by Ralph Moody
“Ain’t going to have no lily fingered fiddler ’round here! Ain’t nothing the matter with them hands that time and work won’t cure. Did ever you see a decent dirt farmer wearing gloves?”
I didn’t want to hear them wrangling the very first night Uncle Levi was there, so I said, “They’ll be all right just as soon as . . . ” but Uncle Levi cut me off.
“Thomas, it’s a God’s wonder . . . ” He stopped right there, dropped my hands, and went back into the kitchen. Millie had just put a big slab of steak into the red-hot iron frying pan, and it spluttered and hissed so loud that I didn’t hear what Uncle Levi was saying to Grandfather.
They kept wrangling all the time I was washing my face and hands and combing my hair, but they didn’t shout as much as they had been. Once I heard Grandfather holler, “Mary sent him down here to be made a man out of and, by thunder, I callate on making him one.”
“Just like you done with Frankie,” Uncle Levi shouted back. “First thing you know he’ll be gone off somewheres to learn a trade.”
For a minute, I thought I’d go in and tell them they didn’t need to worry, because I was going away right then, but Millie called, “Victuals is ready!” And the steak did smell awfully good.
Millie didn’t act at all as she had for the past three days. She had on a pink calico dress that was starched so stiff it could have stood alone, and was as happy as if she were at her own birthday party. As soon as the steak was on the platter, she whisked half a dozen big baked potatoes and a pan of hot biscuits out of the oven, brought a jar of wild strawberry jam from the cellarway, and said, “Sit right down here by the window, Levi. It’s a sight for sore eyes to see you down here again. Thomas, he’s been feeling poorly since spring. It’ll do him a sight of good to have you here for a spell. Don’t know when ever I seen a piece of yard goods as pretty as that you fetched me.”
“Ain’t nothing! Ain’t nothing,” Uncle Levi grumbled as he pulled his chair up to the table. “Scared something terrible might be the matter with Thomas, and didn’t have time to do much shopping. Ralphie, didn’t know you was here or I’d have fetched you something.”
Grandfather didn’t seem a bit hungry when we first sat down at the table. He only took a little corner of steak onto his plate and then kept pushing it around with his knife and fork. Millie scolded at him a bit for not eating, then got a cushion and put it behind his back. She scooped out half a baked potato onto his plate, put gravy from the steak platter on it, and spooned him out some of the strawberry jam, but he still only ate a mouthful or two. After a few minutes, she looked up at Uncle Levi, and said, “Levi, you got any medicine upstairs in your valise?”
She hardly had the words out of her mouth when Grandfather shouted, “Ain’t nothing the matter with me! Don’t need it! Don’t need the tarnal stuff, I tell you! I ain’t sick and I ain’t tired! I just ain’t hungry, that’s all.”
Neither of them paid a bit of attention to Grandfather. Uncle Levi was in his stockinged feet, and had them up on the little shelf under the table. He let them drop to the floor, pushed his chair back, and said, “Wouldn’t surprise me none if there might be a drop or two up there.” Then, while Millie unlaced Grandfather’s boots and pulled them off, Uncle Levi went padding up the front stairs. I heard a board or two squeak in the chamber where I’d been sleeping and, in a couple of minutes, he came back with a half-empty quart bottle in his hand. There was a broken green sticker over the cork, and a picture of a crow on the label.
Grandfather watched, but he didn’t say anything while Millie measured a teaspoon of the whiskey into the glass, put in a heaping spoonful of sugar, and filled the glass with hot water. It smelled good when she set it beside Grandfather’s plate. He wrinkled up his nose a little, and grumbled, “Don’t need the tarnal stuff! Ain’t sick!” But he picked the glass up, and lifted his eyebrows high as he slooped a little sip from the glass.
Millie hadn’t given the bottle back to Uncle Levi, but he walked around the table and picked it up. Before he put the cork back in, he turned the bottle up and took a big, long swallow. A couple of dozen little air bubbles went dancing up through the red liquor. He didn’t raise his eyebrows the way Grandfather had, but when he took the bottle down he shut his eyes tight and shook his head like a horse with a fly in its ear. Then he took the bottle back upstairs.
While he was gone, Grandfather kept telling me what wicked stuff whiskey was, that the Almighty never planned it for anything but medicine, and where people went who drank it just for fun the way Uncle Levi did. But he kept sipping, too, and smacked his lips after every sip. When it was all gone, he cut himself a piece of steak bigger than the one I had, and he ate it all.
I did the milking and fed the calf while Millie was washing the supper dishes. When I came back into the house Grandfather was dozing at the kitchen table, Old Bess was sitting with her head in his lap, and Uncle Levi was asleep in the high backed rocking chair. He had his feet up on the hot-water tank at the back of the stove, and the magazine he’d been reading had fallen on his chest. Millie strained the milk and put it away while I was blowing out the lantern and washing my hands. Then she scrubbed her hands until I thought she’d peel the skin off them. She didn’t say a word to me until she’d gone to her room, brought out a long flat bolt of checkered gingham, and stood, with the pantry windowpane for a mirror, shaping the end of the cloth over her shoulders and around her neck. “Pretty, ain’t it?” she asked at last in a low whisper. “Levi don’t never come down, he don’t fetch me something pretty.”
“Does he come very often?” I whispered back.
“No telling when he’ll come or when he’ll go. Comes when Thomas is down sick—or when he makes him think so. Goes when they get to squabbling so devilish hard they can’t abide one another no longer. Sometimes Levi has to go off back to Boston when he’s got a job of work to do. Brick mason. Devilish good one I hear tell. Only man roundabouts can put the linings in glass furnaces.”
As she whispered, she wound the checkered gingham back on the flat spool, folded the paper around it, tucked it under her arm, and held both hands out toward me. “Let’s see them hands,” she said. She took both my hands in hers and turned the palms up toward the lamp. “Devilish sore, ain’t they?” she asked. “Why didn’t you let on sooner?”
“I didn’t let on at all,” I told her. “Uncle Levi just happened to notice them when we shook hands.”
“Levi notices lots of things a body wouldn’t count on.”
“They’re all right,” I said. “They’ll toughen up when I soak them in salt water.”
“And saleratus. Helps to keep the salt from burning so devilish bad. Sit down at the table while I fix you some.”
Grandfather woke up when I sat down at the table. It was a warm night and, though the wood had burned out, the stove had quite a little heat left in it. I’d have wanted to sit near an open window, but Grandfather opened the oven door, drew the other rocking chair up close, and put both feet into the oven. Then, as he rocked the chair back and forth, he began to tell me about the time the lightning had struck the big barn in the middle of the night and burned it flat to the ground. Uncle Levi was still asleep in the high-backed rocker and, for a few sentences, Grandfather talked above the drone of his snoring. Then his head nodded forward and he was asleep too.
Millie brought the washbasin, half filled with warm water, salt, and soda. As she set it in front of me, she whispered, “Soak ’em good now. I’m going off to bed. You take the corner chamber, next beyond Levi’s. It’s all ready, and ain’t been slept in since I filled the tick anew last husking time. Lamps is filled and ready there on the mantel. Take care Thomas is awake enough so’s he don’t drop his lamp on the way to bed.”
Millie slept downstairs in the parlor, and Grandfather had his room in the other front corner of the house, just off the dining room and next to the parlor. When I’d put my hands to soak, she took the lamp from the pantry, went first to Grandfather’s room, and the
n I heard her moving quietly in the parlor.
After a few minutes, Grandfather’s head came up a little way, and he began talking about the fire again. He was still more asleep than awake. His voice was soft, and the words came in little gusts, like the sound of a summer breeze blowing through dry grass. “’Twa’n’t long after Frankie . . . Portland . . . learn a trade. Not a critter saved . . . Old Hannibal . . . bellered something awful. Twenty-odd feet shorter’n the big barn.” His head jerked right up straight for a minute. He looked over at me, and said, “One day I and you’ll build the piece back onto it, Ralphie.” He spoke loud enough that he woke Uncle Levi but in another minute they were both snoring again.
The salt water made my hands sting to beat the band for a little while, and every muscle in my body ached, but I was awfully tired. The next thing I knew, Grandfather was shouting, “Levi! Ralphie!”
I must have been sleeping there for a couple of hours, with my hands soaking in the pan and my head resting on the edge of the table. When I opened my eyes, the moon had moved around so it was coming in the south window. Grandfather was yawning and rubbing his bald spot. “Gorry sakes alive,” he yawned, “I must have nodded off a minute or two. Come, Levi! It’s time all honest folks was abed.”
Grandfather was more awake than any of us, so I didn’t worry about his carrying his lamp, but lighted two from the mantel and went upstairs with Uncle Levi. His eyes were still only half open when I picked up my suitcase from beside his bed and went on to the next room.
I had just crawled into bed when Uncle Levi pushed open the door between our rooms. He had undressed down to his long underwear, and had a little round nightcap on his head. He had his lamp in his hand, and peered at me from under his eyebrows as though he were looking over the top of glasses. “Sleep tight, boy,” he whispered. “Watch out Thomas don’t work the tail off you.” Then he went back into his own room.
8
New Tricks
THE 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?”
“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.”