Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill Read Free Book Online Page A

count up that we had made maybe three dollars of our own money for a ticket to the fair and new clothes for school.
    Some cold Saturday, we would harvest our winter apples and haul them to the cellar bins. We had “seek-no-farther” apples, “smoke house,” “fallow waters,” “winesaps,” and sometimes a sack of hard, green winter pears. The cellar was full of leaf and apple fragrance, and the leaves rustled as we covered up the bins. Sometimes we would bury a hole or two of apples along with the potatoes, yellow turnips, and cabbages under dirt and leaf mounds along the kitchen yard.
    We always had the big Apple Butter Stirrin'out at the washplace behind the house. For two days before, all the girls and women of the household, with perhaps a neighbor or two added, would gather on the back porch to peel and core the necessary five bushels of cut apples. The peeled apples were then packed into great crocks in the milkhouse to await Apple Butter Makin' Day.
    In the dawn of that hot and spicy-smelling day, the twenty-gallon copper kettle was dragged out of the smokehouse and scrubbed with vinegar and salt. The rinsed copper insides shone pink and gold as we set the kettle up in its iron frame, kindled the fire, and carefully put three copper pennies down on the bottom of the pot. The apple crocks were carried out, and the first batch poured into the kettle with enough water to start the boil. Because apple butter, even with three pennies added, will scorch on the bottom, the stirring, with a long-handled, wooden, hoelike contraption, had to begin immediately. The women and big girls took turns at the hot and arm-aching job.
    All day, among the smell of apples and wood smoke, the stirring would go on, as the apple butter thickened and “plopped” and turned a deep, rusty red. Along in the evening, the sugar, cloves, and cinnamon were poured into the boiling pot, and thenall the fragrance of the East filled our shabby dooryard, and the children could have a spooned-out sample to taste.
    Granny Fanny and Mama would taste and confer seriously, and in the dusk, as the fire died low, one of the men would stroll down to the makin' place and help lift the heavy, hot kettle off the fire. The simmering apple butter was dipped out with a long dipper and poured into the waiting crocks or scalded “air-tight” jars to be stored in the cellar, and darkness would come over the dooryard and the dying fire.
    In the late fall came corn-cutting and corn-husking, with fodder shocks and mounds of yellow corn ears lying in the fields. G.D.'s and Uncle Dock's hands would be bleeding and raw from the harsh corn blades, but the golden corn would become hot corn pone and hominy, mush, chicken feed, hog fattener, and always a little left over for the cows. We even used corn grains for checkers, for we could always find a few red ears for our red and gold checker “men.”
    All fall the men were busy cutting and hauling in the winter's wood, bringing the sheep and cattle in from the hills, doing the fall plow work, and selling the lambs and calves. They hunted squirrel and pheasant up in the woodland, and there would befried squirrel on the table for breakfast or an occasional grouse or a few quail. In the prosperous years, there would be Mama's prized flock of turkeys to butcher, scald, pick, and pack down in barrels to send off to the Thanksgiving market in exchange for the one big stock of cash money Mama could earn during the year.
    At the very end of the fall, often on Thanksgiving Day itself, came the hog butchering, with its shooting, squealing, scalding, and scraping, and with its great piles of steaming hog guts, pink mounds of sausage, grinning hogs' heads, and pans of fresh spareribs and backbone. On butchering day, we children would always retrieve, clean and dry the hog bladders, and blow them up like blood-veined balloons. We called them “footballs” and took them to school to