by Ralph Moody
I was mad all the way home. When I got there Mother was feeding the hens and turkeys out beside the barn. After I’d pulled the bridle off Fanny so she could go and roll, Mother asked me what the matter was. I remembered what Father had told me about forgetting what Mrs. Corcoran said and not telling anybody, so I told Mother I was mad because I didn’t think I was getting paid enough for herding the cows. She put her arm around me and pulled me up against her. Then she patted me on the head, and said, “Son, if you amount to as much as I think you’re going to, some day you’ll kick on a dollar and thirty-five cents a day.” I did tell Father about it that night when we were milking, though. And from then on I never herded Mrs. Corcoran’s cows.
School started about the first of October. Muriel was old enough to go that year, but she wasn’t strong enough to walk the mile and a half, so Father let us drive Fanny. It wasn’t a bit the way starting school had been when we first came there. All the kids knew we had a horse now, and that I had ridden up to the mountains to get Two Dog, and that I had made Mrs. Corcoran pay me thirty-five cents a day for herding her cows. They knew, too, about Father fighting to get the irrigating water and about his fixing Fred Aultland’s stacker so as to make the hay fall where they wanted it. Everybody called me Spikes, and Freddie Sprague gave me half an apple at morning recess.
Mr. Lake was the chairman of the school board. They said he always came for the opening day, and he always rode his old white mule. He was a little man—quite a lot older than Father—and he had big joints at the knuckles of his hands. All morning he sat up on the little platform by Miss Wheeler’s desk and watched everything we did. While he was watching us, he kept pulling his fingers, one at a time, until he made the knuckle pop. Just when you didn’t expect it he would point at somebody and ask him to bound California, or what body of water the Mississippi River emptied into, or something else. He got me on the worst one. He pointed his finger right at me and said, “You! Little tow-headed fella! Go to the board and write me: ‘Pare a pear with a pair of scissors.’”
The only two kinds I knew about were pear and pair, and I got all mixed up on whether there were two s’s or two z’s in scissors. He banged his hand down on the desk and told Miss Wheeler she wasn’t a very good teacher, or I’d know better than that. Then he told her to put me back in the first grade in spelling till he came again. I was pretty much ashamed of myself, because we liked Miss Wheeler and I didn’t want to get her in a mess with her boss, but Grace got mad. She jumped right out of her seat and told him that it wasn’t Miss Wheeler’s fault, because we were new there—and that I never could spell cat without a k, anyway. All the good it did was that he made her stand with her face in a corner till noontime. He said that would “learn her not to sass her elders.”
Everybody was talking about old Mr. Lake while we were eating our lunches, and Willie Aldivote dared me to sneak out in the afternoon and put a burdock burr under his saddle. I pretty near lost my nerve, but the more I looked at him, the madder I got, so halfway between recess time and four o’clock I put up two fingers, and Miss Wheeler nodded at me.
Mr. Lake had a two-cinch saddle, and I only had to loosen the back one a little bit so I could get the burr well up under the middle. From then till school let out, I was so nervous I could hardly think at all, but he didn’t make me answer any more questions, so I don’t think he noticed me.
As soon as Miss Wheeler tapped the school’s-out bell we all grabbed our caps and coats and ran for the carriage shed. The old white mule was tied away over at the east end of the shed, so the boys made a big piece of work about getting their harness down and getting the straps straightened out. All the girls knew about the burr, too, and they stood around twittering and giggling and trying to look as if they didn’t see Mr. Lake when he came out and put the bridle on his mule.
Just as soon as he put his foot in the stirrup the old mule went crazy. Mr. Lake let go of the reins and sat kerplunk down against the board fence, and the mule bucked so hard he’d have made a bronco look like a carriage horse. After he had the saddle slewed way over on the side of his belly, he shot right out through the turnstile gate and raced off up the road. As he went through the gate he smashed the turnstile all to pieces and ripped the saddle off. Maybe Miss Wheeler wasn’t a very good teacher, but Mr. Lake was. I learned at least a dozen new words from what he said about that old white mule. I was still shaking from being nervous, but Rudolph Haas was as cool as watercress. He went over and helped Mr. Lake get up and asked him if he couldn’t drive him home in his buggy.
Of course, Grace had to tell Mother all about Mr. Lake coming to school. While we were eating supper she told about my not being able to spell “Pare a pear with a pair of scissors,” and about her being able to bound California, but she didn’t mention having to stand with her face in the corner or my putting the burr under Mr. Lake’s saddle. The next I heard of it was three or four nights later when we were out milking. Our Holstein cow’s tieup was nearest to the barn door, then came the brindle, so that Father’s back was toward her when we were milking. Everything was quiet in the barn, except for the music milk makes when it goes singing down into the buckets, and I was thinking about Two Dog, when Father said, “It’s a dangerous thing to put a cockle burr under an old man’s saddle. Mr. Lake might have been badly hurt.”
I just said, “Yes, sir,” and Father never mentioned it again.
I didn’t have any more trouble at school for nearly a—except for my glasses and the cellar door. I don’t know why we had a cellar door, because there wasn’t any cellar, but we did have one. It was one of those bulkhead doors that slant like a lean-to roof. Some of us were sliding down it one day, when I ran a big, long splinter into my behind. It broke off inside the skin and there was nearly an inch of it in there. Willie Aldivote tried to get it out with the little blade of his jackknife, but he couldn’t, so he called Grace. She tried to get hold of it with her fingernails, but she didn’t have any more luck than Willie. Then Miss Wheeler picked at it with a needle, and finally she sent Grace and Muriel to take me home.
I think Mother always did kind of like operations. She put a clean sheet over the kitchen table, dropped scissors, darning needles, and Father’s whisker tweezers into a basin of boiling water, and rolled up her sleeves. It looked as though she were really going to do a big job, and I wasn’t very happy when I shinned up on the table.
It seemed as if Mother were trying to dig clear to China. First she tried tweezers, and then she tried darning needles, but the splinter was so rotten that all she could do was nibble away at the end of it. The more she dug, the more I bled, and the louder I yelled. Grace stood by with a strip of torn sheet to mop off the blood. Every few minutes she’d mop away my tears with the same rag, and tell me that the worst would be over soon. I peeked over my shoulder once or twice, and Mother’s mouth was clamped up tight. It was a long operation. I must have been on the table half an hour, but it seemed like a month. At last Mother put both hands on her hips, and said, “Well, we’ll just have to let Nature take her course. It will fester in a day or two and come right out by itself.”
While she was court-plastering a patch on my behind and helping me get my overalls back on, she explained to me that Mother Nature was the best surgeon of them all, and that everything would work out nicely in a couple of days. All the time she was telling me, I was wishing she had thought of it sooner, and not tried to give old Mother Nature quite so much help when she didn’t need it.
That splinter bothered my riding for a week or two while I waited for the fester to come and the splinter to go, but nothing happened, except that a hard little lump formed around the splinter. Once in a while, if I slide around quick, I remember that it’s still right there.
I don’t know that I should tell about my glasses, because my Heavenly Father and I are the only ones who know how I lost them. Maybe the sun was too bright when I was out herding cows, or maybe I got too much hay dust in my eyes during stacking time, but anywa
y, as soon as I got back to school my eyes started smarting every time I read very long. Miss Wheeler went to talk with Mother about it, and Mother took me in to Denver to be fitted with glasses. It was lots of fun to peek through the little gadgets the man put over my eyes, and to have drops put in them that made everything seem as if I were looking through a rain-covered window, but I didn’t like the glasses. They were silver-bowed glasses, and Mother told me I’d have to wear them all the time, and couldn’t do anything where I’d be apt to get them broken because they cost two dollars and a quarter.
I wore them to school three days. That is, I wore them every time somebody caught me and made me put them on. The rest of the time I kept them in my blouse pocket. Miss Wheeler was as bad about them as Mother, and I think Grace was worst of all. I stood it just as long as I could, and then, in the middle of the afternoon of the third day, I put up two fingers. Whoever built the privies at our schoolhouse dug the holes good and deep. When I came back to the schoolroom I had lost my glasses. Miss Wheeler had everybody stay after school to help me hunt for them, but we never found them anywhere. Before we could spare another two dollars and a quarter my eyes got better.
16
A Good Month, with No School
FREDDIE SPRAGUE got the mumps in late October, and they closed the school. That month was one of the best I ever had in some ways. It started off bad because Bill, our old white horse, died. Father let me go up to Bear Creek Canyon with him to get another load of fence posts. We drove Bill and Nig, and while we were loading the poles it started to rain and sleet. It didn’t hurt Nig a bit, but from the time it started, Bill humped his back up like a sick old cow. We had to stop and rest him so often that we didn’t get home till long after dark, and that night he died in spite of all the doctoring Father could give him.
Mother wouldn’t let us quit studying just because the school-house was closed, so as soon as the supper dishes were washed we had to get our books out. One evening Fred and Bessie Aultland came over to play whist with Father and Mother before we had our arithmetic done, so they sat and talked till we got through using the table. Fred said, “For God’s sake, Charlie, don’t you know me well enough yet to let me lend you a horse? You could do me a favor by taking that three-year-old I bought at the auction, and gentle-breaking him for me this winter.”
“Fred, I couldn’t expect a brother to do the things you’ve already done for me and my family. No, Fred, I can’t take your colt. My record for losing horses must be the worst in the country—50 per cent in a year.”
Fred slapped his leg and laughed when Father said that. Then he said, “Those nags were 90 per cent dead when you got hold of ’em. A man’s just throwing his money away to buy that kind of plugs. They eat just as much as good horses and you can’t get any work out of them. I’ll bring the colt down in the morning.”
Fred brought the big bay colt right after we got done eating breakfast the next morning. He was a beauty, but Father wouldn’t let me go near him at first. He tied him up at the far end of the barn and gave him two quarts of oats morning and night, while Nig and Fanny only got peas—vines and all.
The day after we got the new horse Father and I went to Fort Logan with the box wagon. Fanny took Bill’s place, but she didn’t like it a bit. I guess she had forgotten all she had learned in the spring about working double. She slammed and banged around and threw herself down a couple of times before she decided she was going to have to do it. And all the way down to the Fort she danced and pranced like a two-year-old.
We did our trading with Mr. Green in Logan Town. He had the only general store, but there were nine saloons and a post office, beside the depot. Father had brought a couple of little bags to show Mr. Green. One was beans and the other was peas. There were quite a lot of little beans among them, because they didn’t get water enough when they needed it, and some of them were kind of black where the frost had hit them before they were ripe. Mr. Green looked both samples over and said he didn’t think he could handle many of the peas, but he’d take all the beans we had—in trade—if they were hand-picked so that we only brought him the full-sized white ones.
Mr. Green and Father talked a long time while I was looking around the store at all the things I hoped we would be able to trade our beans for. Then Mr. Green went into his back room and rolled out three empty barrels. While he was gone to roll out a barrel of flour, I smelled of the empty ones. Two of them had had vinegar in them, and the other one molasses. I ran my finger in through the bunghole of the molasses barrel, and there was still some in there. It tasted good.
You never saw so many groceries as we got that day. Besides the barrel of flour, there were hundred-pound sacks of corn meal, sugar and salt; ten pounds of seeded raisins, and cream of tartar, rice, soda, and saltpeter—and a pound of Baker’s chocolate. It seemed we would have enough stuff to keep us fed even if winter lasted clear till June.
That night after supper Father and Mother talked about peas and beans, and did arithmetic problems on the other side of the table from where Grace and I were doing our homework. Father was telling Mother how many square feet of ground he pulled the bean vines from to get the sample for Mr. Green, and the same thing about the peas. First she borrowed Grace’s arithmetic book to find out how many square feet in an acre, and after that she got her marked cup and measured each sample. Then she figured, and figured, and figured. When she was all done, I could tell that both she and Father were the happiest they had been since we came to the ranch.
She had all the answers down on one sheet of paper, and said, “Charlie, we’re going to be a lot better off than I ever thought we could be when I saw the leaves on those poor plants curling up in the summer. If I didn’t make any mistakes in my figures—and I’m sure I didn’t—we’ll have a hundred and sixty bushels of beans and a hundred and eighty bushels of peas. Supposing that thirty bushels of the beans are small ones which will only bring four cents a pound, and that thirty bushels are frosted and will only be good for pig food; that would leave a hundred bushels of good ones. At five cents a pound, our share will be worth a hundred and eighty-six dollars ...that is, if there are sixty pounds in a bushel.
“You know, practically all the peas of the variety we have are used for soup, so it doesn’t make a particle of difference if some of them are small—they should all bring the same price. Let’s say that will be four cents a pound; our half should bring in a hundred and ninety-two dollars. I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to afford a good horse like Fred Aultland’s.”
Right after breakfast the next morning, Father hooked Fanny to the buckboard, and Mother took all the other youngsters to Englewood to buy stockings and underwear and things. I had a day’s work helping Bessie Aultland pick apples, so I left before they did. We picked bushels and bushels of apples, and when Bessie took me home, just before supper, she helped me put two bushel basketfuls on the buckboard for us.
As we came near our house I could see what looked like three big white sacks of grain hanging from a crossbar at the back of our barn. I jumped off while the bays were making their circle in bur yard, and ran around the barn. Our three biggest pigs were hanging there dead, with all the hair scraped off them. It kind of startled me at first, and I guess Father noticed it. He came right over and bent down on one knee beside me. Then he put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “There isn’t a thing to be afraid of, or to feel bad about, Son. The only time to feel sorry for anything—or anybody—that dies is when they haven’t completed their mission here on earth. These pigs’ mission was to get big and fat so as to make food for us. They have done a good job of it and their mission is completed. And I do want you to know this: they didn’t know what was happening, and they weren’t hurt a bit—they didn’t even squeal.” Father could always explain things like that so I’d understand.
Everybody worked on the pork the next day. Father cut the hams and bacon and side meat, while Philip and I stripped all the fat off the insides, and ground u
p the scraps for sausage. Father made a separate pile of the leanest scraps, and we ground them for mincemeat.
Mother and the girls were just as busy in the kitchen as we were outside. They rolled all the sausage into little cakes the size of a turkey egg, fried them slow, and packed them away in stone crocks; tried out all the lard, and made the livers and hearts into sausage. Then they chopped apples and made the mincemeat. It was stewing on the back of the stove when we came in to supper. I never heard of making mincemeat with pork before, but it smelled and tasted better than any other I ever ate.
We got a lot of things done that month when school was closed. We were the only people anywhere around who didn’t have a corral and a dug-out cellar. Mother had been worrying ever since the big wind because we didn’t have a storm cellar, and Father had been saying he’d build one as soon as he had time to get to the mountains for poles. I couldn’t figure why we needed poles to build a cellar, but I didn’t like to ask Father. On things like that, he always used to tell me I could learn more if I kept my eyes open and my mouth closed.
Mother must have mentioned something about wishing we had a cellar half a dozen times while we were packing the barrels of pork away in my room in the bunkhouse. At breakfast the next morning, Father winked at me, and said, “Do you think we could spare time to go up the canyon for a load of poles today?”
Of course, I did think so. And right after breakfast he started putting Bill’s harness on the new colt. Then he sent me up to Aultland’s on Fanny, and said to tell Fred we’d like to borrow one to fit her. I was so excited about going to the mountains with Father that I didn’t think much about what we were going to do with three harnesses, but Fred did. As soon as I told him what I wanted and where we were going, he scratched his head and said, “Has your old man gone loco? If he thinks he’s going to harness that green colt and take him up to the mountains, along with Wright’s old mare, he’s either the bravest man I ever seen, or a damn fool.” I told him Father was the bravest man he ever saw, and wasn’t any fool, so he let me have the harness.