Ned gave me a spade and a sack, pointed to a potato field and worked his mouth around a plug of tobacco. “Dig spuds at the far end of the field.”
The ground was wet and heavy after the rain, and the potatoes were small. A dozen skinny little boys dug in the other rows. It was heavy going and by the time the sack was half filled, my back burned like fire, I was covered with mud and my hands had blistered. A thicket of trees was at the end of the row and just beyond that, a little creek flowed between willow trees. I went down to the creek for a drink of water and had no more than sat down when a bell rang. The other boys put down their tools and scampered back to the orphanage. I was plumb wore out. We washed our faces and hands at the pump and went inside the dining room. The old witch checked each child’s face and hands for dirt. She gave my hands a whack with a stick.
“Get on back and wash your hands before you eat.”
I worked with the soap and water then went and got my bowl and spoon. A lady doled out two slices of dark bread with bacon grease and a piece of boiled cabbage. We waited through the prayer before shoveling down the food. I was still hungry and hoped for jam or butter. The girl with the baby sat next to me. I still didn’t know her name and wondered why she was so much older than all the rest. The girl didn’t eat all her bread, but pushed about half of it to me.
“You can have this. The cook gives me extra for taking care of the young ones.”
I ate every scrap while she spoon fed the baby.
“Thanks,” I whispered. “What’s your name? I’m Tom Slocum.”
“I’m Mary and this here is Timothy. Don’t talk out loud.”
I didn’t even know where to begin with all my questions and had to turn my good ear, she talked so soft.
“Don’t you have a last name?”
“None of us gits last names until some family takes us.”
Then I remembered the empty straw tick and the hard bed. “Where can I get straw for my bed?”
She nudged me in the side and whispered. “Be real quiet, so’s Mrs. Burns don’t hear. Ned can take you to the hayloft. He’s a nice man and good to everyone, but kinda strange.”
“Who’s Mrs. Burns?
“The lady who checks hands, She’s Reverend Burns wife.”
“When does school start?”
Mary looked wistful. “Sometimes a man comes from town to teach reading, writing and numbers, but that don’t start until it’s too cold to work outside.”
“What about history and Latin and science?”
“Pshaw, that stuff ain’t important. Mrs. Babbs, the cook, and Mrs. Burns teaches us girls how to cook and sew and take care of babies. That’s what people want before they take a child from here. The boys got to learn how to plow and tend livestock.” You watch out! If you don’t learn how to pitch hay and look after animals they will put you in the mines.”
“You know all about taking care of babies; how come a family didn’t take you?”
Her face clouded up, she turned away for a minute and held the baby tighter. “I was borned with this bad foot. No one wants a cripple.”
“There’s doctors who can fix anything these days. You don’t have to be crippled,” said I.
I knowed it wasn’t right, but seeing someone who was worse off made me feel some better. At least I wasn’t crippled. It was peculiar that Mary didn’t have a last name and I wondered what she meant by a family taking her in. There was a lot to learn about this place and I would have to keep my eyes open for a way out.
I washed my bowl at the pump, went upstairs and got an empty straw tick. Ned’s cabin was out beyond the privies. He was in a sunny spot on his porch, reading a book.
“Mary says to see you about getting straw,” said I.
His forage cap was pulled down to keep the sun out of his eyes and he leaned back on a straight chair. He read for a spell like then put a splinter of wood between the pages and put the book in his overall pocket.
“Follow me,” he said.
The barn was a solid wooden building, painted red. Stalls for horses and cattle and a harness room were on the first floor. A half dozen cats lazed around and a red headed boy who looked to be about twelve years old and another little fellow shoveled manure into a wheelbarrow. I wanted to stop and talk, but Ned pointed to a ladder. “Go on up to the hayloft,” said he.
I went up ladder to the dark, dusty loft and filled my tick with fresh, sweet smelling hay. When I came down, Ned was back to reading his book.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“Can you read?”
“Yes, sir.”
He held the front of the book so’s I could see it. “Read the title.”
“The Iliad, by Homer. It’s about Greeks and the Trojans. Aunt Alice made me read it,” I said.
Ned stroked his mustache. “How come you got sent to the orphanage?”
“Pa died. Aunt Alice had to go to the poor house and Reverend Pendleton brought me here.”
“I’m sorry, that’s real sad. Take your straw tick up to your bed, then come back to the potato patch.”
That afternoon, Ned showed me an easier way to dig and I filled the sack by the time the afternoon bell rang for us to stop work. Me and the other boys emptied our sacks into a bin and washed away the dirt so the potatoes could be stored in the vegetable cellar for winter.
I had seen all the potatoes I needed that day, but supper was boiled spuds. Now spuds mashed up with a lot of butter and salt can be pretty tasty, but these were just boiled and still a little hard. That’sall there was and I dug in and ate, just like the others. After we washed our bowls, the girls went to one end of the hall with Mrs. Burns and us boys went with Reverend Burns. I sat down on the floor with the others and waited.
First the fourth prayer of the day. Next he read a verse from Matthew, about being a light for the world. He read it over and over again. “You learn this verse by heart or you get a whipping,” said the Reverend. I was plumb tuckered out. My bed was next to the a boy with red hair. Of course, he was called Red, but the other boys said his real name was Judas. Red got real mad and said Judas was a bad man and everyone had to call him Red. The other boys had names like Timothy, Luke, and Aaron. Two were named Moses. I listened to talk about how their real family lost them by accident and would come looking for them pretty soon. The others bragged about the rich people who were going to take them away from the home and give them fine clothes and all they could eat. I decided they were just spinning dreams.
While the boys were getting settled, Mary tucked baby Timothy in and sang until he went to sleep. She left the lamp on the table by the stairs and pretty soon Mrs. Burns came up to see that everyone was in bed. She slapped a boy who tried to hide a piece of bread under his blanket. Once I got the lumps out, the straw tick was pretty comfortable, but sleep wouldn’t come. Boys cried in their sleep and I was used to sleeping in a room all by myself. This was like a jail or even slavery. That made me think of Isaiah and his family who were good and kind and lots better than some white folks. Maybe, Doc Steele was right about helping people like the Indians and the darkies.
Chapter Nine
There was no end to that potato patch. We dug and cleaned and stored spuds until the first hard frost in November, when the ground froze and we couldn’t dig no more. By then, I had grown muscles but my empty stomach always felt like it was against my backbone. Ned carried the full sacks to the barn in the wheelbarrow. Almost every day, when we quit digging he gave us an apple that kept us from starving to death. When the potatoes were all dug we walked to the barn together. “Tom, it’s time you learned to care for cows and pigs if you want to stay out of the coal mines. Follow me,” said he.
Mr. Babbs, the cook’s husband watched boys mucking out the stalls while he mended harness. “This here is a town boy, good on book learning, but he doesn’t know about farming. Put him to work,” Ned said.
Mr. Babbs spit a gob of tobaccy juice on the barn floor. “He’s just in time to help rou
nd up pigs,” he said.
The hogs, fat from eating acorns watched us with mean little eyes.. A dozen of us boys came at them with sticks but they ran into the woods. It was fun for a while but the air was nippy and frost was on the ground. We got cut up on brambles and one boy fell into the creek. When the bell rang for supper, we had rounded up three hogs. It took all the next day to put a dozen hogs inside the pen. Mr. Babbs shot each pig in the head with a little bitty revolver, then cut his throat with a long knife. Meantime, us boys gathered wood for a roaring fire under a big cauldron of water. Next, we older boys put hooks on the dead hog and hoisted him up in the air with a rope and a pulley and dunked the carcass in scalding water. The younger boys and the girls scraped the bristles off the hide. It was hard, dirty work. I watched pretty close when the cut open the hogs, so I could study the heart and the guts. We got to eat bits of pig liver for almost a week.. The last thing was cutting up the meat into hams and bacon for curing. They sold some in town and the Reverend got the rest of it. He had meat and eggs and even sugar for just about every meal. We had little pieces of head meat in our corn meal mush and the jowls and some of the chitlins too.
I cleaned stalls but hated the smell of manure. I never got the hang of how to milk a cow and squirt milk into the bucket. Red showed me how to lean my head against the cow’s flank and squeeze the udder, but the one time I got about a pint of milk in the bucket, the durned cow kicked and the milk spilt I had got enough for one cup of fresh milk. After a few days, Mr. Babbs just gave up. You will never learn how to be a farmer,” said he. .
I did learn how to shell and grind corn, pitch hay and find eggs.. Red showed me how to poke a hole in each end of an egg and suck out the inside. It was warm and nice in the barn the Reverend never bothered us.
One Sunday after prayer meeting, I went to feed the hens. Ned was in a patch of sun on his porch with a book. “What are you reading? “ I asked.
“ The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. What kind of books do you like?” Ned asked.
“Just about anything, but mostly stuff about Indians.”
“Come with me,” he said.
His shack wasn’t much on the outside, but the room was cozy and warmed by a fireplace. There was one chair, a table, a cot and shelves filled with books.
“This is about Indians and the French and English wars. You might even learn some history,” said he.
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS by James Fenimore Cooper was a thick book. Just inside the cover was written, “Ned Crockett, Antioch College, 1859.” I read the first page, while Ned’s old orange tomcat, General Grant, rubbed against my ankles.
“It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before adverse hosts could meet.”
That first sentence was hard reading, but my mind sparkled; war, dangers, wilderness! I couldn’t wait to get into the book. “Don’t let the Reverend catch you reading,” said Ned
It was too cold to read outside and too dark in the room where we boys slept under the eaves. I kept the book inside my shirt.. The best place to read was up in the hay loft. I couldn’t wait to see what Hawkeye would do next, but Ned and Mr. Babbs kept us boys busy collecting firewood. It was getting real cold. One time when we were in the woods picking up dry sticks, a couple hunters shot guns a ways off by the creek. Ned dropped down on the ground, covered his ears and yelled. “Fall Back, fall back, fall back, sound retreat.”
He laid on the ground, whimpering and crying. It was pitiful. Later, Mary explained that he had spent almost a year in Andersonville, a Reb prison.
Even when the stove in the middle of the dining room was going like blazes, it was cold around the edges. My flannel shirt and pants were just about plumb worn out. When rich people left bundles of old clothes, the girls cut and sewed pieces of rags to make winter coats. I got a pretty warm jacket made out of an old officer’s coat. Baby Timothy was starting to crawl and the younger girls looked after him while Mary worked in the kitchen. I talked to her some when she came up the stairs to put Timothy to bed. That’s when I started telling her about how Hawkeye protected pretty ladies.
During the first weeks of December, three new babies were left at the door. One was already dead. Mary said they were left by girls who got pregnant and couldn’t take care of their babies. It was about the saddest thing you could imagine. Mary took it especially hard. The Reverend took them in, made them Christians and gave them names. Mrs. Burns opened the bible and took the first name she came to. Then the Reverend laid his hand on their heads and said a long winded prayer that ended with a name, like Luke or Deborah.. The poor kids that got named from the Old Testament had funny monickers like Japheth or Abimael.
There’s something about being cold, tired and hungry that just takes the stuffing right out of a person. Whole days went by when I didn’t think of Doc or Pa or anyone from Sandy Ford, not even Rachel. It was just terrible, how even the good memories faded away until there weren’t nothin’ good to think about. Sometimes, I thought I had only dreamed about Doc and the operations. One night, I had a terrible nightmare about those men in white robes and saw poor little Ike, just as plain as day, with a big hole in his stomach. It could have been a fever, or maybe a rotten potato.
Things got better the week before Christmas. Mrs. Burns put us to cleaning and polishing and dusting. The girls worked hard making clothes. On Christmas Eve, Ned brought in a big tree that we decorated with colored paper, red berries and bird feathers. The Reverend put a few small candles on the tree, but didn’t light them.
On Christmas day, we had roast chicken, carrots and potatoes with gravy. Bells jingled on two four horse carriages with women dressed in furs or long wool coats and hats with frilly pink feathers. The Reverend Burns, decked out in his best frock coat and vest, bowed and kissed the hands of the women. Four darkies put boxes under the tree. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the pretty lady dressed in a bright blue dress with a blue shawl thrown over her shoulders. I was sure she looked just like my mother before she died.
One of the darkies unpacked a box of candles and put them in holders on the tables that lit up the whole room, just like sunshine. Reverend Burns prayed and preached for longer than usual and each of us had to say a Bible verse. I recited the first part of Matthew two by heart.
“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea
in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men
from the East came from Jerusalem, saying,
“Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?”
It seemed to take forever, but we finally got to the presents. There were clothes and candy and fluffy blankets for the babies. I got a new pair of wool socks and hard candy. The lady in the blue dress shook my hand. “You recited perfectly and with such feeling,” said she.
She had a nice musical voice and was just about the prettiest lady I ever saw. I was too tongue tied to say anything until I noticed a box of unused candles. I blushed and stammered. “Please, could I have one of the candles for reading?”
“Of course,” she said.
I slipped a candle into my pocket just before Mrs. Burns took the whole box. We didn’t get any supper that night and it turned real cold. The next day, baby Timothy came down with a bad cough and a high fever and wouldn’t eat. Mary gave him water and skim milk, but he cried and cried and didn’t get any better. Pa said that that willow bark tea would bring down a fever. Right after breakfast, I ran out to Ned’s shack and told him I needed a knife to get willow bark. He came along on the long cold walk down to the creek. It didn’t take any time at all to cut and peel willow branches. Ned let me use his fireplace to boil up the bark and added a dollop of whiskey and sugar. Timothy spit and gagged at first but kept down the second dose. He went to sleep and his fever broke. Mary said it was the most wondrous thing she had ever seen. When no one was looking, gave me a big kiss on the cheek that left a warm spot. I went around for the next two days, touchin
g my face. Mary had pretty green eyes and the front of her chest stuck out real nice. I impure thoughts about her.
It was cold out back of the barn and too dark to read in the hayloft. I was at the place where Hawkeye and the good Mohican Indians were on an island in the middle of a river defending two beautiful damsels. Hawkeye had just run out of gunpowder and it looked like the dastardly, painted injuns would kill them all. I made a candle holder out of a tin can in the blacksmith shop that reflected light onto the book and shielded the candle. That night, after Mrs. Burns left I lit the candle on coals in the stove and read under my blanket. When candle burned down, Ned took pity and gave me another one.
It snowed and kept getting colder and colder. The potatoes and cabbages froze in middle of January and we had only corn mush and bread with bacon grease to eat. Mary said it was because the lady managers sent food and money to people in Chicago on account of the fire. They forgot about us orphans. The kids were cold and so hungry they couldn’t learn their verses and the Reverend smacked them with a stick.
The little boys took to sleeping two to a bed to keep warm. I wore a long flannel nightshirt and wool socks and covered the bed with my coat but shivered every night. Once, I was near freezing and got up to stir the coals in the stove. I held my hands on the stove and had the blanket wrapped around my shoulders when baby Timothy cried like he was about to die. Pretty soon Mary tiptoed in. When the baby calmed down she hunched down by the stove and I covered her shoulders with my blanket. After a while, we had the same idea. She came into my bed. We shivered, our teeth chattered and it was awkward laying there side by side trying not to touch each other. Pretty soon Mary started to sob, like her heart was breaking. “I hate this place, I hate this place. I wish I was dead.. My folks didn’t want no baby with a bad foot,” she whispered.
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