A Son of the Middle Border Part 12

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 Sat.u.r.day 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 _G.o.dey's Ladies Book_ and _Peterson's Magazine_ were the only high-cla.s.s 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 Babc.o.c.k and Albert b.u.t.ton, two of our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best teams. .h.i.tched 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sing 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 Sat.u.r.days. 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 a.s.sociated 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 bra.s.s and their runners came up over his toes in beautiful curves and ended in bra.s.s 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 ign.o.ble 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 c.o.c.ks 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 ma.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstance 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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.

Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth, alert and watchful.

Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in blind bewildered ma.s.s, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary cause of some ancestral danger.