Fields of Home (4 page)

5

Snath and Scythe

I
COULD
hardly wait to get into the field so I could show Grandfather that I really knew something about haying. It worked just exactly backwards. Instead of letting me run the mowing machine, he told me to take the snath and scythe and cut hay out from under the apple trees. I might just as well have been trying to cut it with a broom as with a scythe. On the first swing, I ran the edge of the blade along a hidden rock, and then it wouldn’t cut worth a cent.

To see Father swinging a scythe, it had looked to be the easiest thing in the world to do. The scythe went back and forth like a clock pendulum, and left stubble two or three inches high. For me, it was like trying to swing a dog by his tail. The crooked handle wobbled around in my hands, and the blade either stuck in the ground or just tore the heads off the hay. The stubble looked the same way my brother Philip’s hair did the first time I tried to cut it.

We started in the corner of the orchard, near the gap in the stonewall. As soon as Grandfather had told me what to do, he let the cutter bar on the mowing machine down and hollered, “Gitap! Gitap!” to the horses. The yella colt started off on his hind legs, the gears screeched, and the sickle pounded back and forth in the cutter bar like a broken piston on a steam engine. I watched them make the first fifty yards before I tried the scythe. The three broken knife sections on the machine didn’t cut at all; just tore the grass and left it lying in snaky lines on the ground. The yella colt was still jumping like a rabbit when they went out of sight behind a tree, and every time he jumped they left a patch of dragged-down hay. Above the racket of the machine, Grandfather was shouting, “Tarnal fool colt! Settle down! Settle down, I tell you!”

The orchard wasn’t more than ten acres, but it was half an hour before Grandfather got around it the first time. He stopped the mowing machine just beyond the tree I was trying to mow under, and hollered, “What in the name of creation be you trying to do?”

“I never tried to use one of these things before,” I told him, “and I haven’t got the hang of it yet.”

“Gorry sakes alive!” he said, as he came toward me. “You might have et it off evener with your teeth. Why, you ain’t got the amount of sense the Almighty give to hens.”

I was mad enough at myself for not being able to make the scythe do what I wanted it to, and when Grandfather said that, I couldn’t help boiling over. “It looks just about as bad as the swath you’ve cut, doesn’t it?” I shouted back. “Only you had a machine to do it for you.” Then I hooked the scythe on a limb and started to walk away.

Grandfather’s voice dropped right down. “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie,” he said. “’Tain’t no fault of your’n, I don’t cal’late, that you ain’t been learned nothing. Here, let your old grampa show you how to swing a snath and scythe. Pass me the whetstone.”

You’d have thought Grandfather’s wrist and elbow were on ball bearings. There wasn’t more than two inches of the whetstone sticking up out of his fist, but he swiped it forward and back along both sides of the scythe edge so fast my eye couldn’t follow his hand, and at every stroke he stoned the blade from heel to point. After about a minute, he ran his thumbnail the length of the blade, and said, “There! There, by gorry, Ralphie! Now we’ll see what kind of logs makes wide shingles!”

Grandfather slipped the broken stone into his pocket, grasped the hand grips on the snath, and had the scythe swinging as he brought it down. Little as he was, he kept in perfect balance as he swung the long blade, and he made it whistle each time it swept forward through the grass. Closely as I watched him, I never saw a jerk or pull anywhere. The ground was littered with stones—some of them as big as my head—and the scythe rode over every one without touching it. When he’d gone eight or ten feet, he stopped and held the scythe out toward me. “There you be, Ralphie,” he said. “Ain’t nothing to it ’cepting to watch out for rocks. Tarnal hard to see some of ’em where the grass is rank. Now let your old grampa see you swing it.”

I did a little better after that, but not very well. For the next half hour, Grandfather alternated between scolding me for being awkward and telling me I was beginning to get the hang of it. Then he went back to the mowing machine. It was out of my sight when I heard Grandfather shouting, and thought he must be in bad trouble. I went running over there as fast as I could and, when I got to where I could see them, he was pulling at the buckskin’s bridle and shouting into his face, “Gitap! Gitap, you fool colt! What ails you? Gitap, I tell you!”

Grandfather dropped the bridle rein when I came running up, and said, “Might just as leave unhitch him. Tarnal stubborn critter! Ain’t ary man this side the Androscoggin River can make him pull once he gets his head sot on balking.”

One of the men I’d worked for in Colorado was an expert with balky horses. I didn’t know all the tricks, but I’d learned enough of them that I never had much trouble with his horses, and I was sure I wouldn’t have any with the yella colt. “Let me try him,” I said to Grandfather, and reached for a piece of thin wire that was twisted around one of the old horse’s traces.

“Stand back! Stand back!” Grandfather snapped at me. “For aught I know he’ll commence having one of his cat fits any minute now.”

As if the yella colt had understood him, he began shaking his head and slatting around. “Whoa, colty! Whoa! Whoa!” Grandfather shouted as if the horse had been a mile away. “Unhitch Old Nell quick, Ralphie, whilst I loose the colt. Look lively afore he staves the whole shootingmatch to smithereens! Ain’t nothing to do now but fetch him back to the barn.”

That was the end of our haying for the day. As soon as the horses were unharnessed and in their stalls, Grandfather set me to sawing firewood with a bucksaw, and went down to do something around the beehives.

I didn’t see a thing of Millie all afternoon, but my dirty clothes had been washed and were hanging on the clothesline. It was nearly sunset, and I was as hungry as a coyote when Grandfather called, “Leave be, Ralphie! I and you’ll go fetch the cows.” He came climbing up over the yard wall, looked at the pile of wood I’d sawed, and said, “Gorry sake! Ain’t half bad for a boy that don’t know no more’n you do about farming, Ralphie. Cal’late your old grampa can make a man out of you yet. Did Charlie learn you to handle a bucksaw?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Father taught me to do quite a few things, and I’ve learned a little bit from other men, too.”

“Poor boy! Poor boy! Shame they didn’t learn you nothing worth while, ’cepting to saw wood. Oh, well, what’s the odds? You’re still young enough, and your old grampa’ll learn you.”

Most of the way out through the fields, he kept pointing this or that spot out to me, and telling me long stories about what happened there when his father first took the land up from the wilderness, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I’d been told enough that day—mostly about what a fool boy I was and what my old grampa was going to learn me—and I didn’t want to hear any more. I told myself that I’d stay there till the hay was in if it killed me, but I’d let him do his learning to somebody else. I’d worked for plenty of ranchers, and for market gardeners, too. Any one of them would hire me again, and none of them had ever yelled at me or called me a fool boy. The minute the last forkful of hay was in the barn, I’d start for Colorado.

All the way up the long hill beside the orchard, I kept thinking about the people I’d go to see as soon as I got back to Colorado, and Grandfather kept on talking. Old Bess was walking along beside him, and he might just as well have been doing his talking to her. To me, it was just sound: like brook water makes in running over stones. At the top of the orchard, he took hold of my arm and pointed toward a field of spindly hay that stretched across the crown of the hill. “Curious,” he said, “that high field yonder. Father and my half-brothers cleared it afore ever I was born. Take heed the wall here! Nary stone bigger’n a sweet punkin. Mark them little cobbles ’mongst the hay! Millions of ’em no bigger’n a goose egg. I cal’late they draw heat from the sun. First field in twenty miles roundabouts to thaw in the spring, and last to freeze up in the fall. Late and early frosts never touches it.”

I’d heard what he said, but I was still thinking about Colorado, and said, “Too bad it isn’t richer ground.”

Grandfather jerked his hand off my arm, and snapped, “Ain’t nothing wrong with the soil! Who said there was? Plenty good cow dressing and that little field’ll grow two ton of good timothy hay.”

“I didn’t mean that I thought there was anything wrong with it,” I said, “and I don’t know very much about dressing. . . . ”

“Hmfff! Don’t know much about nothing worth while!”

“Well, I know about strawberries and tomatoes,” I said.

“What you know about ’em; how to eat ’em?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know how to eat them. And I worked for a man in Colorado who knew how to raise them. He had a high, warm field for them, and he always got the highest prices because his strawberries and tomatoes were the first ones to ripen in the . . . ”

“Hmfff! Hmfff! Strawb’ries!” Grandfather exploded. “Time and tarnation! Tomatoes and strawb’ries! Garden sass! Garden sass! Why in thunderation didn’t somebody learn you something worth while?”

“They did!” I snapped back before I could catch myself.

“Mind your manners!” Grandfather shouted. Then he reached out and took hold of my arm again, but didn’t take hold hard. “Poor boy! Poor Ralphie!” he said. “Tarnal shame to let a boy grow up so know-nothing. Your old grampa’ll learn you. No, Ralphie, no. This here is hay soil. ’Tain’t good for nothing else. Gorry sakes, we better fetch the cows in afore Millie’s supper gets cold. Ain’t no living with her whenst her victuals gets cold.”

We’d been walking along the brow of the hill, where it dipped away eastward toward Lisbon Valley. The crown of the hill was to the westward and, as we passed it, I noticed a few cows and calves standing at a pasture gate beyond. Grandfather slipped one arm inside mine. “Ralphie,” he said, “your old grampa’s powerful glad to have you here. The land’s been a-crying for young hands. I done the best I could after Frankie went off to Portland to learn a trade, but I and Old Bess was all alone . . . Levi off a-homesteading in Dakota, the big barn burning flat to the ground, the malaria keeping me abed half the time. I catched it whilst I was off to the war . . . seems like it bothers me a sight worse since I lost your gramma. Kind of had hopes when Mary wed, maybe her and Charlie’d come home to the old place to rear their family. I and your father could have cleared a power of land. I and you’ll clear a power of it yet, Ralphie, soon’s ever I learn you to be a farmer. Father was older’n I be afore ever I was born, but he learnt me all there is to know about the land. Poor boy! Poor Ralphie! Your old grampa’ll yet learn you to be a worth-while man.”

When he’d first started talking, I’d wanted to squeeze his arm against me a little, but before he was through I’d taken mine off his and moved far enough away that he couldn’t put it back. We were nearly to the pasture gate, and four cows were waiting there. It was easy to see that they were all milch cows, and not very good ones. Three of them had pretty good sized calves running with them, and the fourth had her head over the bars, bellowing. So I wouldn’t act as peeved at Grandfather as I felt, I said, “Do you just take the Holstein in for milking?”

“No! Take ’em all in!” Grandfather said, grumpily.

Then, as I let the bars down, he and Old Bess stood beside the gatepost. As each cow passed him, he put a hand on her or patted her and called her by name. Even Clara Belle, the Holstein without a calf, stopped long enough for him to scratch the tuft of hair between her horns before she hurried off down the lane. Next was Jessie, a thin old Jersey with a fat heifer calf. Spotty, a Durham with a steer calf three or four months old; and Marthy, just a nice old brown cow with a heifer calf that looked like a Jersey.

As we started to follow them down the lane, I said, “The nights don’t get very cold here at this time of year, do they?”

Grandfather seemed to have forgotten all about the cows. The thumb of one hand was hooked around the finger of the other behind him, his head was down, and he leaned a little forward from the hips as he stumped along. “No,” he said after a little while. Then, after a few more steps, “Why?”

“Well,” I said, “I wondered why you didn’t leave the cows with calves in the pasture at night. There aren’t any coyotes or wolves to bother them, are there?”

Grandfather stopped and looked up at me as though he didn’t believe anybody could ask such a foolish question. “Gorry sakes alive, boy!” he said at last. “Don’t you know nothing? How’d you raise crops without cow manure? You got to take ’em in to save the dressing.”

“They raise pretty good crops in Colorado—if they have enough irrigation water—and they don’t put cow manure on the fields,” I told him. “We put horse manure under our first potatoes on the ranch and they all went to tops.”

“Hmfff! Tarnal fools! Hoss manure’s for hay!” Then he put his head back down, and didn’t say another word till we were at the barn.