Stitch in Time

by John Gould

  “Your putting me on,” said Marty.

  Father Greene said, “I am?”

  Garden Surprise

  One of the seed catalogs offers a special packet described as “Grandmother’s Garden,” and says it has a surprising mixture of old-fashioned country flowers such as grandmotherpeople grew back on the farm. It might be so. My grandmother had a flower garden that was full of surprises, and a memorable one was when she surprised a Brahma hen that was taking a quiet dusting in the petunias. That was a big day on the farm. The Brahma is a heavy breed with feathers up and down the legs, and this old biddy was a whopper. Somehow she got over the little stick fence around the flower garden, which was meant to keep hens out, and she was rolling and kicking behind the pumple-stone border of the petunias in the fluffing luxury hens generate when they find a good place to dust. Grandmother came out of the house with a frying pan full of greasy wash water. The frying pan had just processed a galaxy of pork chops for the haying crew, so this wash water was real fatty.

  The disposal system of our farmhouse at that time consisted of a lead gooseneck pipe that ran from the kitchen sink through the wall of the house and ended in midair about a foot beyond. Sink water, when released, next fell into a wooden trough—two boards nailed together in a V—and was conveyed to a point between the grapevine and the egg plum tree, where it perpetuated a damp place where we could find fishing worms in dryest times. The cesspool and septic tank had not yet been imagined So that gooseneck was all the plumbing we had, and it was not prudent to slop fatty and soapy water down the gooseneck, since that could foul the drain and it would certainly build up a mess in time. So Grandmother was now taking the frying pan of greasy water to dump it off in the field somewhere. Frying pan in hand, she found this brazen Brahma lallygagging in the petunias.

  Grandmother let out a yell that lifted the straw hats off the haymakers up in the far field, and she hove the frying pan at the hen. The greasy water missed very few things. The frying pan clanged one by one on the pumple stones, and picked up a resounding vibration so it scaled over the hen’s head like a cathedral carillon. Taken unawares, while every feather was relaxed in the delight of the soft garden dust, the hen thought the sky was falling and began to trot around like the charge at Balaklava calling attention to imminent destruction. She tread down the soapy flowers and soaked up a lot of pork chop grease. This hoss-trot made Grandmother yell some more, and her vituperation and calumny resounded for miles around. One would never suppose there was all that much that one woman could think up to say to a hen.

  After the Brahma had flattened the verbena, hollyhocks, calendoo-las, coreopsis, salvia, and all the other pretty flowers in Grandmother’s Garden, including the “yarbs,” she scaled the stick fence and followed a southerly course. That was the best surprise in Grandmother’s Garden, ever.

  The frying pan lay on the ground and quivered for five minutes.

  No Lady, He

  Sportswriters and sportscasters continue to try, and now we have an athlete who “has great self-confidence in himself.” And another who plays basketball “like the textbook says.” Oh? Like which textbook says? Seems, too, that all of Babe Ruth’s records have been broken except one. That’s most innings pitched in one game. But the fellow didn’t tell us how many innings or which game, and if Ruth won or lost. You could look it up. So, the athletes at our Bangor High School are known as The Rams, and they play other high schools called the Falcons, and The Tigers, and The Bobcats, and so on in the esoteric lingo of the sporting trade. Well, the girls basketball team of Bangor High School played South Portland High School girls for the state championship, and the radio man came up with an interesting switch—The Lady Rams.

  Perhaps some eager Woman’s Libber will volunteer to tell us if this is considered a gain or a loss in the crusade. Nobody who knows anything about rams would think in the feminine. We were always leery of our buck sheep and kept an eye on them, so over the years scarcely anybody got killed, but even with perpetual en garde somebody would now and then get tumbled into the rhubarb with his dignity askew. If small children were to be about, we kept Aries tethered or penned, but resident farm youngsters ran a constant risk and never gave a butter an even break. Old Butthead would mostly roam the dooryard and barnyard, a necessary asset to be tolerated and avoided. “Avoid” is a good word, because when a ram charges he lowers his head and stays on target, and if the target moves he doesn’t adjust. He just keeps on going, and by the time he pulls up to turn and take another aim, you can be gone.

  Before my time, contributing to family lore, we had a hired man who turned a dirty trick on Aunt Vashti, a maiden lady of unsmirched character and stately aplomb. The evil deed was not done a-purpose. This hired man was on his way to harness Fan (a lady stallion), and was about to open the door of her boxstall to fetch her out when the ol’ Butthead of that era caught him fair and square in a fundamental manner, wreaking astonishment and pain. Being delighted that he had connected, the ram backed off to try again and dug his hoofs into the barn floor to get a good start. There happened to be a bushel basket handy, and in a smart maneuver the hired man grabbed this up and shook it in a manner to give the ram something to aim at.

  The ram did take aim at it, and lowered his head and charged. The hired man now stepped nimbly aside and slipped the basket on over the ram’s head en passant. The ram, basket and all, smashed into the wall of Fan’s stall so she whinnied and was high-strung all day, and the hired man made his escape, returning later to harness Fan.

  After that, this hired man made a practice of keeping empty bushel baskets within reach, and several times saved his life in this manner. The few seconds it took ol’ Butthead to get himself out of a basket were sufficient. But this conditioned the ram so he developed a great hatred for bushel baskets, and if he found one sitting around innocently he would charge it and butt it all over the place. Nobody knew how the hired man had wrought this, so everybody wondered about the battered and abused bushel baskets found in the most improbable places.

  Then Aunt Vashti dyed her yarn. She had washed the fleeces (from lady rams, mostly),carded and spun, twisted and skeined, and had dipped into the colors in the big iron kettle. Red, green, blue—she had everything ready in a bushel basket and was going to hang the skeins on the barnyard fence to finish drying and to let the colors “set.”

  The details need not be enumerated. Aunt Vashti survived the first skirmish and climbed to the safety of the hayrack. She forgot her sedate and ladylike reputation and delivered great villification upon the ram. He (the ram) paid no special heed to her comments, but continued to butt the basket until all the yarn was unwound and the barnyard was a bower of beauty, a rainbow and galaxy of color. The hired man was contrite, and explained matters. In conclusion, and pertinent to this discussion, in Aunt Vashti’s entire harangue from the hayrack, during which she covered everything that can be applied to a ram, never once did she refer to ol’ Butthead as a “lady.”

  Only if Funning

  Other people would go to milk a cow, but my father would sometimes announce, “Alas! I shall now wend my weary way o’er the plod and extract the lacteal fluid from the bovine!” Considering his meager public schooling, Dad had a fine vocabulary and he liked to fool around with words. His pompous verbosity was wholly a spoof, because he couldn’t abide people who “put on airs” and used big words to show off without trying to be funny. “Why can’t he talk like a human being?” he’d ask. His stilted periphrastics, amusing himself and others, may have been a reaction to the Gothics his mother used to read aloud to the family in the kerosene lamplight. And he may have been thinking about instructing us children, maybe like reversing a backfield. There was one precious evening that we sat at table harking to his lecture on being simple and direct in conversations, and then he said, “All right—now go ahead and ingest your crepuscular nourishment!”

  He used one remark often, and it does sound like a Gothic. It was his way of greeting somebody who surpr
ised him. He might be splitting wood behind the barn to look up and see an old friend approaching. He’d sink the ax in the block, stride forward with outstretched hand, and say, “ ‘What ho!’ ejaculated the angry monarch in fine scorn!” We youngsters had no idea where he got it, but it did sound like the Castle of Otranto, and we appreciated that it was permitted to talk like that if you were funning. Otherwise, his customary hello to somebody would be, “Greetings and salutations!”

  He came into the house one day to say to Mother, “Madam Dufarge, your larndry is satisfac-tor-ially desiccated.” I couldn’t find any of that in the dictionary, partly because I’ve never known how to spell desiccated, but it did make me go and look. There’s nothing wrong with that. Whenever somebody came into our yard who should be invited to descend and enter the house, Dad would call, “Extricate the quadruped!” Even after automobiles he called that, because in his youth unhitching the horse meant a longer visit, not just a dooryard call. It was part of a longer thing attributed to an old Quaker who wanted his horse taken care of overnight: “Extricate the quadruped from the vehicle, stabulate him, and when the early hour of morn doth arrive thee shalt be amply rewarded for thine amiable hospitality.” Dad could as well have said, “Welcome! Come in!” but then we children wouldn’t have known so much about words. He used to tell about the woman with Mrs. Malaprop tendencies who “instructed a condition on her homicide so she could ascertain more hostilities.”

  At our table the vinegar cruet was always “the Widder Cruse’s oil bottle.” When Dad asked for the Widder Cruse’s oil bottle, we passed him the vinegar cruet. It was a big day when, somewhat later, I read I Kings:17 and found Elijah the Tishbite consoling the poor widow at the gate of the city. I came to know the Widder Cruse! My sister and I had the chore of “doing” the supper dishes, and child-fashion we’d dilly and dally so the sink was often occupied when Dad came from the barn to wash up. Our dishpan accordingly became the “crucible of time.” Cutting firewood was “manufacturing arboreal fuel.” When he plucked a chicken he was “defoliating some nourishment.” Not all his pet ones were puns, but he did have some—his big maul for driving stakes for barbed wire was his “weapon of defense.”

  When he bought the big house where we children were to grow up, there came with it a cast-off black walnut living room set that had been forgotten long ago up under the eaves in the barn chamber. The upholstery had tattered away long since, but the wood was as beautiful as ever. One day Dad opened the trap door and passed the several pieces of this set down through to my mother, who reached up to take them. With new upholstery the set was magnificent, and Mother proudly kept it in the parlor ever after. Everybody who came into the room admired it, for it was truly worthy of being in a museum. One day somebody looked at it and said. “Is the set a family antique?”

  Dad kept a straight face, so my mother and we children kept straight faces. It wasn’t easy. We all understood as we heard him that words are wonderful things and will do just about anything you want of them. We heard our father say, “Yes, it is—it was handed down to my wife.”

  Cuddly and Happy

  Somebody with, I’m sure, nothing else to do, and probably on a fat government grant, has just done a scholarly survey to reveal to society that it costs more to keep a man in jail than it does to put a boy through college. There was a vague inference, not exactly proved but waiting to be pounced on eagerly by our money-hungry educators, that we wouldn’t have so many men in jail if we put more boys through college. This interesting juxtaposition of jail and college gives me a chance to advance a contention of mine of long standing—that everything would be much better off if every young man were required to fetch up a calf. It is an experience that teaches everything, and compared to jail and college is dirt cheap. You even make a penny. The companionship should begin when the calf is brand new, on his wobbles, and his mother is mooing softly as she laps him. He (this is a boy calf) is a gladsome thing. If Dad happens to think you old enough, smart enough, and big enough, he will say, “Want to raise him up?” Oh boy! You’re in business. Later that day you take your very own calf down to the end of the tie-up, and friendship begins. He has some clean straw to lie on, and a string around his neck to a ring in the wall, so he can visit his mother only when you let him. That first night, come the right time, you do release him, and you help his still wobbly legs bring him along the tie-up to the parent stem. He knows just what to do, and his Mommie turns to moo at him. When he is fed, new milk on his chops, you wibble-wobble him back to his little bed of clean straw and make his string fast to the ring in the wall. He is grateful, and he is cuddly and happy. As the proud owner of a new calf, you pat him, stroke him, and when you go to bed you think about him, and after you get to sleep you dream about him, and when you wake he’s on your mind.

  But during the night the wibble-wobbles have gone. You find your calf straining at his string, as if to pull the ring out of the wall, aimed at his mother. When you untie the string, he bolts, and there is no strength in your boyish arms to hold him. So you go sliding along the tie-up on your belly, too scairt to let go the string. By the time you pick yourself up, not too tidy, he has tackled Mommie, had his breakfast, and full of rowdy-dow is ready to disport and cavort. He is all lightning bolts, explosions, national disasters, and hoopla. Education is now coming along just fine and so far it hasn’t cost a nickel, bailiff or bursar. Getting him back to his straw takes more smart than passing algebra, and more sweat than a Rose Bowl game—or a rock pile. Besides, Rose Bowl games come but once a year, and Gulliver (I just named him Gulliver) has to get to Mommie twice a day or he’ll tear down the barn and Mommie will blat up a storm. It is incredible how much that calf is going to teach that boy in the next few weeks.

  And one of the world’s greatest educational experiences comes when Gulliver is ready to be removed completely and permanently from Mommie, and is going to eat and drink on his own so that Mommie’s bounty can be sold to the creamery. There is no more magnificant surprise in a boy’s life. Our little student brings a pail of warm skimmed milk from the kitchen, into which a couple of handfuls of calf meal have been stirred with a stick. He now approaches Gulliver, who has no idea what a pail of warm skimmed milk is, with calf meal stirred with a stick, and he has no suspicion that he is about to be taught how to drink from a pail. He thinks he is going to be released again, and is taut on his string aimed at Mommie. Mommie now moos to encourage him. It is not to be. Our boy now sticks two fingers of his left hand into Gulliver’s mouth and Gulliver, frantic with hunger, is beguiled into thinking he has found Mommie. He makes an effort to draw milk from the boy’s two fingers. When he gets to working properly on the fingers, not yet aware that he is mistaken, the boy lowers his hand into the pail of warm skimmed milk into which a couple of handfuls of calf meal have been stirred with a stick. Suddenly Gulliver finds milk between the fingers, and with gurgles of delight goes to work in earnest. What is taking place here is top-notch instruction in agronomy, economics, subsistence, and merchandising. Gulliver is coming along, and he must be adjusted to the family program. Just as soon as he learns to drink from a pail the money coming from Mommie’s milk will buy a good deal more than calf meal. Simple as that. The boy understands. And now Gulliver is drawing very well on the two fingers, and is guzzling milk and calf meal, and it is time to withdraw the boyish fingers and leave Gulliver on his own.

  It happens every time. Just as the boy is about to take out his fingers, Gulliver, in the ecstacy of gustatory delight, lets go a snort of joy and appreciation, and he blows a good deal of that nice, warm skimmed milk with calf meal up the boy’s sleeve and under his armpit. It spreads out in friendly stickiness to ooze along inside his shirt, to run down along his underwear, and to drip out of his pants into his shoes. Gulliver, however, you will notice, is now well instructed in drinking from a pail, and finishes his breakfast. This is all educational for boy and calf, and nutritious to Gulliver.

  After that come the weeks of careful att
ention, bedding down, cleaning out, brushing, and one day there are little buttons where Gulliver is gong to have horns. He looks like a comer. Other boys, raising calves, come to inspect him and compare notes. Gulliver has to be kept ready at all times for such visits, and education goes on. Whatever becomes of Gulliver, you owe him a great deal for the way he has instructed you and brought you along in understanding and discipline. You will never forget your first calf. He kept you out of mischief, lessening your risk of jail. And whatever you finally do with Gulliver—veal, auctioned at the fair, baby beef, maturity—there’ll be a penny coming in to help with college.

  I made no survey and I had no government grant. Just an opinion. If every boy brings up a calf, we might need fewer colleges, and perhaps no jails at all.

  With the Wind

  A nugget of didacticism in the old Chatauqua days had to do with the three laborers digging a ditch with picks and shovels. A man comes by and asks each what he is doing. The first says, “I’m digging a ditch.” The second, being less a clod and aspiring to riches, says, “I’m making fifty cents an hour.” Good pay in those days.

  But the third laborer, a poet at heart, lifts his eyes to envisioned spires against the sky, and says with pride, “I’m building a cathedral!”