Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (illustrated by Garth Williams).
Title: Farmer Boy.
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (illustrated by Garth Williams).
Genre: Literature, autobiographical, Western, family saga, children's lit, YA, survival, bildungsroman.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1933.
Summary: Based on the childhood of Laura's husband, Almanzo Wilder, who grew up in the 1860s on a wealthy farm near the town of Malone in upstate New York. The book covers more than one year in Almanzo's life, beginning just before his 9th birthday, and following at least two harvest cycles. It describes in detail the endless chores involved in running the Wilder family farm. Young as he is, Almanzo rises before 5 every day to milk several cows and feed stock. In the growing season, he plants and tends crops; in winter, he hauls logs, helps fill the ice house, trains a team of young oxen, and sometimes, when his father can spare him, goes to school. The novel includes stories of Almanzo's brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥
♥
♥
♥
♥ But to Almanzo the most beautiful sight was his mother, bringing in the big willow-ware platter full of sizzling ham.
Mother was short and plump and pretty, her eyes were blue, and her brown hair was like a bird's smooth wings. A row of little red buttons ran down the front of her dress of wine-colored wool, from her flat white linen collar to the white apron tied round her waist. Her big sleeves hung like large red bells at either end of the blue platter. She came through the doorway with a little pause and a tug, because her hoopskirts were wider than the door.
♥ "Thank you," Almanzo said. Those were the only words he was allowed to speak at table. Children must be seen and not heard. Father and Mother and Mr. Corse could talk, but Royal and Eliza Jane and Alice and Almanzo must not say a word.
♥ After supper Almanzo took care of his moccasins. Every night he sat by the kitchen stove and rubbed them with tallow. He held them in the heat and rubbed the melting tallow into the leather with the palm of his hand. His moccasins would always be comfortably soft, and keep his feet dry, as long as the leather was well greased, and he didn't stop rubbing until it would absorb no more tallow.
Royal sat by the stove, too, and greased his boots. Almanzo couldn't have boots; he had to wear moccasins because he was a little boy.
♥ When the work was done, Father came up the cellar stairs, bringing a big pitcher of sweet cider and a panful of apples. Royal took the corn-popper and a pannikin of popcorn. Mother banked the kitchen fire with ashes for the night, and when everyone else had left the kitchen she blew out the candles.
They all settled down cosily by the big stove in the dining-room wall. The back of the stove was in the parlor, where nobody went except when company came. It was a fine stove; it warmed the dining-room and the parlor, its chimney warmed the bedrooms upstairs, and its whole top was an oven.
Royal opened its iron door, and with the poker he broke the charred logs into a shimmering bed of coals. He put three handfuls of popcorn into the big wire popper, and shook the popper over the coals. In a little while a kernel popped, then another, then three or four at once, and all at once furiously the hundreds of little pointed kernels exploded.
When the big dishpan was heaping full of fluffy white popcorn, Alice poured melted butter over it, and stirred and salted it. It was hot and crackling crisp, and deliciously buttery and salty, and everyone could eat all he wanted to.
Mother knitted and rocked in her high-backed rocking-chair. Father carefully scraped a new ax-handle with a bit of broken glass. Royal carved a chain of tiny links from a smooth stick of pine, and Alice sat on her hassock, doing her woolwork embroidery. And they all ate popcorn and apples, and drank sweet cider, except Eliza Jane. Eliza Jane read aloud the news in the New York weekly paper.
You can fill a glass full to the brim with milk, and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk, and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place.
♥ Royal was dressing. His breath froze white in the air. The candle-light was dim, as though the darkness were trying to put it out.
Suddenly Royal was gone, the candle was not there, and Mother was calling from the foot of the stairs:
"Almanzo! What's the matter? Be you sick? It's five o'clock!"
He crawled out, shivering. He pulled on his trousers and waist, and ran downstairs to button up by the kitchen stove. Father and Royal had gone to the barns. Almanzo took the milk-pails and hurried out. The night seemed very large and still, and the stars sparkled like frost in the black sky.
♥ "I wish I was big enough to fight 'em!" he said.
"Son, Mr. Corse hired out to teach the school," Father answered. "The school trustees were fair and aboveboard with him; they told him what he was undertaking. He undertook it. It's his job, not yours."
"But maybe they'll kill him!" Almanzo said.
"That's his business," said Father. "When a man undertakes a job, he has to stick to it till he finishes it. If Corse is the man I think he is, he'd thank nobody for interfering."
♥
♥ "Don't take such big mouthfuls."
Mothers always fuss about the way you eat. You can hardly eat any way that pleases them.
♥
♥
♥ He trudged with the others across the ice to the middle of the pond. A sharp wind blew there, driving wisps of snow before it. Above the deep water the ice was smooth and dark, swept almost bare of snow. Almanzo watched while Joe and John chopped a big, three-cornered hole in it. They lifted out the broken pieces of ice and carried them away, leaving the hole full of open water.
"She's about twenty inches thick," Lazy John said.
"Then saw the ice twenty inches," said Father.
Lazy John and French Joe knelt at the edge of the hole. They lowered their cross-cut saws into the water and began to saw. Nobody pulled the ends of the saws under the water.
Side by side, they sawed two straight cracks through the ice, twenty inches apart, and twenty feet long. Then with the ax John broke the ice across, and a slab twenty inches wide, twenty inches thick, and twenty feet long rose a little and floated free.
With a pole John pushed the slab toward the three-cornered hole, and as the end was thrust out, crackling the thin ice freezing on the water, Joe sawed off twenty-inch lengths of it. Father picked up the cubes with the big iron ice-tongs, and loaded them on the bobsleds.
..Father finished loading the bobsled. Then he spread the laprobes on top of the ice, and Almanzo rode on them with Father and Royal, back to the ice-house near the barns.
The ice-house was built of boards with wide cracks between. It was set high from the ground on wooden blocks, and looked like a big cage. Only the floor and the roof were solid. On the floor was a huge mound of sawdust, which Father had hauled from the lumber-mill.
With a shovel Father spread the sawdust three inches thick on the floor. On this he laid the cubes of ice, three inches apart. Then he drove back to the pond, and Almanzo went to work with Royal in the ice-house.
They filled every crack between the cubes with sawdust, and tamped it down tightly with sticks. Then they shoveled the whole mound of sawdust on top of the ice, in a corner, and where it had been they covered the floor with cubes of ice and packed them in sawdust. Then they covered it all with sawdust three inches thick.
They worked as fast as they could, but before they finished, Father came with another load of ice. He laid down another layer of ice cubes three inches apart, and drove away, leaving them to fill every crevice tightly with sawdust, and spread sawdust over the top, and shovel the rest of the mount of sawdust up again.
..Buried in sawdust, the blocks of ice would not melt in the hottest summer weather. One at a time they would be dug out, and Mother would make ice-cream and lemonade and cold egg-nog.
♥ "Yes, Father," Almanzo whispered. He knew it. He knew he should have been more careful. A boy nine years old is too big to do foolish things because he doesn't stop to think. Almanzo knew that, and felt ashamed.
♥
So he washed as quickly as he could, and he dried himself and got into his warm underwaist and his woolly long drawers, and he put on his long woolen nightshirt.
..He felt very clean and good, and his skin felt sleek in the fresh, warm clothes. It was the Saturday-night feeling.
♥ Poor people had to wear homespun on Sundays, and Royal and Almanzo wore fullcloth. But Father and Mother and the girls were very fine, in clothes that Mother had made of store-boughten cloth, woven by machines.
♥
♥ Frank's father was Uncle Wesley; he owned the potato-starch mill and lived in town. He did not have a farm. So Frank was only a town boy and he played with town boys. But this Sunday morning he was wearing a store-boughten cap.
It was made of plaid cloth, machine-woven, and it had ear-flaps that buttoned under the chin. Frank unbuttoned them, and showed Almanzo that they would turn up and button across the cap's top. He said the cap came from New York City. His father had bought it in Mr. Case's store.
Almanzo had never seen a cap like that. He wanted one.
Royal said it was a silly cap. He said to Frank:
"What's the sense of ear-flaps that button over the top? Nobody has ears on top of his head." So Almanzo knew that Royal wanted a cap like that, too.
"How much did it cost?" Almanzo asked.
"Fifty cents," Frank said, proudly.
Almanzo knew he could not have one. The caps that Mother made were snug and warm, and it would be a foolish waste of money to buy a cap. Fifty cents was a lot of money.
♥ But Almanzo just sat. He had to. He was not allowed to do anything else, for Sunday was not a day for working or playing. It was a day for going to church and for sitting still.
♥ As soon as the whip was ready, he began. Every Saturday morning he spent in the barnyard, teaching Star and Bright. He never whipped them; he only cracked the whip.
He knew you could never teach an animal anything if you struck it, or even shouted at it angrily. He must always be gentle, and quiet, and patient, even when they made mistakes. Star and Bright must like him and trust him and know he would never hurt them, for if they were once afraid of him they would never be good, willing, hard-working oxen.
♥
♥ The days were growing longer, but the cold was more intense. Father said:
"When the days begin to lengthen
The cold begins to strengthen."
♥ At last the snow softened a little on the south and west slopes. At noon the icicles dropped. Sap was rising in the trees, and it was time to make sugar.
In the cold mornings just before sunrise, Almanzo and Father set out to the maple grove. Father had a big wooden yoke on his shoulders and Almanzo had a little yoke. From the ends of the yokes hung strips of moosewood bark, with large iron hooks on them, and a big wooden bucket swung from each hook.
In every maple tree Father had bored a small hole, and fitted a little wooden spout into it. Sweet maple sap was dripping from the spouts into small pails.
Going from tree to tree, Almanzo emptied the sap into his big buckets. The weight hung from his shoulders, but he steadied the buckets with his hands to keep them from swinging. When they were full, he went to the great caldron and emptied them into it.
The huge cauldron hung from a pole set between two trees. Father kept a bonfire blazing under it, to boil the sap.
..They poured the syrup into Mother's big brass kettle on the cook-stove.
..After supper, the syrup was ready to sugar off. Mother ladled it into six-quart milk-pans and left it to cool. In the morning every pan held a big cake of solid maple-sugar. Mother dumped out the round, golden-brown cakes and stored them on the top pantry shelves.
♥ ..and they ate wintergreen berries all afternoon.
Almanzo brought home a pailful of the thick, green leaves, and Alice crammed them into a big bottle. Mother filled the bottle with whisky and set it away. That was her wintergreen flavoring for cakes and cookies.
♥
♥ Almanzo hated house-cleaning. He had to pull up carpet tacks, all around the edges of miles of carpet. Then the carpets were hung on clotheslines outdoors, and he had to beat them with a long stick. When he was little he had run under the carpets, playing they were tents. But now he was nine years old, he had to beat those carpets without stopping, till no more dust would come out of them.
Everything in the house was moved, everything was scrubbed and scoured and polished. All the curtains were down, all the feather-beds were outdoors, airing, all the blankets and quits were washed. From dawn to dark Almanzo was running, pumping water, fetching wood, spreading clean straw on the scrubbed floors and then helping to stretch the carpets over it, and then tacking all those edges down again.
Days and days he spent in the cellar. He helped Royal empty the vegetable-bins. They sorted out every spoiled apple and carrot and turnip, and put back the good ones into a few bins that Mother had scrubbed. They took down the other bins and stored them in the woodshed. They carried out crocks and jars and jugs, till the cellar was almost empty. Then Mother scrubbed the walls and floor. Royal poured water into pails of lime, and Almanzo stirred the lime till it stopped boiling and was whitewash. Then they whitewashed the whole cellar. That was fun.
..The whole cellar was fresh and clean and snow-white when it dried. Mother moved her milk-pans down to the scrubbed shelves. The butter-tubs were scoured white with sand and dried in the sun, and Almanzo set them in a row on the clean cellar floor, to be filled with the summer's butter.
Outdoors the lilacs and the snowball bushes weer in bloom. Violets and buttercups were blossoming in the green pastures, birds were building their nests, and it was time to work in the fields.
♥
♥ All over the countryside other boys were harrowing, too, turning up the moist earth to the sunshine. Far to the north St. Lawrence River was a silver streak at the edge of the sky. The woods were clouds of delicate green. Birds hopped twittering on the stone fences, and squirrels frisked. Almanzo walked whistling behind his team.
When he harrowed the whole field across one way, then he harrowed it across the other way. The harrow's sharp teeth combed again and again through the earth, breaking up the lumps. All the soil must be made mellow and fine and smooth.
♥ A good horseman always takes care of his horses before he eats or rests.
♥ There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. All the wild seeds of weed and thistle, the sprouts of vine and bush and tree, are trying to take the fields. Farmers must fight them with harrow and plow and hoe; they must plant the good seeds quickly.
Almanzo was a little soldier in this great battle. From dawn to dark he worked, from dark to dawn he slept, then he was up again and working.
♥ Potato plants have blossoms and seeds, but no one knows what kind of potato will grow from a potato seed. All the potatoes of one kind that have ever been grown have come from one potato. A potato is not a seed; it is part of a potato plant's root. Cut it up and plant it, and it will always make more potatoes just like itself.
Every potato has several little dents in it, that look like eyes. From these eyes the little roots grow down into the soil, and little leaves push up toward the sun. They eat up the piece of potato while they are small, before they are strong enough to take their food from the earth and the air.
♥ She could pucker her mouth and whistle. Royal teased her.
"Whistling girls and crowing hens
Always come to some bad ends."
♥
♥ The seeds were too small to be seen on the ground, and you could not know how skillful a sower a man was, till the seeds came up. Father told Almanzo about a lazy, worthless boy who had been sent to sow a field. This boy did not want to work, so he poured the seeds out of his sack and went swimming. Nobody saw him. Afterward he harrowed the field, and no one knew what he had done. But the seeds knew, and the earth knew, and when even the boy had forgotten his wickedness, they told it. Weeds took that field.
♥
♥
♥
♥ Washing sheep was fun for everybody but the sheep. The men splashed and shouted and laughed in the water, and the boys ran and shouted in the pasture. The sun was warm on their backs and the grass was cool under bare feet, and all their laughter was small in the wide, pleasant stillness of the green fields and meadows.
..When evening came, all the sheep were washed. Clean and fluffy-white, they scattered up the slope, nibbling the grass, and the pasture looked like a snowball bush in bloom.
♥
♥ Only small children went to the spring term of school, and he wished he were old enough to stay home. He didn't like to sit and study a book when there were so many interesting things to do.
♥ Mother was making soft-soap, too. All the winter's ashes had been saved in a barrel; now water was poured over them, and lye was dripping out of a little hole in the bottom of the barrel. Mother measured the lye into a caldron, and added pork rinds and all; the waste pork fat and beef fat that she had been saving all winter. The caldron boiled, and the lye and the fat made soap.
♥ The grass was white with frost, and a cold green streak was in the eastern sky, but the air was dark.
Father hitched Bess and Beauty to the wagon. Royal pumped the watering-trough full. Almanzo helped Mother and the girls bring tubs and pails, and Father set barrels in the wagon. They filled the tubs and barrels full of water, and then they walked behind the wagon to the cornfield.
All the corn was frozen. The little leaves were stiff, and broke if you touched them. Only cold water would save the life of the corn. Every hill must be watered before the sunshine touched it, or the little plants would die. There would be no corn-crop that year.
The wagon stopped at the edge of the field. Father and Mother and Royal and Eliza Jane and Alice and Almanzo filled their pails with water, and they all went to work, as fast as they could.
♥
♥ Father looked at him a long time. Then he took out his wallet and opened it, and slowly he took out a round, big silver half-dollar. He asked:
"Almanzo, do you know what this is?"
"Half a dollar," Almanzo answered.
"Yes. But do you know what half a dollar is?"
Almanzo didn't know it was anything but half a dollar.
"It's work, son," Father said. "That's what money is; it's hard work."
Mr. Paddock chuckled. "The boy's too young, Wilder," he said. "You can't make a youngster understand that."
"Almanzo's smarter than you think," said Father.
Almanzo didn't understand at all. He wished he could get away. But Mr. Paddock was looking at Father just as Frank looked at Almanzo when he double-dared him, and Father had said that Almanzo was smart, so Almanzo tried to look like a smart boy. Father asked:
"You know how to raise potatoes, Almanzo?"
"Yes," Almanzo said.
"Say you have a seed potato in the spring, what do you do with it?"
"You cut it up," Almanzo said.
"Go on, son."
"Then you harrow-first you manure the field, and plow it. Then you harrow, and mark the ground. And plant the potatoes, and plow them, and hoe them. You plow and hoe them twice."
"That's right, son. And then?"
"Then you dig them and put them down cellar."
"Yes. Then you pick them over all winter; you throw out all the little ones and the rotten ones. Come spring, you load them up and haul them here to Malone, and you sell them. And if you get a good price son, how much do you get to show for all that work? How much do you get for half a bushel of potatoes?"
"Half a dollar," Almanzo said.
"Yes," said Father. "That's what's in this half-dollar, Almanzo. The work that raised half a bushel of potatoes is in it."
Almanzo looked tat the round piece of money that Father held up. It looked small, compared with all that work.
♥ Almanzo ran with all the other boys to fell the warm muzzles of the cannons. Everybody was exclaiming about what a loud noise they had made.
"That's the noise that made the Redcoats run!" Mr. Paddock said to Father.
"Maybe," Father said, tugging his beard. "But it was muskets that won the Revolution. And don't forget it was axes and plows that made this country."
..That night when they were going to the house with milk, Almanzo asked Father:
"Father, how was it axes and plows that made this country? Didn't we fight England for it?"
"We fought for Independence, son," Father said. "But all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America."
"How?" Almanzo asked.
"Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.
"This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It's the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don't you ever forget that."
♥
♥ Father had shown him how to raise a milk-fed pumpkin. They had picked out the best vine in the field, and snipped off all the branches but one, and all the yellow pumpkin blossoms but one. Then between the root and the wee green pumpkin they carefully made a little slit on the underside of the vine. Under the slit Almanzo made a hollow in the ground and set a bowl of milk in it. Then he put a candle wick in the milk, and the end of the candle wick he put carefully into the slit.
Every day the pumpkin vine drank up the bowlful of milk, through the candle wick, and the pumpkin was growing enormously. Already it was three times as big as any other pumpkin in the field.
♥
♥
♥
♥ Mother met him on the back porch with the milk-pail, brimming full of cold egg-nog.
The egg-nog was made of milk and cream, with plenty of eggs and sugar. Its foamy top was freckled with spices, and pieces of ice floated in it. The sides of the pail were misty with cold.
..Father always maintained that a man could do more work in his twelve hours, if he had a rest and all the egg-nog could drink, morning and afternoon.
♥
♥ Almanzo liked haying-time. From dawn till long after dark every day he was busy, always doing different things. It was like play, and morning and afternoon there was the cold egg-nog. But after three weeks of making hay, all the haymows were crammed to bursting and the meadows were bare. Then the rush of harvest-time came.
The oats were ripe, standing thick and tall and yellow. The wheat was golden, darker than thwe oats. The beans were ripe, and pumpkins and carrots and turnips and potatoes were ready to gather.
There was no rest and no play for anyone now. They all worked from candle-light to candle-light. Mother and the girls were making cucumber pickles, green-tomato pickles, and watermelon-rind pickles; they were drying corn and apples, and making preserves. Everything must be saved, nothing wasted of all the summer's bounty. Even the apple cores were saved for making vinegar, and a bundle of oat-straw was soaking in a tub on the back porch. Whenever Mother had one minute to spare, she braided an inch or two of oat-straw for making next summer's hats.
♥
♥ They picked every perfect apple carefully, and laid it in a basket. Father drove the wagonful of baskets slowly to the house, and Almanzo helped carry the baskets down cellar and lay the apples carefully in the apple-bins. They didn't bruise one apple, for a bruised apple will rot, and one rotten apple will spoil a whole bin.
The cellar began to have its winter smell of apples and preserves.
♥
♥
♥ There was a man in a tail coat and a tall shining hat, who put a pea under a shell and then paid money to any man who would tell him where the pea was.
"I know where it is, Father!" Almanzo said.
"Be you sure?" Father asked.
"Yes," said Almanzo, pointing. "Under that one."
"Well, son, we'll wait and see," Father said.
Just then a man pushed through the crowd and laid down a five-dollar bill beside the shells. There were three shells. The man pointed to the same shell that Almanzo had pointed at.
The man in the tall hat picked up the shell. There was no pea under it. The next instant the five-dollar bill was in his tail-coat pocket, and he was showing the pea again and putting it under another shell.
Almanzo couldn't understand it. He had seen the pea under that shell, and then it wasn't there. He asked Father how the man had done it.
"I don't know, Almanzo," Father said. "But he knows. It's his game. Never bet your money on another man's game."
♥ Father said it was all right to bet on races, if you wanted to.
"You get a run for your money," he said. "But I would rather get something more substantial for mine."
♥
♥ The best part of a potato is next to the skin, and you can see how thick the best part is, if you hold a very thin slice to the light and look through it.
♥
♥
♥ A chill wind was blowing and the sunlight was hazy. Squirrels frisked about, storing away nuts for the winter. High in the sky the wild ducks were honking, hurrying south. It was a wonderful day for playing wild Indian, all among the trees.
♥ Father was pleased. The soft snow was six inches deep, but the ground was not yet frozen.
"Poor man's fertilizer," Father called such a snow, and he set Royal to plowing it into all the fields. It carried something from the air into the ground, that would make the crops grow.
♥ Five hogs and a yearling beef were to be killed that day.
As soon as one was killed, Father and Joe and John dipped the carcass into the boiling caldron, and heaved it out and laid it on boards. With butcher knives they scraped all the hair off it. Then they hung it up by the hind feet in a tree, and cut it open and took all the insides out into a tub.
Almanzo and Royal carried the tub to the kitchen, and Mother and the girls washed the heart and liver, and snipped off all the bits of fat from the hog's insides, to make lard.
Father and Joe skinned the beef carefully. The hide came off in one big piece. Every year Father killed a beef and saved the hide to make shoes.
..They cut up the pork fat and boiled it in big kettles on the stove. When it was done, Mother strained the clear hot lard through white cloths into big stone jars.
Crumbling brown cracklings were left inside the cloth after Mother squeezed it, and Almanzo sneaked a few and ate them whenever he could. Mother said they were too rich for him. She put them away to be used for seasoning cornbread.
Then she made the headcheese. She boiled the six heads till the meat came off the bones; she chopped it and seasoned it and mixed it with liquor from the boiling, and poured it into six-quarts pans. When it was cold it was like jelly, for a gelatine had come out of the bones.
Next Mother made mincemeat. She boiled the best bits of beef and pork and chopped them fine. She mixed in raisins and spices, sugar and vinegar, chopped apples and brandy, and she packed two big jars full of mincemeat. It smelled delicious, and she let Almanzo eat the scraps left in the mixing-bowl.
All this time he was grinding sausagemeat. He poked thousands of pieces of meat into the grinder and turned the handle round and round, for hours and hours. He was glad when that was finished. Mother seasoned the meat and molded it into big balls, and Almanzo had to carry all those balls into the woodshed attic and piled them up on clean cloths. They would be there, frozen, all winter, and every morning Mother would mold one ball into little cakes and fry them for breakfast.
The end of butchering-time was candle-making.
Mother scrubbed the bug lard-kettles and filled them with bits of beef fat. Beef fat doesn't make lard; it melts into tallow. While it was melting, Almanzo helped string the candle-molds.
A candle-mold was two rows of tin tubes, fastened together and standing straight up on six feet. There were twelve tubes in a mold. They were open at the top, but tapered to a point at the bottom, and in each point there was a tiny hole.
Mother cut a length of candle-wicking for each tube. She doubled the wicking across a small stick, and twisted it into a cord. She licked her thumb and finger, and rolled the end of the cord into a sharp point. When she had six cords on the stick, she dropped them into six tubes, and the stick lay on top of the tubes. The points of the cords came through the tiny holes in the points of the tubes, and Almanzo pulled each one tightly, and held it tight by sticking a raw potato on the tube's sharp point.
When every tube had its wick, held straight and right down its middle, Mother carefully poured the hot tallow. She filled every tube to the top. Then Almanzo set the mold outdoors to cool.
When the tallow was hard, he brought the mold in. He pulled off the potatoes. Mother dipped the whole mold quickly into the boiling water, and lifted the sticks. Six candles came up on each stick.
Then Almanzo cut them off the stick. Her trimmed the ends of wicking off the flat ends, and he left just enough wicking to light, on each pointed end. And he piled the smooth, straight candles in waxy-white piles.
♥
♥
He wanted a piece of maple, perfectly seasoned, and with a straight, fine grain.
When he found it, he took his small saw, and he sawed off two thin slabs. One was exactly an inch thick; the other was a half inch thick. He measured, and sawed their corners square.
He took the slabs to his cobbler's bench, and sat down, and opened his box of tools. It was divided into little compartments, and every kind of cobbler's tool was neatly laid in them.
The cobbler laid the thicker slab of maplewood on the bench before him. He took a long, sharp knife and cut the whole top of the slab into tiny ridges. Then he turned it around and cut ridges the other way, making tiny, pointed peaks.
He laid the edge of a thin, straight knife in the groove between two ridges, and gently tapped it with a hammer. A thin strip of wood split off, notched all along one side. He moved the knife, and tapped it, till all the wood was in strips. Then holding a strip by one end, he struck his knife in the notches, and every time he struck, a shoe-peg split off. Every peg was an inch long, an eighth of an inch square, and pointed at the end.
The thinner piece of maple he made into pegs, too, and those pegs were half an inch long.
Now the cobbler was ready to measure Almanzo for his boots.
..That day the cobbler had whittled out two wooden lasts, just the shape of Almanzo's feet. They fitted upside-down over a tall peg on his bench, and they would come apart in halves.
Next morning the cobbler cut soles from the thick middle of the cowhide, and inner soles from the thinner leather near the edge. He cut uppers from the softest leather. Then he waxed his thread.
With his right hand he pulled a length of linen thread across the wad of black cobbler's wax in his left palm, and he rolled the thread under his right palm, down the front of his leather apron. Then he pulled it and rolled it again. The wax made a crackling sound, and the cobbler's arms went out and in, out and in, till the thread was shiny-black and stiff with wax.
Then he laid a stiff hog-bristle against each end of it, and he waxed and rolled, waxed and rolled, till the bristles were waxed fast to the thread.
At last he was ready to sew. He laid the upper pieces of one boot together, and clamped them in a vise. The edges stuck up, even and firm. With his awl the cobbler punched a hole through them. He ran the two bristles through the hole, one from each side, and with his strong arms he pulled the thread tight. He bored another hole, ran the two bristles through it, and pulled till the waved thread sank into the leather. That was one stitch.
"Now that's a seam!" he said. "Your feet won't get damp in my boots, even if you go wading in them. I never sewed a seam yet that wouldn't hold water."
Stitch by stitch he sewed the uppers. When they were done, he laid the soles to soak in water overnight.
Next morning he set one of the lasts on his peg, the sole up. He laid the leather inner-sole on it. He drew the upper part of a boot down over it, folding the edges over the inner sole. Then he laid the heavy sole on top, and there was the boot, upside-down on the last.
The cobbler bored holes with his awl, all around the edge of the sole. Into each hole he drove one of the short maple pegs. He made a heel of thick leather, and pegged it in place with the long maple pegs. The boot was done.
The damp soles had to dry overnight. In the morning the cobbler took out the lasts, and with a rasp he rubbed off the inside ends of the pegs.
♥ After that they looked for two small crooked trees to make curved runners. They must be five inches through, and six feet tall before they began to curve. It was hard to find them. In the whole timber lot there were no two trees alike.
"You wouldn't find two alike in the whole world, son," Father said. "Not even two blades of grass are the same. Everything is different from everything else, if you look at it."
♥ First Father hewed the bottoms of the runners flat and smooth, clear around the crook of their turned-up front ends. Just behind the crook he hewed a flat place on top, and he hewed another flat place near the rear ends. Then he hewed two beams for cross-pieces.
He hewed them ten inches wide and three inches high, and sawed them four feet long. They were to stand on edge. He hewed out their corners, to fit over the flat places on top of the runners. Then he hewed out a curve in their underneath edges, to let them slip over the high snow in the middle of the road.
He laid the runners side by side, three and a half feet apart, and he fitted the cross-beams on them. But he did not fasten them together yet.
He hewed out two slabs, six feet long and flat on both sides. He laid them on the cross-beams, over the runners.
Then with an auger he bored a hole through a slab, down past the cross-beam, into the runner. He bored close to the beam, and the auger made half an auger-hole down the side of the beam. On the other side of the beam he bored another hole like the first.
Into the holes he drove stout wooden pegs. The pegs went down through the slab and into the runner, and they fitted tightly into the half-holes on both sides of the beam. Two pegs held the slab and the beam and the runner firmly together, at one corner of the sled.
In the other three corners he bored the holes, and Almanzo hammered in the pegs. That finished the body of the little bobsled.
Now Father bored a hole cross-wise in each runner, close to the front cross-beam. He hewed the bark from a slender pole, and sharpened its ends so that they would go into the holes.
Almanzo and Father pulled the curved ends of the runners as far apart as they could, and Father slipped the ends of the pole into the holes. When Almanzo and Father let go, the runners held the pole firmly between them.
Then Father bored two holes in the pole, close to the runners. They were to hold the sled's tongue. For the tongue he used an elm sapling, because elm is tougher and more pliable than oak. The sapling was ten feet long from butt to tip. Father slipped an iron ring over the tip and hammered it down till it fitted tightly, two feet and a half from the butt. He split the butt in two, up to the iron ring, which kept it from splitting any farther.
He sharpened the split ends and spread them apart, and drove them into the holes in the cross-wise pole. Then he bored holes down through the pole into the two ends of the tongue, and drove pegs into the holes.
Near the tip of the tongue he drove an iron spike down through it. The spike stuck out below the tongue. The tip of the tongue would go into the iron ring in the bottom of the calves' yoke, and when they backed, the ring would push against the spike, and the stiff tongue would push the sled backward.
Now the bobsled was done.
♥
♥ Almanzo asked Father why he did not hire the machine that did threshing. Three men had brought it into the country last fall, and Father had gone to see it. It would thresh a man's whole grain crop in a few days.
"That's a lazy man's way to thresh," Father said. "Haste makes waste, but a lazy man'd rather get his work done fast than do it himself. That machine chews up the straw till it's not fit to feed stock, and it scatters grain around and wastes it.
"All it saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?"
"No!" said Almanzo. He had enough of that, on Sundays.
They spread the wheat two or three inches thick on the floor. Then they faced each other, and they took the handles of their flails in both hands; they swung the flails above their heads and brought them down on the wheat.
Father's struck, then Almanzo's; then Father's, then Almanzo's. THUD! Thud! THUD! Thud! It was like marching to the music on Independence Day. It was like beating the drum. THUD! Thud! THUD! Thud!
The grains of wheat were shelling from their little husks and sifting down through the straw. A faint, good smell came from the beaten straw like the smell of the ripe fields in the sun.
Before Almanzo tired of swinging the flail, it was time to use the pitchforks. He lifted the straw lightly, shaking it, then pitched it aside. The brown wheat-grains lay scattered on the floor. Almanzo and Father spread more sheaves over it, then took up their flails again.
When the shelled grain was thick on the floor, Almanzo scraped it aside with a big wooden scraper.
All that day the pile of wheat grew higher. Just before chore-time Almanzo swept the floor in front of the fanning-mill. Then Father shoveled wheat into the hopper, while Almanzo turned the fanning-mill's handle.
The fans whirred inside the mill, a cloud of chaff blew out its front, and the kernels of clean wheat poured out of its side and went sliding down the rising heap on the floor. Almanzo put a handful into his mouth; they were sweet to chew, and lasted a long time.
He chewed while he held the grain-sacks and Father shoveled the wheat into them. Father stood the full sacks in a row against the wall-a good day's work had been done.
..All winter long, on stormy nights, there would be threshing to do. When the wheat was threshed, there would be the oats, the beans, the Canada peas. There was plenty of grain to feed the stock, plenty of wheat and rye to take to the mill for flour. Almanzo had harrowed the fields, he had helped in the harvest, and now he was threshing.
♥ He had to scour the steel knives and forks, and polish the silver. He had to wear an apron around his neck. He took the scouring-brick and scraped a pile of red dust off it, and then with a wet cloth he rubbed the dust up and down on the knives and forks.
♥
♥ He was ten years old now, and he was driving his own oxen on his own sled, and going to the timber to haul wood.
♥
Logs lay all around, half-buried in snow. John and Joe had sawed them into fifteen-foot lengths, and some of them were two feet through. The huge logs were so heavy that six men couldn't lift them, but Father had to load them on the bobsled.
He stopped the sled beside one of them, and John and Joe came to help him. They had three stout poles, called skids. They stuck these under the log, and let them slant up to the bobsled. Then they took their cant-poles. Cant-poles have sharp ends, with big iron hooks swinging loose under them.
John and Joe stood near the ends of the log. They put the sharp ends of their cant-poles against it, and when they raised the poles up, the cant-hooks bit into the log and rolled it a little. Then Father caught hold of the middle of the log with his cant-pole and hook, and he held it from rolling back, while John and Joe quickly let their cant-hooks slip down and take another bite. They rolled the log a little more, and again Father held it, and again they rolled it.
They rolled the log little by little, up the slanting skids and onto the bobsled.
♥ Then one evening Father said they had hauled that year's supply of wood, and Mother said it was high time Almanzo went to school, if he was going to get any schooling that winter.
Almanzo said there was threshing to do, and the young calves needed breaking. He asked:
"What do I have to go to school for? I can read and write and spell, and I don't want to be a school-teacher or a storekeeper."
"You can read and write and spell," Father said slowly. "But can you figure?"
"Yes, Father," Almanzo said. "Yes, I can figure-some."
"A farmer must know more figuring than that, son. You better go to school.
♥ The liveryman laughed, and said to Father, "That's a smart boy of yours."
"Time will show," Father said. "Many a good beginning makes a bad ending. It remains to be seen how he turns out in the long run."
♥ Mr. Case was polite and friendly to everybody alike; he had to be, because they were all customers. Father was polite to everybody, too, but he was not as friendly to some as he was to others.
♥
♥ "For a cent I'd have smashed his sneering face," Mr. Paddock said. "But it stuck me that giving up cash is what hurts him most. And I figure the boy's entitled to it."
"I don't know as anyone's entitled to anything for common honesty," Father objected. "Though I must say I appreciate the spirit you showed, Paddock."
"I don't say he deserved more than decent gratitude for giving Thompson his own money," Mr. Paddock said. "But it's too much to ask him to stand and take insults, on top of that."
♥ Almanzo went out of the bank with Father, and asked him:
"How do I get the money out again?"
"You ask for it, and they'll give it to you. But remember this, son; as long as that money's in the bank, it's working for you. Every dollar in the bank is making you four cents a year. That's a sight easier than you can earn money any other way. Any time you want to spend a nickel, you stop and thinking how much work it takes to earn a dollar."
♥
♥ Then Father told her that Mr. Paddock wanted to take Almanzo as an apprentice.
Mother's brown eyes snapped, and her cheeks turned as red as her red wool dress. She laid down her knife and fork.
"I never heard of such a thing!" she said. "Well, the sooner Mr. Paddock gets that out of his head, the better! I hope you gave him a piece of your mind! Why on earth, I'd like to know, should Almanzo live in town at the beck and call of every Tom, Dick, and Harry?"
"Paddock makes good money," said Father. "I guess if truth were told, he banks more money every year than I do. He looks on it as a good opening for the boy."
"Well!" Mother snapped. She was all ruffled, like an angry hen. "A pretty pass the world's coming to, if any man thinks it's a step up in the world to leave a good farm and go to town! How does Mr. Paddock make his money, if it isn't catering to us? I guess if he didn't make wagons to suit farmers, he wouldn't last long!"
"That's true enough," said Father. "But-"
"There's no "but" about it!" Mother said. "Oh, it's bad enough to see Royal come down to being nothing but a storekeeper! Maybe he'll make money, but he'll never be the man you are. Truckling to other people for his living, all his days- He'll never be able to call his soul his own."
'
For a minute Almanzo wondered if Mother was going to cry.
"There, there," Father said, sadly. "Don't take it too much to heart. Maybe it's all for the best, somehow."
"I won't have Almanzo going the same way!" Mother cried. "I won't have it, you hear me?"
"I feel the same way you do, said Father. "But the boy'll have to decide. We can keep him here on the farm by law till he's twenty-one, but it won't do any good if he's wanting to go. No. If Almanzo feels the way Royal does, we better apprentice him to Paddock while he's young enough.
.."He's too young to know his own mind," Mother objected.
Almanzo took another big mouthful of pie. He could not speak till he was spoken to, but he thought to himself that he was old enough to know he'd rather be like Father than like anybody else. He did not want to be like Mr. Paddock, even. Mr. Paddock had to please a man like Mr. Thompson, or lose the sale of a wagon. Father was free and independent; if he went out of his way to please anybody, it was because he wanted to.
.."Well, son, you think about it," said Father. "I want you should make up your own mind. With Paddock, you'd have an easy life, in some ways. You wouldn't be out in all kinds of weather. Cold winter nights, you could lie snug, in bed and not worry about young stock freezing. Rain or shine, wind or snow, you'd be under shelter. You'd be shut up, inside walls. Likely you'd always have plenty to eat and wear and money in the bank."
"James!" Mother said.
"That's the truth, and we must be fair about it," Father answered. "But there's the other side, too, Almanzo. You'd have to depend on other folks, son, in town. Everything you got, you'd get from other folks.
"A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent, son, on a farm."