Fields of Home (28 page)

Anyone would have thought Millie was an only daughter who had been away for years. Grandfather wouldn’t let her get her hat off till he’d taken her to the cellar to see all the milk and cream we had, to the barn to see the new bull, and to the carriage house to see the spreader. “There! There you be, Millie girl!” he crowed. “Look what I fetched home for Ralphie! I and him has tarnal nigh took all the rocks off’n the high field. Cal’late on growing strawb’ries and tomatoes up there, come spring. Going to give it a thundering heavy top-dressing afore the frost sets in. Can’t hand-spread dressing for them kind of crops. Got to have tools that’ll do the job right.

“Gorry sakes, Millie, can’t you see the womenfolks a-picking berries up there; you a-canning ’em for winter, and me a-fetching ’em off to early market. Didn’t I tell you things was a-popping ’round the old place? By thunder, ’twon’t be long afore the wildernes field is under the plow again, and an all-fired big new piece built onto the barn. Didn’t think to tell you ’bout us a-going into the butter business, did I? Partners! I and you and Ralphie . . . and Levi, if he’ll stay to home. By gorry, we’ll be a-fetching butter off to market by the firkin. Cal’late it’ll be up to thirty cents afore spring.”

I wanted to run and throw my arms around him and hug him, but I didn’t. I just stood there with a lump in my throat and a hot feeling behind my eyes. I think Uncle Levi felt the same way. As Grandfather led Millie off toward the house, he watched them out of sight, and said almost reverently, “It’s a God’s wonder! Could be the war’s all over for Thomas; could be it’s only an armistice. Calc’late we done about all we can, and the rest is in the hands of the Almighty.”

It was late on Thursday afternoon when Uncle Levi tightened the last new bolt on the manure spreader, stood back, and said, “There you be, Thomas! Wisht there’d been time enough to give it a good coat of paint, but there wa’n’t. Still-and-all, ’twouldn’t help the spreading none, and I’ll be a-coming back down afore long. Ralph, how ’bout hitching the hosses on? Calc’late we got time to try one load afore I have to go?”

With three of us pitching, the load went on in a hurry. When he threw the last forkful up, Uncle Levi said, “You and Thomas climb up on the seat, Ralph, so’s you can show him how the levers works. It’s time I was getting washed up and my clothes changed.”

I looked at my new watch. It was quarter of six, the man with the automobile wasn’t coming for Uncle Levi till seven, and there was something in his voice that made me know he’d like to show Grandfather himself. “You know a lot more about it than I do,” I said, “and besides, it’s nearly six o’clock and I’ll have to get the cows in.”

“Well, we’ll have to hurry,” Uncle Levi sort of grumbled.

Grandfather climbed to the high seat like a squirrel. He snatched up the reins, and before Uncle Levi was hardly beside him, started shouting, “Gitap! Gitap! Gitap!”

I watched them as I went up the lane for the cows. The yella colt was dancing and jumping, the way he always did when Grandfather drove. The shadows stretched long across the stubble of the hayfield, and Uncle Levi and Grandfather sat so close together that they made just one shadow.

31

Dynamite

U
NTIL
we had the talk on the granite outcropping, Grandfather hadn’t put in a full day’s work in the fields. After Millie came home, we had trouble in keeping him from working himself to death. All through the rest of the stone hauling from the high field and the manure spreading, I had to hunt ways to keep him from trying to do too much. He was so proud of the new spreader that he’d rush the loading, then ride to the fields with me and work the levers. The wilderness field was always on his mind, and when I’d try to slow him down, he’d tell me, “Can’t dig stumps after the ground’s froze, Ralphie, and there’s a tarnal heap of ’em to dig.”

The evenings changed as much as the days. Where Grandfather had usually gone off to his room as soon as supper was over, he began sitting in the kitchen till nine or ten o’clock. He brought out a stack, nearly a foot high, of catalogs, seed books, government pamphlets, and magazines about strawberries and tomatoes that he’d read until the corners were dog-eared. As soon as I’d come in with the last pail of milk, Grandfather would call, “Let be! Let be, Ralphie! What in time and tarnation took you so long? Millie’ll look after the milk! By gorry, there’s an awful good piece in the
Country Gentleman
’bout mulching strawb’ries with marsh hay. Come read it to me; these spectacles of mine is getting wore out so bad I can’t see next to nothing with ’em.” Then, as I read, he’d keep breaking in to have me go back and read something over, or snap, “Set that down! Set it down on paper, Ralphie, afore we forget it! By thunder, I cal’late on us a-knowing how to do the job afore we tackle it. Man shouldn’t ought to tackle a job less’n he knows what he’s about and the best way of doing it.”

As soon as we’d finished hauling dressing, we began the clearing of the wilderness field. It was a little more than eight acres. None of it was heavily wooded. On the northern part, nearest the orchard, there were thirty or forty pines, none of them more than fifteen or sixteen inches at the butt. On the east side, south of the granite outcropping, as many hemlocks were scattered and, here and there, a spruce, a hackmatack, or a fir. The rest of the field was covered with rocks, junipers, hazel bushes, and birch, beech, or maple saplings. Before we started the clearing, Grandfather blazed a cut on three pines that marked off the north quarter of the field. “There, Ralphie!” he told me. “That marks our stint for the year ahead. I cal’late we’ll do tarnal well if we lay the north end under the plow come planting time. Let’s heave an axe into this one; we’ll lay her yonder, ’twixt that white birch and the hazel bush.” By noon, we had six pines felled and trimmed out.

In the afternoon, we brought shovels, picks, and crowbars; and Grandfather started me on taking out the first stump. It wasn’t the kind of a job I liked. The roots snaked in and out between hidden rocks. Around and ’round the stump, each root had to be dug free and chopped away, at least a foot below the ground. And every time I cut one out, there was another one under it. Long before the afternoon was over, my axe was so nicked and dull that it would bounce off the tough roots as though it were made of rubber.

All afternoon, I kept hearing Grandfather’s axe ring, and half a dozen times there was a crash as another pine went down. By sunset, my first stump would wiggle, but there were still some uncut roots under it, and I’d dug a hole big enough to bury a bull in. I was sure Grandfather would scold me for dawdling, and for dulling the axe, but he didn’t. When he came over, he said, “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie! Been digging like a woodchuck, ain’t you? Leave be! We’ll hitch the hosses on and twist it roundabouts till it gives up. By thunder, the way we’re a-starting off, I cal’late we’ll be ready to go to hewing stone inside a fortnight.”

It rained all our third day in the wilderness field, and Grandfather caught a cold. Then the malaria flared up, and he had to stay in bed with chills and fever. He was irritable, and kept fretting about the freeze-up coming before we’d get the stumps all dug.

Road work started the Monday after Grandfather was taken sick. Most farmers worked out part of their taxes on the roads, and Grandfather sent me to work out part of his. A new piece of road was being built through the field where Sam Starboard had planted the white oaks that Grandfather told me about. The old stumps had to be taken out, and they were doing it with dynamite.

Bill Hubbard was the blast man, and I made friends with him the first day I worked on the road. Most of the time, I was hauling rocks and gravel, but whenever I had a spare minute, I spent it with Bill. He wasn’t more than thirty, and was big and slow-talking, but he was always joking, and he knew a lot about dynamite. The thing that surprised me most was that he wasn’t afraid of it. He’d let me watch him while he made his primer cartridges, put in the firing caps, and crimped on the fuses. I watched him often when he looked over a stump, dug a hole under the heaviest root, set the charge, tamped it, and packed the hole, but he’d never let me get close enough to watch him fire it. He’d blow a whistle when he was going to shoot, and we all had to get out of the way.

They had a steam engine for moving heavy rocks and stumps. One day when Bill and I were eating our dinner together, the engine got stuck in a sandy spot. The big drive wheels dug themselves nearly three feet deep, and the boiler was right down to the ground. I’d seen a steam engine stuck that way in Colorado, and had seen it pulled out with a team of horses. The men had pushed fence posts down in front of the drive wheels, then pulled the horses just hard enough to hold the wheel lugs against the posts, and the engine had come out of the hole on its own power.

Ever since I’d been on the road job, I’d been wishing we had some dynamite for blowing out stumps in the wilderness field, so I said to Bill, “If four sticks of dynamite would lift that engine out without hurting it, would you use them?”

“Or six, if need be,” he answered.

“Then would you give five sticks to get it done?” I asked.

Bill nodded, and said, “Or six.”

The engine came out of the hole just the way the one in Colorado did, but I had a hard time getting Bill Hubbard to give me the dynamite. I didn’t tell him that Grandfather had used lots of it before, or that he was the one who was going to blow a stump, but when he thought that was what I meant, I didn’t correct him.

Bill cut the fuse for me, and crimped on the firing cap before I took the dynamite home Saturday night. I didn’t want to leave it around the buildings, so, when I went for the cows, I put it in a box and hid it in the pasture. Sunday morning, I took a crowbar and a fork handle with me when I drove the cows to pasture. I planned that I’d get everything ready, and set the charge before I went to Sunday school. Some day when Grandfather was well and had gone to Lewiston, I’d fire it. Then, when he saw what the dynamite would do, I might be able to get him to buy some.

I picked out the meanest stump I could find. It stood right in the middle of a nest of rocks the size of washtubs. Some of the roots were as thick as my legs, and they writhed around and between the rocks like the arms of an octopus. I looked the stump over carefully, and tried to guess just where Bill would have set the charge. When I’d picked what looked to be the right spot, I punched the crowbar hard under the root, but it hit solid rock. I had to try a dozen different places before I found one where I could work the bar between the rocks and under the stump. Then, as I loosened the dirt, I had to lie on my stomach and dig it out with my fingers. There was just room for my hand between the roots and the top of a boulder.

I’d been sure I wasn’t going to be any more afraid of the dynamite than Bill was. But by the time I’d made the primer, tamped the charge in under the stump, and packed the hole, I was shaking, and soaking wet with sweat. Then, as I started to the house, I began to worry. I had two more days’ work on the road, and Grandfather was up and around the house. He might come to the field while I was away, do something to set off the dynamite, and be killed. I ran back, struck a match, and held it against the end of the fuse. At the first splutter, I dropped the fuse and ran for the nearest good-sized tree.

Nothing happened. It seemed as if I’d been behind that tree for ten minutes, but there wasn’t a sound. I was sure I’d set the charge wrong, or had put the fuse out when I dropped it. I let my breath out and was sort of glad it had been a failure. Then, just as I stepped from behind the tree, the whole wilderness field seemed to be flying in the air. Before the crash of sound came, I went heels over head. Sticks and stones were falling all around me, and I was sure I was killed. When I picked myself up, I wasn’t hurt at all. I was only dizzy, had a nosebleed, and my ears felt as if someone were beating on tin pans inside them. Where the stump had been, there was nothing but a big hole, with broken rock edging it, so that it looked like pictures I’d seen of a volcano crater.

I sat down on a big rock to let my head clear, and time must have passed faster than I realized. I was still shaking my head when I heard Grandfather shout. It sounded miles away, but when I looked around, he and Millie were running toward me from the pasture bars. “What in time and tarnation you been up to now?” Grandfather shouted, as he came panting up. “Be you hurt? Be you hurt, Ralphie?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m not hurt at all. I just fell down and got a nosebleed.”

“Tarnal hard fall, by the sound of it! What you been up to?”

“I blew a stump,” I said. “I guess I blew it a little too hard.”

“Gorry!” Grandfather said, when he looked around. “Gorry sakes alive!” Then he walked over to the hole.

Millie was just starting to give me the dickens for scaring Grandfather half to death, when he shouted, “How in thunderation did ever you do it, Ralphie? Looks like somebody’s smashed the ground with a tarnal great hammer!”

Instead of scolding me, as I expected he would, Grandfather was all excited about the dynamiting. “Gorry sakes! Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie! You cal’late you could do some more of ’em?” he asked. “By fire, four men couldn’t a-done that much in a day. How long you been a-working on it?”

“It didn’t take more than an hour,” I told him, “and I guess I could do it again, but I don’t know much about it, and it might be dangerous for both of us. Bill Hubbard knows all about dynamite. He’s only got two more days’ work on the road, and I think we could get him to come and do it for us.”

“No sense hiring somebody to do for you what you can do for yourself,” Grandfather said.

“Well, I don’t know what dynamite costs,” I said, “but the men on the road say Bill can get more out of it than anybody else. I’m afraid I’d waste too much.”

I thought the wasting part would be the most interesting to Grandfather, but he turned on me sharply, and snapped, “Don’t know what it costs! Where did you get what you used; steal it?”

“No, sir, I didn’t steal it. I earned it,” I said. “Any of the men on the road job will tell you.”

“Hmmm, hmmm,” Grandfather said, as he stood looking at the hole. “If you’re cal’lating on going to Sabbath school with Annie Littlehale, ain’t it ’bout time you was getting cleaned up and ready?”

Bill Hubbard wouldn’t come to do the dynamiting for us for less than two dollars a day, and, at first, Grandfather said he wouldn’t pay any man over a dollar. But on the last day of road work, he said it would be all right if I asked Bill to stop by and talk to him. Bill came home with me that night, and Grandfather told him to get all the things he’d need for the job, and to bring them with him the next morning.

I never saw a little boy have more fun on the Fourth of July than Grandfather had on the first day of dynamiting the wilderness field. Bill showed us where to dig the blasting holes under the stumps, and he was shooting a charge nearly every half hour. Every time he’d blow his whistle, Grandfather would dive behind a tree or boulder. Then, when the explosion came, he’d wave his arms and shout, “There! There, by thunder! ’Twon’t be long afore we have her flatter’n a thrashing floor. Gorry sakes alive! ’Minds me of the battle of Bull Run! Did ever I tell you, Ralphie . . . ” Sometimes he’d tell about some battle for a few minutes, but it would never last long. He was too anxious to get the holes dug, and be ready for another blast.

Along toward the end of the afternoon, Bill blew the last stump from the trees Grandfather had cut. I liked to work with Bill, and was afraid Grandfather would say we didn’t need him any more, so I asked, “How many potatoes did you raise on this whole field after you cleared it the first time?”

“Thousand bushel,” Grandfather said quickly. “How come you to ask that?”

“I was just thinking,” I said. “The way Bill is knocking the stumps out, we might be able to clear more than a quarter of the field this year.”

“Clear it all!” Grandfather said sharply. “What’s to hinder? Take a tarnal hard freeze to stop that damanite a-blasting out a stump. Fast as ever I and you gets ’em ready, I cal’late on having the Hubbard boy come and histe ’em out for us. Gorry sakes! Don’t cal’late there’ll be a tarnal stump left, come Thanksgiving time.”