My Great-grandfather Turns 12 Today

by Bill Dodds

  “That’s me,” Charlie said. “And it’s Michael’s birthday, too.”

  “Is that right, Michael?” Aunt Mary asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “He’s twelve just like I am,” Charlie said.

  “Well, now,” Aunt Mary said, “isn’t that grand?”

  We finished dinner and then Aunt Mary left the room and came back with a large cooking dish and set it on the table. It was filled with some kind of chunky glop.

  “No cake and candles, huh?” I asked and everyone looked at me.

  “Cake and candles?” they asked.

  “You know,” I said. “Make a wish and blow out the candles.”

  “Blow out what candles?” Pat asked.

  “You put little candles in a cake,” I said. “Then you light them and make a wish and blow them out. And sing ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  “Sing what?” Aunt Mary asked.

  “Everyone does,” I said. “Everyone in . . .” Charlie gave me a hard kick under the table. He was barefoot but it still hurt.

  “Vaudeville,” he said. “Everyone in vaudeville.”

  “Sing it,” Pat said.

  “No,” I said, “I couldn’t . . .”

  “I never heard of anybody in vaudeville who didn’t love to sing,” Uncle Peter said. “Go ahead, Michael. We’d enjoy hearing it.”

  So I sang it. Then we all sang it. Then we had the bread pudding. It was okay. It had a lot of sugar in it.

  “Pa?” Sean asked while we were finishing up with our dessert. “What does the letter from the banker mean, exactly?”

  “It means,” Uncle Peter said, “now we owe the money to Mr. Meyer. We’ll make the monthly mortgage payments to him.”

  “But . . .” Aunt Mary began to say something and then she stopped. She looked worried. No, more than worried. She looked scared.

  “But,” Uncle Peter said, seeming to read her mind, “we were behind in our payments to Mr. Braxton. He let us fall behind so we could buy seed and other necessities this spring. And when the crop comes in this fall, we would have paid him back.”

  “Do you think Julius will . . .?” she asked.

  “Let us stay behind in our payments all summer?” he asked. “No, I think he’ll demand all the back money we owe.”

  “How much exactly?” Aunt Mary asked.

  “One hundred and fifty dollars,” Uncle Peter said and I laughed. Was that all? Everyone looked at me.

  “That’s not a lot, is it?” I asked.

  “Maybe not if you’re in vaudeville,” Pat said, “but a lot for most folks. A job in town pays three dollars.”

  “An hour?” I asked.

  “A day,” Charlie said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Uncle Peter. I didn’t know.”

  “That’s all right, son,” Uncle Peter said. “According to Mr. Braxton’s letter, the money isn’t due until a week from Monday.”

  “A week from Monday!” Aunt Mary exclaimed.

  “And if we don’t pay it by then,” he said, “we lose the farm.”

  Chapter 13

  How to Save the Farm

  “We lose the farm!” Aunt Mary said and now she really looked scared.

  “If we don’t pay the money,” Uncle Peter said.

  “We lose the whole farm just because of that money?” Pat asked.

  “Those are the terms of the loan agreement,” his father said. “Mr. Braxton was willing to bend the rules a little because he knew we would pay him back in the fall. Apparently, Mr. Meyer isn’t.”

  “Oh, that Julius!” Aunt Mary said.

  “So,” Uncle Peter said, “the family will just have to make an extra one hundred and fifty dollars in the next ten days.”

  “But we can’t . . .” Aunt Mary began.

  “But we shall,” Uncle Peter said and laughed. “Come on.”

  He led us all outside. By now all the clouds had disappeared and it was starting to warm up.

  “It’s beautiful after an early summer rain shower, isn’t it?” he asked. “So fresh and clean.”

  “Washes away all the smog,” I said.

  “Washes away all the what?” Pat asked.

  “Frogs,” Charlie said. “There’s not a frog to be seen.”

  We left the small yard, passed a horse tied up to a post, and walked into the barn.

  “You have gold hidden away in here, Peter Farrell?” Aunt Mary asked.

  “Better than gold,” he said, taking a step up a ladder made of 2-by-4’s that had been nailed to one wall. “I have walnut.”

  He easily climbed up the ladder and disappeared through a square hole in the ceiling. “Come on,” he shouted back down to us. “I can’t believe I’ve been able to keep this a secret.”

  Sean clambered up the ladder, then Charlie, then the rest of us, even little Francis who was only about two years old.

  “Papa?” the tot called out, as his mom helped him up the wooden rungs. “Papa?”

  “Come on up, Frank,” his dad answered. “See what Papa’s got.”

  The second floor of the barn was about three-fourths the size of the main floor. It was a loft, stored with hay and small farm equipment.

  “Watch the edge, children,” Aunt Mary said, pointing to one side that was open to the ground floor.

  “That’s so you can throw hay down to the animals, huh?” I asked Charlie and he nodded.

  It was pretty dark up there until Uncle Peter lit a kerosene lantern. That helped some. “Back here,” he said, handing the lantern to Sean. He pulled away an old tarp and there was the most beautiful piece of furniture I had ever seen.

  “Peter, what . . .?” Aunt Mary started to say.

  “A sideboard,” Uncle Peter said. “I’m making it with lumber we had cut from that old walnut tree that blew down three years ago.”

  “The walnut?” Aunt Mary said. “But you were saving that wood for something special.”

  “This is special,” he said. “It’s being specially made for the Widow Dixon.”

  “The old rich lady?” Charlie asked.

  “Elderly,” his mother said.

  “The very same,” said Uncle Peter. “She has a dining room set of the finest walnut. It’s been in her family for years but somewhere along the line the sideboard was lost or misplaced or stolen or ruined. In any case, she’s asked me to make her a new one.”

  “What’s a sideboard?” I whispered to Charlie.

  “What?” Uncle Peter asked.

  “He said ‘What’s a sideboard?’,” Sissie answered.

  “A sideboard is a cabinet for the dining room,” he told me. “For the finest dishes and sterling silver.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Aunt Mary said. “It’s so beautiful.”

  She was right. It was about eight feet long and two and a half feet wide. The top of it stood about four feet off the ground. There were three long drawers in the center and open shelves at each end.

  “These will be covered,” Uncle Peter said as he pointed at the shelves. “I’m just finishing the second door.”

  He bent down and picked up a piece of wood that was leaning against the side of the sideboard. It was two feet wide and would cover the shelves completely. There was an intricate design—three pine cones and the branch of a pine tree—carved into the center of it. It matched the carving that had been done on the front of each of the drawers.

  “This was the hard part,” he said. “The drawers and this door are all done and I’m just about done with the other door. But by a week from Monday it will be all stained and varnished and polished and ready for delivery. Cash on delivery.”

  I wondered how much.

  “How much?” Sean asked, speaking for all of us.

  “You’ve been working on this for months,” Aunt Mary said. “All those afternoons when you said you were out here fixing a harness or tinkering with a wagon’s axle or . . . or . . .”

  “Or anything else I could think of,” Uncle Peter said and lau
ghed. “Then I’d cover it all up and slide it safely back behind the hay where no young lad coming up to pitch hay down to the animals would see it. Oh, I’m a sneaky one.”

  “How much?” Sean asked again. He seemed much more serious than Pat or Charlie.

  “One hundred and seventy-five dollars,” Uncle Peter said.

  “Saints preserve us!” Aunt Mary exclaimed.

  “Fortunately,” he said, “Mr. Braxton let me know late last winter that he could allow us to fall a little behind in our mortgage payments but he might not be the one holding the note by the time the crops came in.”

  “How come so much money for one piece of furniture, Pa?” Pat asked.

  “The wood and the design match the set the Widow Dixon already has,” he said, “but it was the carving that she was really interested in, and willing to pay for.”

  “But it’s such a shame you have to give it away,” Aunt Mary said.

  “I’m not giving away anything,” he reminded her. “What I’m doing is keeping our house and our farm.”

  “How are you going to get it down, Papa?” Sissie asked. “It’s too big to go down the ladder.”

  “Oh, no!” he said and he smiled. “I guess then we’ll have to wrap it all up in blankets and then put some ropes around it and lower it right down over the edge of the floor there. Right down into the wagon and out the big door and into Culver City.”

  “That’s a good idea!” the little girl squealed.

  “And now if all of you will excuse me,” Uncle Peter said, “I have some carving to do.”

  “Let’s go, children,” Aunt Mary said.

  “Pa?” Charlie asked.

  “Mmm?” his dad answered.

  “Can Michael and I go swimming?”

  “May Michael and I go swimming,” Aunt Mary corrected him.

  “May Michael and I go swimming?”

  “I guess some boys will do just about anything to get out of a Saturday night bath, won’t they?” he asked and then he nodded his head. “Don’t either one of you swim alone,” he said.

  “No, sir,” Charlie answered.

  The girls went down the ladder first and then all the boys except Charlie and me. Uncle Peter had pulled out the other door, set it up on some sawhorses and was getting out some wood chisels that looked really sharp.

  “You do know how to swim, don’t you?” Charlie asked me.

  “Uh huh,” I said, “but I’m going to need to borrow a swim suit.”

  “A what?”

  “A bathing suit. I didn’t exactly pack one with me.”

  “You don’t need a bathing suit,” he shook his head and said. “You’re going to be naked.”

  Chapter 14

  To the River

  “I’m going to be what?” I asked but Charlie was already scampering down the ladder.

  “You boys be home for chores,” Uncle Peter called out.

  “Yes, Pa.”

  “Charlie!” I hurried down after him. Everyone else was gone. “What did you mean when you said . . . ”

  “Warming up, ain’t it?” he asked me and he headed out the main double doors. “Going to be right hot this afternoon.”

  “Wait up,” I said.

  “One way or another,” he said, “I’m going to have to get wet today and I figure I’d rather do it swimming in some nice cool water than sitting in some old bath tub in the summer kitchen.”

  I walked along beside him. Down the driveway and out to the road.

  “There was a bath tub in your kitchen?” I asked. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t there during dinner,” he said. “Never is. Usually on Saturday after supper Sean or Brigid will fetch it from the summer kitchen and bring it on in but during the summer it just stays out there.”

  “Bring it on in where?”

  “Into the kitchen,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

  “And instead it stays where?” I asked.

  “The summer kitchen,” he said.

  “What’s a summer kitchen?”

  “You don’t have a summer kitchen?” Charlie asked and I shook my head. “How do you keep your house cool with your wood stove going?”

  Wood stove? I figured he meant the fireplace insert. “We don’t use a wood stove in the summer,” I said. “We use an air conditioner.”

  “A what?”

  “A machine that cools the air. It make the house cool in the summer.”

  “Oh, go on with you,” he said and laughed. “And if you don’t light your stove all summer then how does your ma cook or bake anything?”

  “She uses the stove,” I said.

  “I bet she does.”

  “She just turns it on.”

  “She just does what?”

  “So what’s a summer kitchen?” I asked, going back to something he had said earlier.

  “That’s the room built on out back where Ma and Brigid cook meals during the summer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. You mean you’ve never heard of a summer kitchen?”

  “Huh uh,” I said, “and could you slow down a little.”

  “I’m talking too fast for you?” Charlie asked.

  “No,” I said, “you’re walking to fast for me. How far is it anyway.”

  “About three miles.”

  “Three miles!” I said. “Why didn’t your mom or dad drive us?”

  He really laughed at that one. I ignored him and I thought about what he had said a little earlier. “So in the winter,” I said, “you would just take a bath in the kitchen? I mean the regular kitchen.”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? Because that’s where the water is heating up, that’s why. The kettle is on the stove.”

  “Everyone would take a bath there?”

  “Of course they would. Not all at the same time. One at a time. From Francis on up to Sean. Then, when we’re all in bed, Ma takes hers and goes to bed and Pa comes back downstairs and takes his and dumps out the water.”

  “You don’t each get fresh water?”

  “Fresh water?” he asked, sounding puzzled. “We each get a little hot water added.”

  “But isn’t the water all dirty from soap and shampoo and conditioner?” I asked.

  “Soap and what and what?”

  “Never mind.”

  We walked along for quite a while with neither of us talking. I took off my jacket and carried it. We passed farmhouses and barns every once in a while. Sometimes a dog would start barking at us and Charlie would call out its name and tell it to hush. There was a man in one field with a team of animals pulling a plow.

  “You still use horses for everything?” I asked.

  “Those are mules,” he said.

  We kept walking.

  “That’s my schoolhouse,” he said at one point, gesturing toward a small, one-story building.”

  “How many in your class?” I asked.

  “Three.”

  “Three?”

  “Thirty-seven in the whole school. First through eighth grade.”

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead. “I don’t suppose this swimming place we’re going to is indoors, is it?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “most rivers are outside.”

  “We’re going to a river?”

  “Fair Brook,” he said.

  “So is it a brook or a river?” I asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know how it got the name,” he said. Then suddenly he stopped and turned to me. I stopped, too.

  “I’m not supposed to know a lot about the future,” he gushed, “but I just gotta ask. Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to sail the oceans on some big ship. See the world, you know? I just gotta know: Do I ever do that?”

  “You . . .” I began.

  “No!” he said. “Don’t tell me.”