Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page B

Japanese.”
    Mom laughed. “But I’m not the one who goes looking for trouble.”
    “You, Squirt? How do you feel about tonight?”
    Dad stopped the truck, and I jumped down to open the barn door and didn’t answer, because I couldn’t make up my mind about the Japanese. I agreed with Mom and Dad that they’d gotten a rotten deal by being sent halfway across the country to live in a camp. But still, I wished they’d been sent someplace else.
    THE NEXT WEEK, DAD and Mr. Gardner went to Tallgrass to talk to Mr. Halleck about hiring Japanese boys for the harvest, but Mr. Halleck hadn’t worked out the system yet.
    “It’s a durn shame. Those young men want to work, but the government has them sitting there playing cards,” Mr. Gardner said. “I believe cards do more to weaken the mind of a boy than an honest day’s work.”
    “I have to agree with you on that,” Dad said. After Mr. Gardner left, Dad teased Mom. “You hear what he said about cards, Mother?”
    Mom, who loved to play pinochle, sniffed. “He said boys, not women. And don’t tell me you don’t play poker on Sunday mornings down at Red Lee’s place.”
    Dad laughed and slapped her on the bottom as he went out.
    “Behave,” Mom told him, but she smiled, and I pretended I hadn’t seen them. Sometimes my folks embarrassed me.
    SO THE JAPANESE DIDN ’ T help with our 1942 sugar beet harvest, but Dad and Mr. Gardner found some Mexicans, young boys and old men, who worked the beets for us. “They aren’t very fast, but they make up for it by charging more,” Dad complained. Still, he didn’t have much choice, so he hired the fellows, and we got our beets in.
    I stayed out of school to help Mom with meals for the crew. Despite the hot, hard work, harvest was one of my favorite times. The kitchen smelled of homemade bread and pies. The table was stacked with plates and platters, silverware, dishes of butter, salt and pepper shakers, pitchers of iced tea. Mom treated me just like one of the women she’d hired in years past, assigning me chores and nodding her approval when I did them right. There weren’t any women to hire that year, what with so many of them working the fields in the place of sons and husbands who’d gone off to war. So we had to make do with family. Granny still pitched in. Her mind always worked fine when it came to farm work. She’d fixed meals for harvest crews from the time she and Gramp started farming in Ellis fifty years earlier, and even before that, as a girl in Fort Madison, Iowa.
    “You got to figure a pie feeds four men, five if you have to, although a man might think you’re trying to skimp him,” she told me as she took four pies out of the oven and set them on the Hoosier cabinet. “I’ve found they like apple above all others, but you better not give a man a dried-apple pie. Mattie used to tell me, ’I loathe, abhor, detest, and despise dried-apple pies. Give me pneumonia or poke out my eyes, but never give me dried-apple pies.’ ”
    “Betty Crocker has a recipe for pumpkin pie that looks real good,” I told her.
    “Betty Crocker.” Granny thought a minute. “There was a Sam Homer Crocker up north of here. I don’t recollect his wife’s name. Mattie will know.”
    “Who’s Mattie?” asked Betty Joyce. Because it was Saturday, she had come over to help, and she was carrying tin cups and plates and utensils out to the tables, which were planks of wood laid across sawhorses.
    “Mattie’s my sister. She lives up to Mingo,” Granny said.
    I didn’t tell Granny that her sister had died a long time ago; I just looked at her and worried that I’d be like her one day. She deserved better. It wasn’t fair that God had let her mind wear out before her body. I figured maybe she’d get worse and I’d have to take care of her all the time. As much as I loved Granny, I didn’t want to be her nurse. For a minute, I felt sorrier for myself than I did for her. Since Buddy was in the army and