by Ralph Moody
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.”
“Wastin’! Wastin’!” Grandfather exploded. “There’s plenty good nuts and bolts right there at your hand. Throwed ’em there myself just t’other day. If you can’t find ’em, Ralphie’ll find ’em for you.” Then he slammed the sharpened scythe blade onto the floor and stamped out of the carriage house.
As soon as Grandfather had gone, Uncle Levi winked at me. “Kind of balky on us fixing up that cussed hossrake, wa’n’t he? And we ain’t going to be able to tie his ears together neither. Calc’late we got to cook up some other way around it. Let’s see now. Tomorrow is the Sabbath, ain’t it? Thomas, he has his troubles with the Sabbath. It’s agin his scruples to work on it, and he won’t set you a job of work to do on it—that is, excepting chores. And sometimes he’s a mite careless ’bout the line where chores leaves off and a job of work begins. Never heard tell of him raising much ruction if somebody done him a job of work on the Sabbath without him knowing of it. Might happen we could get Thomas out of the way tomorrow, and run a little hossrake mending in on the chores.”
“It’s going to take a lot of nuts and bolts and things to fix it,” I said. “Do you think I’ll find enough of the right kind among the stuff here on the bench?”
“What you think I’m going to the village for? I got plenty stove bolts for the sweeps right down there in that locked drawer.” As he spoke, Uncle Levi unbuttoned the cuff on one of his shirt sleeves. When he turned it back, the inside was all marked over with figures. “There they be,” he told me. “Don’t allow I missed so much as cotter pin or washer. Keep your nose clean while I’m gone, and don’t rare into this mess of junk too hard. It’ll take a month of Sundays to get it all sorted out. I was scared Thomas would set you to mowing, and your hands ain’t fit for it right now.”
It was more than two hours before Uncle Levi came back from Lisbon Falls. By that time, I’d made a pretty good hole in the stuff on the
workbench, and Grandfather hadn’t once come up from whatever he was doing down at the beehives. He did come up when Uncle Levi drove back into the yard, and was standing by the front wheel of the spring wagon when I went to unhitch Old Nell. “There you be, Thomas,” Uncle Levi said, as he passed the reins to me and a flat package to Grandfather. “Them ought to hold smoke enough to make every bee in Lisbon township peaceable. Seen ’em when I was looking for carriage bolts, and calc’lated you might have some good use to put ’em to.”
“Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive, Levi!” Grandfather sang out, as he fumbled a little bellows out of the package. It was made of brown leather, with bright tips and handles. “Shouldn’t ought to have spent so much money on a tarnal pair of bellows. Little court plaster would have mended up the old ones so’s they’d do me all right. Gorry sakes alive! Ain’t them beauties! Ralphie, you unhitch the hoss whilst I go set my smoke pot a-burning. I got a . . . ” By that time he was so far toward the bee shop that I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Uncle Levi winked at me again. “Calc’lated he might have a few bees that would need some smoking about now. No sense starting into the fields afore noon, and this’ll give us time to do a decent job on them handsweeps.” I’d noticed a good-sized box under the seat, with a Lewiston Sunday paper laid in over the top. There was a roll of something wrapped in brown paper. It was about three feet long and as big around as my head. Uncle Levi climbed down, rolled the round package out from under the seat, and pulled the box to the edge of the wagon. “Found about everything we’ll need, ’cepting histe handle and shafts, and I allow we’re smart enough betwixt us to make them out of hardwood. I’ll fetch this stuff to the carriage house while you unharness Old Nell.”
I was just leading her away toward the barn when he called, “Hold up a minute, Ralphie! By hub, I come nigh forgetting it. I fetched you something for them sore hands. Catch!” He tossed a package, and as it wobbled toward me, end over end, a pair of brown gloves spilled out right at my feet. They were as soft as a woman’s kid gloves, and as smooth as satin, both inside and out. When I tried to tell him how much I liked them, he grumbled, “No thank you’s; no thank you’s! Got ’em for you; not for thank you’s,” and went off to the carriage house.
9
Uncle Levi Teaches Me to Swing a Scythe
AS I unharnessed Old Nell, I told myself that, after my promise to Mrs. Littlehale, it wouldn’t be honest of me to leave Grandfather until he had all his hay in. But, all the time I knew I was going to stay because I liked to work with Uncle Levi. The box he’d brought from the village was nowhere in sight when I hurried back to the carriage house, but he was down on his hands and knees, rolling the other package way back under the workbench. “Screen wire for Millie,” he said when he looked up and saw me. “Flies in the house like to drive her crazy. Been yammering at me for going on five–six years but, with one thing and another when I been down, I never got around to making ’em.”
“If the horserake doesn’t take any longer than I think it will, maybe we can start on them tomorrow,” I said.
“Mayhaps! Mayhaps! But, first, we got to see what we can do with Thomas. He ain’t going to sit around here peaceable while we’re fixing up that hossrake. Thomas, he don’t cotton to machinery. Wouldn’t have that cussed old rattletrap of a mowing machine around here if he could hire hand mowers. Good scythe men is getting hard to find.”
“He has quite a little trouble keeping any kind of men, doesn’t he?” I asked.
For the first time, Uncle Levi looked at me as if he was peeved. Before he answered, he shoved the roll of screen wire to the farthest corner under the bench, and climbed to his feet. By the time he was up, he seemed more sad than mad. He reached one hand out and laid it on my shoulder but, instead of looking at me, he looked out across the fields. “Thomas never learnt to get along with other folks,” he said at last. “’Tain’t that he don’t like ’em, Ralphie. He does. There ain’t a man living with more love in him than what Thomas has. Worshipped Father to the longest day he lived. No man ever loved the land more’n Thomas loves this old farm—every stone and stump of it. You seen him with critters; tender as ary woman. But he has a devilish hard time showing it to people. A crossgrain in the timber someplace. Treats worst them he likes best. Ain’t you heard him jaw and row at Millie?”
“She jaws and rows at him just about as bad,” I said.
“Being around Thomas, it gets to be a habit. There’s times it’s tarnation hard not to row back at him.”
I knew that, but I didn’t want to say it, so I said, “I don’t think Millie likes anybody but you very well.”
“Millie?” he said. “Why do you calc’late she’s put up with Thomas all these years? Millie don’t like strangers. Fetched up that way. Her mother lived like a hermit—way up on Rocky Dundy, t’other side Lisbon Village.”
“Was her father a hermit too?” I asked.
“Don’t nobody know. Her mother married a man off to Portland when Millie come to work for Thomas.”
Uncle Levi jerked his hand down off my shoulder. “Great day of judgment!” he said. “Here we stand gossiping like a pair of widow women. This ain’t mending handsweeps, is it? Mark them pieces of clear pine racked up beneath the ceiling? Them’s for Millie’s screen frames; had ’em all ripped out and ready to put together four–five–six years now.” He chuckled a few notes behind his mustache. “Have to devil her a little ’bout the flies, come dinner time.”
Before we started on the handsweeps, Uncle Levi fished a ring of keys out of his overalls’ pocket and unlocked the drawers on the right-hand side of the workbench. The top two were filled with tools. There was a place made for each one, and they were all in their places. Every metal part was covered with a film of oil, and there wasn’t a rust spot anywhere. The two lower drawers were divided into sections, with sliding trays, and each section held a different size of nut, bolt, screw, or washer. “Have to keep ’em locked up,” he told me, “else Thomas would have ’em scattered from Dan to Beersheba. It’s a God’s wonder when he can lay his hand on a wrench. Drops ’em whereever he uses ’em; got four–five-half-a-dozen planted in every cussed field on the place. Now you can go to cutting shanks on these teeth, if you’ve a mind to, while I turn ’em down with the spoke shave. Set your calipers a dite bigger’n the hole so’s they’ll fit good and snug.”
I felt terrible when I had to say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what calipers are.”
“Little fellow there in the top drawer,” he told me. “Looks like a bowlegged cowboy. That’s the one. Open and close the spraddle with that little burr nut on the side. That’s the ticket. Set it just a dite bigger’n the holes in the sweep rail.”
As soon as I saw it, I remembered that Father used to have one like it in his tool chest. I could remember having seen him use it before I ever started school. He’d made an old sewing machine over into a wood lathe, with a big flywheel and spindles. When he turned things on it, he used to measure them with the caliper. As I set the width of the hole, I could see that old lathe of Father’s as plainly as if I’d been looking back ten days instead of ten years. The flywheel was big—almost like a grindstone—and he got it going fast with the foot treadles before he began to cut with the chisels. I could remember his making Mother a whatnot with it. I’d stepped back from the handsweep, and was looking at Grandfather’s grindstone, when Uncle Levi asked, “What’s biting you, Ralphie? What you trying to figure out?”
“Nothing,” I said, “I was just remembering about a wood lathe Father once built out of an old sewing machine. It had a flywheel that looked like a grindstone. He’d get it turning real fast with the foot treadles, and then he’d turn out any shape he wanted with a chisel.”
“Hmff!” Uncle Levi said, came over, and gave the grindstone handle a twist. Then he shut one eye and watched it as it twirled around. “Hmff!” he said again. “’Pears to run pretty even. There’s treadles for it someplace; Thomas never uses ’em. N
ever grinds nothing less’n there’s some poor devil to turn the crank.” He looked along the wall over the top of his glasses. “There they be! S’posing we set it to spinning and see how true the center runs.”
We put the treadles on, and I got the stone whirling as fast as I could make my feet go. “True as gospel,” Uncle Levi said, as he squinted at it, “so long as you don’t push it too hard and make it gallop. Let me see now. ’Bout all we’re going to need is a dead center and a spring to hold it close up agin. I’ll file that bolt end into a hold-chuck while you hunt a spring. Get a good stout one; ’bout six or eight inches long.”
Within an hour, we’d rigged a little makeshift lathe onto the grindstone. It worked fine for the handsweep teeth, and Uncle Levi was careful to make every one of them just alike. After he’d calipered one of the shanks, he looked up at me, and said, “Charlie must have been a pretty good mechanic.”
“He was,” I said. “Father could make anything he wanted to out of anything he had.”
“Calc’late you take after him,” he said, and ran the chisel smoothly along the piece of kindling as he shaped the tooth. If he’d asked me right then to jump off the peak of the barn, I’d have been glad to do it for him.
We had the handsweeps fixed just as good as new, when Millie called dinner. And it was a good dinner, too, with a big piece of corned beef, boiled potatoes, cabbage, johnnycake, and another apple pie. It was a hot day, the windows were open, and there were quite a few flies in the kitchen. We weren’t any more than down at the table before Uncle Levi began swatting at them and shooing them off the corned beef. “Great day of judgment!” he snapped, as if they were worrying him to death. “Flies so tarnation thick around here a man has to blow his victuals afore the flies does! Millie, it’s a God’s wonder you wouldn’t spread a little molasses on a piece of brown paper and catch these pesky things. How’s a man going to enjoy his victuals when he daresn’t open his mouth for fear of getting a fly in it?” Then he turned his head so he could wink at me without her seeing him.