Читать книгу Plowing On Sunday - Sterling North - Страница 9

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Stud Brailsford stopped his team of sorrel mares beside the old mill and blacksmith shop, led Jinny in through the wide doorway and tied her to a wrought-iron ring worn with sixty-five years of friction. He lit the charcoal in the forge, pumped the ancient foot-bellows, and buried a shining shoe in the bright coals.

"This ain't going to hurt you a bit," he told the nervous mare. "Your ma, and your ma's ma, and a long ways back of that got nice new shoes in this same smithy."

He whistled happily as he rolled up his sleeves, showing huge brown arms with bulging biceps, tied on a leather apron, and lifting the heavy hammer gave the anvil a couple of preparatory whangs, bell-like strokes which rang out across the valley of the stream all the way to Cottonwood Hill and back again.

"Blamed if I don't like shoeing a horse," he told the sorrel. "Nothing like it to set a fellow up in the morning."

Stud had a weakness for his blacksmith shop and the adjoining mill which had once ground all the grist and cut all the lumber for the entire countryside. The old stone building was in ruins now, the mill-wheel fallen, and the dam washed away, moss and vines covered the rotting roof; but Stud would not tear it down.

He liked to come down here on a wet day and tinker around in the pile of wheels and machine parts which littered the floor. At a bench in one corner he kept his paraphernalia for stuffing birds, in another his saws and planes and chisels, his brace and bits and other woodworking equipment. He liked to make things, and fix things, and whang away at his anvil.

"Have to fix that bellows with a new cowskin," he announced to no one in particular. "Must have been made before the Civil War by my Granddaddy—and what a great old fellow he was!" Stud fished the glowing crescent of iron out of the coals and set to work with his hammer.

"Tailor made shoes for a pretty lady," he told the anxious mare. "Can't go barefoot like a blamed little foal."

So he had heard his father talk to sleek and shining mares in this same blacksmith shop, and so his father's father had doubtless talked to his horses on this very spot. Stud had a sneaking fondness for horses and ancestors. Particularly the big men who had come swinging into Wisconsin in the eighteen-forties to open up this country as if by miracle.

He had heard his father tell of the stormy voyage from England in a sailing ship, the long journey up the canal and through the Great Lakes, the landing at Milwaukee where the candle-lit taverns were over-run with settlers, frontier merchants, gamblers, whores, and itinerant ministers of the gospel who shared the unpartitioned floors, and waded democratically through the deep mud in the tavern yard where scores of oxen were tethered beside their clumsy carts.

Stud himself remembered the last of these "toad-crushers" with wheels cut from cross-sections of huge oak trees. Loaded with lead and pulled by as many as eight yoke of oxen, these carts drew the metal mined in Galena and Exeter across the wilds of intervening Wisconsin to the lake port of Milwaukee. The drivers were a wild and frisky crew, Stud had been told. It shocked and titillated his righteous old Daddy (who had watched the ox teams from this very window) knowing how the drivers whored and played at cards in Milwaukee and the thriving town of Galena.

Great fellows and great times, thought Stud Brailsford, dipping the hissing shoe into the tub of green water beside the anvil. Men who could carry a three-hundred pound barrel of salt up a steep loft stairs, Big Jock Macreedy who had set the nine-hundred pound oak cornerpost on the lower eighty. His grandfather's brother (for whom Brailsford Junction was named) who had single-handed lifted the millstone in this very mill into its place.

"Hold up there, Jinny," he admonished, lifting her tasseled leg and catching the hoof between his leather knees. "This ain't going to hurt you a bit, Jinny. Nice new shoes for a pretty lady."

There had been a log house on the farm where the brick one stood now, and Stud had often heard his father tell how the deer came to eat the cabbages, and how one night a cougar had looked in at the window.... Rain came in through the cracks in the hand-split hickory shingles, it whipped into the faces of the eight children sleeping in the loft on the corn-husk mattresses ... rain and snow in the winter, mosquitoes in the summer. Cracks between the logs which no amount of mudding would completely fill.

Stud could just remember the log house; it had been torn down the year he was five. There were wide stone fireplaces at either end of the big downstairs room, tallow candles made in a mold brought over from England on the sailing ship, a flintlock rifle with which his father could hit a squirrel at one hundred yards. There had been sweet-smelling roots and herbs hanging from the beams, seed corn, hams, and traps for catching bobcats and foxes that came to steal the chickens.

And kids all over the place. Three girls and five boys.... Stud wished he could have a family of husky youngsters like that. He didn't blame Sarah for the fact that all of her babies had died except Peter. But he did wish that Peter could have been a real farmer. He wished that he would quit mooning around and find a girl and use his fists more often. He wondered if the boy would actually run away to Chicago to work in an automobile or trailer factory. It made him bitter to think that farming wasn't good enough for his son.

Stud drove home the tapered horse-shoe nails with a viciousness which made the mare dance like a tumble-weed.

"Whoa, there, you ornery piece of horseflesh. Act like a lady or I'll larrup the living daylights out of you."

Times were soft, Stud argued. Kids got notions in their heads. Like Peter wanting to build automobiles or trailers. Everyone riding instead of walking, talking about a device to milk cows by electricity, wearing gloves for husking in the fields.

When Stud was a boy men husked corn bare-handed. He could remember how his fingers cracked and bled in the cold, how one could follow his trail across the snow by the drops of blood. At night the men laughed about their split fingers, rubbed in hot tallow, and next morning went at it again.

Underwear was a luxury and almost unknown. Men wore their coarse homespun against their skin. The burrs in the virgin wool scratched like pins and needles.

Stud put another horse-shoe into the charcoal and worked the bellows. He tossed a handful of hickory nuts through the open window into the pig pen where the big sows cracked them between their teeth and swallowed them with noisy gusto. Stud noticed that the sick sow was back on her feet again and as greedy as any of her fantastically enormous sisters.

Better hogs than we raised in the old days, he thought. That's one place we've improved. Men get meaner and weaker and filthier, while hogs and cattle get to be better animals every year. That's on account of the way we breed the beasts. No romance. No guessing what's under a bustle. Just hard-headed facts and scientific breeding. Do the human race some good to have a first rate breeder put in charge for a few generations.

"Whang, whang," went the hammer on the anvil as sparks flew out like Fourth-of-July. "Hissss" went the second shoe in the tub of scummy water. The smithy was filled with the delectable odor of hot metal and scorching hooves and dung, age old dust and the first breath of crab-apple blossoms now bursting on the scraggly black trees beside the smithy window.

Man got meaner and smaller while the animals got greater and finer, thought Stud again, and that was why a man could give his best years to raising Jersey bulls like Napoleon, or Percheron stallions like Teddy Roosevelt ... could care for his cattle almost more than his family. There was a decency about animals not to be found in men.

This he had known ever since as a young man—a spoiled but good-looking young fellow who dominated his daddy and bought the big farm for a song—he had found that one can't trust bankers, share farmers, renters, or hired men, but one can trust horses, cows, and pigs....

"Give 'em your best and they'll give you their best," thought Stud. And no stock in the Rock River valley had better care or better feed than the Brailsford stock.

Stud thinks now, seeing Peter dash down the road like mad on his new red motorcycle, that a buggy was good enough for him at that age. No, he didn't get his first buggy until he was eighteen. It had red wheels and a fringed whip-socket, and his father had given him a spanking bay gelding to go with it. What a figure he cut courting Sarah to the tune of "I'm the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo".... Black curls, a little mustache turned up at the ends, derby hat, pants tight over strong rippling thighs, smart checked coat. A dashing young giant, muscled like a bull.

And Sarah in her long flaring gown, curls down the back of her neck, rows and rows of buttons, puff sleeves and a waist so small he could reach around it with his two hands.

"Ah, Sarah, you were beautiful then," Stud says aloud. He slaps the mare sharply across her gleaming flank. "Get going, you lazy piece of horse flesh."