Farmer Boy (5 page)

When Father saw them he laughed and called out:

“You flipped that penny yet?”

Everybody laughed but Almanzo. He did not know the joke. So French Joe told him:

"Once two Irishmen were sent out to saw ice with a cross-cut saw. They had never sawed ice before. They looked at the ice and they looked at the saw, till at last Pat took a penny out of his pocket and he says, says he:

“'Now Jamie, be fair. Heads or tails, who goes below?'”

Then Almanzo laughed, to think of anyone going down into the dark, cold water under the ice, to pull one end of the cross-cut saw. It was funny that there were people who didn't know how to saw ice.

He trudged with the others across the ice to the middle of the pond. A sharp wind blew there, driving wisps of snow before it. Above the deep water the ice was smooth and dark, swept almost bare of snow. Almanzo watched while Joe and John chopped a big, three-cornered hole in it. They lifted out the broken pieces of ice and carried them away, leaving the hole full of open water.

“She's about twenty inches thick,” Lazy John said.

“Then saw the ice twenty inches,” said Father.

Lazy John and French Joe knelt at the edge of the hole. They lowered their cross-cut saws into the water and began to saw. Nobody pulled the ends of the saws under the water.

Side by side, they sawed two straight cracks through the ice, twenty inches apart, and twenty feet long. Then with the ax John broke the ice across, and a slab twenty inches wide, twenty inches thick, and twenty feet long rose a little and floated free.

With a pole John pushed the slab toward the three-cornered hole, and as the end was thrust out, crackling the thin ice freezing on the water, Joe sawed off twenty-inch lengths of it. Father picked up the cubes with the big iron ice-tongs, and loaded them on the bobsleds.

Almanzo ran to the edge of the hole, watching the saw. Suddenly, right on the very edge, he slipped.

He felt himself falling headlong into the dark water. His hands couldn't catch hold of anything.

He knew he would sink and be drawn under the solid ice. The swift current would pull him under the ice, where nobody could find him. He'd drown, held down by the ice in the dark.

French Joe grabbed him just in time. He heard a shout and felt a rough hand jerk him by one leg, he felt a terrific crash, and then he was lying on his stomach on the good, solid ice. He got up on his feet. Father was coming, running.

Father stood over him, big and terrible.

“You ought to have the worst whipping of your life,” Father said.

“Yes, Father,” Almanzo whispered. He knew it.

He knew he should have been more careful. A boy nine years old is too big to do foolish things because he doesn't stop to think. Almanzo knew that, and felt ashamed. He shrank up small inside his clothes and his legs shivered, afraid of the whipping. Father's whippings hurt. But he knew he deserved to be whipped. T h e whip was on the bobsled.

“I won't thrash you this time,” Father decided.

“But see to it you stay away from that edge.”

“Yes, Father,” Almanzo whispered. He went away from the hole, and did not go near it again.

Father finished loading the bobsled. Then he spread the laprobes on top of the ice, and Almanzo rode on them with Father and Royal, back to the ice-house near the barns.

The ice-house was built of boards with wide cracks between. It was set high from the ground on wooden blocks, and looked like a big cage.

Only the floor and the roof were solid. On the floor was a huge mound of sawdust, which Father had hauled from the lumber-mill.

With a shovel Father spread the sawdust three inches thick on the floor. On this he laid the cubes of ice, three inches apart. Then he drove back to the pond, and Almanzo went to work with Royal in the ice-house.

They filled every crack between the cubes with sawdust, and tamped it down tightly with sticks. Then they shoveled the whole mound of sawdust on top of the ice, in a corner, and where it had been they covered the floor with cubes of ice and packed them in sawdust. Then they covered it all with sawdust three inches thick.

They worked as fast as they could, but before they finished, Father came with another load of ice. He laid down another layer of ice cubes three inches apart, and drove away, leaving them to fill every crevice tightly with sawdust, and spread sawdust over the top, and shovel the rest of the mound of sawdust up again.

They worked so hard that the exercise kept them warm, but long before noon Almanzo was hungrier than wolves. He couldn't stop work long enough to run into the house for a doughnut. All of his middle was hollow, with a gnawing inside it.

He knelt on the ice, pushing sawdust into the cracks with his mittened hands, and pounding it down with a stick as fast as he could, and he asked Royal:

“What would you like best to eat?”

They talked about spareribs, and turkey with dressing, and baked beans, and crackling cornbread, and other good things. But Almanzo said that what he liked most in the world was fried apples'n'onions.

When, at last, they went in to dinner, there on the table was a big dish of them! Mother knew what he liked best, and she had cooked it for him.

Almanzo ate four large helpings of apples'n'-

onions fried together. He ate roast beef and brown gravy, and mashed potatoes and creamed carrots and boiled turnips, and countless slices of buttered bread with crab-apple jelly.

“It takes a great deal to feed a growing boy,”

Mother said. And she put a thick slice of birds'-

nest pudding on his bare plate, and handed him the pitcher of sweetened cream speckled with nutmeg.

Almanzo poured the heavy cream over the apples nested in the fluffy crust. T h e syrupy brown juice curled up around the edges of the cream.

Almanzo took up his spoon and ate every bit.

Then until chore-time he and Royal worked in the ice-house. All next day they worked, and all the next day. Just at dusk on the third day, Father helped them spread the last layer of sawdust over the topmost cubes of ice, in the peak of the ice-house roof. And that job was done.

Buried in sawdust, the blocks of ice would not melt in the hottest summer weather. One at a time they would be dug out, and Mother would make ice-cream and lemonade and cold egg-nog.

That night was Saturday night. All day long Mother had been baking, and when Almanzo went into the kitchen for the milk-pails, she was still frying doughnuts. The place was füll of their hot, brown smell, and the wheaty smell of new bread, the spicy smell of cakes, and the syrupy smell of pies.

Almanzo took the biggest doughnut from the pan and bit off its crisp end. Mother was rolling out the golden dough, slashing it into long Strips, rolling and doubling and twisting the Strips. Her fingers flew; you could hardly see them. The Strips seemed to twist themselves under her hands, and to leap into the big copper kettle of swirling hot fat.

Plump! they went to the bottom, sending up bubbles. Then quickly they came popping up, to float and slowly swell, tili they rolled themselves over, their pale golden backs going into the fat and their plump brown beilies rising out of it.

They rolled over, Mother said, because they were twisted. Some women made a new-fangled shape, round, with a hole in the middle. But round doughnuts wouldn't turn themselves over. Mother didn't have time to waste turning doughnuts; it was quicker to twist them.

Almanzo liked baking-day. But he didn't like Saturday night. On Saturday night there was no cosy evening by the heater, with apples, popcorn, and eider. Saturday night was bath night.

After supper Almanzo and Royal again put on their coats and caps and mufflers and mittens.

They carried a tub from the washtub outdoors to the rain-water barrel.

Everything was ghostly with snow. The stars were frosty in the sky, and only a little faint light came from the candle in the kitchen.

The inside of the rain-water barrel was coated thick with ice, and in the center, where the ice was chopped every day to keep the barrel from bursting, the hole had grown smaller and smaller.

Royal chopped at it, and when his hatchet went through with an oosy thud, the water welled up quickly, because the ice was squeezing it from all sides.

It's odd that water swells when it freezes.

Everything else gets smaller in the cold.

Almanzo began dipping water and floating pieces of ice into the washtub. It was cold, slow work, dipping through the small hole, and he had an idea.

Long icicles hung from the kitchen eaves. At the top they were a solid piece of ice, then their pointed tips hung down almost to the snow.

Almanzo took hold of one and jerked, but only the tip broke off.

T h e hatchet had frozen to the porch floor where Royal had laid it, but Almanzo tugged it loose. He lifted it up in both hands and hit the icicles. An avalanche of ice came down with a splin-tering crash. It was a glorious noise.

“Hi, gimme!” Royal said, but Almanzo hit the icicles again; the noise was louder than before.

“You're bigger than I be; you hit 'em with your fists,” Almanzo said. So Royal hit the icicles with both his fists; Almanzo hit them again with the hatchet. T h e noise was immense.

Almanzo yelled and Royal yelled and they hit more and more icicles. Big pieces of ice were flying all over the porch floor, and flying pieces pitted the snow. Along the eaves there was a gap as though the roof had lost some teeth.

Mother flung open the kitchen door.

“Mercy on us!” she cried. “Royal, Almanzo! Be you hurt?”

“No, Mother,” Almanzo said, meekly.

“What is it? What be you doing?”

Almanzo felt guilty. But they had not really been playing when they had work to do.

“Getting ice for the bath water, Mother,” he said.

“My land! Such a racket I never heard! Must you yell like Comanches?”

“No, Mother,” Almanzo said.

Mother's teeth chattered in the cold, and she shut the door. Almanzo and Royal silently picked up the fallen icicles and silently filled the tub. It was so heavy they staggered when they carried it, and Father had to lift it onto the kitchen stove.

The ice melted while Almanzo greased his moccasins and Royal greased his boots. In the pantry Mother was filling the six-quart pan with boiled beans, putting in onions and peppers and the piece of fat pork, and pouring scrolls of molasses over all. Then Almanzo saw her open the flour barrels. She flung rye flour and cornmeal into the big yellow crock, and stirred in milk and eggs and things, and poured the big baking-pan full of the yellow-gray rye'n'injun dough.

"You fetch the rye'n'injun, Almanzo; don't spill it," she said. She snatched up the pan of beans and Almanzo followed more slowly with the heavy pan of rye'n'injun. Father opened the big doors of the oven in the heater, and Mother slid the beans and the bread inside. They would slowly bake there, till Sunday dinner-time.

Then Almanzo was left alone in the kitchen, to take his bath. His clean underwear was hanging on a chair-back to air and warm. The washcloth and towel and the small wooden pannikin of soft-soap were on another chair. He brought another washtub from the woodshed and put it on the floor in front of the open oven-door.

He took off his waist and one pair of socks and his pants. Then he dipped some warm water from the tub on the stove into the tub on the floor. He took off his other pair of socks and his underwear, and his bare skin felt good in the heat from the oven. He toasted in the heat, and he thought he might just put on his clean underwear and not take a bath at all. But Mother would look, when he went into the dining-room.

So he stepped into the water. It covered his feet. With his fingers he dug some of the brown, slimy soft-soap from the pannikin and smeared it on the washcloth. Then he scrubbed himself well all over.

The water was warm around his toes, but it felt cold on his body. His wet belly steamed in the heat from the oven, but his wet back shivered.

And when he turned around, his back seemed to blister, but his front was very cold. So he washed as quickly as he could, and he dried himself and got into his warm underwaist and his woolly long drawers, and he put on his long woolen nightshirt.

Then he remembered his ears. He took the washcloth again, and he scrubbed his ears and the back of his neck. He put on his nightcap.

He felt very clean and good, and his skin felt sleek in the fresh, warm clothes. It was the Saturday-night feeling.

It was pleasant, but Almanzo didn't like it well enough to take a bath for it. If he could have had his way, he wouldn't have taken a bath till spring.

He did not have to empty his tub, because if he went outdoors after taking a bath he would catch cold. Alice would empty the tub and wash it before she bathed in it. Then Eliza Jane would empty Alice's, and Royal would empty Eliza Jane's, and Mother would empty Royal's. Late at night, Father would empty Mother's and take his bath, and the next morning he would empty the tub for the last time.

Almanzo went into the dining-room in his clean, creamy-white underwear and socks and night-shirt and cap. Mother looked at him, and he went to her to be inspected.

She laid down her knitting and she looked at his ears and the back of his neck and she looked at his soapy-clean face, and she gave him a hug and a squeeze. “There! Run along with you to bed!”

He lighted a candle and he padded quickly up the cold stairs and blew out the candle and jumped into the soft, cold feather-bed. He began to say his prayers, but went to sleep before he finished them.

When Almanzo trudged into the kitchen next morning with two brimming milk-pails, Mother was making stacked pancakes because this was Sunday.

The big blue platter on the stove's hearth was full of plump sausage cakes; Eliza Jane was cutting apple pies and Alice was dishing up the oatmeal, as usual. But the little blue platter stood hot on the back of the stove, and ten stacks of pancakes rose in tall towers on it.

Ten pancakes cooked on the smoking griddle, and as fast as they were done Mother added another cake to each stack and buttered it lavishly and covered it with maple sugar. Butter and sugar melted together and soaked the fluffy pancakes and dripped all down their crisp edges.