Free Fields of Home by Ralph Moody Page B

him?”
    “You mean the man that raised the strawberries and tomatoes?”
    “Mmmm Hmmm.”
    “Fine, but I only worked for him when there weren’t any cattle jobs. We had a horse, and I could make more driving cattle.”
    “What did you do for the man?”
    “Oh, quite a few different jobs: like picking fruit, and setting out tomato plants in the spring, and setting the new runners on the strawberry plants over for the next year’s rows. You know, you don’t have to set out new strawberry plants every year. Little new leaves come at the ends of the runners, and you just move them over like wires to where you want the next year’s row. Then you put a handful of dirt on the runner—right near the little leaves, but so you don’t bury them—and, after the field is irrigated, roots grow down from the new leaves, and then you’ve got a new plant, and when fall comes you can plow up the old row.
    “The man I worked for had a high warm field: just like the one up beyond the orchard that has all the stones on it. It never got late frosts in the spring, and we could set his tomato plants out two weeks earlier than anybody else could set theirs out. So his tomatoes were always the first ones to ripen anywhere around Denver, and he used to get as much as ten cents a pound for them.”
    I was going to tell him why we always had the earliest strawberries too, but he said, “You done pretty good with the yella colt this morning. Who learned you to handle hosses?”
    “Oh, Father and quite a few other men; Hi Beckman, and Mr. Batchlett. Hi taught me how to break and train a cow horse, but Mr. Batchlett was more of a trader. He taught me some of the tricks about balky horses, and I’ve been using one of them on the yella colt. It works all right. I just tie his ears together good and tight with a piece of soft wire. Then, after I’ve let him stand and shake his head till he’s only thinking about his ears, and has forgotten he’s balking, I cluck to him and he walks right along. I think I’ll have him cured of balking altogether pretty soon.”
    “Shame the Almighty stood a man’s ears on his head the way he did, ain’t it? Makes ’em so cussed hard to wire together. Here’s the pan for your cat’s milk; you been dry-stripping there for the past five minutes.”
    By the time I had the calf fed and had gone to the house, breakfast was all on the table. The spicy smell of frying sausage met me at the door of the summer kitchen. Millie was whisking a pan of hot biscuits out of the oven, and called to me to get my face and hands washed as fast as the Lord would let me. Grandfather and Uncle Levi were already in their places at the table when I’d finished washing, and Uncle Levi was curling the ends of his big mustache, and smacking his lips the way Mother did when she was tasting her new batch of mincemeat.
    The breakfast was really something to smack your lips over. Instead of the oatmeal and fried salt pork we’d had every other morning, there was a platter loaded with fried eggs and good big sausage cakes, a nappy of fried potatoes, a plate of hot biscuits, and a jar of wild strawberry jam. Most of the talk during breakfast was about people Uncle Levi knew but hadn’t seen for a long time. I’d never heard of any of them, so I paid most of my attention to biscuits, sausage, and eggs. Just as I was finishing my fourth egg and sixth biscuit, Millie got up and opened the oven door. As she gathered up the corners of her apron for holders, and brought out a high crusted pie, she snapped, “There’s your devilish old apple pie, Levi! Never seen a man that sot such store on pie for breakfast. It don’t look to be up to my usual.”
    Millie sounded as cranky as she did sometimes when she was scolding at me, but it didn’t worry Uncle Levi. He bounced out of his chair as if there had been a spring in it, threw both arms around Millie’s neck, and danced her around in a circle. “Levi! Levi!” she kept squawking.