Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  Right at the start, I had a little trouble in kicking the pedal at just the right second to keep the windrows straight, but I got the knack after the first two rounds. Everything went fine till the train came through, and I was planning how I’d be able to get a man’s pay in haying time. Old Joe was the engineer on the combination train that went up to Morrison every forenoon and came back every evening. I had known him ever since Bill and Nig fell through the trestle, and we always waved at each other.

  I was so busy watching to see that I would kick the pedal just at the right moment—and maybe thinking about being old enough to earn a man’s pay—that I didn’t even wave to Joe when the train went through. I guess he wanted me to see him wave at me, though. He blew three sharp blasts on the whistle when he was right even with me.

  You’d think the whistle might have scared Billy, but it was old Nig that started to run first. He jumped quicker than our tomcat did the time I hit him with a tomato. That made the singletree bump Billy on the hocks, and he took off like a greyhound.

  The ground was bumpy where the bean rows had been, and the big high wheels of the horse rake bounced over them so that the iron seat jumped in every direction. The iron was smooth and slippery, and my bottom hopped around on it like a drop of cold water on a hot stove. I couldn’t grab hold of anything with my hands because I had to haul on the lines for all I was worth.

  Billy could run so much faster than old Nig that we kept turning a little and a little, till we were headed right into the passenger car at the end of the train. It just got out of our way before the horses galloped up over the track. I didn’t know I was doing it, but I guess I grabbed hold with my toes when I couldn’t hang on with my hands. When the wheels hit the first rail it must have jarred the foot pedal down. The rake teeth flew up to dump the hay. That turned the angle iron bar I was holding on to with my toes, and jammed them in between it and the stay-rod.

  When we hit the other rail the teeth flew down again and caught the rail. As the teeth went down, it let my toes loose, but the doubletree broke right at the middle. Of course, that left the team free from the horse rake—and me, too. I had the lines wrapped good and tight around my hands, and I don’t think I could have let go if I’d tried. I didn’t try; I was too scared to think about my hands.

  With the doubletree broken in two, there was nothing to hold the singletrees up, and they kept bumping the horses on the heels. I was skidding along on my stomach with the singletrees jumping around right in front of my nose, and Billy kicking past my head every time his heels got bumped. They dragged me about halfway to the barn before they stopped.

  We had been stopped hardly long enough for me to know where I was, before Father picked me up. I didn’t know how much I was banged up till then, and I really didn’t hurt much anywhere but in my toes. I must have been a little loco, because I don’t remember unhooking Billy’s trace chains from the singletree, but Father told Mother that’s what I was doing when he got there.

  They carried me into the house and put me on their bed. I tried not to cry, but I did just a little. It wasn’t because I hurt so much, either. It was just because I couldn’t help it. And maybe just a little bit because I was glad I didn’t get killed.

  About all there was left of my blouse was the collar band, and both legs got ripped off my overalls. Mother had hardly taken off what was left of them when old Joe and the train conductor, Mr. Duffy, came to the door. While Father went to let them in, Mother was feeling me all over. Her hands were shaky, and she cried more than I did. The first thing she said when they came in was, “Nine broken toes, and four of them nearly torn off. It will be a wonder if he ever walks again.”

  Old Joe yanked his cap back onto his head, and started right out again. “Come on, Duffy,” he hollered. “We’ll highball for the Fort and send Doc Stone out.”

  Mother wrapped a quilt around me, and Father held me on his lap, with my feet soaking in a bucket of warm water, till Doctor Stone got there. While the doctor was thumping and poking me, and listening to my insides with his little ear trumpet, he had me tell him what happened. After we got done, he looked around at Mother, and said, “You don’t ever need to worry about this boy getting killed in an accident; he must have an ‘in’ with the Almighty. If this leaky heart holds out he ought to live to be a hundred.” I could have loved him for that, because the thing I was most afraid of was that Father and Mother wouldn’t let me handle horses any more.

  After he’d wiggled my toes around some, he told Father to get a piece of smooth board and cut out pieces to fit the bottoms of my feet. When they were ready, he had Father saw slots between the places for my toes.

  It hurt like sixty, and I yelled plenty when Doctor Stone was pulling my toes out so as to make the ends of the bones fit together, and while he was taping them down to the boards. He’d put a little wad of cotton under one of them, then wind sticky tape around both it and the place Father had cut out in the board to match it.

  He let me rest for a little while after he had set all five toes on my left foot. Then he started to laugh when he was looking at the big toe on my right foot—the only one that didn’t get broken. I had a stone bruise on the bottom of it, and he said, “Don’t you ever holler about a stone bruise again. If this one hadn’t been so sore that your nerves told your brain to keep it up out of the way, you’d have broken all your toes.”

  I liked Doctor Stone, even if he did hurt me when he was setting my toes. Mother asked him how long I’d have to stay in bed. First he looked at me, then he looked at his watch, and said, “Oh, I’d say till about seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll tape these wooden shoes around his ankles, so they won’t flop, and it won’t hurt his toes any to clump around on them.”

  My toes and the places where I got skinned up hurt a lot more that night than they did right after I hurt them. Father slept out in the bunkhouse, and I stayed in bed with Mother, but I didn’t sleep very much. Before Father went out to bed, he fixed me some brandy in a glass with sugar and water. I got kind of dizzy after I drank it, and I guess I slept some, but it was an awfully long night.

  The next morning, Father made me a pair of crutches out of two old broom handles, and I went out to the kitchen for breakfast. Mother had made the other youngsters stay outdoors after I got hurt and when the doctor was there, so I hadn’t seen any of them. My toes didn’t ache so much that morning, and I guess I was a little bit glad I did get in an accident, because all the others kept looking at me as if I were somebody important.

  It’s funny how word gets around when anybody gets hurt. The day after I broke my toes, most everyone in the neighborhood came to see me. Even Mrs. Corcoran came and told me I was a fool because I didn’t let go of the reins instead of getting dragged. Willie Aldivote brought me a pair of doves that were just big enough to have feathers on them, and Fred Aultland said he knew I was going to make a horseman the minute he laid eyes on me. The one I liked best to have come to see me was King. He acted more sorry than anybody but Father and Mother, and he’d sit beside me for an hour at a time, and every little while he’d lick my hand.

  Two Dog and Mr. Thompson came the second day. Two Dog had a little pouchful of dried leaves, and Mr. Thompson told Mother to boil them and put the broth on places where I was skinned. I don’t think Mother would have done it if Mr. Thompson hadn’t stayed all afternoon to watch. Anyway, she only put it on my hands and arms—and they were the first sores to heal.

  Mother let me eat supper out on the porch with Two Dog. He ate all his salt pork and johnnycake, but he didn’t touch his beans, and I got Grace to bring out a bowl of sugar to go -with his tea. Once in a while he would reach over and lay his hand on the part of my leg that wasn’t skinned, and I hoped he’d stay till late in the evening, eating sugar out of his hand, but Mr. Thompson harnessed the buckskins right after supper.

  I liked to have people come to see me and ask me about getting hurt. Really, my toes didn’t ache very much after the first two days, but I th
ought it might be nice to act as though they were killing me, so Mother would give me lots of attention and more people would come to see how I was. I tried it for a while the next morning, but it wasn’t any fun lying on the bed when Mother was busy in the kitchen and all the other youngsters were outdoors. I couldn’t even fool King, and he would only come to the door and whine. By nine o’clock I took my crutches and went out to see how our new colt was getting along. I forgot all about the colt, though, because Father was just coming out of the barn, and called me to come and see Brindle’s new calf.

  In a few days I got tired of my crutches and threw them away. Father glued pieces of leather on the bottoms of my wooden shoes, so I wouldn’t wear out the binding tapes, and I could clump around pretty well. Of course, I had to walk kind of stiff-legged, the way you do on stilts, but it didn’t bother a bit about riding Fanny. Father let me ride her to Fort Logan to see Doctor Stone, so I got a chance to let all the kids in Logan Town see that I had really broken nine toes at one time. All the doctor did was to wiggle my feet around a little and put some fully at the places where Mother put on the broth from Two Dog’s leaves. Then he said, “Hmmm, hmmm, I do declare! Find out from that old Injun what kind of leaves those were, will you?” I said I would, but I always forgot it when I saw Two Dog.

  That spring, Mr. Welborn, a wealthy man from Denver, had bought the quarter section where I used to herd Mrs. Corcoran’s cows. He had an artesian well sunk, and had trees set out along his driveways and where he was going to build his house. He used to pay me fifty cents a day to hoe and water them when we weren’t busy haying. My broken toes cost me two whole weeks working for him, but Fred Aultland said I would be worth just as much in haying as if my feet were all right. He said I wouldn’t be able to break any more toes driving a horse rake now that I had boards on the bottoms of my feet, and he couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t do it. Fred must have talked to Father and Mother a lot, because they didn’t say no.

  We did a lot of haying that summer, because nobody but Mr. Welborn had any money to hire help, and the neighbors had to trade work back and forth. My two jobs were driving a hay rake and riding the stacker horse. And, whatever place we worked, Father sharpened the mowing machine knives, fixed the broken machinery, and ran the stacker. When it was our turn, the neighbors all brought their machines and helped us.

  I always liked working at Aultland’s best. Fred used to butcher a pig for each of his three alfalfa cuttings, so there was plenty of fresh pork, and Mrs. Aultland didn’t seem to care how many chickens she fried, or how much sugar it took to make pies and cookies. She and Bessie could cook almost as well as Mother, and they had lots more things to cook.

  While we were putting up Fred’s first cutting of alfalfa, his cousin came out from Denver for a visit. He brought his wife and Lucy with him. Some of the other men said he was sponging on Fred because he loafed around and told stories a lot of the time. I think his wife and Lucy were sponging, too, because I never saw them help with the cooking or dishwashing, but I liked Lucy just the same. She was a year or two older than I, and while the horses were resting after dinner we used to play up in the hayloft of the barn. She told me lots of things I hadn’t thought about before.

  Her father had just been fired from a good office job in Denver, but Lucy didn’t care. She said he’d been fired lots of times before so it didn’t make any difference. I remembered what Fred had told Father about needing food for us youngsters more than money, and I told Lucy about it. Then I said that the Aultlands had better things to eat than anybody else in the neighborhood, and I thought Fred would let them live right there if they did enough work.

  Lucy didn’t like that at all. She asked me if I thought her father looked like a darn fool. Then, before I could tell her, she said that only dolts and darn fools lived on ranches, because farmers didn’t need any brains and there was too much hard work to do.

  When I got mad, she said that Fred and Father weren’t fools because they owned their own ranches and hired men to do most of the work. I didn’t want to tell her that Father didn’t own our ranch, and I didn’t want her to think he was a darn fool, so I just kept still. Then she told me that smart men like her father never did have to work hard, because they knew the world owed them a living and there were easier ways to get it than doing hard work.

  I wanted her to tell me more about the easier ways, but the men had come out to get the horses, and Jerry Alder yelled, “Jigger, up there in the haymow, Spikes; your old man’s coming.”

  All the men except Father and Fred were there, and when I started coming down the ladder, Jerry called up to me, “I’ll bet you learned a hell of a lot of new things up there; did you do any good?”

  I told him I didn’t know if I did any good, but I sure learned a lot of new things. Then, before I could tell him anything about the world owing everybody an easy living, they all started howling and laughing. Lucy’s father laughed louder than anybody else.

  While we were milking that night, I told Father what Lucy said about her father, and asked him why he didn’t try to do the same thing.

  I only saw Father mad two or three times, but that was one of them. He jumped up off his milking stool and came around behind Brindle. His face was gray-white—even his lips were white—and his voice was shaky when he said, “Don’t you ever talk to that girl again.”

  He just stood there for a minute, as if he didn’t know what he was going to say, then he put the stool right down in front of me and sat on it. He reached out and took hold of my knee hard. His voice didn’t shake then, but he talked low. “Son,” he said, “I had hoped you wouldn’t run into anything like this till you were older, but maybe it’s just as well. There are only two kinds of men in this world: Honest men and dishonest men. There are black men and white men and yellow men and red men, but nothing counts except whether they’re honest men or dishonest men.

  “Some men work almost entirely with their brains; some almost entirely with their hands; though most of us have to use both. But we all fall into one of the two classes—honest and dishonest.

  “Any man who says the world owes him a living is dishonest. The same God that made you and me made this earth. And He planned it so that it would yield every single thing that the people on it need. But He was careful to plan it so that it would only yield up its wealth in exchange for the labor of man. Any man who tries to share in that wealth without contributing the work of his brain or his hands is dishonest.

  “Son, this is a long sermon for a boy of your age, but I want so much for you to be an honest man that I had to explain it to you.”

  I wish I knew how Father was able to say things so as to make you remember every word of it. If I could remember everything the way I remember the things Father told me, maybe I could be as smart a man as he was.

  22

  Bad Times Were Not So Bad

  WE HAD traded what was left of our good beans for groceries at Mr. Green’s store in Logan Town, but there were a couple of sacks of our peas and all our landlord’s peas and beans left in the bunkhouse. The landlord wrote us in September and wanted Father to bring his share of the good beans in to Denver, and as many of his peas as we could haul.

  After the letter came, Mother got down her Wedgwood sugar bowl and poured the money out on the kitchen table. There was only twenty-four dollars and a quarter in it. Most of it was money I got working for Mr. Welborn. Of course, we had receipts for fifteen and a half tons of hay in there, too. That was how we got paid for work we did for other people in haying.

  When the money was counted, Mother told Grace to take all the youngsters but me out to play, and to ask Father to come in. The three of us sat around the table where the money and Mother’s memo pad were laid out. She said I had earned so much of the money that I should help decide how much of it we could afford to spend and what we would buy with it.

  The bottoms of my feet were so tender from having worn my boards all summer that I couldn’t go barefoot, and
my Christmas shoes were all worn out. Mother said I would have to have new ones before school started, and she thought we’d better pay two dollars and get a good pair, because my Christmas shoes didn’t wear very well. Then she said she could can tomatoes and green peas and beans from the garden if we could afford to buy some canning jars and rubbers. After that, we started going over the list of unbleached muslin, calico, quilting cotton, and other things she had written down on her pad.

  Really, Father and I didn’t do much of the planning. Mother would guess how much different things would cost, and put down the amounts. Then she would add them up, and say, “Oh my! That’s a lot more than we can afford to spend. Charlie, do you think there will be a cash market for sugar beets or beans or hay this fall?”

  Father only said, “I hope so, but the panic seems to be as tight as it was in the spring; maybe things will open up a little before cold weather.”

  Mother would cross off some of the things on the list, and change the amounts on others. Then she would sum up, and say, “Oh my!” again. At last it got down to where it was just my shoes, some cloth for winter coats and dresses, and the canning jars—if Father could trade our two sacks of dried peas for them. And then we’d have ten dollars left in the sugar bowl for emergencies.

  We loaded the big wagon that night and Father let me go to Denver with him the next morning. We started way before daylight. Mother made me wear Grace’s new shoes and the stockings she had knit with yarn from an old shawl. The last thing Father did before we left was to tie the feet of Brindle’s calf together and lay him up on top of the load.