by Ralph Moody
Twice, while I was frying the pork for supper, Grandfather told me to hurry up and get the victuals on the table, but when it was ready he ate only a few bites. For several minutes, he sat staring at Millie’s pink apron that still hung on a nail by the pantry door. Then he said, wearily, “Gorry, there’s a tarnal lot of mills off to Lewiston. Cal’late I’ll go to bed. Got to make an early start, come morning. Cal’late I’ll fetch them twin steer calves off to market. Wouldn’t make pulling critters no ways for two, three years, and eat as much provender as a pair of milk cows. I and you is going into the butter business, Ralphie. No sense a-keeping steer critters ’round.”
I was sure that Grandfather didn’t want to get rid of the little steers, and that they were just an excuse for his going to Lewiston to hunt Millie. I wished I could have thought of something else for him to take instead, or that I could have told him something that would help him find her, but I couldn’t.
Even with the tackle, stone hauling was hard work, but it had become sort of fun since the yella colt and I found we were friends. My biggest troubles were meals and milk. Neither Grandfather nor I could cook anything but boiled potatoes and fried salt pork. He always burned the oatmeal, and his biscuits never raised. By the end of the week, he was hardly eating anything, and I was getting awfully tired of pork and potatoes. Apples and milk helped, but they didn’t put much of a leg under me for hauling stones.
With all the calves gone and seven cows in the barn, I was swamped with milk. When I finished the chores Saturday morning, I had every pan, crock, and pail in the house full to the brim, but didn’t know how to make it into butter. I hurried our cows to pasture, and went down to meet Annie Littlehale when she came with hers. I thought that if I could get her to come up to the house for an hour or two, she could show me about the butter and teach me to make johnnycake and biscuits. Annie said she’d come, but that there wasn’t any need for me to stay out of the field; that she’d show me how to make them when I came in for dinner. Then she asked me which I liked best, pie or cake.
“My grandfather likes pie best,” I told her. “Millie made one with apples and wild strawberries, and he ate nearly half of it.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” she said, as she started back to the pasture gate. “I’ll come up as soon as the breakfast dishes are finished, and I’ll call you when I’m ready for you to come in for dinner.”
It was a long forenoon for me. I never drove the yella colt to the wall with a load of stones that I didn’t stop to look toward the house. Once Annie came to the orchard for apples, once I saw her in Millie’s little garden, and another time she was walking up the road from her house with some packages in her arms. I didn’t want her to see that I was excited when she called me to dinner, so I led the yella colt slowly down the hill. But when we reached the barn, I rattled his harness off as fast as I could, fed him, and then walked to the house as if I wasn’t in any hurry.
Annie had all sorts of things laid out on the pantry table. There was a bowl of eggs she’d gathered from the henhouse, cream she’d skimmed from milk in the cellar, and butter, chocolate, and white lard she’d brought from home. After I’d washed my face and hands, she tied Millie’s pink apron on me, and said, “There’s no sense in making both johnnycake and biscuits for dinner; which one do you want to try?”
“Both of them,” I told her.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “They’re only good when they’re hot. There’ll be lots of other days. Which one shall we make today?”
“Well, I’d still like to make them both,” I told her. “Tomorrow is Sunday. I won’t be working in the field, and you’ll be gone to Sunday school. If I knew how, I’d make hot biscuits for breakfast and hot johnnycake for dinner.” It wasn’t so much that I was in a hurry to learn to make them, but I liked to be with Annie. It seemed to me the more things she taught me, the longer the lesson might last.
She still said it was silly, but I made both biscuits and johnnycake, and she told me just what to do and when to do it. Before I started the biscuits, she explained to me about having to judge the amount of soda to use by the sourness of the milk, and about sifting the flour twice to get plenty of air into it. Then, as soon as I’d poured the sour milk in with the flour, she made me hurry to beat the band. She said it was hard to make bad biscuits if you had them in the oven within two minutes of the time the sour milk touched the soda.
The johnnycake was easier than the biscuits. The batter was looser, it didn’t have to be rolled or cut out, and Annie didn’t make me hurry with it. After I had a cup of sour cream stirred into the meal, flour, and molasses, she had me beat in three eggs. “You can use as many eggs as you want to,” she told me. “If you and Mr. Gould are going to try to live on salt pork and potatoes, I’d put plenty of eggs in the johnnycake. They’ll do you just as much good that way as any other, and it makes a nicer johnnycake. You can use sour milk instead of cream, but if you do that, you’ll have to put in shortening. You should always use cream instead of milk when you’re doing hard work like hauling those stones. It will be good for Mr. Gould, too. He’s apt to be sick if he doesn’t eat good rich food. Goodness! You’re going to beat that into a froth. Let’s get it into the pan; the biscuits should be ready by now.”
The biscuits were ready, and they were pretty. The last second before they’d gone into the oven, Annie had frosted the tops of them with cream and marked them with fork pricks. When they came out, they looked like little white castles with brown roofs.
I’d had lots of good dinners at home, and at some of the ranches where I’d worked, but never one that I liked much better than that one. Annie had made a boiled dinner of vegetables she found in the garden and, beside the biscuits and johnnycake, there was a warm apple pie and cupcakes with maple sugar frosting on them. As she cut the pie, Annie said, “This one hasn’t any strawberries in it, but this afternoon I’ll make one that does have. I didn’t have a chance to go for them this morning. My! You had lots of milk set. I couldn’t find a bowl to cook with till I skimmed some of it. I’ll take care of the rest of it this afternoon, and the first of the week we’ll have to churn. You shouldn’t let it set so long. Every evening, you should skim the milk from the day before.”
Annie let me tell her a little about Colorado while we were eating, and she told me a little about the high school she went to at Lisbon Falls, but she wouldn’t let me stop to help her with the dishes after we’d finished. She said that Grandfather was too old to do hard work and that she’d only come to help me if it wouldn’t interfere with my work in the fields. Just before I went back to the barn, she said she’d leave a pot of beans in the oven, and told me to keep them filled with water, and to keep a slow fire going till bedtime. Then she said she’d leave everything for supper on the back of the stove when she went.
The sun was low enough that the shadows of the pines on the ridge stretched across the orchard before I left the high field. When I went to the pasture for the cows it was twilight. I had them halfway to the barn when I saw Grandfather and Old Nell coming down the road. Nell was walking with her head bobbing low, and from the way Grandfather was sitting hunched on the wagon seat I knew he hadn’t found any trace of Millie. I hated to have him feeling so bad about it, but I didn’t know what I could say or do. Instead of leaving the cows in the barnyard and going to meet him, I put them in the tie-up, and closed the stanchion yokes on their necks.
There was no sound from the dooryard, so I went to see what Grandfather was doing. Old Nell was standing in the driveway, but Grandfather was nowhere in sight. Then a light showed in the windows of the open chamber above the kitchen. I saw the lamp move past one window, then the other, and then the light faded away. I was sure Grandfather wouldn’t have gone up there, and went running to the house. I’d just come into the kitchen when the door from the front stairway opened, and Grandfather stood in the doorway with a lamp in his hand. His face looked like a little boy’s when he first spies the Christmas tree, and
he sang out, “You fooled me, Ralphie! You fooled me! Why didn’t you tell me Millie was a-coming home? Where you cal’late the little minx is a-hiding at? Gorry! Gorry sakes alive!”
For half a minute, I thought Grandfather was right, and that Millie had come back. Then the lamplight spread across the set table, the pots and pans on the back of the stove, and Grandfather’s slippers, set neatly beside his rocker. I knew in a moment that he was wrong, but I hated to tell him so. While I was hunting for the right words, Grandfather looked at me questioningly, and asked, “What’s the matter, Ralphie? Be she gone off again? Why didn’t she stay till I come home? I’d a . . . Was it account of the . . . ” And then he just stood there looking at me blankly.
“No, she hasn’t gone,” I said. “She didn’t come home. Annie Littlehale came up to show me how to cook. She stayed to do the dishes after I went back to the field at noon. It looks as if she did some scrubbing too, and left supper ready for us.”
As I spoke, I noticed that Grandfather’s hand was trembling so that the lamplight flickered. The flickering grew sharper for a minute as he peered around the kitchen. Then he snapped, “Don’t want no supper! Don’t want no tarnal neighbor womenfolks a-snooping ’round this house a-cooking the victuals! I won’t have it! I won’t have it, I tell you!” With every word, his voice grew louder until, at the end, he was shouting.
“Annie wasn’t snooping,” I told him quietly. “I’m sure she didn’t go into any part of the house except the kitchen, the pantry, and the cellar.”
“Keep her out of here! Keep away from that girl, I tell you!” Grandfather shouted, shoved past me, and started toward his room. At the pantry doorway he stopped and shouted again. “What in thunderation you been up to anyway? Four pies! Layer cake! Cup cakes! Wastin’! Wastin’!”
Four swill pails were lined up under the sink, filled nearly to the tops with sour skimmed milk. Grandfather snatched the long handled mixing spoon from its nail by the table, and scooped deep into the nearest pail. When the spoon came up, there were two broken eggshells on it. He dipped again and again. Each time there was a shell on the spoon. “Wastin’! Wastin’!” he snapped out as he scooped. “Wastin’ as her mother! Throws out more in a teaspoon than what Fred Littlehale can fetch home in a wheelbarrow. Best tarnal bottom-land farm in the country roundabouts, and what’ll he have to pass on to his children? Nothing! Nothing! Mortgaged to the handle! Work like a fool and watch his womenfolks heave his worth away in fancy victuals! Them womenfolks better go to watching the bees! Bees don’t eat theirselves out of house and home! Saving! Saving for the generations to come! Great thunderation! Eggs is eighteen cents a dozen! Stay away from that girl, Ralphie! Stay away from her! First thing you know, she’ll learn you to be a spendthrift.” Then he stamped off to his room and slammed the door.
I hardly slept at all that night. It was nearly midnight before I went to bed, and then I couldn’t get Annie out of my mind. I thought of dozens of ways I might be able to get Grandfather to let her come back again, and then I’d think of the reasons he’d say she couldn’t come. When the first gray of morning showed at the window, I got up, dressed, and took my shoes in my hand. I didn’t put them on till I’d tiptoed through the kitchen and out to the doorstone. As I sat tying the laces, Old Bess came from the woodshed and tucked her head into my lap.
When I’d got up, I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do, but as I stroked Old Bess’ head, I whispered, “Let’s go for a walk, Bess. Let’s go down to the brook in the hidden field, and see if the raccoon still comes back there to wash his food.”
It was a beautiful morning. Dew had settled thickly on the grass. As the light spread across the eastern sky, mist lay in the valley like milk in a great green bowl. The smell of pine was sweet and heavy in the air. From the ridge above the house, a crow cawed as though he were calling someone. There were three separate, throaty notes, and, from somewhere in the valley, a rooster answered.
The light grew and spread as Old Bess and I climbed the hill through the orchard. A pink glow touched a cloud above the dark pines along Hall’s hill. Slowly, it changed to red. The red widened and deepened along the hill, till it looked as if the whole world beyond were in flames. Meadow larks sang from the stonewalls and, as Bess and I walked along the brow of the hill above Littlehale’s pasture, a partridge strummed in the beech woods. We stopped, and standing there on the hill, looking down at the little meadow where I had first seen Annie, Mother’s “Nut Brown Maiden” song began going through my mind.
All the way, down through the maple grove, the hemlock woods, and the hidden fields, the rhythm kept swaying back and forth in my head. It was still there when we had walked over every inch of ground where Annie and I had walked before. When Bess and I had gone back and were sitting on the granite outcropping in the pasture, words began to fit themselves along the path of the rhythm. They were beautiful, rhyming words. I wished Annie had been there beside me, so I could have said them to her, and I was afraid I might forget them before I ever saw her again. While Old Bess slept, I found a sliver of flint, and scratched the verse into the gray table of the outcropping. I sort of hoped that, someday, Annie might come there again and see it.
When it was finished, I read it to Old Bess. The words sounded better aloud than they had when they were just in my mind. I read it again; but, that time, to the hemlock woods. I made each word as round and full as I could—the way Mother’s voice always sounded when she recited the last verse of Thanatopsis.
The last sounds were just echoing back from the hemlocks when, from right behind me, Grandfather said, “Gorry sakes, Ralphie, what you doing way off out here in the woods a-spouting poetry at this hour of the morning?”
When he spoke, I slid over and tried to cover the verse, but Grandfather had already seen it. “Gorry,” he said, “rit it yourself, did you? Hmmmm! Hmmmm! Poetizing is for poets and farming is for farmers. Every man can’t be a poet, no more’n a sheep can be a goet. The cows is bellering to be milked.” Grandfather pulled at the end of his whiskers a minute, then asked, “Wa’n’t writing that for Annie Littlehale, was you?”
“No,” I said, “I wasn’t. It just came into my head while I was sitting here, and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it.”
“Ought to fetch out a chisel one day and cut it deeper. Rain and time will wear it away afore you know it.”
I had stood up, and Grandfather slipped one of his arms in under mine. For a minute or two, he stood looking down at the verse, but I don’t think he saw it. Then, he said, “Time wears lots of things out of a man’s mem’ry, too, Ralphie. Ones he hates to lose, and ones he yearns to. Father stood here on this selfsame outcropping with me the day afore I went off to war. Ninety-four, he was, and commencing to feeble a mite. He passed away whilst I was gone. Ain’t come to mind for years, but now I recollect us a-standing here as if’t was only yesterday. Father a-telling me how he come to this outcropping whenst first he blazed his way up through the woods from Bath in the year of 1793.”
“1793!” I broke in. “Why, there wasn’t any State of Maine in 1793.”
“Wa’n’t no United States whenst Father was born. He was in his twenty-first year whenst George Washington was swore in to be the first president. No, there wa’n’t no State of Maine, Ralphie, but the land was here; been here ever since the Almighty smote on the waters and raised the land above ’em.
“Father, he come onto this outcropping whenst him and his first wife was seeking out a place to rear up a family. Where yonder hummock stands was a tarnal great white oak. Father clim to the top of it and could see all the country roundabouts. ’Twas solid woods and wilderness then, Ralphie. Not a tarnal tree left of them that was standing, save the two virgin pines in the beech woods.
“’Twas a cloudy day in early spring. Whilst Father was atop the tree, a rift come in the clouds, and the sunshine lit on this whole side the ridge and out onto the valley beneath. Ralphie, ’twas the hand of the Almighty parted them clouds and marke
d the land for Father. He come down the oak and blazed his mark on the trees roundabouts the land the Almighty marked to him. There’ll come a day, Ralphie, you’ll love it the same as Father and me. The feel of the land is in your hands. There’ll come a day you’ll clear the wilderness field yonder. I and Levi, we cleared it once—hauled the stone off with three-spanned yoke of oxen, laid up the foundation of the big barn out of ’em; cut off the timber, hewed the beams, and framed the biggest barn in all the country hereabouts.”
I felt Grandfather’s arm weighing down on mine. His head was bowed, and his shoulders slumped forward a little. It was a minute or two before he went on. When he did, his voice was low and thick. “Then the clouds closed in, Ralphie. Levi, he went off a-homesteading, the malaria come on me heavy, and the children. I lost your grandma and the fire come and the woods and wilderness commenced a-pushing back into the fields Father had cleared. ’Tain’t been easy to watch it a-slipping back. Ain’t been able to keep enough stock to dress the fields. Hated awful to see ’em petering out, but now we’ll save ’em, Ralphie. I’m cal’lating on filling what barn there is with cows. With you to help me, we’ll fetch back what fields is left, and whenst I’m gone, you’ll claim back them I ain’t been able to save.”
My throat hurt. I forgot what Uncle Levi had said about not giving Grandfather the pill, and blurted out, “I won’t either! We’ll claim them back while we can do it together. I like hard work. This is my home now, and you’re no older than your father was when you were born. If he could clear the land he did, I guess we can clear the wilderness field again and build the piece back on the barn.”