Fields of Home (31 page)

Bill and I set the new strawberry plants as carefully as we could. There were a hundred of them, and we scattered them pretty well over the whole field. They were bigger than the other plants, so we picked off a few of the outside leaves, set the plants in little hollows, and raked out the footprints around them. When we’d finished we couldn’t look across the field and pick out any one of them. Then, before we went to hoe hills for the yellow corn in the lower hidden field, we stacked the pots together, laid them by the orchard wall, and covered them with stones.

Grandfather got home from Lewiston at noon. He brought Old Nell in dripping sweat, and blowing like a steam engine. We had steak for dinner, but Grandfather would eat only a few mouthfuls before we took Uncle Levi out to see the tomato, strawberry, and potato fields. They came to the hidden field while Bill and I were dropping the yellow seeds into the corn hills. After they’d walked all around the field, dropping pumpkin seed here and there in the hills, Uncle Levi stopped beside us, and said to Bill, “I’ll drop corn with Ralph a while, if you’re of a mind to hoe in the cover dirt.” Then he took Bill’s seed basket and we worked side by side.

Uncle Levi and I were about in the middle of the field, when he stopped and reached his hand deep into his overalls pocket. When he took it out, he had a few red kernels of corn in it. “There, by hub!” he said as he looked around. “Calc’late this is as good a place as any for the red ears.” Then he knelt and dropped five kernels, carefully spaced in a circle, as he said, “One for the blackbird, one for the crow; one for the cutworm, and two to grow. There! There by hub! Know what them’s for, Ralph?”

“Well, so as to raise some red ears, I guess.”

“Know what red ears is for?” he asked.

I just shook my head, and said, “No, sir.”

“Great day!” Uncle Levi chuckled. “Well, you will. Come the husking, first boy to find a red ear gets to kiss his girl.” Uncle Levi was still kneeling. He peeked up at me, and asked, “Kissed Annie Littlehale yet?”

I didn’t want to tell him I had, and I didn’t want to lie to him, either. I was trying to think of some way to change the subject when Uncle Levi sprang up, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Shouldn’t ought to have asked you, but, by hub, I’m glad you done it. Awful nice girl, Annie. Clever as a kitten. I fetched down a box of candy in my valise. Calc’lated you might like to take it along when you went for the cows.” After we’d gone on dropping seed for a dozen or so hills, Uncle Levi laid a hand over on my shoulder. When I raised my head, there was almost a sad look on his face. “A picked flower soon fades, and there ain’t nothing to do but heave it out,” he said. “The Almighty meant ’em to be left on the bush till seed time.” Then he went back to dropping corn.

34

A God’s Wonder

U
NCLE LEVI
didn’t care much about working in the fields. He did come out and ride the new two-row cultivator for a few minutes, when Grandfather first brought it home. But, until haying, he spent most of his time on the barn addition. The big timbers were too heavy for one man to lift and move into place, so Uncle Levi built himself a derrick, and rigged it with ropes and pulleys from the horsefork. The first Saturday after he came, he went to Lewiston with Grandfather. They were gone nearly the whole day, and when they came home, there was a new horse tied to the back of the democrat wagon. She was a bay, about the same size and type of horse as Old Nell. When I looked at her teeth, the pits showed that she was seven years old, just as Nell was. “Yella colt’s a-getting on in years,” Uncle Levi told me when I was putting the new mare into the spare box stall. “You boys been working him pretty cussed hard this spring, and a little rest wouldn’t hurt him none. Do you calc’late he’d work for me on that derrick the way Thomas says he done for you in the woods?”

“I think he would,” I said, “but there’s something Grandfather doesn’t know. I always bribe the colt with a piece of apple after he’s made a good steady pull.”

“A bribe ain’t a bad piece of business in the right place,” Uncle Levi said, and winked at me. “You’ll find a box of choclates under the wagon seat when you go to fetch your cows.”

The yella colt did work for Uncle Levi just as well as he had for me, but for a while his teeth got edgy from eating too many apples. With the derrick and a hand tackle, they could move the heaviest timbers into any position Uncle Levi wanted. First, he laid the sills on the new foundation, set supporting posts in the cellar, and placed the two sixteen-inch-square center struts to carry the weight of the barn floor. Next, he mortised the floor joists into the struts and sills. They weren’t hewn square, as the other timbers were, but, after they were all mortised solidly in place, he adzed the rounded tops, so that anyone could sight across the whole floor frame without finding a single hump or hollow.

All through the winter, and during my first summer on the farm, no one but Uncle Levi had come to visit. After we set out the strawberry plants, there was never a Sunday that several carriages weren’t driven into the dooryard. Grandfather began wearing his best suit all day Sunday, and he loved to take people from field to field and show them the growing crops, the stonewalls we had built, and the big pile of blasted tree stumps in the pasture. Berries on the potted plants Uncle Levi had brought began to ripen in early June. Grandfather would watch them all through the week, but he’d seldom pick one. On Sundays, he’d take the visitors all around the field, let them pick berries to eat, and boast about the plants that were bearing in their first year.

Late one Sunday afternoon, when we thought all the visitors had gone, Annie and I walked through the strawberry field on our way to the pastures for the cows. The sun was just slipping down behind the pines on Lisbon Ridge, I was holding Annie’s hand in mine, and we were watching how the long shadow ran up and down the row as we swung our arms. I heard the rattle of wheels, and looked up to see a buggy coming through the gap in the stonewall at the end of the orchard. Grandfather was sitting between a man and woman I had never seen, and we heard him tell them, “That’s my grandson; Ralphie. Mary’s boy. Him and Annie Littlehale is awful sweet on one another.” For just a fraction of a second, Annie’s hand loosened on mine. Then it squeezed tighter, and we kept on toward the pasture gate.

Of all the visitors who came during the summer, the one Grandfather liked to see best was the one he’d dreaded most in the spring. Every time the man from the cannery came, Grandfather would drop whatever he was doing and go to meet him. They didn’t only go to the sweet-corn field, but to every field on the place. By haying time, samples of the soil from every field had been tested, and Grandfather knew just what kind of fertilizer would be best for each one, and what crop would probably do the best on it. He kept himself, Bill, and me going from daylight till dark, cultivating, hoeing, weeding, spraying potato vines with Paris green, and dusting the corn with powder to keep worms out of the ears. Each time he’d come back from taking the cannery man around, he’d pick up his hoe and sing out, “By fire, we’ll show ’em what kind of logs makes wide shingles! Wager you there ain’t a cleaner field of sweet corn nowheres this side the Androscoggin River.”

Where haying had been a big, hard job the year before, it was almost like a holiday that summer. Uncle Levi did most of the mowing and raking while the rest of us worked in the row crop fields. Grandfather hardly pitched a forkful of hay, and he never scolded or tried to hurry me once. In the field, Bill and I pitched, Uncle Levi built load, and Grandfather raked scatterings or showed visitors the strawberry field and the tomatoes that were beginning to set on the vines. The yella colt had become an expert on the tote rope. Uncle Levi would set the big horsefork deep in the load, cluck quietly, and the old horse would ease three or four hundred pounds of hay smoothly to the mows. As soon as I’d jerk the trip line, he’d come back to the rack for a bit of sugar, a piece of biscuit, or whatever Uncle Levi held out for him. Bill and I stowed away in the mows, and Grandfather tended the bees during the unloading.

We left Jacob’s field till the last. When all but one load of hay was in the barn, I slid down from the mow to find Millie with her sunbonnet on and a pitchfork in her hands. “You don’t cal’late I’m a-going to let this haying go by without so much as a hand in it?” she asked Uncle Levi. “Ralph and I done it all alone last summer, and, by gorry, we’re a-going to do a piece of it alone this time. You and Bill find something else to do while we finish the haying.” Then she laughed and climbed up onto the hayrack with me.

Right after haying, we sprinkled nitrate of soda around each tomato plant, and were lucky enough to get a rain that dissolved it and soaked it down to the roots. It worked wonders. During the next three weeks, the vines spread out till it was hard to find a path between them, new tomatoes set by the thousands, and the early fruit swelled like fatting pigs. Grandfather found the first one turning pink on the twentieth of July. He shouted so loud that Bill and I heard him way down in the hidden fields, and Millie and Uncle Levi heard him at the buildings. “Come a-running! Come a-running, children!” he called, as we hurried toward the high field. “Come see what I got to show you! By fire, we’ll show ’em what kind of logs makes wide shingles!” As we all picked our way carefully through the field, Grandfather pointed out one tomato after another that was turning whitish-pink. “Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive!” he gloated as he turned the thick leaves back and peeked under them. “Did ever you see such a tarnal crop of early tomatoes in all the days of your life? Gorry! Gorry sakes alive! And I didn’t cal’late this old field was good for nothing but timothy hay!” He stopped suddenly, looked up into my face, and smiled. “Cal’late we’re a-going to have to call this Ralphie’s field,” he said.

I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, and my voice was husky when I said, “You scared me that time when you told Mr. Swale you were going to plant it back to timothy.”

“Didn’t tell him no such a thing,” Grandfather chuckled. “I recollect it well. ’Bijah, he asked me two questions to once. Wa’n’t no call to answer but one of ’em, was there?”

On Grandfather’s next trip with the butter, he took two market baskets of tomatoes to Lewiston. They brought twelve cents a pound, and he had the money tied up in the corner of his bandanna handkerchief when he came home. He called for us to come running as he turned Old Nell into the driveway, and was climbing out over the wheel before she’d hardly stopped at the doorstone. “Take it, Ralphie! Take it!” he said, as he untied the handkerchief and showed us the money. “Four dollars and eighty-four cents for them two little baskets of tomatoes. Take it, Ralphie! The first idea of ’em was your’n, and the first money from ’em is your’n, too. Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive! The crop off that old stony field’s a-going to fetch a tarnal heap of money. Don’t cal’late Mary’ll have to worry now ’bout how she’s a-going to fetch up the children.”

The tomato crop did make a good profit. We’d taken a good many spring wagon loads off the field before the price dropped below ten cents a pound. After the first ton, Grandfather came home with a new Studebaker wagon. From then till the height of the season had passed, Uncle Levi took a load to Lisbon Falls every day to go on the Portland train, and Grandfather took a democrat wagon load to Lewiston. Bill and I did most of the picking, while Millie and Annie packed the fruit in bright, new boxes.

With our being so busy in the tomato field, we had to hire two men and a team of horses for cultivating and hoeing the corn and potatoes. The man from the cannery watched the sweet corn carefully. When it was ready, he brought pickers and wagons, and cleaned the whole field in a single day.

Every minute that Uncle Levi wasn’t working in the hayfield or hauling tomatoes, he and the yella colt worked on the new addition for the barn. Uncle Levi had built a cradle that reached forty feet back into the barnyard from the new foundation. On it, he’d put together the whole gable end for the addition. Each upright, girder, and cross-brace was exactly over the paths Grandfather and I had tramped in the November snow, and the story pole was polished from handling till it shone like new bronze. There wasn’t a nail or a spike anywhere, but all the joints were driven tight, bored through with a pair of two-inch auger holes, and pinned solid with wooden treenails. Overlapping the gable, with its lower ends resting at the mortise holes where it would stand on the sills, was the center-frame. Except for the cross-braces, it was built exactly like the gable. The walls lay spread back on either side of the foundation, like the open pages of a great book. Each beam, upright, and cross-brace was in place, but the treenails were driven only part way home, so they could be pulled and the raising done piece by piece.

When the price of tomatoes dropped to fifty cents a bushel, we stopped packing them for the Portland and Lewiston markets. From then till apple-picking time, we picked twice a week for the cannery, and people from miles around came with bushel baskets to buy them for canning. Most of the apples were in the cellar when, one morning, the whole floor of the valley was sparkling with white frost. Grandfather and I went to the high field right after breakfast, to see how badly it had hit the tomatoes. It hadn’t touched them at all. The millions of small rocks had held enough of the sun’s heat to keep the frost away from the ground.

Grandfather worked with the bees that forenoon, waited for the mailman, and told him to pass the word for all who wanted to, to come and help themselves to pickling tomatoes. Before evening, there were a couple of dozen buggies lined up by the wall at the top of Niah’s field. And the high field looked as if a Sunday school picnic were being held there. Every woman that had any children had brought them, and they were carrying ripe and green tomatoes away in pails, baskets, tubs, and wash boilers. Grandfather spent most of the afternoon lugging the smaller children around the strawberry field and hunting them the last ripe berries.

Bill and I mulched the strawberry field deep with marsh grass as soon as the apples were picked. Then we cut and shocked the yellow corn in the hidden field, and started the potato digging. All fall, Grandfather had been digging his hands in under the potato vines. Whenever he’d find a big one, he’d shout, “Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive! Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you, Ralphie? Best potato soil this side the Androscoggin River. Wouldn’t be s’prised a tarnal mite if it would fetch a crop of ’leven, twelve hundred bushels.” Then he’d straighten up, look around the field, and say, “Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes! And to think, scarcely a year agone we sot axe to the first tree for the clearing. By fire, I wisht Father could see it.”

The potato crop on the wilderness field did a lot better than even Grandfather had expected. We had four men to help us dig, and as the forks opened the hills and raked through the black loam, wide rows of smooth russet-brown potatoes stretched the length of the field. Before we began hauling them to the cellar, as many men had come to see them as there had been women and children come for pickling tomatoes. Hundreds of bushels were sold right from the field, and Grandfather would give each neighbor who came a bushel basket, and say, “Walk abouts the field and pick yourself out a basketful for seed. Don’t cal’late there’s better seed potatoes this side the Androscoggin River.” He had a little brown book that he carried in his pocket, and he marked down every bushel that was sold or hauled to the cellar. When the last load was in, we added up the book, and the total was sixteen hundred and twenty-nine bushels.

Uncle Levi had been as busy on the barn as Grandfather, Bill, and I had been in the fields. After every rafter was cut, and every joint in the new frame fitted and pegged, he’d taken the clapboards and sheathing off the end of the main barn. Then he had cut the mortises in the old frame to hold the tenons of the new side and roof girders. “There, by hub!” he told me when he showed me the end mortises in the gables for the four-by-sixteen-inch ridgepole. “There’s going to be a ridgepole that cussed yella colt can’t jerk out with a horsefork!” Then he chuckled, and said, “Great day of judgment! Him and Thomas has trod the same path this year agone, ain’t they? Recollect the first day we hitched the old critter to the hayrake?” He looked down to the foot of the derrick, where the yella colt was standing, resting with one hip dropped low. Uncle Levi laid his hand on my shoulder, and his voice was sort of hushed when he said, “It’s a God’s wonder.”

The first week after the potato harvest was as exciting as roundup week used to be in Colorado. The mailman had passed the word that Grandfather was going to have his barn-raising on Saturday, and there wasn’t a day all week that three or four men didn’t come to see the solid chestnut frame, and to say they’d be on hand for the raising. One woman after another drove into the dooryard, offered to help Millie with the cooking, asked what kind of pies she should bring, and said to count her husband in on the raising. We butchered Clara Belle’s big spring calf and the fattest hog for the dinner, and apples were taken to the press for cider.