by Ralph Moody
“Loading it,” was all I said, as I pulled my shirt sleeves up and started to wash.
Uncle Levi stopped singing, I heard Millie come to the pantry doorway, then I could feel them both standing there and looking at my back. Millie was the first one to make a sound. She sort of snickered, and said, “Ain’t a mite het up, be you, Ralphie?”
“My name isn’t Ralphie; it’s Ralph,” I told her, and I wasn’t a bit careful to make it sound pleasant.
“Great day of judgment,” Uncle Levi chuckled. “What did you; mop down the tie-up with that calf afore you loaded her?”
“No,” I said. “She fell,” and went right on washing.
“Calc’late Thomas give you a little help; or was it hindrance?”
“Hindrance,” I said, and scooped a double handful of soapsuds onto my face.
Uncle Levi had stopped chuckling. “By hub,” he said, “I never seen a man could get a critter so het up as Thomas can! Can’t lead a hoss to water without getting him atop the backhouse at least once!”
Buttons clicked on a chair seat behind me, and Millie said, “There’s some clean clothes, Ralph. Better get into ’em afore you come to the table. Victuals is all ready.”
All through breakfast, Millie and Uncle Levi kept joshing each other, but I didn’t feel like joshing. And I didn’t have very much to say while we were picking out the tools and carrying them down to the old hayrake. We’d just propped up the end that had the crumpled wheel when Uncle Levi said, “Thomas must have got you about as het up as he did the calf this morning. What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Get it off your stomach, Ralph,” he told me. “It’s the things he keeps down that poisons a man; not the things he gets rid of.”
“Well, I might be a fool,” I said, “but I don’t like to be told it forty times in five minutes.”
“A tarnal fool?” Uncle Levi asked, and winked at me.
“Yes, a tarnal fool. And I don’t like it.”
Uncle Levi chuckled a little. “I didn’t, neither, when I was a boy. Used to make me so cussed mad I’d want to skin Thomas alive. Afore he went off to the war, I used to ache for the day I’d be big enough to lick him.” Uncle Levi straightened up and patted his fat belly. “Calc’late I started this bread basket on its way afore I was ten years old; stuffing it with victuals so’s I’d grow bigger than what Thomas was.”
“Did you ever lick him?” I asked.
“Can’t say as ever I did. Time he come back from the war, I was a trifle bigger than him, but he had malaria. Ain’t been in the best of health since.”
“It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t licked him, if he goes around calling everybody a tarnal fool.”
“Licks hisself. Calc’late it’s cost poor Thomas many a dollar and many a friend. Recollect hearing my half-sister, Eunice, tell of his saying it afore he was knee high to a toad. Father thought ’twas clever.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s clever now,” I said.
“No. No, ’tain’t. But it’s a habit. Get a habit when you’re young, and it’s harder to get over than blue eyes. Thomas, he don’t mean no more by it than Sim Smiley means when he says he’s going to kill his old woman.”
“Well, I get just as mad as if he meant it,” I said, “and I can’t help it.”
“Don’t pay it no mind, I . . . Great day of judgment! This ain’t doing nothing for this old hayrake, is it? First thing we know, Thomas, he’s likely to come raring back here and catch us at it. By hub, I hope he makes a good trade on them cussed bees. If he don’t, he’ll be sorer than a cut thumb about us planing to rake hay with it.”
“And if he makes a good trade?” I asked.
“Can’t always tell with Thomas, but you got to watch your chances. Like as not, if he makes a powerful good trade, and if we don’t wave the cussed hossrake right afore his nose, he’ll never let on he knows we used it. Let’s get on with it. I’d kind of like to see the orchard in windrows afore he gets home.”
The horserake didn’t take as long to fix as I’d thought it might. We took all the bent and broken pieces up to the forge. Uncle Levi built up the fire and, while I robbed pieces off the wrecked machine and bolted them onto the better one, he did the blacksmithing. With the early start we’d got, we were all finished by ten o’clock.
The yella colt didn’t give me much trouble in harnessing, but he made up his mind that he wouldn’t pull the horserake. By the time he’d settled down to do it, we’d lost more than an hour. He’d thrown himself down three or four times, squirmed and bucked out of his harness over and over, and acted exactly as if he’d been eating loco weed. I’d had to wire his ears together, tie a string around his tongue, throw dirt in his mouth, and even hog-tie him like a calf for branding. It was while I had him hog-tied that he decided to behave himself. And, once he’d decided, there was nothing more to it. He let us hitch him into the shafts without a bobble, and when I climbed up onto the seat he walked off as quietly as Old Nell would have. He didn’t even jump when I tripped the gears to dump our first load.
Uncle Levi brought sandwiches and a pitcher of milk to the orchard for me, and when I’d finished raking he took one wheel and the shafts off the horserake. He said it would be sort of waving it under Grandfather’s nose if we left it all together.
In Colorado, the hayracks were flat platforms on wheels, but Grandfather’s was built more like a basket. The bottom was only about three feet wide, and there was a high, flaring fence all around it. Instead of having boards for the floor, it was made of half a dozen birch poles. Most of them were rotten, and nearly a third of the fence stakes were broken or missing. While I was doing the raking, Uncle Levi had made new stakes and floor poles for it. After I’d unharnessed and fed the yella colt, I helped him build them into the hayrack.
It took us till nearly sundown, and Grandfather hadn’t come home when we finished, so Uncle Levi went with me to get the cows. I took him past the high stony field, told him again how well I thought it would do in strawberries and tomatoes, and then we walked along the brow of the hill above Lisbon Valley. There was a little green meadow just beyond the foot of the hill, and a girl drove four or five cows into it from behind Grandfather’s beech woods. She was wearing a white dress and, against it, her long hair looked as black and shiny as polished jet. “Annie Littlehale,” Uncle Levi said when she came into sight. “Clever little thing. ’Bout your age. Hear tell she can cook better than any woman roundabouts.”
I wanted to ask him if Annie was pretty, but I didn’t quite like to, so I just said, “I see our cows are waiting at the bars.”
Grandfather was home when we got in with the cows. Old Nell was standing in the dooryard, and Grandfather was down at the beehives. The minute we came out of the barn, he called, “Levi! Levi! Come see the powerful good trade I made. Didn’t get the colonies I sot out for. Man wouldn’t trade; Ralphie dirtied the heifer up too much a-loading her, but I seen most of the bee men ’roundabouts there, and I made a tarnal good trade. Come see ’em.”
They were still down there when I’d unharnessed Old Nell and watered her, but by the time I’d finished the chores, supper was ready and they were at the table. Grandfather was so excited about all the trades he’d tried to make that he wouldn’t eat his supper, and Millie had to make him an eggnog with a spoonful of whiskey in it. When I went upstairs to write Mother a letter, he was still telling Uncle Levi and Millie about his trading.
It was just by luck that I saw Grandfather looking over my raking job the next morning. He didn’t usually get up until after I’d finished chores, and I seldom left the barn until I went to feed Clara Belle’s calf, after milking. That morning Old Bess wasn’t waiting to catch her squirt of milk, and when I whistled for her, she came running in, wet, from the direction of the orchard. I just happened to glance out through the tie-up window, and there was Grandfather. He had his hands linked behind his back, and was walking along slowly between the windrows. His head was turning from
side to side, and he looked as if he were trying to find something he’d lost. He couldn’t have stayed out there more than two minutes after I saw him. Before I had finished milking Martha, he called from the front barn doorway, “What you dawdling over them chores for, Ralphie? Time flies! We got haying to do today.”
In some ways, the haying went better than I expected it to for the first few days. Grandfather worked most of the forenoon with Uncle Levi and me while we shocked the hay in the orchard. He never asked how the raking had been done, and we didn’t tell him. In the afternoon, when we were ready to haul, Millie put on a pair of overalls, made a jug of switchel—Jamaica ginger and water, sweetened with molasses—and came out to help us.
I had thought I was going to show Grandfather something about pitching hay but, little as he was, he could swing up as big a forkful as I could. And he started swinging them just as fast as he could go. “Come on, Ralphie! Come on!” he sang out as Millie stopped the rack beside the first row of shocks. “I and you’ll show ’em what kind of logs makes wide shingles!” Then he jabbed his fork into a shock, crouched, levered the fork handle across his bent knee, and sent the load sailing over the high rail of the hayrack. It was hardly off the fork before he was trotting toward the next.
My blisters were beginning to heal pretty well and, with my new gloves, they didn’t bother me much in handling a pitchfork. I wasn’t going to let Grandfather get ahead of me, so I jabbed my fork deep, pitched, and ran for the next shock. We went neck and neck for the first half dozen, and then I came to a big one. I either had to take it all at one forkful or, if I took two, let Grandfather get ahead of me. I caught the near edge of the shock with my fork tines, folded it up, and rammed the fork hard into center. Then, when I sprang back, bent my knee, and threw my full weight on the fork handle, it broke in the middle.
Out of breath as he was, Grandfather scolded me till his face was almost purple, called me a tarnal fool boy a dozen times, and went off to the barn for another fork. Uncle Levi was raking scatterings. As soon as Grandfather had gone, he pulled his rake up beside me, and said, “Cussed good thing you broke that fork handle. If you hadn’t, Thomas would like as not have killed hisself afore he got to the end of the row. Always took pride that he could outpitch ary man in a hayfield. Recollect what I told you, ‘Slow and easy goes far in a day’? You pitch first-rate, but take it easy and let him run off from you. He won’t go more’n two–three shocks afore he cools down; just has to prove to you that he’s a better man than you be. Ain’t that so, Millie?”
Millie had been building load as Grandfather and I pitched to her. Her face, deep in her sunbonnet, was dripping sweat, and she was still breathing hard when she said, “’Tain’t hard for him to prove with ninety-nine men out of a hundred. Take his fork, Ralph, and let’s get this load on afore he comes back.” Her voice wasn’t a bit mean, and it was the first time she had called me Ralph without being sarcastic.
I only had the rack loaded a little way above the rail when Grandfather came back. He passed me a heavy, long-handled fork, and as I took it, he told me to quit trying to show off before I broke everything on the place all to smithereens. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t change my pace from the way I’d been going before he came. For the rest of the row, Grandfather pitched three shocks to my two. Then he stood his fork against a tree, and said, “Load’s getting a little high for your old grampa, Ralphie. You throw on eight or ten or a dozen more shocks, and fetch it on to the barn. I’ll go ahead and get some the culch out of the barn floor.”
When we got to the barn, I found why Grandfather wanted me to build the load so high. Instead of using a horsefork, the way they always did in Colorado, we had to unload by hand. But that wasn’t all. The hay had to be handled three or four times. I pitched off the rack to Uncle Levi on the low mow above the tie-up, he pitched to Grandfather on the next higher mow, and he pitched to Millie, who stowed away in the high mow above the driveway. Unloading was twice as hard as loading on in the field. With the hayrack built the way it was, the whole bottom part of the load was tangled and matted together. To tear it loose with a pitchfork was like pulling stumps.
On the second trip, we tried to get Grandfather to build load, let Millie rake scatterings, and Uncle Levi pitch with me, but he wouldn’t do it. For half a dozen shocks, he’d tear into it as if he were throwing dirt on a prairie fire, then he’d either go off to see how the new bees were doing, or remember that he had to set a trap in a ground-hog hole. He was away and back two or three times to each load, and it was nearly sundown before we had the third one pulled into the barn. Both Grandfather and Uncle Levi were too tired to do the unloading, Millie had to cook supper, and I wasn’t a bit sorry when Grandfather said, “Unhitch your hosses, Ralphie! We done a good job of work today, and we’ll leave her set right where she is till morning. Can’t go to hauling of mornings, anyways, till after the sun’s high enough to suck up the dew.”
I saw Annie when I went for the cows that evening. She had on a pink dress and, for a minute, I thought she’d spied me sitting there by the base of the big beech tree. Her face turned that way just as she went out of sight behind the woods at the foot of the hill, and I could have sworn that her hand waved a little.
11
The Horsefork Disaster
THE second day of hay hauling didn’t go as well as the first. It was hot. There was a little breeze in the orchard, but the barn was stifling. It took twice as long to pitch a load off and stow it in the mows as it took to pitch it on in the field. We’d have to stop and rest three or four times during each unloading, and every one of us would be wringing wet by the time we reached the bottom of the rack.
Grandfather grew more crochety as the forenoon went on. During the first unloading, he called down to me only two or three times about pitching either too fast or too slow. By our third load, just before dinner time, he wouldn’t let me alone five minutes at a stretch. If I happened to get hold of a big forkful, he’d yell at me to stop trying to show off before I broke every fork handle on the place. And if the forkful was small, he’d scold me for dawdling.
Grandfather would neither rake scatterings nor build load in the field. During each loading, he’d come to the field two or three times, stay about ten minutes and go away. Each time he came, he’d take Uncle Levi’s fork, pitch hay as fast as he could swing it, and scold me for being too slow. I didn’t say anything back when he scolded, and I tried not to change my pace, but before he’d leave the field, I’d be so furious that every muscle would be quivering.
Millie didn’t help with the last unloading of the forenoon, but went to the house to get dinner. When we went in to eat, there was only fried salt pork, boiled potatoes, and johnnycake. Uncle Levi looked the table over when he sat down, and said to Millie, “If you’d told me this morning you was out of meat, I’d have killed a hen while Ralph was doing the chores.”
“Ain’t nothing the matter with salt pork,” Grandfather snapped at him. “Et a-plenty of it whenst you was a boy to home, didn’t you? Never heard tell of nobody starving whenst they had salt pork to eat, did you? Eggs is eighteen cents a dozen, and the hens is all laying.”
Uncle Levi didn’t answer, but he ate only one small potato and a couple of slices of pork. No one said another word till the meal was finished. It was the first dinner since Uncle Levi had been there that the red rooster hadn’t flown up onto the window sill behind him and tucked-tucked for something to eat. As Uncle Levi pushed his chair back from the table, he grumbled, “Even a cussed rooster knows better than to come to a dinner of salt pork in haying time.” Then, as we were leaving the kitchen, he turned to Grandfather and said, sharply, “How do you expect Ralph to hold the pace you’re trying to set him, with nothing but salt pork in his belly?” Grandfather flared right back at him, but I didn’t want to be there while they were wrangling, so I went to the barn and hitched up the horses.
The afternoon was hot and muggy. Millie and Uncle Levi tried to get Grandfather to
slow down a little in his pitching, but they only made him worse. Each time he came to the field, he’d grab the fork out of Uncle Levi’s hands, race into the pitching, and yell at me for being shiftless and lazy.
At the starting of the second load, Grandfather made me so mad that I didn’t care if he did kill himself. I wasn’t going to hold a steady pace any longer and let him keep yelling at me for dawdling. I shoved my fork deep into the shocks, and pitched as hard as I could. The faster I worked, the louder Grandfather yelled at me, till Uncle Levi called, “Thomas, it’s a God’s wonder you ain’t drove the boy away a’ready.”
Grandfather was winded, and his voice was squeaky when he yelled back, “Mary sent him down here for me to make a man out of him, and, by thunder, I cal’late on doing it.” Then he tore into the pitching again. Instead of taking each shock clean, he’d grab a forkful off the top, heave it onto the rack, and shout, “Gitap!” at the horses. I had to go just as fast as he, or be left behind. Then I jabbed my fork too deep into a big shock, sprung the handle too hard, and broke it.
Grandfather was beside the yella colt when I broke the fork handle. He jumped up and down, and shouted so loud that he set the old horse dancing and shaking his head. Then the colt braced his feet, and went into a balk. I leaned on my fork handle and waited while Grandfather yelled, “Gitap! Gitap! Gitap, you tarnal fool hoss!” He grabbed a bridle rein, tugged on it, and shouted into the yella colt’s face, “Gitap! Gitap, you worthless, good-for-nothing crow bait! Gitap, I tell you!”