Fields of Home

by Ralph Moody

  I went to the barn, turned the cows out, and called to Grandfather that they were ready to go to pasture. Then I harnessed the horses, called Millie, and we drove to the high field.

  I’d left the high field that had all the rocks on it till the last. It had the poorest hay on the place, and was the farthest from the barn, way back by the beech woods. Millie always helped me pitch till the load was above the rails on the hayrack. That morning, the shocks were dripping wet with dew, so I set her to skinning the tops off them while I pitched the dry hay from underneath. We’d just made a good start when there was a yoo-hoo from down in the valley, and I looked over the brow of the hill to see Annie waving to us from Littlehale’s pasture gate. I forgot all about Grandfather, or Millie, or haying, and just stood there, watching Annie and waving my hand, but she didn’t wave again. She just put up the pasture bars, and walked back along the lane toward Littlehale’s house. I felt kind of silly, because I was still standing there, watching her go and flapping my hand a little when from right behind me Grandfather said, “Come on, Ralphie! Come on! Don’t stand there dawdling all day! There’s rain a-coming tarnal soon.”

  Grandfather’s sickness seemed to have done him a lot more good than harm. He didn’t tire nearly as soon from pitching, and even with the rain coming, he acted a lot happier than I’d ever seen him. He pitched steadily until the load was about as high as he could reach, and he only got mad once. That was when I said the field looked to me like awfully good strawberry and tomato ground. He called me know-it-all and bigheaded, and said he didn’t need me or anybody else telling him how to farm. In less than two minutes he was all right again, and sang out, “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie, don’t seem like it’s took us no time at all to pitch on this load. There! That’s just about as high as your old grampa can histe it. You finish it on out whilst I go look at my ground-hog trap. I’ll catch up with you children at the barn.”

  Millie began worrying and stewing as soon as we started driving to the barn. “Thomas will skin the both of us alive soon as ever he lays eyes on that cussed horsefork,” she fretted. “Like as not he’ll run you off the same way he done with Levi.”

  I was still sore about Grandfather’s calling me know-it-all and bigheaded, and I told her, “You don’t need to worry about it. The horsefork was my idea in the first place, and it still is. I’ll take the blame for it. How much of this hay do you think we’d have put up without it? Let him run me off if he wants to; he’ll never be able to say I didn’t do a good job for him. What difference does it make now? With nothing but hay on this place, he doesn’t need me any longer, and I’ll go where people don’t think I’m bigheaded. There are only two more loads left in the field, and one wetting won’t ruin it.”

  “Ain’t there no way we can pitch what’s left up by hand?” Millie asked. “If he don’t have to see the cussed thing, maybe we can finish up without no trouble.”

  “I want him to see it,” I blurted out. “I want him to know that he’d have lost most of his hay if we hadn’t used it.” Millie took hold of my arm, and her voice was pleading when she asked, “You ain’t going to point it out to him, be you, Ralph? Don’t start no row with him. Thomas, he can’t abide to be crossed, and he’d run you off for certain.”

  I didn’t want Millie to feel badly, and though I didn’t believe it, I said, “Don’t worry, Millie; just keep your fingers crossed. He’s as sick today as he has been any day in the last week, and maybe he’ll go back to bed before he catches us.”

  “Ain’t there no way we can pitch it up by hand?” she asked again.

  “Not a way in the world,” I told her. “We’ll have to use the horsefork, but I won’t point it out to him. If there’s going to be any row, he’ll have to start it.”

  As we pulled into the dooryard, we could see Grandfather and Old Bess way off at the far side of Niah’s field. They were beyond where he’d set the ground-hog trap, and were poking along the stonewall toward the woods. Millie didn’t say a word, but she held her hand up in front of my face, and her fingers were crossed.

  We didn’t see anything more of Grandfather till we’d finished unloading, gone back to the field, and had the next load half pitched on. He came out of the beech woods, and hurried toward us so fast that Old Bess had to trot. “By thunder, Ralphie!” he called as he came. “Cal’late I and Old Bess has found the boar ground-hog’s hole. All-fired great big one! Under the stonewall down nigh the twin pines. Tarnal, pesky critter! Been hunting his hole ever since the snow went off last spring. Gorry sakes alive! Didn’t cal’late on running off like that and leaving you children to do all the work. Did you take note where I left my pitchfork?”

  We’d finished the pitching, unloaded, and were back in the field before Grandfather found where he’d left his pitchfork in the woods. Until there were only three or four shocks left in the field, he alternated between pitching hay and telling us about all the woodchucks he and Old Bess had caught. Then he stopped, looked down at the beech woods, and said, “Gorry sakes! That’s where I ought to have my trap sot, ’stead of over in Niah’s field. Did ever you eat woodchuck, Ralphie? Just as good as hen, any day. Cal’late I’ll go move the tarnal trap afore the rain comes. Go on to the barn whenst you’re done; I’ll be along in a jiffy.”

  It was a long jiffy. During the time Grandfather had been sick in bed, we’d worked the tote-rope horse out through the back barn doorway, so he wouldn’t see her from the house. That morning with him in the fields, we had to work the other way, into the dooryard. Old Nell was making the last pull on the last forkful from the last load of hay on the place, when I looked through the swallow hole in the peak of the barn. Grandfather and Old Bess were halfway down the orchard hill, and coming fast.

  I jerked the trip cord the second the horsefork came over the edge of the mow, called Millie to unhook Old Nell and get her hitched back to the hayrack. Then I unfastened the rope from the big fork, left it lying where it fell on the top of the hay, tied the loose end around my waist, and slid down the tote-rope to the barn floor. Millie had Old Nell hitched back to the hayrack by the time I’d hauled the rope end through the block on the ridgepole. We gathered up rope, pulley blocks, and whiffletree, stuffed them into the grain bin and slammed the cover down. When Grandfather climbed up over the yard wall, we were backing the hayrack out of the barn floor. The only signs of the horsefork were the empty pulley block hanging high on the ridgepole, and the path Old Nell made in pulling the tote rope.

  For the first time since Grandfather had taken sick, he walked in through the big front doorway of the barn. He didn’t look up till he was standing right in the middle of the barn floor. For at least a full minute, he just stood there with his head turned back, his hat in his hand, and his mouth wide open; looking up through the narrowing cone of the mows. “Gorry sakes alive! Gorry sakes alive!” he said, half aloud. Then he swung around to Millie and me as we came back to the doorway. “Good on your heads, children! Good on your heads!” he sang out, ran and threw an arm around each of us. “How in the great thunderation did ever you . . . Bless my soul! Never seen the old barn stuffed so full in all my born days. Gorry! Wisht Levi was here to see it. Provender enough to winter twenty head of cattle! Ralphie, your old grampa’s proud of you, boy. And you, too, Millie girl. How in the great . . . ” As he talked, he had led us in to the middle of the floor, stopped, and stood looking up toward the peak of the barn.

  I felt pretty good myself, but I think Millie felt even better. There was pink in her cheeks when she pushed her sunbonnet back, and her eyes were bright. “’Twa’n’t nothing,” she told him, laughing, “but don’t you get no ideas about me milking twenty head of cows, come winter. We done it so’s you could go to the reunion off to Gettysburg.”

  “Foolishness! Foolishness!” Grandfather snapped out, but there wasn’t much edge to his voice. “Ain’t going off frittering away nigh onto a week’s time whilst there’s yet the dressing to be spread. Ralphie, I and you’ll . . . ”

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p; I cut in on him, but I’d only got as far as “I’ll take care of the . . . ” when a quick blast of wind swept through the barn. Lightning and thunder both struck together and, for a moment, I was afraid the buildings had been hit.

  When we’d backed the hayrack out, I’d left the horses standing faced toward the barn doorway. With the crash of thunder, the yella colt came tearing in, dragging Old Nell and the hayrack after him. We all had to dive to keep from being run over. When Millie and I scrambled to our feet, water was pouring down as if the barn had been under Niagara Falls, the yella colt was dancing a jig, and Grandfather was lying almost under his hoofs. He rolled away, sat up, and he seemed to be looking at something far away, through the open doorway of the barn. “By fire!” he sang out. “Just like the battle of Gettysburg; guns a-blasting, fire a-spurting out, hosses a-running and stomping, and the rain a-pelting down. Gorry sakes, Ralphie, do you cal’late you and Millie could look after the farm if I was to go off to the reunion?”

  It wasn’t a very busy afternoon for me. The shower settled into a steady rain, and I spent most of my time mending harness and cleaning the bench in the carriage house, but Millie was as busy as a beaver. She heated water for Grandfather’s bath, cleaned his Sunday suit, and packed his old valise, while he fussed around like a hen with one chick. He got soaking wet when he went out to tell the mailman to pass the word about his going to the reunion. And it was nearly nine o’clock before Millie could get him to stop telling army stories and go to bed.

  14

  Trouble with Bees

  IT WAS as black as pitch, and I could hear the rain pattering on the roof, when Grandfather called me at four o’clock the next morning. The chores were done, breakfast eaten, and the cows taken to pasture by five o’clock. Grandfather’s train wasn’t leaving Lisbon Falls until half-past eight, but he was all in a dither.

  Anyone would have thought he was going away for a year instead of a week. He had to look at the old sow with the litter of pigs, at the hogs in the barn cellar, at the spider web and the calf in the sheep barn, and he said good-bye to the yella colt every time we went past his stall. Then I had to go to the high field with him while he showed me just how he wanted the dressing spread.

  “Don’t spread it stingy and don’t waste none of it, Ralphie,” he told me as we tramped over the field in the rain. “Didn’t winter but six–seven head of stock, and dressing is tarnal scarce this year. Spread it even; no big lumps and bare spots, and dress the hilltop heavier’n the edges. Water’ll leach it down whenst the snow melts, come spring. I cal’late on eight loads being a day’s work, if you spread it nice and even. The dumpcart’s under the barn. Might need a dite of mending afore you commence, but there ain’t no call to waste time on it.”

  All the way to the Falls, Grandfather told me stories about Gettysburg. At the depot, four other Grand Army men were waiting for him. He only let me stop long enough for him to get out his valise, tell me he’d be home in a week’s time, and pat Old Nell on the rump. Then, as I drove away, he called after me, “I’m cal’lating on you a-hauling forty-fifty loads of dressing whilst I’m gone, Ralphie. You won’t have time to dawdle, and it’ll keep you out of mischief. Tell Millie I’ll fetch her a present whenst I come home, and you meet me here a week from this morning.”

  I’d seen the dumpcart backed into the corner of the barn cellar. It wasn’t really a cart at all, but a wagon. There were two great big wheels in back, with the body balanced across the axle, and two little wheels in front. I was afraid it would go to pieces like the “one-hoss shay” before I got it hauled up to the carriage house. Most of the planks in the bottom were rotted or broken, nuts and bolts were missing, all the wheels creaked, and one of them was held together with rusty wire.

  The rain had settled into a steady drizzle when I backed the dumpcart into the middle of the carriage-house floor, put the horses away, and went back to start working on it. I was sure it would keep right on raining for a couple of days, so I wouldn’t have to hurry, and made up my mind that I’d do just as good a job on that dumpcart as Uncle Levi would have done if he’d been there. Of course, I had to take the rotten wood, rusty bolts, and old wires off before new parts could be put on. It took longer than I thought it would, and when I was nearly finished, the whole thing sort of collapsed. It acted the way an old cow does when she’s been driven till she can’t take another step. At first, it just groaned and settled a little in front, then the back end swayed, and thumped down on one haunch. It did look kind of wrecked when Millie came running out to see what had made all the noise.

  For a minute, she just stood there in the doorway with her mouth open and her eyes looking like white saucers with bright blue centers. “Good Lord a-living! What in tunket did you do to it?” she asked. “Thomas’ll skin you alive and hang your hide on the barn door!”

  “Oh, no, he won’t,” I told her. “By the time I get finished it will be as good as a new dumpcart.”

  “Hmfff! By the time Christmas comes, it’ll be a-snowing, and you can haul dressing on a sled! How long you cal’late it’s going to take to piece the cussed thing back together again?”

  “I’ll bet you I have it all done by the time it stops raining,” I told her. “That wheel isn’t broken; it’s just fallen apart, and Uncle Levi left me the keys to his tool drawers.”

  “Drawers!” she sniffed. “Trouble with you is, you’re getting too big for your drawers! Levi, hisself, couldn’t put the devilish thing together in two days, and I’ll drink all the rain that falls ’twixt now and sundown tomorrow.”

  I’d been so busy that I hadn’t paid any attention to the weather. When I looked out through the doorway, the whole eastern sky was bright blue, hens were picking up worms in the dooryard, and the sun made drops of water on the apple trees look like diamonds. Before I said anything more, I had to think a little. “Well, tomorrow’s the Fourth of July,” I told her. “That’s a legal holiday, and you’re not supposed to have to work. By tomorrow night, I can have it looking almost new.”

  If it hadn’t been for Millie’s helping me, I’d have turned out to be a liar at that. And, though we made it strong enough, we never did get it looking nearly like new, but it took us till nearly midnight on the Fourth.

  Millie called me at four o’clock the next morning. By sunrise, I was pitching my first load of dressing, while she did the chores. I didn’t like the job. The dressing was smelly, as heavy as lead, and it took two hundred forkfuls to make a load. The spreading took twice as long as the loading. No matter how hard I snapped my wrists, the dressing would fall in big blobs, and I’d leave bare spaces bigger than a wash tub. After each unloading, I’d have to climb down, break up the lumps, and scatter them with the fork. It was nearly nine o’clock before I had the second load spread, and I’d run all out of breakfast. After I had the dumpcart backed in under the barn, I started for the kitchen to get a piece of johnnycake or something.

  I was halfway to the house when I heard what sounded like an engine letting off steam in the east orchard. At first, I didn’t see anything that could be making the noise, but when I’d poked around awhile, I found it was bees. About a bushel of them were clustered on the top branch of the tallest apple tree, and the whole mass was seething. I watched them for a few minutes, then went up to the house and told Millie about it. She couldn’t have jumped quicker if one of the bees had stung her. She was peeling apples for a pie, and bounced out of the chair so fast that she spilled peelings all over the kitchen floor.

  I didn’t know that bees split up into families, or that they swarmed and would fly off to the woods if you didn’t put them into a new hive right away. But Millie knew all about it. She went tearing down to the orchard as fast as she could run, took a quick look at the bees and shouted, “Fetch a high ladder as fast as the Lord will let you! Them’s Thomas’s blackbelts, and he’ll skin us alive if we let ’em get away. I’ll fetch the bee hats.”

  I ran for the tall ladder, let it down, and had carried it as
far as the yard wall, when Millie called me to come to the bee shop. She already had on a straw hat with a mosquito netting veil that came down over her shoulders. She crammed another one on my head, pulled the veil down, and gave me a pair of gloves with netting sleeves at least two feet long. “Get ’em on! Get ’em on!” she snapped at me, as she threaded her own arm into a sleeve. “Never seen such a helpless, awkward boy! Make a fist! Don’t go ramming your thumb through the netting. Good lands, hurry up! Bees don’t wait on nobody!” Before I had one hand in a glove, she’d put both of hers on, had grabbed up an old dishpan, and was running toward the ladder. I didn’t bother with my second glove, but stuffed it into my pocket and ran after her.

  We had a lot of trouble getting the ladder up into the tree. The branches were thick, but where the bees were, there wasn’t a branch to rest it against. Both our hats got twisted around on our heads, sweat was running down into my eyes, and Millie was yapping like a fox terrier. Before the ladder was set solidly, she grabbed the dishpan in one hand and started climbing. With the ladder sort of balanced in mid-air, I couldn’t keep it from wabbling a little. Millie was up about six rungs, when she hollered down to me, “Watch what you’re doing, and hold that devilish ladder still!”

  I braced my feet and held my shoulder against one of the uprights but it didn’t do much good. After every couple of rungs, Millie would stop and yell at me to quit mooning around like a sick calf and to hold the ladder still. Then a bee started crawling up my arm. At every step, I expected it to sting me, and when I put my head over to try brushing it off with my hat, the ladder began dancing. I just had to shut my eyes tight and let the bee crawl. It had nearly reached my elbow when Millie screamed.