Then I did the most foolish thing I could have done. I stepped over and said, “If you’ll let me quiet him down a bit, I think I can make him stop balking.”
Grandfather yanked his hat off, threw it on the ground, and shouted, “Tarnal fool boy! Never in all my born days seen such an all-fired know-it-all boy! Stand out of the way, I tell you! What you think you could do to stop a horse a-balking?”
“Wire his ears together,” I said. And I said it quietly.
“Wire his ears together!” Grandfather stormed. “Don’t you never let me catch you wiring a critter’s ears together!”
I was mad enough that I had to be careful not to shout back, but I kept my voice down, and said, “All right, I won’t. What do you want me to do now?”
“Do! Do! Start fetching hay to the rack! What in time and tarnation you cal’lating on doing? Time flies, I tell you! Levi! Give Ralphie a hand fetching hay whilst I go to the barn for another fork! Millie, go get your victuals ready! Tarnal colt’s likely as not to balk till sundown!”
When Grandfather was nearly to the barn, Uncle Levi stood his fork down, and said, “Don’t let Thomas rile you no more’n you can help, Ralph. When he’s tired and his nerves is jangled, he ain’t accountable for what he says. Don’t mean a cussed thing by it. Something I can’t ravel out is tormenting him bad.”
“I’m sorry I broke another fork handle,” I said. “I’ve been trying to pitch as well as I could.”
“Ain’t nothing the matter with your pitching,” Uncle Levi told me. “It’s good, and Thomas knows it. I’d give a cookie to know what’s eating him. Calc’late you could get that cussed yella colt to stop balking?”
“Not without doing something to make him forget he is balking,” I said. “I think I’d have to put a wire on his ears.”
“Don’t calc’late Thomas could catch us at this distance from the barn,” Uncle Levi said and winked at me. “Seems to me I seen a piece of wire a-hanging on the colt’s harness.”
Uncle Levi pitched hay just the way I liked to; steady but not rushing. Within a few minutes after I put the wire on the yella colt’s ears, he forgot his balking and went back to work. I’d taken off the wire, and we had the rack piled high when Grandfather came back to the field. Neither of us saw him coming till, from right behind us, he sang out, “Now you see, Ralphie! What did your old grampa tell you? Can’t nobody do nothing with the yella colt, ’cepting to leave him be till he makes up his own mind. Ruin him for all his lifetime if ever you’d go to putting wire on his ears. Levi, you climb up and build load whilst I and Ralphie pitches to you.”
For the rest of the loading, Grandfather pitched without rushing. At the unloading, I heard him wrangle with Uncle Levi several times, but he only scolded me once, and that was for pitching too fast. When we were finished, and he came down from the mow, he was so tired his feet dragged.
Uncle Levi stayed at the barn to help me unharness and feed the horses. He grumbled to himself most of the time, and I could see that he was as tired as Grandfather. I told him so, and said I’d take care of the horses, but he almost snapped at me, “’Tain’t the work! ’Tain’t the work! There’s times Thomas wears me thinner’n a cobweb. Oughtn’t to quarrel with him; he ain’t well, but, by hub, there’s times he riles me.”
I think he was sorry as soon as he’s said it. While I was hanging up Old Nell’s harness, he stood with both hands crammed deep in his overalls’ pockets, and said, “Man shouldn’t be trying to work in the field at Thomas’s age. Leastways, not a man that’s got the malaria. Them of us that’s never had it don’t know how cussed cantankerous it can make a man feel.”
Grandfather sounded plenty cantankerous when he shouted from the house, “What in thunderation you dawdling around at now? The victuals is getting cold!”
The only difference between supper and dinner was that Millie had baked a couple of apple pies. Uncle Levi didn’t say a word when he looked the table over, but went up to his room. He was gone two or three minutes, and when he came down, he was sort of tasting his tongue. He passed Millie the bottle, partly full of whiskey, and said, “Here, I calc’late Thomas better have an appetizer afore he tackles this kind of victuals.”
Grandfather said he wasn’t sick and he wasn’t tired, and that he wouldn’t touch a drop of the hot toddy Millie brought him. He did, though, then he ate a pretty good supper, and went to bed.
I was just leaving the barn to get the cows when I heard a squawking at the henhouse. I thought it might be a fox or a skunk that was after the hens, so I grabbed a stick and raced back through the barnyard. As I rounded the corner of the barn, Uncle Levi was going toward the chopping block with a Rhode Island Red hen in each hand.
Uncle Levi had gone to bed by the time I’d brought the cows in from the pasture, and the kitchen was dark when I’d finished my chores. The only lighted lamp was out in the summer kitchen, where Millie was picking the hens. I turned a bushel basket over, sat on it, and began helping her pick. Neither of us said anything for several minutes. Then Millie asked, “Who learned you to pitch hay and drive hosses?”
“My father,” I told her.
It was several more minutes before she said, “Proud of your pitching, ain’t you?”
“Neither proud nor ashamed,” I said.
I didn’t look up until I noticed that Millie had stopped picking. When I did, she was looking straight into my eyes, and if her face showed any expression, I couldn’t see it. “You’re good, for a boy, and you know it, and Thomas knows it. Don’t rub it in.”
“I’m not,” I told her.
“You was this afternoon,” she said.
“Only for a few minutes; after he’d called me lazy.”
“Know why he done it?”
“To get every ounce of work out of me that he could.”
“Grow up,” she said, without any change in her voice.
“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” I said.
“You will, time you’re his age and have to watch a young boy best you in the face of your own folks.”
“What am I supposed to do,” I asked, “let him beat me and then call me lazy and shiftless?”
“Till he cal’lates you think he’s got you bested. Names don’t hurt nobody. Thomas ain’t going to let on to hisself nor nobody else that he’s bested till he drops dead. You want to kill him, or let him row at you for a few minutes? I’ll wager ’twouldn’t be more than a few times.”
I looked back at the hen, and picked a few feathers. After I’d had a couple of minutes to think, I asked, “Where did you learn to make such good apple pies?”
Millie began to pick feathers again. All she said was, “I got two oranges saved out from them Levi fetched. Want one afore you go to bed?”
When Millie called me the next morning, there was a pink glow in the eastern sky. By the time I’d finished milking, it looked as if the woods beyond Hall’s hill were afire. Hens were oiling their feathers in the dooryard, and swallows skimmed low across the uncut hayfields. At breakfast, Grandfather snapped at me, “Eat your victuals, Ralphie! Get the hosses out quick as ever you can! There’s a tarnal hard rain a-coming, and five loads of hay still in the field.”
With rain coming, I expected Grandfather to be awfully hard to get along with, but he wasn’t. It worked just the way Millie had told me it would. I tried to act as if I were doing my best, but took two pitches for each shock till Grandfather was well ahead of me. Now that I understood, it was sort of fun to watch him tear into the pitching, and hear him yell at me to stop dawdling and pitch hay man-fashion. Within twenty minutes, he stopped rushing, and pitched steadily a good part of the forenoon. Whenever he got tired, Millie or Uncle Levi found something for him to do away from the hayfield.
We had a light shower just before noon, but the sun came out bright and the tops of the shocks were dry by the time we’d finished eating. Millie had a good dinner. She had stewed the hens with carrots and potatoes, and the top of the bowl was covered wi
th dumplings. We were right in the middle of eating when the old red rooster flew up onto the window sill and tuck-tuck-tucked. Uncle Levi wouldn’t give him any chicken. He said it would be a sin to make a cannibal of him, but he did feed him nearly a whole dumpling.
The rain held off till the sun had dipped down behind the pines on the ridge. The last load was so high I could hardly reach the top with a long-handled fork, and there were just two shocks left in the field when the sky seemed to open and the rain came down in torrents. Before we got to the barn, we were drenched.
It was nearly dark when I’d finished my chores and took the milk to the house, and it was raining steadily, but Grandfather was doing something at the beehives. Uncle Levi had to go down and argue with him before he’d come to the house. He would neither go to bed nor put on the dry clothes Millie had laid out for him, but sat shivering in front of the kitchen stove for more than an hour. He was sure the rain was going to last for several days and was fretting about its holding up the haying. Twice, he asked Uncle Levi how many days were left before the Fourth of July.
The next morning it was still raining. The sky was like a gray bowl turned down on the saucer of the valley. Grandfather had chills and fever, so he had to stay in bed, but Uncle Levi and I hauled the old mowing machine into the carriage house and went to work on it. The wheels were the only things about it that weren’t completely worn out.
We’d never had a forge on our ranch in Colorado, and I didn’t know much about blacksmithing, but Uncle Levi did. He never hurried, and he didn’t care how long a job took, but when he’d finished with it, every cog and bearing fitted perfectly. Besides that, he liked to show me how to do things, and I liked to have him. We spent all day, and until late in the evening, on the mower; regrinding gears, refitting bearings, sharpening knives and replacing broken ones; soda welding the pitman head, and making a new tongue of dry white oak.
While we were working, I asked Uncle Levi why Grandfather didn’t have a horsefork in the barn for unloading hay. For the past two days, I’d been figuring out the different places a pulley could be hung from the rafters, so that a horsefork would drop the hay onto any mow in the barn without a bit of pitching. Uncle Levi listened till I’d told him just how a horsefork would work. Then he shook his head a little, and said, “You’d have a cussed big battle with Thomas. You’re always telling about how your father done things, and always trying to do like he done, ain’t you?”
I didn’t know just what he was getting at, but nodded and said, “Yes, because he always knew the best way to do things.”
“That’s the ticket,” Uncle Levi said. “That’s what Thomas thinks, too. Father learned him to farm the way he done it hisself, and you’ll find Thomas is pretty good at it. He ain’t never changed where he could help it, and I don’t calc’late he ever will.”
“I was just thinking,” I said. “With a platform rack and a horsefork, two men could have put that hay up in a day and a half. It took four of us two days and a half.”
Uncle Levi didn’t look up from his welding for at least ten minutes. Then he stopped hammering and said, “Never afore seen Thomas want to get away from the old place, but this summer he’s got his heart sot on going to his regiment’s reunion off to Gettysburg. Comes on the Fourth of July, but he won’t go less’n the hay’s all in the barn. Might happen Thomas would stand for one of them cussed machines if ’twas the only thing that would get the hay in afore the Fourth.”
“Well, it’s the only thing that would do it unless we have two or three more men,” I said. “And, besides, it isn’t really a machine. It’s just a big grapple fork with ropes and pulleys.”
Uncle Levi went back to the forge. In a few minutes, he said, “Calc’late we could whack one together out of heavy steel strap? There’s plenty pulleys ’round here. How big a hank of rope you figure we’d need?”
The next few days the weather was fine, but Grandfather wasn’t. His chills and fever were worse instead of better, and he had to stay in bed. That was when I found why Millie slept in the parlor. She’d get up four or five times during the night to take care of him, and she gave him, in teaspoonfuls, nearly a third of Uncle Levi’s bottle of whiskey.
The mowing machine worked almost like new after we’d fixed it. Uncle Levi kept working around the carriage house while I was mowing the east field. He kept the forge going most of the day, and the ring of his hammer would follow me way out across the field. By night, he had most of the parts for the grapple fork shaped, and ready to be riveted together.
I finished mowing in the middle of the second afternoon. Then Uncle Levi hitched Old Nell to the spring wagon and drove down to Lisbon Falls. While he was gone, I’d figured out just where to hang the high pulley in the barn and bored a hole for it in the ridgepole. When he came home, he had steak, oranges, baker’s bread, a piece of corned beef the size of the dish pan, and a big coil of heavy rope.
Before I went out to rake hay the next morning, we strung up the tackle for the horsefork in the barn. Uncle Levi stood in the center of the floor and watched me climb to the peak of the barn. When I’d hooked the pulley block to a clevis, I lifted it to the ridgepole, and pushed the clevis pin through the hole I’d bored. “You sure that’s going to be stout enough, Ralph?” he called up to me. “Hole looks pretty nigh the bottom edge of the beam. There’ll be a powerful strain on it.”
“Sure,” I told him. “It’s higher into the wood than it probably looks from down there.”
“Just so’s you’re sure,” he called back. “Don’t want nothing to go wrong with the cussed thing.”
“It won’t,” I told him, then wrapped my legs tight around the new rope, and went sliding down to the barn floor.
Grandfather really wasn’t well enough to be up but, when we were ready to haul hay from the east field, he wouldn’t stay in bed any longer. I’d put all the low ropes and pulleys for the horsefork onto one of the side mows, so he wouldn’t notice them if he went to the barn, and we hadn’t even told Millie about the big fork.
Everything went fine in the loading. For half a dozen shocks, Grandfather pitched as fast as he could go. Then he ran out of breath, passed Uncle Levi his fork, and went to look at the bees. When Millie and I drove the first load into the barn, Grandfather came from the beehives and climbed to the low mow above the tie-up. He didn’t notice the pulley ropes till I picked up one of the blocks, slid to the barn floor with it, and called to Millie to follow me. The pulley whanged against a wagon tire as I turned to catch it over the floor hook. The noise set Grandfather off like a charge of dynamite.
“What in time and tarnation!” he yelled. Then he saw the long rope dangling from the ridgepole, and Uncle Levi’s horsefork hanging in the space between the two high mows. I heard his pitchfork slam down onto the bare boards of the low mow, and he shouted, “What kind of fiddledeedee falderal’s going on here? Get that tarnal contraption out of here! Get it out, I tell you, afore it fall’s on somebody’s head! Levi, what in thunder you been sneaking into this barn whilst I been sick? Get it out! Get it out, I tell you!”
When Grandfather stopped for breath, it was easy to see that Uncle Levi had expected just what was happening. He squatted down on the edge of the high mow, and talked to Grandfather like a mother talking to a little boy who doesn’t want to go to bed. He kept telling him over and over that the horsefork was only so he wouldn’t have to break his back pitching hay all the rest of his life, and so we could get the haying done in time for him to go to the reunion.
Every minute or two, Grandfather would shout, “Lazy man’s contraption!” but each time he said it, a little more of the fire went out of his voice.
In the end, he let us try it, but he wouldn’t let me hitch Old Nell on the tote rope. The yella colt didn’t like the whiffletree dangling around his heels, and I had to tie his blinders together before he’d stop rearing and kicking. The last thing I did before I climbed up to set the fork was to tell Millie to lead him real slow, and to stop quick
if I shouted.
Except for the yella colt’s jerking and jumping, everything went pretty well with the first forkful. There was about three hundreds pounds on it, and Uncle Levi yanked the trip line just at the right second to toss the hay clear to the back of the high mow.
Grandfather was still grumbling, “Lazy man’s contraption!” after the first load went up. After the third one, he climbed the ladder to the high mow, and stood watching like a little boy at a circus. “By fire!” I heard him sing out when Uncle Levi jerked the trip line on the next load.
Everything would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the yella colt and the way the hayrack was built. I had to bounce my whole weight on the fork to get it through the matted hay in the bottom of the load, and I bounced a little too hard. The yella colt started off as if a firecracker had exploded behind him. When he’d taken up the slack in the tote-rope, the whole rack jumped a foot into the air and crashed back onto the wheels. I knew in a second that I’d pushed the fork too far and hooked the grapples under the floor of the hayrack. But, instead of stopping when I yelled “Whoa!” the yellow colt lunged hard into the collar. There was a ripping screech from the top of the barn, and I looked up just in time to see a big piece of ridgepole come shooting down past Grandfather’s head. It missed him by about six inches.
Grandfather wrapped his arms over the top of his head, and crouched on the edge of the high mow, as the strip of ridgepole shot into the barn floor and stood quivering. Ropes were still trailing behind it when he slammed his hat down onto the mow, jumped on it, and shouted at Uncle Levi, “Get out of here! Get out of here, afore you stave the whole place to smithereens! Get back to Boston afore I lose my temper! Don’t you never come down here again with no more of your infernal contraptions!”
I tried to tell Grandfather it was all my fault, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t listen to a word from Uncle Levi, either, but followed him to the barn door, shouting, “Don’t you durst come sneaking ’round here with your newfangled contraptions. Get out of here! Get out of here, I tell you!”