One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost to me my father was brought to subscribe for The Hearth and Home or some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of everyday life.
In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools, protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of the middle border.
To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and Daddy Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper, so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover. I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's characters were near neighbors.
The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their worthlessness.
This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a teacher and writer of fiction.
It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls, humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to gather close about the stove.
Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like, at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made my teeth ache.
Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves, adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and buoyancy of our youthful hearts.
CHAPTER XII
Chores and Almanacs
Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave shelter to the north.
In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw-rick, the cattle passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood about humped and shivering – only on sunny days did their arching backs subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to be "tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant wrath. I could not understand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful.
One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pumping water for our herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid, and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well, some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his fill – and this had to be done when the thermometer was thirty below, just the same as at any other time.
And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her. Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once established, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost helpless.
We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to "Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let them in – for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was set right, very quickly, by her superiors.
Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for water but this to me was a melancholy winter function, and sometimes as I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the personification of a desolate and abused race.
Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber warmed only by the stove-pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not rise by candle-light but I did, not because I was eager to make a record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early rising. I groaned and whined but I rose – and always I found mother in the kitchen before me, putting the kettle on.
It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet was hasty – something less than "a lick and a promise." I couldn't (or didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem useless in an attic bedchamber at five in the morning of a December day – I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five A. M. even in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment.
Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flapjacks, sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed, watching at the gate of the new day.
Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our "revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pancake batter – but she was always there!
"What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?" – This is a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun?
I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit summer and winter, and that most of our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition. None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all.
My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button, Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit, but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I came home from school at half-past four.
Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hattie was able to play a few simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John occasionally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open admiration.
There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played "Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a book.
Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing in the neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most respectful consideration. Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs brought to us both anguish and delight. Tempest and Sunshine was another discovery. I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for Ivanhoe but I read and re-read it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I borrowed a huge bundle of The New York Saturday Night and The New York Ledger and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric the Saxon."
At this time Godey's Ladies Book and Peterson's Magazine were the only high-class periodicals known to us. The Toledo Blade and The New York Tribune were still my father's political advisers and Horace Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind.
Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small, badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and "Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery.
These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and "Allen's Cherry Pectoral" were most needed to "purify the blood." They were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous mixtures they celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an overworked wife.
These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and "Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from Poor Richard.
Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind, and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or "bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow-cheeked folk were shown "before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the same "complaints."
Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely took into account the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of time with these publications and to them a large part of my education is due.
It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy, half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Franklin's Autobiography we owned and they were also wellsprings of joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the Lacedemonians that "hunger is the best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made the most of all that came our way.
Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of it are mostly pleasant.
Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter, the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells, along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak teacher and his flock.
I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting. The schoolroom had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town, for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood and in one of these was a postoffice.
That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret for they added the final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove School House."
Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the thermometer stood twenty below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams splinter.
Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said, "It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was mawkish if not actually improper.
Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an important part of our contentment.
Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their elders met only at public meetings.
Singing, even among the young people was almost entirely confined to hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. Tell Me the Old Old Story did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and Hold the Fort for I am Coming was no longer a signal from Sherman, but a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing O, Bear Me Away on Your Snowy Wings, although we had no real desire to be taken "to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for Minnie Minturn and Nellie Wildwood, – but his love for Smith's Grand March persisted and my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he explained its meaning. The war was passing into the mellow, reminiscent haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his pursuit of the Sunset was at an end.
CHAPTER XIII
Boy Life on the Prairie
The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or from the wood-pile, for splitting firewood was our first spring task.
From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use. Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work, after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time suggestion which vibrated in the caw-caw of the hens as they burrowed in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother helped to pile the finished product.
The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had husked the down-row so painfully in November. From the wood-pile I was often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in these excursions. However, my joy in his companionship was not unmixed with bitterness, for I deeply envied him the skates which he wore. They were trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which transfigured their wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all earthly glory.
My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages argues a high degree of enthusiasm.
Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us, and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home.
We held to this sport to the last – till the ice with prodigious booming and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts (which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the greatest trouble in getting them on again. Greasing them with hot tallow was a regular morning job.
Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile.
Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We start seeding tomorrow."
Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough, unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness from their ravaged hills.
Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it – a million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion, and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to "lap-half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father could not be fooled. He saw every "balk."
As the ground dried off the dust arose from under the teeth of the harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western farmer.
One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high, – a cloud which darkened the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust, almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away.
As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the extra care with which we had pulverized the ground.
"If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!"
Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt, his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this land had to be resown.
Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out experiences like this – they omit the mud and the dust and the grime, they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they stood in crowded malodorous stalls.
In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his boot straps once – and regretted it almost instantly. – No, no, it won't do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too well – and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail they are nasty brutes – quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose all their charm – for me.
Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially at the table.
Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs, and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard, getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist.
Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free commoners" in the eyes of the law.
The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom. Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those that had wintered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of previous servitude.
They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Canuck," with a strain of broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how deeply-buried instincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will.
Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells, across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf – often from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality.
In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an excellent place for boys. As we galloped along together it was easy to imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or buffalo.
We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the language and the psychology of kine as well as colts. We watched the big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We possessed perfect understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a perfectly definite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned, truculent three-year-olds all came in for interpretation.