Uncle Daney's Way

by Jessie Haas

  “Daney doesn’t think it’s enough, does he?” Pop asked later, coming to the door of Cole’s room. “Because I can get the logs out, you know. This is a big help to me, but it isn’t money in the bank.”

  Cole felt his face get red. Of course, it wasn’t enough. He’d known that all along. And, anyway, was Pop afraid of Uncle Daney? Cole was tired of being the go-between. “He hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Well … if he does …”

  “I’ll tell him,” Cole said. “Pop, can I move out to the barn for the summer? It’s a lot cooler.”

  Pop looked surprised. “I guess you’d better ask your mother,” he said. “But ask Daney first. It’s his place.”

  Cole went out to the barn. It was dark out, and there was no light in Uncle Daney’s stall. Was he asleep already?

  Then Cole saw the gleam of moonlight on metal in the big barn doorway, and he smelled the smell of Uncle Daney’s shirt, which he’d worn a day too long. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello, young feller.” Uncle Daney sat quietly. Cole stood there a moment. He heard the frogs in a far-off swamp. From the direction of the pasture he heard a thud, and he heard Nip snort.

  “I think he was happy to skid a log again,” Cole said, just for something to say. Then he wished he’d kept quiet.

  “It’s been his work,” said Uncle Daney. “It’s what he knows.”

  “You, too,” Cole said. Are you sad? he wanted to ask, but he didn’t quite dare.

  After a moment Uncle Daney gave a faint cackle. “Just thinkin’,” he said. “I started out skiddin’ with the reins in both hands. Then I figured out how to let the horse do the steerin’, and now I got you and Bill doin’ all the work. I’m gettin’ better at this all the time!”

  “I was thinking about moving into one of the other stalls for the summer,” Cole said. “Would that be okay?”

  “Heck, yes!” said Uncle Daney. He gave a boisterous laugh. “Nobody to boss us out here. We could have some fun!”

  Cole chose the stall across from Uncle Daney’s. When he had cleaned it, built screen windows and doors, and moved his bed in, he decided not to do anything else. He left his posters and model spaceships in the trailer. He just wanted the big, bare wooden room for a while, the hayrack in the corner, and the rough places worn in the floor by horses’ hooves.

  There was no time to be bored this summer. He picked the peas for Mom, and then he and Uncle Daney shelled them. By the time all the peas were eaten or in the freezer, it was time to start on string beans.

  Ray West kept coming by and taking them over to look at the cart. It had started out being a square, rough little wood wagon, with a rotten floor and rusting metal sides. Ray had torn it down to the frame and rebuilt it of new wood. There were taillights, reflectors, even directionals. Every time Cole went to see it there were other old men, sometimes two or three, tinkering, swapping yarns, or bringing valuable spare parts. They acted as if they’d known Uncle Daney for a long time.

  Afternoons, to keep the pasture from getting eaten down, Uncle Daney took Nip out to graze along the roadside. Sometimes Cole went along to explore in the woods and fields. Often, when he came back to the road, a truck would be parked beside Uncle Daney, and a man in work clothes would be leaning out the window to talk.

  Then Pop would come home, and he and Nip and Cole would climb the Hogback. They’d hitch on to a log, and Nip would disappear with it. Pop would start to chain-saw. They’d work about twenty minutes, and then Nip would come back. After three or four trips Nip would have a bright strip of cloth tied to the brass knobs on the hames. That was Mom’s signal to come on down to supper.

  After supper Cole and Uncle Daney played cards or checkers or Cole might read. Uncle Daney never did read. Cole thought maybe he couldn’t. He sat and whittled or made birchbark boxes from bark Cole had cut for him. Sometimes he rolled his chair to the big doorway and sat listening to the night sounds.

  “Have you thought of anything yet?” Cole asked him one night. They had been sitting out for a while, looking at the warm yellow lights in the trailer and listening to a whippoorwill.

  “Not yet,” Uncle Daney said. “You?”

  “We could give rides in the cart when it’s finished.”

  Uncle Daney said, “It’ll take a couple hundred dollars’ worth of hay to feed that horse. That’s a lot of cart rides.”

  “We could do it, though. Take him to the fair—”

  “We’ll come up with something,” Uncle Daney said. Cole could see why Pop didn’t like to tackle him directly. He made one more try.

  “What if we don’t? What will you do?”

  “Send him back to the log camp,” Uncle Daney said. “Hate to, though. Most loggers don’t handle a horse the way I do.”

  Cole thought of Roger Allard’s bulging muscles, of the men at the pulling contests, leaning back on the reins with all their weight. He didn’t want to send Nip way up north to a logging camp.

  “People win prize money at the fair,” he said. “The cattle show, baked stuff—” Maybe he could show the steer—if he could train him to lead. Maybe he could bake a cake …

  “Somethin’ll come to us,” Uncle Daney said.

  Cole went into his stall and closed the door. He wasn’t so sure something would come, and he didn’t want to wait around for it. But he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  The first thing that came to them was the cart.

  Ray West and a carpenter friend and Cole built a ramp along one side of the barn, so Uncle Daney could get up into the cart. They used some wood that was stored in the back of the barn, some wood Ray had around, a little new wood, so that the ramp was all different shades of weathered pine. That made it look a little ramshackle, but really it was straight and strong and made a long, gradual slant up to the level of the cart.

  When the ramp was done, Ray brought the cart over in the big truck he used to carry his horses around. There were two old men with him to help unload it.

  It still wasn’t an elegant cart. It was square and high off the ground, and it had fat rubber tires, like a truck. It was bright red with a yellow pinstripe. Cole had painted the pinstripe on himself.

  “Goodness!” Mom said when she came out to take a look. “What a job you’ve done, Ray!”

  “Had plenty of help,” Ray West said. He looked excited. “Hook her up, Daney! Where’s Nip?”

  Cole ran to get him, and Nip was brushed and harnessed in record time.

  “Think you ought to put some reins on him, Daney?” one of the men asked. “Might startle folks, they see you drivin’ without ’em.”

  Uncle Daney cackled. “All right, put some on. Braided twine there on the wall—ought to be long enough.”

  While the reins were being put on, two more old men in a pickup truck stopped by. Ray West introduced them. Mom made coffee.

  Suddenly everything was ready. A man stood at Nip’s head, and Cole and Ray West picked up the shafts and pulled the cart into position behind Nip. It rolled smoothly and easily. Ray buckled the straps around the shafts, showing Cole how it was done. Then he led Nip around the yard a few times. Nip turned his ears back, listening to the sound of the cart behind him, but he didn’t seem alarmed. He was used to pulling all kinds of things.

  “Time to try it out, Daney,” Ray West said at last. He led Nip over to the ramp, and Uncle Daney wheeled himself up it. They had measured right. The platform was exactly the same height as the back of the cart, and Uncle Daney rolled smoothly into it. He wheeled up to the front.

  There was a seat there for a passenger and a wide empty space for Uncle Daney’s chair. There was a bar that came down behind the chair and locked in place, so the chair couldn’t roll backward. Uncle Daney put it down behind him and picked up the baling twine reins. He looked down at all of them. His eyes were as bright as a bird’s.

  “Lou?” he said. “There’s an empty seat up here.”

  Mom looked pleased—and worried. She climbed up beside
Uncle Daney.

  “Boys,” Uncle Daney said, “I’m takin’ this pretty gal for a spin. Nip, walk.” Slowly Nip crunched down the driveway. At the road Uncle Daney pressed a switch on the dashboard of the cart. A blinker came on. He turned out onto blacktop, and the bright red cart went down the road, both lights flashing now like the hazard lights on a truck.

  “Think that’s safe, Ray?” somebody asked. “If they was to get in trouble—”

  “Oh, heck, they won’t get in trouble! That horse’ll do anything Daney asks him to.”

  Ray West and Cole went into the barn and put down blocks for the cart to rest against when it wasn’t being used. Cole kept listening for Nip’s hooves in the drive-way. Mom could handle Nip, too, he was thinking. But it might have been better for him, or Ray West, to go out with Uncle Daney the first time.

  Half an hour passed. They didn’t come back. The coffee was cool and gray in the mugs, and everyone stood not talking, watching the road.

  Then a pickup came along, going slow, and pulled into the yard in a hesitant way. A man in overalls and a striped cap leaned out the window. “Was that Daney I seen down the road drivin’ a red cart?”

  “Yes,” said Ray West, and Cole asked, “Are they all right?”

  “Oh, heck, yes! They’ll be here in a few minutes.” The man in the cap stopped his truck and got out to wait with the rest of them.

  Cole wanted to go down to the road and look, but that would make him feel like a little kid. He scuffed his foot in the gravel and drew tic-tac-toe. Pop’s truck pulled into the yard.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mom and Uncle Daney are out in the cart,” Cole said. “They should be back any minute—”

  Pop went down to the end of the driveway, and now Cole could go, too. At first they didn’t see anything. Then Cole heard a faint crunching sound and a high-pitched cackle, and he saw a small red spot in the distance, coming slowly nearer.

  Mom’s hair was windblown, and she was laughing. Uncle Daney said, “Whoa,” and looked down at Pop. “’Fraid supper’ll be late, Bill. Your wife’s been out with me, joyridin’.”

  Pop looked at the bright new cart and at Mom laughing down at him. He turned and looked back at the little knot of old men in work clothes, waiting by the barn door. Cole thought he looked trapped.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  COLE DIDN’T WANT Pop to be trapped.

  They had to keep Nip. As soon as they had the cart, there was no other choice. Uncle Daney was out every day, sometimes alone, sometimes with Cole. Often he drove into abandoned fields and sat while Nip grazed. The grass they had seeded was growing well, but it was still too young and tender for hard grazing. Now that he had another set of wheels, Uncle Daney could take Nip farther and graze him more.

  He went visiting. He stopped in people’s dooryards, and they came out and leaned on the cart to talk with him. He stopped in the middle of dirt roads to talk with men who leaned out the windows of their pickups. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t get out of the cart alone. Half the people around here visited only from the cabs of their trucks and left the engines running. Uncle Daney was just like everybody else now. Pop couldn’t take that new freedom away from him.

  On the other hand, there still wasn’t any money. Pop had sold a cord of wood to one of Uncle Daney’s friends the day the cart came. Cole figured he could claim a little of that money for Nip if he had to. But the chain saw needed repairs, and when Cole saw the bill for that, he understood the hole Pop was in.

  He looked in the help wanted ads every night. Nobody seemed to need his help.

  While he thought, summer was passing too quickly. Cole measured by the work they did. One bushel of beans canned. One log down the Hogback. One tree cut before Nip came back. Day by day, log by log, it went.

  In August Uncle Daney taught Cole how to find chanterelles. “Them’re the one mushroom I dare eat!” he said, and he told enough stories of towering loggers dead in a moment to keep Cole from wanting to experiment. He found plenty of chanterelles, but not enough to sell. Mom fried them up in butter.

  Then it was blackberry time, and Uncle Daney drove Cole far afield to overgrown roadside pastures and the edges of new clearings. “You check over there?” he’d ask. “Oh, there’s a big, juicy feller! Get him—no, to your left! Higher!” Blackberrying with Uncle Daney was a test of Cole’s patience.

  They did get enough berries, though, to send into town with Pop and sell at the store. That was enough to keep Cole going. Five dollars, eight dollars, ten dollars …

  Once they went farther than usual and came on a place where the Allards were cutting firewood. There was a rough road into the woods, littered with flakes of bark, and Uncle Daney turned in. Logged-off areas were good for blackberries, and they grew thick along the edge of the road, berries the size of Cole’s thumb.

  Uncle Daney pulled the cart close to one side of the road. That way he could reach from where he sat and pick the highest berries. Not many went into the bucket. Ahead, behind, Cole pushed deep into the bushes. He was so scratched already, so mosquito-bitten that he hardly noticed anymore. All he saw were blackberries: one for hay, one for jam, one for pie, one for mouth. There were chain saws working in the distance. Nip stood patiently, ears pricked toward the sound.

  After a while they heard a truck. Uncle Daney pulled Nip farther to the side. Cole went to stand at Nip’s head, just in case.

  “He won’t go nowhere,” Uncle Daney said. “He knows trucks.”

  When the truck finally growled into view, it seemed to fill the narrow road completely. Cole tightened his grip on Nip’s bridle, but Nip just watched, mildly interested, while the truck slowed down and crawled along the other edge of the road.

  It was a tall stock truck, and there were horses inside. Cole could hear their hooves thump and scrape on the floor. There was a sign on the truck door: ALLARD BROS. FIREWOOD. The driver waved as he passed, and in the passenger side of the cab Cole saw Roger’s surprised face.

  “If them fellers are leavin’ for the day, must be time for us to go, too,” Uncle Daney said. “You keep on pickin’, Cole. I’ll drive up the road a piece and find a spot to turn around.”

  The sun was down by the time they hit blacktop again, but there was no real reason to have the flashers on. Uncle Daney just liked the effect on passing drivers, Cole thought.

  When they came to Ray West’s house, Uncle Daney pulled into the yard.

  “Ray’s out back with the horses,” Mrs. West said, coming to the door. “Just drive around the barn.”

  “I might just’s well talk with the boss,” Uncle Daney said. “This horse’s feet need trimmin’. Will he do it in trade for some blackberries?”

  “He most certainly will! Go around back and tell him.”

  Ray West had his team hitched to a log. Out in the pasture he had six orange road cones set up in pairs, hot very far apart. A green tennis ball was balanced on top of each cone. As Cole and Uncle Daney came around the corner, Ray West drove between one pair of cones, turned sharply, and headed for the next. The end of the log brushed one of the cones; it teetered, and the ball fell off. Ray West turned to pick it up and saw them.

  “Well, hello! You runnin’ the road again, Daney?”

  “I been workin’ all day,” Uncle Daney said. “What d’you call this game?”

  Ray looked down at the ball in his hand. “Oh, I’m just practicin’ for the fair.”

  “What do you mean?” Cole asked.

  “The Farm Horse Contest. You never heard of it, Cole?”

  Cole shook his head.

  “Well, it’s no wonder!” Ray West said. “They put us on Friday night, the night the fair opens. Figure it’s not interesting enough to have on Saturday, when most of the folks actually come!”

  “But what is it?”

  “Well, it’s a bunch of … games, really. Log skiddin’, pullin’ a wagon around an obstacle course. It’s based on how a farmer really works with a team. Chance f
or a feller like me to have a little fun, win a little prize money.”

  Cole felt himself go still all over.

  “So you got to not knock off any of them balls?” Uncle Daney was asking, as if nothing had occurred.

  Cole leaned forward and interrupted. “How much prize money?”

  Ray West looked surprised. “Well, now, it varies from year to year. Usually fifty dollars for first place, and it goes down by ten dollars for each placing, so second would be forty, and so on.”

  “And is it just for teams?” Cole asked. “Or can a single horse come?”

  “Well, most people work a team, so that’s what they bring, but there’s a Single-Horse Skid—Hey! I never thought. You want to go, Daney? About ten miles. You could drive over yourself Friday morning.”

  Uncle Daney seemed slow to answer. Cole aimed a swift kick at the near wheel of his chair, jolting him a little.

  “Might be fun,” Uncle Daney said. “When is it?”

  “Week from tomorrow.” Ray came closer and looked into the back of the cart. “Oh, hey! Blackberries!”

  Before they left Ray West’s, Cole had seen the class list for the Farm Horse Contest.

  There were two classes Nip could go in: Single-Horse Log Skid and the Egg and Spoon Race. Cole wasn’t too sure about Egg and Spoon.

  “Can Nip be ridden? Have you been on him?” he asked. They were on their way home now. Nip’s feet had been trimmed, and they’d had dessert and a cup of coffee with Ray West and his wife. Now it was dark enough for the flashers to be really useful.

  Uncle Daney didn’t answer for a moment. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, the baling twine reins slack in his hands. “Ay-yup,” he said finally. “I been on him.”

  “Then we can go in Egg and Spoon—if he’ll let me ride him. Will he?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “If we win two first prizes,” Cole said, “that’s a hundred dollars! Plus there’s a hundred-pound bag of grain for every horse that enters. We’ll have to practice all week!”