The Fields of Home

by Ralph Moody

  I sat down on a big rock to let my head clear, and time must have passed faster than I realized. I was still shaking my head when I heard Grandfather shout. It sounded miles away, but when I looked around, he and Millie were running toward me from the pasture bars. “What in time and tarnation you been up to now?” Grandfather shouted, as he came panting up. “Be you hurt? Be you hurt, Ralphie?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’m not hurt at all. I just fell down and got a nosebleed.”

  “Tarnal hard fall, by the sound of it! What you been up to?”

  “I blew a stump,” I said. “I guess I blew it a little too hard.”

  “Gorry!” Grandfather said, when he looked around. “Gorry sakes alive!” Then he walked over to the hole.

  Millie was just starting to give me the dickens for scaring Grandfather half to death, when he shouted, “How in thunderation did ever you do it, Ralphie? Looks like somebody’s smashed the ground with a tarnal great hammer!”

  Instead of scolding me, as I expected he would, Grandfather was all excited about the dynamiting. “Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie! You cal’late you could do some more of ’em?” he asked. “By fire, four men couldn’t a-done that much in a day. How long you been a-working on it?”

  “It didn’t take more than an hour,” I told him, “and I guess I could do it again, but I don’t know much about it, and it might be dangerous for both of us. Bill Hubbard knows all about dynamite. He’s only got two more days’ work on the road, and I think we could get him to come and do it for us.”

  “No sense hiring somebody to do for you what you can do for yourself,” Grandfather said.

  “Well, I don’t know what dynamite costs,” I said, “but the men on the road say Bill can get more out of it than anybody else. I’m afraid I’d waste too much.”

  I thought the wasting part would be the most interesting to Grandfather, but he turned on me sharply, and snapped, “Don’t know what it costs! Where did you get what you used; steal it?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t steal it. I earned it,” I said. “Any of the men on the road job will tell you.”

  “Hmmm, hmmm,” Grandfather said, as he stood looking at the hole. “If you’re cal’lating on going to Sabbath school with Annie Littlehale, ain’t it ’bout time you was getting cleaned up and ready?”

  Bill Hubbard wouldn’t come to do the dynamiting for us for less than two dollars a day, and, at first, Grandfather said he wouldn’t pay any man over a dollar. But on the last day of road work, he said it would be all right if I asked Bill to stop by and talk to him. Bill came home with me that night, and Grandfather told him to get all the things he’d need for the job, and to bring them with him the next morning.

  I never saw a little boy have more fun on the Fourth of July than Grandfather had on the first day of dynamiting the wilderness field. Bill showed us where to dig the blasting holes under the stumps, and he was shooting a charge nearly every half hour. Every time he’d blow his whistle, Grandfather would dive behind a tree or boulder. Then, when the explosion came, he’d wave his arms and shout, “There! There, by thunder! ’Twon’t be long afore we have her flatter’n a thrashing floor. Gorry sakes alive! ’Minds me of the battle of Bull Run! Did ever I tell you, Ralphie . . . ” Sometimes he’d tell about some battle for a few minutes, but it would never last long. He was too anxious to get the holes dug, and be ready for another blast.

  Along toward the end of the afternoon, Bill blew the last stump from the trees Grandfather had cut. I liked to work with Bill, and was afraid Grandfather would say we didn’t need him any more, so I asked, “How many potatoes did you raise on this whole field after you cleared it the first time?”

  “Thousand bushel,” Grandfather said quickly. “How come you to ask that?”

  “I was just thinking,” I said. “The way Bill is knocking the stumps out, we might be able to clear more than a quarter of the field this year.”

  “Clear it all!” Grandfather said sharply. “What’s to hinder? Take a tarnal hard freeze to stop that damanite a-blasting out a stump. Fast as ever I and you gets ’em ready, I cal’late on having the Hubbard boy come and histe ’em out for us. Gorry sakes! Don’t cal’late there’ll be a tarnal stump left, come Thanksgiving time.”

  “How about the boulders?” I asked. “Do you think the dynamite would break the big ones?”

  “Don’t know why not! Thundering powerful stuff! Cal’late to find out, come morning.”

  We didn’t find out about the big boulders in the morning. Bill said they’d take more dynamite than he had with him. But we did find out about Bill. He could swing an axe fully as well as Grandfather, and could make a treetop fall within a foot or two of where he wanted it. He was strong as an ox, and he never tired. It didn’t make him mad when Grandfather got irritable, and he knew how to get him over it. Once they started chopping side by side, on two trees that looked as if they might have been twins. Bill wasn’t hurrying, but every time his axe bit, a big chip would fly, and the scarf would widen. Grandfather wasn’t going to be beaten. He was making three swings to Bill’s two, and his breath rasped through his throat at every swing.

  I’d been limbing a felled tree, but I stopped to watch them. Bill was halfway through the trunk of his tree before Grandfather was more than a third of the way through his. And then Bill did a nice thing. When his axe came down, it bit into the tree five or six inches above his first scarf. He didn’t change the timing of his swing, and the chips were just as big, but he still had several inches of solid wood left when Grandfather’s tree groaned, swayed, and fell. Bill stood his axe down, leaned on the helve of it, and panted, “By gosh, Mr. Gould, for an old duffer, you can surely make the chips fly. Danged if you ain’t got me winded!” From there on, I didn’t have to worry about our losing Bill, or Grandfather’s letting him go.

  We took the horses and the stone drag to the wilderness field in the afternoon, and hauled the first big rocks for the stonewall that would separate it from the pasture. Grandfather took his axe, cut stakes, and marked the line. It ran from the corner of the high field south, past the edge of the granite outcropping, and on to meet the old wall at the corner of the hidden field. No rock that we hauled weighed less than three or four hundred pounds, but they handled easily. Bill had sprung them above the ground with dynamite, Grandfather fastened the heavy chains with what he called a rolling hitch, and as I eased the horses into their collars, the big rocks would turn, slide, and roll up onto the drag. If one hung or caught, a heave of Bill’s crowbar would move it along. By the end of the first week, the row of base rocks for the new wall stretched the whole length of the field.

  Bill didn’t work with us every day, but if there was any heavy hauling to do, or blasting, Grandfather would tell the mailman, and Bill would be there the next morning. By Thanksgiving time, all the blasting had been finished, the stonewall nearly laid up, all the felled timber was yarded, and the boulders for the barn foundation had been hauled to the barnyard.

  Bill Hubbard came over from Lisbon Village and ate Thanksgiving dinner with us. It was a fine one, and when we were all in our places at the table, Grandfather bowed his head and mumbled a blessing. The words were lost in his beard, but I think we all felt as though we had heard them. I took some beechnuts down to Annie after dinner, and when I came back, Bill was helping Millie with the dishes.

  The air was sharp all the next day, and the stones rang against each other as Grandfather and I lifted them onto the wall. At sunset there seemed to be a hard, cold pressure that bore down from the clear sky. The horses stood close together and shivered as we unloaded the drag. “There! There she be, Ralphie!” Grandfather said, when the last stone had settled into its place. “Cal’late we done all we can for the fall. Come the heavy snow, we’ll burn out the junipers and cut the brush. And come the spring thaw, I cal’late we’ll be ready to set the plow to it. By thunder, wa’n’t it a lucky day you sot off that first charge of damanite?”

  Grandfather sto
od for a minute or two, looking off across the torn and pockmarked surface of the wilderness field. “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie, who’d a-believed it three months agone?” he asked. “Took I and Levi tarnal nigh three years to do this much whenst we cleared it afore. Took Father and Niah and Stephen and Jacob—them was my half-brothers, Ralphie—took ’em tarnal nigh all the days of their lives to clear ten, eleven times this much. Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes! Wisht Father could a-been here to have saw the stumps a-flying and the boulders splitting asunder.” Grandfather’s hands dropped to his sides, and he stood, staring at a blasted stump that lay with its roots twisting into the air. “Prob’ly he was. Prob’ly he was, Ralphie,” he said quietly. Then he snapped, “Fetch the cows! Fetch the cows, Ralphie, whilst I take the hosses in. Cal’late this is the last day of pasture for ’em till spring; there’s tarnal heavy snow in the offing.”

  32

  The Story Pole

  DURING the fall, Grandfather had traded for several more cows. By the time we finished working in the wilderness field, there was a good milker in every stanchion in the tie-up, and Hannibal, the bull, had been moved into the spare box stall. The milking took me a couple of hours morning and night, and Millie’s part of the butter business took nearly as much time as mine. From one end of the cellar to the other, there were pans and bowls of milk set to rise, and it seemed as if she spent half her time washing and scalding pans. Two or three times each week, she’d have to churn, and there was seldom less than a hundred pounds of butter for Grandfather to take to market on Saturday. He never liked to sell it to the creamery, but went from store to store to see where he could make the best deal. Usually, he had to take part of the pay in trade, and the pantry shelves began to fill with groceries. There was an extra barrel of flour in the summer kitchen, and two or three hundred-pound bags of sugar were stored in the bee shop. Before he came home, he’d always send Mother a money order for my share of the butter money, and put Millie’s in her savings account.

  We’d started fatting three pigs right after Millie came home, and had butchered early in November. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I helped Grandfather when he carried the hams, shoulders, and sides of bacon from the smokehouse and hung them in the summer kitchen. “There you be! There you be, Millie girl!” he shouted as he hung up the last ham. “Don’t cal’late there’s ary house this side the Androscoggin River better provisioned with victuals for the winter! By gorry, I wisht Levi was here to cast a look at it! Never seen a man that sot so much store by his victuals as what Levi does.”

  Sunday, it snowed all day, and Monday morning the fields, stretching away toward the maple grove on the hill, lay glistening pink in the first glow of sunrise. Grandfather came to the tie-up, and stood looking out through the back window as I milked. “Stir your stivvers! Stir your stivvers, Ralphie,” he called to me after a few minutes. “Don’t cal’late ever we’ll find a better day for laying out the barn frame. Time flies, and there’s snow enough in the woods for logging.”

  Grandfather was waiting when I took the milk to the house. As I set the pails down, he pulled on his mittens, and said, “Fetch the twine spool out of the carriage house, Ralphie. Your old grampa’s going to learn you how to frame a barn that will weather the years and bear up thundering great mows of hay. Ain’t but tarnal few men left that knows how to frame a barn so’s it can be built laying flat and histed up in a single day. Cal’late we’ll build the new piece four poles long. Millie, keep Old Bess in the house, so’s she don’t track up the snow on us.”

  When I’d brought the spool of builder’s twine, we took a ladder from the barn, and made a wide circuit to the back of the barnyard. From there, Grandfather sighted along one side of the barn, told me to follow right in his footprints, and walked in a straight line to the corner by the tie-up door. “There, Ralphie!” he said, as he looked back along our tracks. “I cal’late that’s where the sill will lay. Histe the ladder up, and don’t step off the sill line. We got to find the length of the story pole.”

  I had no idea what Grandfather was talking about but, as I raised the ladder against the corner of the barn, I was careful to keep my feet in his tracks in the snow. He took the spool from me, gave me the end of the twine, and told me to go up and hold it exactly where the sidewall met the rafter. Then he drew the twine snug to the top of the foundation stone, and held the mark tightly with this thumbnail. “Now we got her, Ralphie!” he called up to me. “Fetch the end down, and we’ll go cut us a pole. Can’t frame a barn without a story pole.”

  I still had no idea what he was planning to do. We followed our tracks back to the carriage house, with Grandfather holding his thumbnail tight on the twine. After I’d found him a good straight beanpole, about two inches thick, he had me saw one end of it square, then he divided the twine carefully into thirds, measured, and marked the place for me to saw the other end. “There!” he said when I’d cut it. “Let’s go see if we done a good job on the pole. Barn’s six poles wide, three high at the eaves, and five at the peak. Cal’late to build the new piece four poles long.”

  Before we went back to the barnyard, Grandfather took the pole and measured the front of the barn. He laid one end of it carefully at the corner, pressed it lightly into the snow, then laid it again at the end of the mark. When he had laid it down the sixth time, its end was within a quarter of an inch of the opposite corner. “There we be, Ralphie! There we be, true as a trivet! Less’n the story pole’s right, the barn wouldn’t fit together whenst ’twas made.”

  Grandfather and I spent all day laying out, and tramping into the snow, the framing plan for the addition to the barn. Lines were snapped with a tight twine, and no measurement was made except with the story pole. When twilight came, the full-sized pattern of every sill, joist, upright, beam, and stringer was tramped into the snow of the barnyard.

  When we had finished, the barnyard looked as if the barn addition had once been built, and that some giant had tipped each wall back, pressed it into the snow, and taken it away again. As he’d planned the size of each upright, sill, girder, or cross-brace, Grandfather had cut a V-shaped circle around the story pole to match the width laid out in the snow. The space between joists, studs, and rafters was notched there too. And long before twilight, I knew why he called the pole a “story pole.” The sun was nearly down to the tops of the pines when Grandfather counted the number of timbers of each kind we would need, and I carved the figures beside the rings on the pole.

  “There! There she be, Ralphie!” Grandfather sang out as I cut the last figure into the pole. “Now we got her where she can’t get away. Fetch it to the carriage house, and paint the ends afore some tarnal fool whacks off an inch or two. By thunder, I cal’late to keep that story pole right under my bed till the last treenail is drove in place. Come morning, I and you’ll go over to the Bowdoin wood lot. Bark canker killed off more’n half the trees in the chestnut grove a year agone. Don’t cal’late a man could find better timber for barn framing nowhere’s this side the Androscoggin River.”

  Before I painted the ends of the story pole, I measured it carefully with Uncle Levi’s rule. It was eight feet, two and three-eighths inches long. None of the rings that marked the sizes measured to even inches, but were set according to Grandfather’s estimate of the needed strength. The uprights and sills were to be about sixteen inches square, the girders twelve; the cross-braces and joists, ten; and the rafters, three by twelve.

  The Bowdoin wood lot was five miles east of the farm. Before sunup Tuesday morning, Grandfather and I had the chores done and were on the road. There was a sharp bite in the wind. As they pulled the bobsled through the fresh snow, the horses’ breath rose in white clouds around their heads. Hoar frost covered their shoulders, and the hair on their rumps lifted till it stood out like cats’ fur. The dinner pail, peavies, cant hooks, and heavy chains hung from the back sled. The double-bitted axes were stoned razor-sharp, wrapped in gunny sacks, and lashed along with the crosscut saw to the front bolster. Abov
e them, Grandfather and I sat on bags of hay, with the horse blankets wrapped around us, and pulled well up on our chests. We both wore arctics over heavy felt boots and woolen stockings, thick horsehide mittens, reefers, and caps with ear muffs. After we’d passed the fourcorners at the county road, and were on the two-mile pull up Hall’s hill, we took turns walking and flailing our arms. Whichever one of us rode held the story pole.

  The wood lot had been lumbered for pine twenty years before, but hemlock, spruce, and hardwood had been left uncut. Maple, beech, and oak, three feet at the butt, stood bare-armed against the dark green of the hemlocks. Here and there, yellow or silver birch glistened in the frosty air. And gaunt and lifeless, at the far end of a clearing, the tall chestnut trees stood bleakly in the wind that rattled their dead branches together. “Gorry sakes,” Grandfather said sadly, as we drove into the clearing, “looks like the tarnal blight has took ever last one of ’em. Pity, ain’t it, Ralphie? Always cal’lated the chestnut was the prettiest tree in the woods. Wouldn’t be s’prised if the cussed blight should wipe ’em off the face of the earth. Tarnal shame! Tarnal shame!”

  As we left the bobsled, and walked among the trees, Grandfather pointed his arm and showed me the wart-covered, reddish-brown blotches on the bark. “Mark the canker, Ralphie,” he told me. “Take heed how it girdles the trunks and branches roundabouts and chokes ’em. Wood’s alive below the girdle; dead as stone above. Ain’t heard tell of a blessed thing to stop it, once it’s in a grove. Cal’late the bugs and birds fetches it from tree to tree or, like as not, it rides the wind the same as pollen. Leave ’em stand here another year, the worms would riddle ’em; make ’em worthless for aught but firewood. Hew ’em and build ’em into a barn, they’ll stand sound and solid more’n a hundred years. Unhitch your hosses whilst I kindle a fire. This cold a morning, the axe heads needs to be het, so’s they won’t bounce off hardwood.”