Uncle Daney's Way

by Jessie Haas

  Uncle Daney didn’t answer at all this time. Cole looked at him. He couldn’t see well enough to make out Uncle Daney’s expression.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to do it?”

  Uncle Daney rasped a hand across his bristly chin and sighed. “You’re a lot like your grandpa, Coley. Lean into the collar and keep on pullin’ till you get what you’re after.”

  Cole didn’t know what to say. His grandfather hadn’t liked Uncle Daney. Had Uncle Daney liked Grandpa? His voice had sounded—what? Sad? Angry?

  The trailer lights came into view. Nip lifted his head and broke into a trot.

  Mom and Pop were eating supper at their own table tonight, and Cole went in with them. Suppers together was something Mom had insisted on when he moved out to the barn. Tonight Cole was glad of that.

  He told them about the Farm Horse Contest and, after a moment’s wondering if he ought to, about the prize money.

  “I guess I’d heard about that,” Pop said. “One of the Allard brothers works part-time with us, and they always go.”

  Cole remembered the big Allard truck driving past them that afternoon and the sound of horses in back. The Allards worked their horses every day of the week. How could they not win?

  But who had more years of skidding logs than Uncle Daney? What horse was any better than Nip?

  “Well, it’s a chance,” Pop said. “Have to say I’ve got a lot more faith in that horse than I did a few months ago. Like to keep him around if we can.”

  “And how will you get there?” Mom asked, and quickly answered herself. “Of course, you’ll just hop in your chariot and go!”

  Cole waited. He hadn’t felt as if he was asking permission, but it would be just as well to have it.

  “Well, it does sound like fun,” Mom said. “And there’s a band at night, Bill.” Before Mom and Pop bought this place, when money was not quite so tight, they used to go dancing once in a while.

  “What time does this thing start, Cole?” Pop asked.

  “Five sharp.”

  “I’ll see if I can get off work early,” Pop said. “If you’ll pack us a picnic supper, Lou—”

  That night, as he lay in bed, thinking ahead to the fair, Cole heard music coming from Uncle Daney’s stall. At first he thought it was a radio, but the sound kept starting and stopping and picking up again. He got out of bed and went across the aisle.

  Uncle Daney was sitting up in bed. It looked strange, as always, to see how thin and flat his legs lay under the blanket when most people would have bent their knees. Uncle Daney had a harmonica, and as Cole watched, he played the first few bars of a slow, sad tune, stopped, and shook his head.

  Cole was about to back away and leave him alone. But as he moved, Uncle Daney caught sight of him.

  “Wake you up?”

  “No.” Cole came into the stall. “What’s the matter? Don’t you remember the rest of it?”

  “Used to keep time with m’toe,” Uncle Daney said, looking down at the small, still bumps his feet made in the blanket. “Tryin’ to figger out how to do it now.”

  “Maybe try something livelier?” Cole suggested.

  Uncle Daney glanced up at him. “Ay-yup, I’m a-wallowin’ in self-pity, boy, and I’m enjoyin’ it.” He stared so hard at his feet that Cole looked, too. He almost expected to see them move. It didn’t seem possible that anything so small could resist.

  After a minute Uncle Daney looked up. For the first time in a long while Cole noticed the lines in his face, running wearily downward. But Uncle Daney’s blue eyes were as alive as ever. “You’re right,” he said. “How about a dance tune?” He lifted the harmonica to his mouth, and its thin, wailing voice quickened. At first the rhythm was unsteady, but Cole started to thump time with his foot on the floor. Uncle Daney’s eyebrows waggled thanks above the harmonica, and he swung into the chorus. Then he put the harmonica down.

  “Oh, we had some dances!” he said. “Some of them were pretty bad men, but we had fun. I ever tell you how Big Ed Davies danced a hole in the bunkhouse floor?”

  “No,” Cole said, settling down at the end of the bed. As he listened, he closed his eyes. He could see the boy in the old picture, dancing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE NEXT DAY it rained, and they couldn’t practice. Then they had to wait a day for the ground to dry out. Then Mom wanted the cucumbers picked, and she wanted help making pickles. Cole and Uncle Daney sat out in the shade beside the barn and sliced cucumbers into a big bowl, Nip grazed in the pasture, and they made no progress.

  Uncle Daney didn’t seem to mind. He breathed the hot, tangy pickle smell floating out the trailer windows and closed his eyes. “Smells like home,” he said. Cole squirmed and cut faster.

  Finally all the cucumbers were sliced. Cole ran out to get Nip and harness him. He got some sap buckets from the back stall, and he set them up in a pattern like Ray West’s road cones. Then he drove Nip out to the log pile, with Uncle Daney following more slowly. He wrapped the chain around a log and hooked the whippletree onto it. Uncle Daney came up, the wheels of the chair streaked with mud.

  “You’ll have to hitch him yourself,” Cole said. This was the part he was worried about. “Can you reach?”

  “No way to know without tryin’,” Uncle Daney said. He turned Nip in a neat, small square—neater, and smaller, than Cole could ever manage. Then he backed Nip one step. “All right, whoa.” Nip’s heels were very close to the whippletree.

  Uncle Daney brought the chair up close and un-snapped the tug from the ring it was hooked to. That was the easy part. Holding the end of the tug, Uncle Daney reached down for the whippletree.

  Too far, Cole thought. He can’t do it. Uncle Daney could reach as far as his toes, but the chair held him up so his feet were a few inches above the ground.

  Uncle Daney sat up, red in the face. “Nope, can’t reach. If you was to get me somethin’ with a crook on the end: a cane, or a crowbar—”

  “Be right back.” Cole ran to the barn for the crowbar.

  Uncle Daney was still holding the tug when Cole got back. “That ought to be just about right,” he said, taking the crowbar in his free hand. He leaned over, caught the crooked end under the whippletree, and lifted it high enough that he could catch hold and hook the tug into it.

  “Well, that’s one side,” he said. He wheeled himself around in front of Nip, who stood resting one back foot, half-asleep, and hitched on to the other side.

  “They don’t start timing till the log starts moving,” Cole said. “So it’s okay if you’re slow.”

  Uncle Daney was wheeling around Nip again and momentarily out of sight. When he came into view, he was tucking his teeth into his shirt pocket, grinning. “Pretty near a year since I hooked a horse,” he said. “All right, you’re the boss. What do we do now?”

  Cole explained the course to him. It wasn’t the real course. That would be laid out the day of the fair, and it would be a surprise to everybody. But Ray West had told him what it was usually like. Some simple sets of two or four cones to pass between. Some sharp angles from one set to the next, so the driver had to judge closely when to start turning. A row of five or six cones to weave in and out of. A lawn chair for the driver to sit down in for thirty seconds, while his horse waited without moving, without the driver holding the reins.

  “That part’ll be easy enough,” Cole said.

  “Well, you never know,” Uncle Daney said. “He stands good here to home, but bein’ at the fair might excite him some. All right, let’s try ’er. Walk, Nip.”

  Nip and the log passed between the first two sap buckets easily, turned, headed for the second. There was a thump, and one of the buckets went rolling away.

  “Whoa,” Uncle Daney said. “Couldn’t see enough—can’t keep up with him.”

  “Take a wider angle next time,” Cole said, setting up the sap bucket. Uncle Daney brought Nip back to the start to try again.

  This time he did better through the fi
rst set of buckets. But he still couldn’t keep up, had to crane his neck to see where Nip was going.… “Whoa!” Uncle Daney sounded breathless and wheezy. This wasn’t going to work.

  “All right, haw, Nip. Walk on.” Through the second set: “Whoa.” Nip stopped obediently, with the log still between the sap buckets, while Uncle Daney wheeled ahead to the next pair. “All right, gee. Walk on.”

  “It’s based on time, too,” Cole said after a minute.

  “What’s the ground like down to the fairgrounds?”

  “It’s pretty flat,” Cole said, “but it’s all grass.”

  Uncle Daney took a red bandanna out of his pocket and wiped the sweat off his face. “Think you’ll have to push me, then,” he said. “S’pose that’ll be all right with the fair people?”

  “I guess so. I’ll ask Ray.”

  With Cole pushing, it went easier. They could keep Nip moving right along, never touching a bucket, never wasting any time making a wide angle when a sharp one was needed. But after twice through Uncle Daney was breathing hard, and his undershirt was soaked with sweat.

  “You do it, Cole,” he said.

  “I don’t need to practice,” Cole said. “I won’t be doing it.”

  “He will. You got to repeat things with a horse, so he knows you mean it.”

  So Cole tried. It was harder than it looked to judge the distance between the sap buckets and to judge how sharply to turn. He had to say the right thing to Nip, say it fast enough, and then correct Nip, straighten him out before he turned too far. They crunched a couple of sap buckets before Cole got the hang of it.

  “You want to try again?” he asked. Uncle Daney was looking rested now.

  “Nope,” Uncle Daney said firmly. “I been skiddin’ logs all my life. What I don’t know it’s too goldarned late to learn. You go again. ’Twon’t hurt you to have the practice.”

  Cole went, twice more, and the second time he had a clean, fast round. But he couldn’t help worrying. Of course, Uncle Daney knew all there was to know about skidding logs in the woods. But skidding a log between pairs of road cones at the county fair was different. Skidding logs from a wheelchair was different. He wished he could convince Uncle Daney to try again, but he knew he wasn’t really the boss here.

  “Guess we better stop now,” Uncle Daney said when Cole completed his second time around the course. “We’re tearin’ up the grass pretty good.”

  The next day was the day before the fair. Uncle Daney refused to practice again, and Cole couldn’t really blame him. When he looked at the grass and saw the slick, deep gouges the log had made, he knew they’d done all they could. It wouldn’t help to have money for hay if they wrecked the pasture getting it.

  They spent the morning washing the harness with old rags and some of Mom’s liquid oil soap. When it was done, it didn’t look much different, but Cole and Uncle Daney were covered with gray, dirty soap streaks and splashes of water.

  After lunch Mom gave Cole a boiled egg and a spoon, and he practiced for the Egg and Spoon Race.

  In Egg and Spoon you rode around the skidding course balancing the egg on the spoon. If the egg fell off, you were out. If you made it all the way around, you were judged on time. “Most of ’em don’t make it,” Ray West had said.

  There was no point putting the harness on just for this. Cole called Nip to the gate, put the egg and spoon on top of the fence post, and then climbed to the top bar. Nip gave Cole a thoughtful look and swung his rump away.

  “Here, Nip!” Uncle Daney said sharply. “Over now!” His voice was gruffer than usual. Nip promptly moved back toward the gate again. Uncle Daney winked up at Cole. “Old devil’s got a mind of his own sometimes! Hurry up, hop on!”

  Cole jumped and landed astride Nip’s broad, warm back. Nip seemed to lurch forward without moving his feet. “Whoa!” Uncle Daney said sharply. Cole reached for his egg and spoon.

  “Does he mind if I ride him?”

  “Nope. He just don’t take it serious, is all. He’ll do what you tell him, but speak a little sharper.”

  “All right.” Cole pointed Nip roward the sap buckets. He put his thumb on the egg this time and held on to Nip’s mane with the other hand while they went around the course. He did have to speak more sharply, and he saw Nip’s ears going back and forth, instead of settling into the serious angle they stayed at when he was working. But it didn’t feel like this was going to be hard. Nip’s walk was smooth and slow, and he didn’t do anything suddenly. Cole took his thumb off the egg and started around again. He watched it closely. It never rocked in the bowl of the spoon.

  Well, this was easy! “Will he trot?” he asked Uncle Daney.

  “Ay-yup! Cluck a few times with your tongue.” Uncle Daney made a clucking sound himself. Nip pricked his ears toward Uncle Daney, as if surprised, and started to trot.

  Cole had ridden a trotting pony before. He remembered bobbing up and down so quickly that his eyesight blurred. This was nothing like that. Nip’s trot was slow motion, one big, slow, pillowy jounce and then another. They were headed straight toward a sap bucket. “Whoa,” Cole said. Nip stopped abruptly, and the egg rolled off the spoon.

  Nip pricked his ears at it thoughtfully. He put his head -down, nosed the egg for a moment, and then took it in his mouth. Disbelieving, Cole listened to him eat it. The scritchy sound as Nip crunched the shell sent shivers - down his back.

  “That’s nothin’,” Uncle Daney said. “Out in the woods he used to eat half a baloney sandwich every day. With mustard!”

  Cole swung one leg over Nip’s lowered neck and slid down his side. “Guess I won’t trot him,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to practice again?”

  “Ay-yup. Want to shine up my wheels and wash m’face and see if your mother’ll give me a haircut. Usually a lot of pretty women at the fair, aren’t there?”

  Cole gave up. Nip wasn’t the only one who, wouldn’t take some things seriously.

  CHAPTER TEN

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING they set out.

  A heavy fog hung low on the Hogback. The sun was shining above it, and the fog’s brightness stung Cole’s eyes when he led Nip out of the barn. The wheels of the cart rolled smoothly over the gravel as he brought it around to the side of the barn, where Uncle Daney was going up the ramp—so slowly, working so hard. Cole’s gut was tied in a hard, nervous knot. He thought if he had to go that slowly, he’d burst. But Uncle Daney was grinning, his mouth sunken, false teeth wetly outlined in his shirt pocket.

  “Ready to go?” He dropped the safety bar behind him and picked up the reins.

  Mom came out of the trailer as they started down the driveway and handed Cole a paper bag. “Your lunches. Uncle Daney, drive safely!”

  “Oh, Lou, don’t fuss. We ain’t goin’ but ten miles.” But they were going into town, straight through town, out the other side. There were a lot of things in town that might frighten Nip. Cole looked at the limp twine reins, frayed and fuzzy, no thicker than his finger. They might make a passing motorist feel more comfortable, but Cole knew there was no way those pieces of string could really hold Nip.

  Uncle Daney leaned forward and hit the button for the flashers. They drove straight into a bank of fog.

  For a long time they could see no more than the roadside trees and bushes. Uncle Daney sang as he drove, in a high, chirpy tenor—old logging songs and cowboy songs. He made Cole help him with the choruses. Cole hated singing in school and usually just moved his lips. But he figured he couldn’t spoil Uncle Daney’s singing, and Uncle Daney told him he didn’t sound half bad. The knot in Cole’s stomach loosened for a while.

  But as the fog burned off and the sun came out, they came to the crossroad, the farthest they’d ever driven. This meant turning onto a bigger road, with more traffic, tractor-trailers and dump trucks. Cole leaned forward in his seat, ready to grab the reins.

  They hadn’t been on the main road five minutes when a big yellow dump truck came around the corner toward them. Cole heard hims
elf gasp. Uncle Daney took a hand off the reins and reached over to pat Cole’s knee. “Easy there.” Nip pointed his ears thoughtfully at the dump truck and walked on without faltering.

  “Better calm down, Coley,” Uncle Daney said. “We got a long way to go.”

  Nip was strong, steady, and untiring. But the clock on the church said one-thirty by the time they hit Main Street. Their lunch was long since eaten, and both of them were hungry.

  “Took longer’n I thought,” Uncle Daney said. “Guess I’ll ask Ray to bring him back tonight.”

  “You don’t think he’ll be too tired for the contest?”

  “Nope. Wearin’ his feet down, though, walkin’ on this hardtop. Next year we’ll put shoes on him.”

  Next year. Uncle Daney was taking it for granted. But, Cole thought, even if they won both classes in the Farm Horse Contest, that was only half the money they needed. Where was the rest going to come from? He sat running the numbers through his head again, hardly noticing the stares they got—big red horse and big red cart, clopping down Main Street, stopping at the traffic light.

  A lot of people waved. Cole thought it was funny that Uncle Daney, stuck in a wheelchair at their out-of-the-way place, should know so many people here in town. Then he noticed that one person waving was Brie Alexander. She was waving at him. He felt his face get as red as the cart, and before he figured out that he should wave back, it was too late.

  The fairground was on the other edge of town. They turned off the street at the sign and headed downhill, toward the sound of hammering and voices. A man was organizing the ticket booth, and he seemed surprised to see them.

  “Fair doesn’t start for another three hours,” he said.

  “We need to rest this horse before the contest,” Uncle Daney said.

  “Oh, you’re competitors.” The man stuck a pink card into a crack on the cart’s dash. “Go on down then. You’ll be at the far end—and keep him down there, so he doesn’t leave anything for the city folks to step in.”

  They drove through the grounds, where people were setting up booths and carnival rides, cooking sausages and popping popcorn. At the end two men in blue T-shirts were roping off a big section for the Farm Horse Contest. They showed Cole and Uncle Daney where to tie Nip, and they lifted Uncle Daney down out of the cart, wheelchair and all.