Letters from Hillside Farm

by Jerry Apps

  I decided to try one of my risers, and he missed that one, too. By this time he had a menacing look on his face. Mr. Woodward spit on both hands, grabbed the bat, and glared down at me with a glare like I have never seen. He looked like he was ready to hit the ball into the next county, or at least into the next school district.

  I figured Mr. Woodward would either be expecting my sinker or my riser, so I decided to send one right down the middle with as much steam as I could put on it. I am not known for my fastball, but it has gotten better as the ball season has progressed.

  I could see Mr. Woodward eyeing the ball in my hands, the muscles in his arms jerking, waiting for it to come across the plate. I wound up in my usual way and let go of the ball, except this time I threw it as hard as I could. I could see that it was going to fly right across the plate, a perfect pitch.

  All the kids in school were standing off to the side, watching and hoping that I would strike out Mr. Woodward.

  “Swoosh.” Everyone heard the bat miss the ball, but no one expected what happened next. Mr. Woodward completely lost his balance and fell in a heap right across the board that is our home plate. A little cloud of dust lifted from around his massive body, and then it was quiet for a few seconds. Grandma, I swear I heard birds chirping, it was so quiet.

  Then Mr. Woodward scrambled to his feet, brushed off the dust, and swore so loudly that I was sure Miss Harvey didn’t miss a word. I imagine some of the younger kids have never heard such high-powered swearing in their lives.

  Before Mr. Woodward could complete his litany of cuss words—frankly, I’ve never known one man to have such a swearing vocabulary—the fathers began laughing, and then they were howling. They were slapping their knees and hooting and pointing at me and at Mr. Woodward. I just stood on the little pitcher’s mound with a little grin on my face.

  Then Amos walked over to me from where he was playing second base and said under his breath so only I could hear, “I’m gonna get you for this, Struckmeyer. You’ll wish you hadn’t made a fool of my old man.” He stomped back to second.

  Mr. Woodward hit a home run the next time he was up to bat, and the fathers ended up winning the game—apparently they do every year. Some of the fathers told me afterward that I am the first kid ever to strike out Mr. Woodward.

  Amos is really mad. I hope I don’t run into him this summer.

  Your grandson,

  George

  May 31, 1938

  Tuesday

  Dear Grandma,

  It’s a good thing school is out, because Pa has so much work around the farm that he can’t keep up with it. The weather has cooperated so that the corn is up and needs cultivating (that means removing the weeds). The potato patch is full of weeds, too, and Ma’s garden needs hoeing. And Pa says that before we know it we’ll be making hay. Making hay is cutting the hay plants, allowing them to dry, and then hauling them to the barn where we store the hay. We will feed the dried hay to the cattle and horses this winter.

  Yesterday Pa said it was high time we cultivated the potatoes. He planted about three acres of potatoes at one end of the cornfield back in April, and now they are knee high and growing well—but the weeds are growing even faster than the potatoes.

  We’ve got two horse-drawn cultivators. A cultivator consists of a set of small shovels that plow little furrows between the rows, plus two handles that you steer it with. As the cultivator moves along, the little shovels either dig up or bury most of the weeds. Whatever the cultivator doesn’t get, we have to hoe out by hand, a tedious, backbreaking job. Pa hitched Maud to one cultivator and Tony to the other. He asked me to drive Maud—she’s a little less skittish than Tony is.

  As with every other job on the farm, there is a trick to cultivating with a one-horse cultivator. What you really need is four arms: two to hold the leather lines to steer the horse, and two more to hold onto the handles and guide the cultivator between the rows. Pa showed me how to tie the lines together so I can slip them over my neck and keep my hands free to hold the cultivator handles. He had me practice a little at the ends of the rows, where no potatoes grow. I quickly discovered if I pushed on the cultivator handles in the direction I wanted the cultivator to go, it went in the opposite direction. Not only did I have to make my two arms seem like four, I had to make my mind think in opposites!

  Pa got me started between two rows of potatoes. Maud plodded along and didn’t require any steering until I got to the end of the row. I concentrated on guiding the cultivator so it dug out the largest amount of weeds without killing any potatoes. A couple of times I got too close to the row and dug up a few potato plants; if Pa noticed, he didn’t say anything. I guess he knows how hard it is to steer a cultivator pulled by a horse.

  Cultivating potatoes isn’t fun. But if you like being outside under a bright sun, and if you like the smell of freshly turned soil mingling with the smells of harness leather and horse sweat, then it has some good moments. I didn’t think I would ever say this, but I kind of like all these smells and sights on the farm. I enjoy the sounds, too. It was mostly quiet out there in the potato patch, except for the scraping sound of the cultivator as it moved through the soil and clanged once in a while when it struck a stone that we didn’t find earlier this spring. Harness leather creaks in an interesting way, and sometimes when I got to the end of a row, Maud would whinny at Tony over at the opposite end of the patch. I suspect it was horse talk: “How are you doing? I’m doing all right so far. I think George is finally catching on.”

  Every half hour or so we rested the horses under a shade tree at the end of a row. I needed the rest as much as the horses did. Even with two good legs, cultivating would be hard work. For me it was a real challenge. I stumbled along behind the cultivator, holding onto the handles, which gave me some support. I have noticed, though, that my leg doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. But I’m still limping.

  About midmorning the sun turned on the heat. Sweat dripped off my chin and soaked my shirt, as it did Maud’s hide, but we kept on cultivating, digging up and burying weeds so the potatoes will have a better chance to amount to something. Then I noticed that the cultivator had turned up a strange-looking stone. It was greenish and about the size of a man’s fist, but with a little part sticking out like a handle. I kicked it with my foot, and it scarcely moved.

  “Whoa,” I said to Maud, and I bent over to pick up the stone. It was heavy, about twice the weight I was expecting it to be, based on its size. I carried the green stone to the end of the row and tossed it under a tree. The next time we stopped the horses for a rest, I showed it to Pa. He said he had never seen a stone like it. He even wondered if it might be gold! I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not.

  “We’d be rich,” I said.

  “Yes, we would,” he said, and he ran his hands over the surface of the object. He took out his jackknife and scraped off some of the green. Underneath, the material sparkled in the sun. I asked him if he still thought it was gold.

  “Might be,” Pa said. “Professor Amundson would know. He knows about these things.”

  I’ve heard about Professor Oliver Amundson from some of the neighbors. They all talk about how strange he is. He’s retired from a college in southern Wisconsin and lives in a little house east of Link Lake where he grows a big garden and reads lots of books.

  Last night after we finished the chores, Pa and I drove over to Professor Amundson’s house. He is a big burly man but is kind of hunched over when he walks. He has a full white beard, and his head is covered with long white hair that he ties together at the back of his neck with a black string. (I must say, nobody else around here wears their hair like that, especially not the men.)

  We introduced ourselves, and then Pa handed him the green stone. He asked him straight out if we found a hunk of gold. Grandma, the whole time I had my fingers crossed, hoping it was gold, but after touching the stone and holding it up close to his eyes, the professor said, “Copper.”

  Pa asked him if he
was sure it was copper, and the professor said he was certain. He said that the hunk of copper we have is nearly pure, and he asked where we found it. Pa told him and asked if we might have more copper on our farm.

  “Not likely,” the professor answered. He explained that a long time ago, Indians probably lost the piece of copper while they were passing through the land that is now our farm. They used copper to make arrowheads. Professor Amundson said they likely got it from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where there’s lots of copper.

  I asked him if the piece of copper I found is valuable. He said it’s worth a few dollars, but it’s probably worth more in “historical significance.” I didn’t quite know what he meant by that, but it surely has something to do with the Indians who roamed over our farm many, many years ago. So guess what, Grandma? I now have a piece of copper on the dresser next to my bed. Cultivating potatoes turned out to be more interesting than just walking behind Maud and digging up weeds.

  Thanks for your last letter and for the picture you enclosed. Ma put it in a little frame, and it now stands right next to my piece of Indian copper. I look at your picture when I write my letters to you.

  Your grandson,

  George

  June 5, 1938

  Sunday

  Dear Grandma,

  When I have some spare time—which happens only in the evenings when the chores are done and on Sunday afternoons—I’ve been practicing for my circus. I’ve decided to call it the Struckmeyer Stupendous Family Circus. I’ve been making posters with crayons. They don’t look near as fancy as the Ringling Brothers posters I saw in Link Lake, but they are fun to make. I cut a picture of a lion out of an old magazine and pasted it on one poster, and I pasted a picture of a snake on another. I asked Pa what would be a good day to put on the circus, and he suggested the afternoon of Sunday, June 26. He said the barn will still be mostly empty then, because haying season would just be starting.

  June 26 is only three weeks away, so I’ve been very busy. Annie is helping, too, but there is only so much a three-year-old can do. I asked Rachel Williams if she would like to have her pet raccoon, Gregory, perform in our circus, and she said yes, so now we have one more act in our show. I’ll bet it’ll be a good one, too, for Gregory knows a whole bunch of tricks. Ginger and Depot seem excited, too. Can animals look forward to something, Grandma?

  I haven’t told you much about Link Lake, where we buy groceries and where Ma takes her eggs. Now that summer is here, we go to Link Lake every Saturday night, after we finish chores and take baths. Saturday night is bath night all year long. Now that the weather is warm, Pa puts our galvanized metal bathtub in the woodshed. That way our baths aren’t as messy as when we take them in the kitchen in front of the stove.

  Pa and I must carry the water from the pump house into the kitchen to be heated on the stove, in the little water storage area at one side of the cooking area. Now we must carry the heated water back outside and into the woodshed as well.

  We take our baths in order of our age, first little Annie, then me, then Ma, and finally Pa. Ma makes us bathe with a powerful smelling soap called Lifebuoy. You can tell who has taken a bath with Lifebuoy for hours afterward. It’s not a bad smell—nothing like chicken manure, for instance. It’s more of a clean smell that lets you know you’ve had a bath and scrubbed away the dirt from a week of farm work.

  Last night, after we were all scrubbed and in our clean clothes, we piled into our old car. There was just enough room for Ma and Pa in the front, and Annie, me, and a crate of eggs in the back. Ma trades her eggs for groceries at the Link Lake Mercantile, which is on Main Street. Besides having groceries, the mercantile sells clothing, shoes, thread, needles, barn boots, winter caps, leather gloves, fabric of various colors, and even toy wagons, sleds, and checkerboards.

  Down the street from the mercantile is Johnson’s Hardware. Pa and I usually go to Johnson’s while Ma takes Annie to the mercantile. All the farmers gather at Johnson’s, sitting either around a big stove in the back room in winter or on the worn wooden bench out front in summer.

  Next to Johnson’s is Stevens’s Drugstore, where you can buy a double-dip ice cream cone for five cents and two sticks of gum for a penny. Pa gives me a nickel every Saturday night. I can spend it any way I want—which usually means a big strawberry ice cream cone. I can’t think of anything that tastes better than strawberry ice cream. Steven’s also has packaged ice cream to take home, but we don’t have electricity and a refrigerator, so we have no place to keep it.

  Link Lake has a clothing store, a blacksmith’s shop (Pa brings his broken machinery there for repair), a restaurant where the sign says you can buy a plate lunch for fifty cents with coffee thrown in, a harness shop, and three taverns. Pa doesn’t like taverns. I haven’t figured out what he’s got against them. He’s not against beer drinking—in fact, he usually has a couple bottles of beer in our icebox. (Our icebox is like a refrigerator, except you can’t plug it in because there’s no electricity. A block of ice sits in the top of the icebox to keep the food and drink cold.)

  Link Lake also has a bank, a post office, a barber shop, and a gas station next to a used car dealer that doesn’t seem to be doing any business these days. The grist mill that grinds our cow feed is on the edge of town, next to the dam by the millpond.

  Summer Saturday nights in Link Lake are special besides the strawberry ice cream and gum, two sticks for a penny; free movies are shown as soon as it gets dark. Across Main Street from Steven’s Drugstore is an open area that slants toward the millpond. Wooden planks nailed to blocks of wood are lined up for seats, and the movie screen is a big white sheet hung on a wooden frame on the shore of the millpond.

  By the time it’s dark, you can’t find a soul on the sidewalks, the stores empty out, and even the tavern dwellers make their way to the open-air theater to watch whatever is showing—usually a western movie. Before the main feature, the projectionist shows a serial film. That’s the kind with a story that continues on from week to week. Just when the hero is up against the worst kind of disaster (last night he was about to go over a waterfall), the film quits and a little sign says “Continued Next Week.” It’s one way to keep us coming to town every Saturday night, I guess. I surely want to know what happened to the guy in the white hat who was tumbling over the waterfall to certain death.

  Unfortunately, the evening wasn’t as much fun as I have made it sound so far. In the middle of the main feature, I had to visit the outhouse. I made my way down toward the millpond, where the outhouse is located behind a tavern. As bad luck would have it, I met up with Amos Woodward, who must have been doing the same thing I was. He was the last person I wanted to meet. The first thing he said when he saw me was, “I ought to knock your head off.” He walked right up to me, blocking my way to the outhouse.

  I told him I didn’t want to fight. He said I deserve a thrashing because I made a fool out of his pa at the school picnic. I told him that all I did was strike out his pa. Amos bristled up and said that nobody strikes out his old man, especially not some limpy little city kid.

  I told him to leave me alone and that I didn’t want any trouble. He said that I should roll up my sleeves and fight like a man. I said once more that I didn’t want to fight. Then I saw that he had made his hands into fists and was bringing back his arm to hit me. Just as he swung, I ducked and moved to the side. Amos shot right past me and fell in the millpond with a huge splash. The people in the first row watching the movie saw what happened. I just walked away, but I could hear Amos spitting and sputtering and saying something about how he is gonna get me. I hurried on to the outhouse. When I got back, Amos was nowhere in sight. Looks like I’ve really got to watch out for him now. I’m worried about Amos. Any ideas about what I should do?

  Keep writing. I like getting your letters.

  Your grandson,

  George

  Dear George,

  Link Lake sounds like such an interesting town. From your description, it has
just about everything your family needs. And watching a free outdoor movie in summer—what a fun thing that must be!

  That brings me once more to your problems with Amos. I know you probably won’t agree with me, but I’m beginning to feel sorry for him. He wants to start a fight with you because you struck out his pa at the school softball game. He is sticking up for his pa, yet his pa doesn’t treat Amos very well, from what you’ve said in your letters. I’ve decided that Amos is a very angry young man, and you are an easy target for him.

  You did the right thing by not fighting with him, even when he started it. It was smart of you to move aside so he fell in the water. I kind of chuckled when you described it. I’ll bet he made a big splash. But I suppose now he will be angrier than ever. I’m sure you’ll let me know if Amos causes you any more problems.

  The Struckmeyer Stupendous Family Circus: what a great name. I can’t wait to hear more about it.

  Love,

  Grandma S.

  June 19, 1938

  Sunday

  Dear Grandma,

  I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last letter, but I have been very busy working on a project. Today was Father’s Day, and I really surprised Pa. I gave him a present he didn’t expect.

  Pa’s old billfold isn’t really a billfold at all, but a ratty little leather bag. It’s almost worn through, and one day I heard Ma say to Pa, “Adolph, you’re gonna lose the little money you’ve got if you keep it in that old money bag.” Pa said it was all he had. I know Pa doesn’t have any money to buy a new billfold. He’d probably buy a new halter for one of the horses before he’d buy a new billfold.

  I wanted to make him a billfold with the leather tools that you gave me. Pa said he liked the looks of my billfold when he first saw it. And I told you about how even Amos Woodward likes my leatherwork—at school I caught him looking at my belt and all its little designs. When I brought in my billfold to show it to Miss Harvey and the other kids, he held it longer than anybody else when she passed it around. But since I have made a billfold and leather belt for myself, I didn’t have any leather left to make something for Pa.