Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  I had to go right back to school again just as soon as we were done threshing, so I didn’t get much chance to see Father break the new horse. He knew how disappointed I was, and told me I could be the one to name him. It seemed only right, since he was taking old Bill’s place, that he should have his name, too, but he was so young I didn’t want to call him “Bill,” so I named him “Billy.”

  Billy had gentled down enough before I went back to school so Father could lead him with a halter, and he was being tied up in the barn every night. By the end of the week, he was hitching him up with Old Nig, and pulling a load of dirt around in the field. The first time I saw him hooked up, he was still trying to run away from the wagon, but Father had on a heavy load, and the brake set, so all Billy could do was jump and pull.

  About the only things we did the rest of the winter were to go to school and pick over beans. Right after supper every night, Father would pour a big pile of them in the middle of the kitchen table. Then Mother would read to us while we all sat around the table with pans in our laps and sorted the good beans from the frozen ones.

  One Saturday Father and I threshed and winnowed a big sack of the oats that we had raised with our alfalfa. It took a lot of threshing, and he had to turn the crank on the winnower fast, because there was so much hay and straw and so few oats. The next Monday he took them to the mill at Littleton and came home with the sack half filled with oatmeal.

  20

  Thanksgiving and Christmas

  THE MORNING before Thanksgiving Father put three sacks of peas on the back of the buckboard, and he and Mother started for Denver before Muriel and I went to school. We had to walk because they drove Fanny, but Grace stayed home to take care of Philip and Hal.

  It was after dark when Father and Mother came home, but I heard Fanny’s feet when she came over the bridge at the gulch. She was just walking, and King and I ran down the wagon road to meet them. I thought it would be fun to jump out and frighten them, so I flopped down behind a big tumbleweed and held King close up against me. Before they were opposite us I could hear Mother talking. “Let’s not allow the small price we got for the peas to spoil our Thanksgiving, Charlie. With five healthy children we have more to be thankful for than most anyone I know. And we have enough to feed them till spring, even if there won’t be much variety.”

  Hearing her talk like that when she didn’t know I was there made me feel like I was being sneaky, so I jumped up and yelled, “Hi, Father!”

  We did have a good Thanksgiving, too. Father and Mother must have sat up till nearly midnight to get things ready. They didn’t let us look into the box of groceries when they got home, and made us go to bed early. But when we got up in the morning, our biggest turkey was all dressed and hanging up near the kitchen door to chill. At breakfast Mother said, “Grace and I have a lot of work to do this forenoon. I want the rest of you to get bundled up and stay right out from underfoot till dinner is ready.”

  That was the first time Father let me drive Billy. The section hands had been putting some new ties in the railroad track, and had left the old ones so we could have them for firewood. Father wouldn’t let me hitch Billy to the wagon, but said I could lead him out of the barn. Then, after I had hooked Nig’s traces, he passed me the reins.

  Billy still tried to run away sometimes, and I had to be real careful that my hands didn’t shake a bit, so he would know I was a little mite afraid. I didn’t try to sit on the seat, but stood down on the wagon bed where I could brace my feet in good shape. I guess Billy knew all right that somebody besides Father had hold of the lines, because he started off dancing and hopping. But I pulled hard on the reins so as not to give my hands any chance to shiver. And by the time we got out where the ties were he was behaving pretty well. Every time Father heaved a tie onto the wagon Billy would jump, but he didn’t try to run away, and he pulled just as well as Nig when we were going back to the house.

  I was nearly starved before Mother came to the door and called, “Dinnnn . . . nnnerrr!” And you never saw such a dinner in your whole life. There were sweet potatoes and white potatoes and boiled onions, and squash and turnips and cranberry jelly, besides the turkey. When that was gone, there was mince pie and pumpkin pie; and afterwards a pound of cracked nuts . . . and a plate of fudge. We all ate so much we could hardly get up from the table. Then Father and all of us lay on the floor by the stove while Mother read us “Snowbound.” I think it was about the best day any of us had ever had.

  The only other thing that happened before Christmas is one I don’t even like to remember about. Since we moved to the ranch, Father had spent all his spare time setting fence posts. Soon after Thanksgiving he set the last ones, so that he had a row clear around the whole place. The Saturday before Christmas, we started stringing the secondhand barbed wire we had bought from Mr. Cash.

  Father had bought a wire stretcher that worked kind of like a pump. The more you pumped the handle the tighter the wire got. Philip came out to watch us, but Father wouldn’t let me do anything except bring him staples. And he told me to keep Philip way back away from the wire till he had it stapled tight, because it might break and hurt us. Father had just finished stretching the top strand of wire when I noticed a big bald eagle. He seemed to be about a mile high and was almost standing still up there. I forgot all about Philip and the fence and everything else, and was thinking of all the things I could see if I were sitting up there on the eagle’s back.

  All at once there was a quick, high “zinnnng,” and I looked around just in time to see Philip yanked off his feet and thrown end over end. Father and I went running to him as fast as we could go, and I could see blood on his neck and the side of his face. Father’s hands were shaking nearly as hard as mine when he picked Philip up, but the wire hadn’t really hurt him very much. The barbs had ripped the collar off his coat, and had torn a little piece out of the bottom of his ear. It was bleeding all down over his neck. As soon as Father found that Philip wasn’t hurt badly, he said to me, “Take him in to Mother. Your punishment will be that you can’t ride or drive any horse for a month, and you can’t help me with the fence any more.”

  He didn’t say anything about donkeys, but I didn’t play with Willie Aldivote’s old spotted one for the whole month. Every time I even thought about it, I could hear the “zinnnng” of that wire, and see the red blood the way it looked on Philip’s neck.

  Father and Mother went to Denver again a couple of days before Christmas. That time they hitched Nig and Fanny to the big wagon and took a whole load of peas. They didn’t come home till way after dark. Grace and I could hardly wait for them to get back. She had been telling me that Father and Mother had to help Santa Claus with the Christmas presents, and that they would be bringing them when they came home. We both ran down the wagon road to meet them as soon as we heard the wagon come over the bridge at the gulch. Father stopped the team and let us climb up into the wagon, but there wasn’t a thing in it.

  While Father was unharnessing, I poked Grace with my elbow and told her she had been making up all that stuff about Father and Mother having to help Santa Claus, but she just looked at me smart and said if they didn’t there wouldn’t be any presents. When Father hitched Fanny up the next morning and said he was going to the mountains to see a fellow about a dog, Grace poked me right back and said I’d find out if she wasn’t right as soon as he came home. I didn’t, though. There wasn’t a thing in the buckboard, except his little shingle hatchet, and Grace told me we were too poor for Santa Claus to come that year because the beans got frozen.

  Whether Father and Mother helped him or not, we had a fine Christmas. And I never saw anything that looked as though he were getting any help—except the packages that came from our folks back in New England.

  Christmas Eve, Mother told us we couldn’t get up till daylight, but when the sun first peeked over Loretta Heights we were all dressed and waiting inside the bunkhouse door. Father and Mother were still in bed when we went tearing into the h
ouse. There was a big Christmas tree in the corner of their room—all decorated with strings of popcorn and whole cranberries—and there was a big stack of presents under it, but Father said he never even heard the sleigh bells when Santa Claus came.

  We all got new shoes and caps with earlaps, and stockings and heavy winter underwear. And I got a jackknife with two blades, and a new geography book. We didn’t have any turkey, but Mother baked a whole ham, and we had all the trimmings to go with it ... and a big plate of fudge.

  There wasn’t any school between Christmas and New Year’s. That’s when Fred Aultland started baling his hay. Father and I worked for him all week. Fred said hay had gone to such a low price that he could only afford to pay half as much as he paid us in haying time, but he’d give us ten tons of baler chaff for our week’s work. It was good cow feed, and Father said that we could boil it with frozen beans to make the best hog feed in the world.

  The baler chaff was all alfalfa leaves and little short stems, so the only way we could haul it was in a wagon box, and Fred said it would take five loads to make a ton. As soon as my month of punishment was over and I could drive horses again, Father let me start hauling the chaff. At first he went with me to be sure I could handle Billy all right, but after that it was my job to go alone and get one load every night after school.

  I didn’t have a bit of trouble with Billy, but I guess Fanny kind of forgot me during that month. The first day I went to put her bridle on, she kept jerking her head up, so I couldn’t get the bit in her mouth. I was standing up in her feed box, and the more she kept bobbing her head the madder I got. At last I grabbed her by one ear to pull her head down. Quick as a wink, she snapped at me with her teeth. She had snapped at me a thousand times before, but had never touched me, so I didn’t dodge that time. There was a rip and a burn over my wishbone, and when I looked down blood was coming out of the hole in my jumper.

  It scared me a lot more than it hurt, and I went running in to Mother—hollering like a dog with a stepped-on tail. I guess she was as scared as I. Father was working on some little ditch boxes, out in the bunkhouse, and came in to see what had happened. While Mother took off my clothes, he made me tell him what I did to Fanny to make her bite me. Then he just looked at the skinned place before he went back to his work, and said, “Well, I don’t see any reason for me to punish you; I think she handled the matter very well herself.”

  Ever since Christmas, Father had been working on the ditch boxes and a little system of canals. It ran from the well to the far end of the bunkhouse. The Saturday afternoon before Easter, all the ranchers on our side of the creek—clear up to the mountains—came to our place for a meeting. Father explained how the boxes worked so that each one took the right percentage of any water that was coming through the canal. He said that if everybody used them, the ranchers near the head of the ditch would get 60 per cent of the water, and the rest of us would get 40 per cent. Then somebody pumped water into one end of the system, and everybody else watched it work, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  After they’d played with it till the yard was four inches deep in mud, Father went into the house and brought out a paper he and Mother had been working over every evening for a week. Then he passed it to Mr. Wright, who read it aloud. All the signers agreed to use Father’s boxes and not to tamper with them or take any more water than the boxes measured out to them. Fred and Mr. Wright were the last two to go. They both shook hands with Father and told him that if he hadn’t figured out the new system, somebody would have been killed in the water fights.

  Father told them that he hoped they didn’t think his new boxes would be a cure-all. He said that if one man really wanted to be dishonest, another man couldn’t keep him from it, but the boxes would make it harder for him to be dishonest without being caught.

  Mother and I were proud of him, too. She hugged him around the neck as soon as Fred Aultland was gone, and told him he was the smartest man in the world. I was waiting to tell him the same thing, but he said for me to run along and get the cows.

  Our sow—the pig we saved when we were butchering—had her litter on Easter Sunday. There were eight good ones and one runt. Father said the runt would never get his share of milk and would always be sick, so we had a funeral for him in the afternoon. Grace let me be the minister so she could be the head mourner.

  From then till plowing time Father was busy every day making ditch boxes. He made them for every rancher between our place and the mountains, but he didn’t get any money for them. The men would bring him the boards and spikes and bolts, but none of them had any money, so Father had to trade them his time for little pigs or chickens, or other things we could use. He got a heifer calf from one man and a weanling colt from another. By plowing time we had nineteen little pigs, eight turkeys, and a whole bunch of hens.

  It was about that time that I first heard anybody talking about the gold panic. But from then on everybody talked about it. I didn’t know what it was, but anyway, you could hardly get money for anything. Fred Aultland couldn’t sell his alfalfa, Mrs. Corcoran couldn’t sell all her cream, and when Father took peas and beans to Denver he’d come home with more than half of them unsold.

  After Father got finished with the ditch boxes, Fred and Bessie Aultland came to see all the new things Father got for his work. While Mother was telling Bessie where we got this chicken and that turkey, Father and Fred were talking about crops and the panic.

  Fred said, “We’ve all got to face the fact that it’s going to be hard to sell anything for money this year. I think you’re better off to have got a little stock around you than you would have been to get cash for your boxes. If I was in your place, I’d raise stuff I could feed my stock, and something I could trade in at the store for groceries.”

  “That’s the line I’ve been thinking along,” Father said, “but I don’t want to get out more crops than I can get water to raise. Having the stock is fine, but it’s left me less than twenty dollars to buy seed with.”

  Fred always chewed tobacco, and when he was thinking hard he had to spit a couple of times before he said anything. I bet myself he’d spit between the off horse’s heels first, but he fooled me—it was between the nigh horse’s. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, Charlie, ten of that twenty’ll get you seed enough for five acres of sugar beets, you’ve got beans enough left to sow five acres, and you can flail out oats enough to seed twenty acres from what’s left of your last year’s crop. I’ve got a little stack of seed alfalfa that’s two years old. I’ll trade it to you for four days’ work in haying time. With that machine you made, you could clean enough seed to put alfalfa in with your oats, and then you’d have a hay crop all laid down for several years.”

  Father said, “Fred, you’re the best neighbor a man ever had, but I’m afraid you’re an optimist. If I should get my full share of water, I’d only have enough for ten acres. I’ve already got ten acres of alfalfa; you’re talking about my putting down another thirty. I couldn’t expect to do much more than lose my seed.”

  Fred chuckled a little, then he said, “Man alive! You’re the only one in the country that will be helped by this damned panic. You don’t need money as much as you need food for these kids. I’ll make you a bet you’ll get all the damned water you need for eighty acres this year. Nobody up the ditch can hire hands this year any more than I can. The big fellows near the head of the ditch can’t use all their share of water without help; they’ll have to let part of it come on by, except when the ditch is lowest. If you get your ground soaked deep during the spring, and keep a dust mulch over it, you’ll have moisture enough to make a crop. By another year your alfalfa roots will be deep enough so they won’t need so much summer irrigation.”

  That’s the way we did it. We put Mother’s garden and the beets and beans way up at the southwest corner of the ranch—where the irrigation ditch came in—and put alfalfa in with oats on the northwest field. Father got the bean field all plowed, harrowed, and marked off
in squares before school let out for the summer. Afterwards, we dropped all the seed by hand, so we would be able to cultivate in all directions and keep a good dust mulch. I would drop five beans where the lines crossed, then Father would hoe some dirt over them and tread on it.

  21

  I Break Nine Toes

  SWEET clover grew in thick all over our last year’s pea field. Fred told Father it would make pretty good hay if it was cut while it was still young and tender. He let us take his mowing machine to cut it, but Father wouldn’t let me go anywhere near the mower while the horses were hitched to it. I’d had my ninth birthday just before Christmas, and had been driving teams for a year. It seemed to me I was old enough to drive the mowing machine just a little while, and I knew it would be fun to sit up on the little iron seat and watch the cutter bar flash back and forth while the clover tumbled down.

  I guess I came pretty near begging Father to let me do it, but he said No. Then he told me it was too dangerous, but that he would let me drive the horse rake after the clover had dried into hay.

  I could hardly wait for it to get dry enough to rake. I knew just how to kick the foot pedal so the teeth would fly up and dump the hay in straight even rows. I had watched Father do it all one evening the summer before.

  When the day for raking came, Father had to put a low seat on the horse rake, because my legs weren’t long enough to reach the foot pedal. He used the little iron one off the mowing machine. I could sit clear back in it and still reach the pedal.

  At first Billy had been nervous on the mowing machine. The cutter bar went clackety-clackety-clack right behind his heels, and two or three times he acted as though he wanted to run away. But old Nig kept right on plodding, and after three or four times around the field Billy settled down. Father thought he might do the same thing when the horse rake dumped, so he drove the team for the first couple of rounds. Billy behaved as if he’d been pulling horse rakes all his life, so Father boosted me up on the seat and passed me the lines. All he said was, “See if you can keep the windrows straight clear across the field, and don’t hurry the team at the corners.”