Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  The crossties didn’t haul as easy as I thought they would. I forgot to take anything along for hitching them to Nancy’s singletree, and had to use an old piece of barbed wire. I was walking on the downhill side of the crosstie when we tried to go up over the bank at the head of the gulch. Suddenly the tie started to roll toward me and I had to dive out of the way. I skinned my nose and the barbed wire tore a big hole in my overalls, but the tie missed me, and Nancy seemed glad to stop and rest. I was still trying to haul it up over the bank when it got dark, and I was afraid Father would get home before I did. It would be better to go right home and tell Mother I’d lied. If she spanked me first, he probably wouldn’t give me another one right on top of it.

  Mother didn’t spank me, though. She gasped, and looked at me as if I’d been a rattlesnake ready to strike. Then she made me stand with my face in a corner. I stood there while the rest of the youngsters had their supper and went to bed, and for at least an hour afterward while Mother sat at the table and read the Bible. I knew what she was reading, because I heard her take it down from the lamp shelf. There wasn’t any clock in the kitchen, and the only sound was the thumping of my own heart.

  At last I heard Father drive into the yard, and listened to every sound as he put the team away and came to the house. He stood in the open doorway for a moment before he spoke. When he did, his voice was very quiet. “What has happened, Mame?”

  It was a full minute before Mother said anything. And then her voice was as quiet as Father’s. “Charles, the time has come when this boy must have a father’s firm hand. I am appalled by the degeneracy he has shown since we left East Rochester.”

  I had never heard Mother’s voice like that, and I had never heard her call Father “Charles.” I thought my heart would pound itself to pieces while she was telling him what I had done. Hard as Father could spank, he never hurt me so much with a stick as he did when Mother stopped talking. He cleared his throat, and then he didn’t make a sound for at least two full minutes.

  When he spoke, his voice was deep and dry, and I knew he must have been coughing a lot on the way home. “Son, there is no question but what the thing you have done today deserves severe punishment. You might have killed yourself or the horse, but much worse than that, you have injured your own character. A man’s character is like his house. If he tears boards off his house and burns them to keep himself warm and comfortable, his house soon becomes a ruin. If he tells lies to be able to do the things he shouldn’t do but wants to, his character will soon become a ruin. A man with a ruined character is a shame on the face of the earth.”

  He waited until his words had plenty of time to soak in, then he said, “I might give you a hard thrashing; if I did, you would possibly remember the thrashing longer than you would remember about the injury you have done yourself. I am not going to do it. There were eighteen crossties in the gulch yesterday, and the section foreman told me they were going to replace twenty more. Until you have dragged every one of those ties home, you will wear your Buster Brown suit to school, and I will not take you anywhere with me.”

  It was half a mile from the house to the gulch. Father showed me how to hook onto the ties with a chain, and how to pull them up through the head of the gulch. By getting up early, I dragged one tie home each morning and two after school. With a half dozen on Saturdays, I had the job done in a couple of weeks.

  It was a tough two weeks. I was sure I would become Molly again for wearing the Buster Brown suit to school; I think Grace saved that by telling everybody what a bad boy I was. Then, too, the weather turned windy and cold. The gulch half filled with dry tumbleweeds that scratched me when I dug through them to get the ties. But worst of all, Mother got a song in her head. When that happened, she would sing the same tune over and over and over, for a week at a time. That time it was “The Bird with a Broken Pinion.” I don’t think she was singing it just for me, but I couldn’t go into the house without hearing about “a young life broken by sin’s seductive art,” or that “the soul that sin hath stricken never soars so high again.” It made me think a lot, as I walked along behind Nancy and a dragging crosstie, about the permanent damage I had already done to my character.

  5

  The Big Wind

  I THINK it was my lying about the ties that got us the buckboard. One night I came in from tie hauling to hear Father and Mother talking together in the kitchen. Mother was saying, “But, Charlie, we can’t just load the children into that old farm wagon like cordwood and haul them off to church. We saved quite a little from what we expected to pay for the new horse and harness. Somewhere we should be able to find something better in the way of a conveyance that’s within our means.”

  Mr. Cash came by on Saturday, and he had our buckboard tied behind his wagon. Sunday we all went to church at Fort Logan.

  Church and Sunday school were held in the day-school room. There weren’t enough seats to have them both at one time, so the grown folks stayed outside and talked while we had Sunday school, and we played outside while they had church. The fathers of most of the other children who went to Sunday school were soldiers at the Fort. Some of the kids were kind of tough. I learned a couple of new words from them, and Philip learned a lot.

  He called Muriel a couple of them after we got home, and Mother cried so hard that Father sent us all into the bedroom. We could only hear a word or two she was saying between sobs. It was something about not being able to stand what the ranch was doing to her boys. From then on Mother held Sunday services at home.

  Father had been hauling long poles to be cut into fence posts for about a week when the big wind came. It was blowing when we woke up, and tumbleweeds were rolling across the prairie like big brown bowling balls pitched by some giant in the mountains. By school time it was too strong for Grace and me to stand against. By noon it had racked our house until some of the windows had broken out and the doors were jammed fast in their casings. The whole house was vibrating like a beaten drum, and every few minutes a joint among the rafters would crack with a report as sharp as a rifle shot.

  Father’s face was gray, and Mother’s milk-white. Neither of them spoke; their mouths were clamped tight, and the muscles were popping out and in on the sides of Father’s jaws. I could see Muriel, Philip, and Hal crying, but, against the roar of the wind, I couldn’t hear them.

  Father went out and untied the horses. They drifted away to the east, the wind whipping their tails up under their bellies. Next he brought poles and propped them against the lee side of the house. Mother huddled us into a corner of the bedroom, away from the windows. She crouched over us like a hen brooding her chicks. There came a tearing screech from the roof as the wind ripped away a section of the shingles, and sheets of plaster fell from the ceiling.

  Father crawled in through the blown-out window with a coil of rope in his hand. He took his Sunday suit from the corner and told Mother to put it on. Then he knotted the rope around our chests and shoulders until all but Hal were strung on it the way Mother used to string popcorn balls for Christmas—about five feet apart. Philip was on one end and Muriel on the other. Mother had taken off her dress and put on Father’s suit, with the sleeves and legs rolled way up. Father tied Philip’s end of the rope around her waist and Muriel’s end around his own.

  Then he motioned Mother to follow, tied Hal on his back like a papoose, and crawled out the window. As she passed us out to him, he had us fall to the ground and lie still. After he lifted Mother down, he crouched and told us to crawl on our stomachs like horned toads; that dust would get in our eyes, but we must keep them open so as not to crawl into cactus beds.

  Our nearest neighbors were the Aultlands, a mile up wind. Fort Logan was to the east—three and a half miles away—with no houses between. Father crawled east, and we crawled after him.

  When we had wriggled along for a hundred yards or so, Father stopped to let us rest, and I looked back toward Philip and Mother. Philip must have gotten cactus spines in his hand, because h
e held it out toward Mother and tried to sit up. The wind caught him and rolled him like a tumbleweed as far as the rope would let him go. As he went, Mother sprang to her hands and knees. She was no more than up before she sprawled forward on her face as though some giant had put his foot on her from behind and shoved. In that same backward glance, I saw the roof of our new barn fly away like a sheet of newspaper. We started on. The next time we stopped to rest, I looked back again. There was blood on Mother’s face, and our barn was gone completely.

  A few minutes after we had begun crawling again, something like the shadow of a great bird flashed past me on the ground. I raised my head, and a second later the body of our farm wagon struck a few feet beyond Father. It bounced crazily like a football and flew away in kindling wood.

  My eyes were running from the dirt in them, my nose burned as though the dust in it were pepper, and I was coughing from breathing through my mouth. At the next rest, I lifted my head again and looked up and down the line. Father was coughing hard—I could see Hal bounce up and down on his back. Philip was sobbing and gasping for breath against the pull of the wind, and Mother’s face was black where dirt had mixed with the blood.

  I had no idea where Father was taking us, but after a dozen or more stops I knew we were going more north than east; we were not going to Fort Logan. We crawled across the wagon road, and on, and on. The wind ripped up curled, dry leaves of buffalo grass and raked them across our faces like jigsaw blades. At last Father stopped and waved his lifted arm. Then he raised them both and made motions like a man pulling himself up a rope. We all understood and drew ourselves up to him. There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth. We got our heads close to his, and he yelled, “We’re almost there. We’re going to be all right.”

  It seemed hours longer before we crawled into the head of a gulch leading down to Bear Creek. Under the level of the prairie we could crawl on our hands and knees. Father led us along to where there was an overhang in the west bank of the gulch. There was hardly any wind there. I was so tired I could barely move, and shaking all over. I wasn’t frightened any longer and nothing was hurting me, but I started to cry. I didn’t know what I was crying for, but I couldn’t make myself stop. Everybody but Father and Mother was crying.

  The wind went down with the sun. At twilight it was no more than a breeze. We crawled from our shelter under the bank, cold, stiff, and ragged. Our faces were smeared with blood, cut by the sharp grass that had been whipped against us by the wind, and our hands, arms, and legs were burning with cactus spines. It seemed to me that we had crawled miles on our stomachs, but when we came out at the head of the gulch, our house stood little more than half a mile away. It and the bunkhouse stood alone; barn, privy, wagon, and buckboard were gone.

  The house leaned tiredly against the prop poles. From the wagon road it looked like a deserted ruin. And when we got to the back door Father stood Hal down and put his shoulder against the door. It stuck tight and he heaved against it, but not as he had heaved when he lifted Nig’s hind legs from the trestle. He looked tired and old.

  The inside of the house looked almost as deserted as the outside. Fallen plaster, broken glass, and dirt covered everything. Father coughed hard after pushing the door open, and wiped his mouth with a red-stained handkerchief.

  Sometimes Mother cried over little things, but she didn’t cry then—she hadn’t all day. She bustled right through the kitchen and into the bedroom, with her underlip bitten in between her teeth. In a few seconds I heard her shaking bedclothes so hard they snapped. While she was doing it, Father looked over the chimney to see if it was cracked, then started a fire in the stove. Next, he took boards from the bunkhouse and nailed them over the broken kitchen window. We youngsters didn’t know where to begin in helping get cleaned up, and stood huddled by the stove.

  When Father had finished with the window, he put his hat on and started out the door. Mother came from the bedroom while he was in the doorway and said, “Charlie, where are you going?” She spoke quietly, but her voice was husky—way down in her throat.

  Father said, “I’ve got to find the horses, Mame. Heaven only knows where they may be by now. They may have fallen in a gulch.”

  Mother went over and took hold of his arm. She stood close against him and looked up into his face. Her voice was still husky as she said, “Ralph can stay home from school tomorrow and find them; you’re going to bed.”

  Father bent over and kissed her on the forehead as he tried to take her hand off his arm, but she wouldn’t let go. “Charlie,” she said—it was only a little more than a whisper—“we came here to save your life. Are you going to throw it away over so little? We need you, oh, we need you, Charlie.” From where we were standing, I saw her eyes fill up with tears, but none spilled over.

  As I watched her, I heard the fast beat of running horses’ feet. Fred and Bessie Aultland came into the yard, circled, and pulled up at the steps. Fred jumped off the buckboard with the reins still in his hand, and cried, “Charlie! For God’s sake, what’s happened to you, man? You look like a ghost.”

  After Mother told them about the house nearly blowing over, and about our crawling to the gulch, Bessie said they had worried all day because they knew we didn’t have a storm cellar. They made us all go home with them and stay for three days, while Fred and Bessie helped Mother get our house fixed up again. Mrs. Aultland and Mother wouldn’t let Father get out of bed for the whole three days.

  6

  We Become Real Ranchers

  IT RAINED most of the next couple of weeks. One of Fred’s hired men had found our horses and what was left of the wagon and buckboard. Nig was all right, but Bill stood with his back humped up most of the time, and all the starch seemed to have drained out of Nancy’s legs. We kept them in the end of the bunkhouse Father had cut off to use for a kitchen, while he and I worked in the other end. There was no school when it rained, so I could stay home and help him a lot. We built a new wagon body and put new spokes in the wheels of the buckboard, right there in the bunkhouse. Between showers we built a new privy—we were never able to find even one board of our old one.

  I had to bring two pails of milk from Aultland’s every night. When I had eggs to bring, too, Grace went with me to lug the basket. Mother was making Father drink all of one bucket of milk every day, and giving him raw eggs with a spoonful of brandy in the glass. I still liked the smell of that brandy, but the weather was getting warm enough so that I couldn’t get blue any more. Father’s cough got better day by day, but as he grew stronger, Nancy grew weaker. One morning near the end of the second week, Father went out to the bunkhouse and found her dead. Grace and I had to go to school that day, so we missed the funeral.

  Our big wind must have been an ill one, because I never heard of anyone it did any good—except maybe it did help us a little in one way. The Saturday after Nancy died, Father and I were putting the buckboard back together when a man with a big load of new boards stopped out in front of our house. He came in and said his name was Wright, and that he lived a couple of miles up the creek. He said the wind had raised the dickens with his buildings and he’d noticed how nicely we were getting fixed up again.

  After he’d watched Father work for a little while, he said, “You seem to be a pretty handy sort of fellow with a hammer and saw. I wish I could get you to come and help me get fixed up. I’d give you three dollars a day for your time, or trade work with you, or trade something I might have that you wanted.”

  Father told Mr. Wright he ought to be getting started with his own plowing now that the rains had come, but he would talk it over with Mother and let him know the next day. Mother must have said it was all right, because Father helped Mr. Wright for a couple of weeks.

  Father drove Bill and Nig up to Mr. Wright’s the first morning. When he came home he had a saddled bay mare tied to the tail gate of the wagon, and a little black and white collie puppy in the pocket of his reefer coat. He said Mr. Wright had insisted on lending him the ma
re to ride back and forth, but the puppy was ours to keep. It was still so young it was wobbly on its legs and cute as could be. We all wanted to claim it, but Father wouldn’t let us. He said Muriel could name it, but it would belong to all of us. She named it King.

  I liked King a lot, but it was the saddle horse that really took my eye. She was a crabby Morgan mare and laid her ears back every time anyone went near her. In the mornings when Father put the saddle on, she would fling her head around and snap at him with her teeth, but she always missed him by an inch or two. She could run like a greyhound, and I wanted to ride on her so much I couldn’t think about anything else, but neither Father nor Mother would let me go within a rod of her. I had got so I could ride Willie Aldivote’s donkey without my feet being tied together—and only holding on to the belly strap with one hand. Willie had taught me how to squeeze my knees tight behind the withers, and ride on them instead of the seat of my pants. I had spent hours practicing and knew that, especially with a saddle, I could ride the mare as easy as pie.

  It was about the middle of April when Father finished helping Mr. Wright repair his buildings. He took Bill and Nig with him that last Friday. I remember so well because that was the day we changed from being immigrants to being ranchers. When he came home that night the bay mare was tied to the tail gate. She didn’t have the saddle on, but there was a driving harness in the wagon, along with four little Berkshire pigs and two gunny sacks with the heads of half a dozen hens sticking out of holes in each of them.