Little Britches (19 page)

Father hadn't been coughing nearly so much that fall as he used to, but he coughed and it seemed as if he choked a little before he answered me. He said he didn't want a sneaky partner, but if I could be open and aboveboard he didn't know a man he'd rather be in business with.

I couldn't help crying some more when he told me that; not because my bottom was still burning, but just because I loved him. I told him I'd never be sneaky again, and I'd always ask him before I did things. We walked to the house together. At the bunkhouse door he shook hands with me, and said, "Good night, partner." When I went to sleep, my hand was still hurting —good—from where he squeezed it when we shook hands.

WHILE we were in school Father hauled all the beans in from the field and made a stack right beside the barn. Every day he would flail out a big pile of them, and when I got home we would winnow them out. The vines were so musty that the dust nearly choked us and it made Father cough terribly. And the beans weren't very good either. Almost half of them were little tiny ones, and a third of all we winnowed were black from being frozen before they were ripe.

Mother would come out every night when we were finished. Then she and Father would look at the bags of beans in the barn and at what was left of the stack. He'd say, "There are still quite a few left in the stack, and they're from this end of the field. That's where I took the samples we figured from, and I'm in hopes they'll run a little better."

Mother would bite her underlip in between her teeth, and then she'd say, "Don't worry about it, Charlie. We'll get along all right—one way or another. I think it's the worry as much as the dust that's running you down so. Why don't you have Mr. Lewis come with his machine and finish the threshing for you? We could pay him with part of the peas and beans, couldn't we?"

Then Father would put his arm around her, and they'd walk to the house while he told her that, with a wife like her, a man had nothing to worry about; and she'd tell him that the Lord had always provided for us and that He always would.

Father left our new horse out in the corral all the time we were threshing beans. But every evening he'd take him in a few oats in an old bucket. At first the colt wouldn't come near him, but crowded into the farthest corner of the corral. Then Father would set the bucket down and come outside the gate. After a while, the colt would start sticking his nose out toward it. Pretty soon he'd creep up and grab a mouthful, jerk his head up quick, and watch us while he chewed them. Every day he seemed to be less afraid, and the last day of bean threshing he came trotting right up to the gate when he saw Father coming toward him with the bucket.

The peas were easier to thresh than the beans, and weren't quite so musty, but there were an awful lot of small ones. Father made me a little flail out of an old broom handle and a singletree stick, and let me stay home from school to help him thresh. The only way Mother would let us do it was with wet cloths tied around our faces. Maybe it was a good idea, because we didn't breathe in so much dust, and the wet cloths got so cold that we had to flail like sixty to keep from freezing.

As soon as we opened the stack and started threshing peas, the pheasants would come every morning at daylight. There were as many as a dozen on top of the stack one morning when we went out to milk. Father said they were getting to be pests, and would rob us of ten pounds of peas every morning.

While we were milking I got thinking about all the peas the pheasants were robbing us of, and about how good the one Mother roasted had been. That night I set my steel trap right in the middle of the open place on top of the pea stack. The next morning there was a nice fat cock pheasant in it. At breakfast Father and Mother talked about whether or not it was all right for me to have done it. At first they said it was against the spirit of the law for me to catch him, but I told them again what the sheriff said about there being nothing he knew of in the law against catching pheasants in a steel trap.

Father said, "You know, son, a man sometimes has to consider the spirit of the law as well as the actual words."

But all Mother said was, "Wasn't that other one delicious?"

I kept wondering all day about trying to trap another pheasant. Father hadn't really said I couldn't, but he hadn't said I could, either. I started to ask him two or three times, but without Mother there to say how delicious the first one was I thought I'd better not. Then I thought I'd just slip out when I went to bed and set the trap. If I didn't catch anything, of course, Father would never know anything about it, because I was the one who always climbed up on the stack to pitch the vines down. If I did catch one, Mother'd probably say, "How delicious!" again, and that might be all there'd be to it.

I thought I had my mind all made up, but I tried to keep my back turned toward Father as much as I could, so he wouldn't be able to see what I was thinking. Then I'd get worried that he might be able to see, anyway, and I'd start remembering about our being partners, and the chopping block, and how good my hand felt that night after he shook it. I tried to tell myself it wouldn't be sneaky to set my trap without his knowing about it, because he didn't always know when I set it for prairie dogs, but my head kept saying, "It would, too, be sneaky!"

I didn't figure out what to do till we were eating supper; then I said to Father, "Do you think I ought to drive a stake down in the pea stack to keep the pheasant from flying off with my trap?"

Instead of looking at me, he looked up at Mother. We were having spareribs and beans for supper that night. She was helping Hal get the meat off the bones when Father looked up at her. I don't know whether she saw him or not, but she kept right on cutting Hal's meat, and said, "I do hope the children won't get tired of pork and beans before spring comes."

Father looked down at his plate again, and said, "It might be a good idea, Son."

I got a pheasant off the pea stack every morning till we finished threshing. I guess that made up a little bit for how few bags of peas we got out of it.

The day we finished winnowing, we carried all the peas and beans into my room in the bunkhouse. Then we measured them all out into other sacks. When we were through putting two bushels into each one, we had just an even hundred sacks. Forty-nine of them were peas, twenty-eight were little beans, and twenty-three were large ones. Of course, the frozen beans were still in with the good ones, and there were lots of them. Father kept running the big ones through his hands, and saying, "They'll be more than half salable."

I had to go right back to school again just as soon as we were done threshing, so I didn't get much chance to see Father break the new horse. He knew how disappointed I was, and told me I could be the one to name him. It seemed only right, since he was taking old Bill's place, that he should have his name, too, but he was so young I didn't want to call him "Bill," so I named him "Billy."

Billy had gentled down enough before I went back to school so Father could lead him with a halter, and he was being tied up in the barn every night. By the end of the week, he was hitching him up with Old Nig, and pulling a load of dirt around in the field. The first time I saw him hooked up, he was still trying to run away from the wagon, but Father had on a heavy load, and the brake set, so all Billy could do was jump and pull.

About the only things we did the rest of the winter were to go to school and pick over beans. Right after supper every night, Father would pour a big pile of them in the middle of the kitchen table. Then Mother would read to us while we all sat around the table with pans in our laps and sorted the good beans from the frozen ones.

One Saturday Father and I threshed and winnowed a big sack of the oats that we had raised with our alfalfa. It took a lot of threshing, and he had to turn the crank on the winnower fast, because there was so much hay and straw and so few oats. The next Monday he took them to the mill at Littleton and came home with the sack half filled with oatmeal.

THE MORNING before Thanksgiving Father put three sacks of peas on the back of the buckboard, and he and Mother started for Denver before Muriel and I went to school. We had to walk because they drove Fanny, but Grace stayed home to take care of Philip and Hal.

It was after dark when Father and Mother came home, but I heard Fanny's feet when she came over the bridge at the gulch. She was just walking, and King and I ran down the wagon road to meet them. I thought it would be fun to jump out and frighten them, so I flopped down behind a big tumbleweed and held King close up against me. Before they were opposite us I could hear Mother talking. "Let's not allow the small price we got for the peas to spoil our Thanksgiving, Charlie. With five healthy children we have more to be thankful for than most anyone I know. And we have enough to feed them till spring, even if there won't be much variety."

Hearing her talk like that when she didn't know I was there made me feel like I was being sneaky, so I jumped up and yelled, "Hi, Father!"

We did have a good Thanksgiving, too. Father and Mother must have sat up till nearly midnight to get things ready. They didn't let us look into the box of groceries when they got home, and made us go to bed early. But when we got up in the morning, our biggest turkey was all dressed and hanging up near the kitchen door to chill. At breakfast Mother said, "Grace and I have a lot of work to do this forenoon. I want the rest of you to get bundled up and stay right out from underfoot till dinner is ready."

That was the first time Father let me drive Billy. The section hands had been putting some new ties in the railroad track, and had left the old ones so we could have them for firewood. Father wouldn't let me hitch Billy to the wagon, but said I could lead him out of the barn. Then, after I had hooked Nig's traces, he passed me the reins.

Billy still tried to run away sometimes, and I had to be real careful that my hands didn't shake a bit, so he would know I was a little mite afraid. I didn't try to sit on the seat, but stood down on the wagon bed where I could brace my feet in good shape. I guess Billy knew all right that somebody besides Father had hold of the lines, because he started off dancing and hopping. But I pulled hard on the reins so as not to give my hands any chance to shiver. And by the time we got out where the ties were he was behaving pretty well. Every time Father heaved a tie onto the wagon Billy would jump, but he didn't try to run away, and he pulled just as well as Nig when we were going back to the house.

I was nearly starved before Mother came to the door and called, "Dinnnn… nnnerrr!" And you never saw such a dinner in your whole life. There were sweet potatoes and white potatoes and boiled onions, and squash and turnips and cranberry jelly, besides the turkey. When that was gone, there was mince pie and pumpkin pie; and afterwards a pound of cracked nuts… and a plate of fudge. We all ate so much we could hardly get up from the table. Then Father and all of us lay on the floor by the stove while Mother read us "Snowbound." I think it was about the best day any of us had ever had.

The only other thing that happened before Christmas is one I don't even like to remember about. Since we moved to the ranch, Father had spent all his spare time setting fence posts. Soon after Thanksgiving he set the last ones, so that he had a row clear around the whole place. The Saturday before Christmas, we started stringing the secondhand barbed wire we had bought from Mr. Cash.

Father had bought a wire stretcher that worked kind of like a pump. The more you pumped the handle the tighter the wire got. Philip came out to watch us, but Father wouldn't let me do anything except bring him staples. And he told me to keep Philip way back away from the wire till he had it stapled tight, because it might break and hurt us. Father had just finished stretching the top strand of wire when I noticed a big bald eagle. He seemed to be about a mile high and was almost standing still up there. I forgot all about Philip and the fence and everything else, and was thinking of all the things I could see if I were sitting up there on the eagle's back.

All at once there was a quick, high "zinnnng," and I looked around just in time to see Philip yanked off his feet and thrown end over end. Father and I went running to him as fast as we could go, and I could see blood on his neck and the side of his face. Father's hands were shaking nearly as hard as mine when he picked Philip up, but the wire hadn't really hurt him very much. The barbs had ripped the collar off his coat, and had torn a little piece out of the bottom of his ear. It was bleeding all down over his neck. As soon as Father found that Philip wasn't hurt badly, he said to me, "Take him in to Mother. Your punishment will be that you can't ride or drive any horse for a month, and you can't help me with the fence any more."

He didn't say anything about donkeys, but I didn't play with Willie Aldivote's old spotted one for the whole month. Every time I even thought about it, I could hear the "zinnnng" of that wire, and see the red blood the way it looked on Philip's neck.