Fields of Home by Ralph Moody Page A

hogs in the barn cellar. As soon as I’d fed Bess and the cats, I took the rest of the milk and started to the sheep barn. I was just to the doorway when Grandfather hollered from behind me, “Stay out of there! Mind what you’re doing!” When I looked around, he was coming across the barnyard toward me as fast as he could walk. “Who told you to feed that calf?” he asked me as he got closer.
    “Nobody,” I said, “but I heard Millie come down and feed it last night, and this morning she told me she only wanted a quart of milk at the house.”
    “Didn’t she tell you to mind the spider web?” he asked.
    “No, sir.”
    “Rattle-brained girl!” he snapped out, and pushed between me and the doorway. Its frame was made of heavy oak logs, and the open door sagged on thick rawhide hinges. Grandfather put a hand against each of the upright logs, peeked into the darkness of the old barn, and his voice was only a whisper when he said, “Mark it, Ralphie; the all-fired great spider web acrost the top half the inside doorway. Been there nigh onto three weeks. The old spider’ll be hatching out her brood pretty quick now. You have to scooch down low a-going in. I was scairt you was going to blunder into it and smash it all to smithereens.”
    The sheep barn was dug back into the hillside. The roof was of poles with hay and earth over them, and the floor was solid packed clay that was as hard as stone. As we ducked under the spider web and my eyes became used to the dimness, I could see a spotted calf, three or four weeks old, penned in one corner of the old barn. A chipped white porcelain bucket was nailed inside the fencing of the pen, and the calf was butting it with his head. So he wouldn’t slop the milk, I climbed the fence, straddled his neck, and poured all but a quart of it into the chipped bucket. Then I slipped two fingers into his mouth, for teats, and poked his nose into the warm milk. I’d almost forgotten about Grandfather’s being there till he asked, “Who learned you how to do that?”
    “Father, I guess. It seems as if I’ve always known it.”
    “Well, it’s more’n I thought you knowed, Ralphie. You done it like a real farmer.”
    “I am a real farmer,” I told him. “I just don’t know much about mowing with a hand scythe.”
    “Hmfff! Don’t know nothing about bees or dressing or hay land neither! Strawb’ries and tomatoes! Who ever heard of a farmer that couldn’t swing a snath and scythe? Only fit way to mow a field; ’cepting a man can’t find hired hands with gumption enough to do an honest day’s work for a dollar. You seen how that tarnal mowing machine hogs down the grass and leaves half of it laying flat in the field.”
    “It wouldn’t if it was fixed up in good shape.”
    “Don’t tell me!” Grandfather shouted so loud that the calf let go of my fingers. “Ain’t a machine made that will do ary job as good as a man can do it by hand if he’s got a spark of gumption in him. Wastin’! Wastin’! Lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing farmers nowadays; run into debt for a parcel of fancy machines that ain’t worth a tinker, and go broke afore ever they get ’em paid for.”
    “Father always said that good machinery would pay for itself ten times over.”
    “Father said! Father said! What in time and tarnation did Charlie know ’bout farming anyways? Mill hand, wa’n’t he, whenst Mary wed him? My father took this farm up from the wilderness, cut the timber, pulled the stumps, sot up the stonewalls and cleared the fields, and he didn’t have nothing ’cepting his own two hands, a homemade plow, and a yoke of oxen. Hosses! Hosses! Ain’t a hoss a-living can hold a candle to a Durham ox. Why I recollect . . . ”
    Just at that moment Millie called to us, “Victuals is ready!”
    After breakfast, I harnessed the horses while Grandfather was doing something down at the beehives. I hoped he’d stay there till I had time to tighten the nuts on the mowing