Fields of Home by Ralph Moody Page B

machine and give it a good oiling, but he didn’t. He came to the carriage house doorway when I was hunting through the litter on the workbench. “What in thunderation you dawdling ’round there for whenst there’s haying to be done?” he shouted.
    “I was just looking for some wrenches and an oil can,” I told him. “That mowing machine sounds as if it’s in pretty bad shape.”
    “Ain’t nothing the matter with it that ain’t the matter with all the pesky things,” Grandfather snapped. “Now come take care of Old Nell whilst I hitch up the yella colt!”
    As we led the horses over to the machine, I told myself I’d keep my mouth shut even if I could see that the whole shebang was going to explode with the first turn of the wheel. I didn’t do it, though. The bolt on the keeper at the end of the pitman rod was so loose that the sickle head had a half-inch play. I’d heard it hammering the day before, and knew that if it wasn’t tightened it would break the ball joint off. The yella colt was prancing, bobbing his head, and kicking as Grandfather dodged in and out trying to fasten his traces. As soon as I had Old Nell hitched, I picked up a sharp stone and began tapping the keeper nut tighter. “What in time be you playing with now?” Grandfather shouted at me.
    “I’m not playing,” I said. “I’m just trying to tighten this bolt enough that the sickle head won’t break.”
    “Leave be! Leave be, I tell you! First thing you know you’ll have it all busted to smithereens. Hold the yella colt whilst I gather up the reins and get along. Time flies!”
    Time wasn’t all that flew. Grandfather had just yelled, “Gitap! Gitap!” and the yella colt had taken two jackrabbit jumps when wet grass clogged the cutter bar and the loose pitman keeper jerked the head off the sickle.
    “Worthless, useless, meddlesome, big-headed boy!” Grandfather howled. “Now look what you done! Busted it all to smithereens! What in time and tarnation ails you?”
    I opened my mouth to yell back, but bit my teeth together and started for the tree where I’d been mowing. “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie,” Grandfather called after me. “Didn’t cal’late to scold you. Tarnal thing keeps a-busting all the time and likes to drive me to distraction. Guess I and you’d better fetch it in to the carriage house and tinker it up a mite.”
    The tinkering took us all the rest of the forenoon. Grandfather blew off at me a dozen times for wanting to be too fussy, but he let me put in new knife sections to replace the broken ones, turn the grindstone while he half sharpened the rest of them, put a new head on the sickle, and tighten most of the bearings. As soon as we’d eaten dinner, he went down to the beehives and seemed to have forgotten all about haying. I sawed wood ten or fifteen minutes while I was waiting for him, then bridled the horses, hitched them to the mowing machine, and drove to the orchard.
    It was the middle of the afternoon before I saw Grandfather again. By that time, I’d made a dozen rounds of the orchard, and the old machine had worked pretty well. I’d had a little trouble with the yella colt at first, but it hadn’t amounted to much. He’d danced and pranced until he found that I wasn’t paying any attention to him, and then he balked. It only lasted a minute or two. After I’d wired his ears together good and tight with a piece of soft wire, he’d stood, slatting around and bobbing his head. I gave him just time enough to forget he was balking, then picked up the lines, clucked to him, and he walked on, bobbing his head and snorting a little.
    Grandfather didn’t come near us when he came into the field. He took the scythe I’d been using from a limb of the apple tree, looked at the blade, and went to the carriage house. It was nearly an hour before he came back. Then he went to mowing under the trees as though he were all alone in the orchard. The sun was dipping down behind the tops of the