoke shave down so that the cutting edge was against the board wall. He’d put his glasses on, and he peered up over them when he asked me, “Did you look ’em over careful, Ralphie?”
I just nodded, and Uncle Levi started out the doorway. I went with him as far as the corner of the barn, while Grandfather shouted after us, “They ain’t no good, I tell you, Levi! Ain’t nary one of ’em worth a tinker! I tried mending one of ’em myself, but it won’t work. Worthless! Worthless, I tell you! Ralphie! Ralphie!”
Uncle Levi didn’t pay any attention until Grandfather called my name. Then he stopped, and said to me, “Ain’t no God’s wonder it don’t work if Thomas tried to fix it. You better go back there afore he blows a gasket.”
Grandfather scolded me plenty for mentioning the horse rakes to Uncle Levi, and told me to keep my long nose out of things that were none of my business. Then he had me turn the grindstone while he sharpened the scythes, and he bore down on them so hard that the stone turned like a windlass.
Uncle Levi was gone quite a while, but when he came back he didn’t say a word about the horserakes. He just began raising the dickens about all the junk on the top of the workbench. Just as we were finishing the second scythe, he slammed things around on the bench, and shouted, “By hub, Thomas, I ain’t going to fix your cussed sweeps nor another tarnation thing around here till I got a decent place to work! And I don’t lay out to clean the junk off this bench myself neither! It’s a God’s wonder you ain’t fetched home every dump ’twixt here and Bangor! Where in tunket did you get it all? Auctions?”
“It’s all good stuff! It’s all good stuff, I tell you!” Grandfather shouted back.
“Ain’t worth a tinker; none of it! Can’t find a usable nut or bolt no place amongst it! If you want them sweeps mended I’ll have to go to the Falls and get some stove bolts for ’em.”