Fields of Home by Ralph Moody Read Free Book Online

malaria keeping me abed half the time. I catched it whilst I was off to the war . . . seems like it bothers me a sight worse since I lost your gramma. Kind of had hopes when Mary wed, maybe her and Charlie’d come home to the old place to rear their family. I and your father could have cleared a power of land. I and you’ll clear a power of it yet, Ralphie, soon’s ever I learn you to be a farmer. Father was older’n I be afore ever I was born, but he learnt me all there is to know about the land. Poor boy! Poor Ralphie! Your old grampa’ll yet learn you to be a worth-while man.”
    When he’d first started talking, I’d wanted to squeeze his arm against me a little, but before he was through I’d taken mine off his and moved far enough away that he couldn’t put it back. We were nearly to the pasture gate, and four cows were waiting there. It was easy to see that they were all milch cows, and not very good ones. Three of them had pretty good sized calves running with them, and the fourth had her head over the bars, bellowing. So I wouldn’t act as peeved at Grandfather as I felt, I said, “Do you just take the Holstein in for milking?”
    “No! Take ’em all in!” Grandfather said, grumpily.
    Then, as I let the bars down, he and Old Bess stood beside the gatepost. As each cow passed him, he put a hand on her or patted her and called her by name. Even Clara Belle, the Holstein without a calf, stopped long enough for him to scratch the tuft of hair between her horns before she hurried off down the lane. Next was Jessie, a thin old Jersey with a fat heifer calf. Spotty, a Durham with a steer calf three or four months old; and Marthy, just a nice old brown cow with a heifer calf that looked like a Jersey.

    As we started to follow them down the lane, I said, “The nights don’t get very cold here at this time of year, do they?”
    Grandfather seemed to have forgotten all about the cows. The thumb of one hand was hooked around the finger of the other behind him, his head was down, and he leaned a little forward from the hips as he stumped along. “No,” he said after a little while. Then, after a few more steps, “Why?”
    “Well,” I said, “I wondered why you didn’t leave the cows with calves in the pasture at night. There aren’t any coyotes or wolves to bother them, are there?”
    Grandfather stopped and looked up at me as though he didn’t believe anybody could ask such a foolish question. “Gorry sakes alive, boy!” he said at last. “Don’t you know nothing? How’d you raise crops without cow manure? You got to take ’em in to save the dressing.”
    “They raise pretty good crops in Colorado—if they have enough irrigation water—and they don’t put cow manure on the fields,” I told him. “We put horse manure under our first potatoes on the ranch and they all went to tops.”
    “Hmfff! Tarnal fools! Hoss manure’s for hay!” Then he put his head back down, and didn’t say another word till we were at the barn.
    Millie had made a johnnycake to go with the fried pork and boiled potatoes for supper, and we had some of the cake that I hadn’t had a chance to try at noon, but the tea was terrible. It tasted as if it had been made by boiling musty alfalfa, and it was so strong you couldn’t see the spoon handle under the surface. She and Grandfather put milk and sugar in theirs. I tried it, but it was still as bitter as quinine. Though I didn’t mean to, I must have made a face when I tasted it, because the only thing Millie said to me all through supper was, “Don’t be so devilish finicky about your victuals! There’s worse where there’s none!”
    Grandfather didn’t eat anything but a piece of cake and a cup of tea, and he dozed off to sleep at the table a couple of times before I’d finished. He was still asleep, with his head resting on the table, when Millie got up and took a faded old calico wrapper from a nail behind the kitchen door. She put it on over the fresh one