We couldn’t spend the whole day at Butch’s. There were cows to feed and milk, water to haul, Brutus to tend. I think everyone had a good time though. It was really fun for Lynette and me to be with a group of kids our age. Donna Smith, Robbie’s mother, had talked with Mom about spending parts of the day at each other’s farm. Monday afternoon we should look for them to come down and help us with our chores and then play something. Then on Tuesday we’d go up there. Sounded good to me.
We loaded everything up including a bag of oats for Brutus and headed home. After Josh and I used Brutus to haul water, I fed him and put him away for the night. When I went to help with the milking, sure enough Harvey was right; there was a new bull calf. Mother and newborn son were both fine.
After that fine meal we had at Butch’s, no one was really hungry for supper. But the men had worked hard since we came back and needed nourishment. Besides, breakfast was pretty far away. As there was plenty of milk to use (we had used none for lunch) Grandmom made potato soup. She didn’t use many potatoes, just digging a few from her husband’s potato patch. The soup was mostly milk. However, the addition of globs of butter and some hard boiled eggs from those we had received from Butch the day before made it pretty darn good. We just had enough crackers so that everyone had a few.
“That’s the end of our crackers,” Lois announced.
“And there is no bread or rolls, either,” added Jean. “How soon will you be able to make flour?” she asked the boys.
“Not too soon,” Jake answered, “We’ve figured we have to take two pieces of concrete, perhaps from a feed trough that we’re not using. They’ll be the grinding wheels, but it will take time to chisel them to the right shape to have the grain flow in between them. And they’ll have to be aligned just right to produce a fine enough flour or cornmeal with which to bake.”
“Then we’ll have to devise an apparatus to turn them,” Josh added. “It’s the best long term plan, but in the meantime we were wondering if anyone has an electric blender. We think flour can be made with one and we’d like to experiment if we can rewire it to 12 volts and still have it operate fast enough.”
“Sure, we have one,” Jean said. “Experiment all you want.”
“The oven’s another matter,” Dennis said. “The outdoor furnace is burning all the time to heat water and eventually to heat Harvey’s house. But the furnace is so well insulated, positioning any oven next to it wouldn’t do any good; it just wouldn’t get enough heat. So the butcher stove is the other option. It has fire going all the time for cooking and it’s mostly brick, so if we place the oven at the right spot, and maybe drill a few holes into the bricks, we think the oven would stay hot enough to bake. We’d have liked to build an oven from bricks, but we have no cement. Neither did we think clay from the creek’s banks would hold up as mortar in this application. So we decided to use Jean’s range; it has a larger oven than Poppop’s. Because it is so well insulated to keep the heat inside the oven and out of the kitchen in its designed use, we’ll have to take the back off to let heat in. Then replace it with a thin piece of steel that will let the heat through but not the smoke. We’ll probably remove the insulation in the sides and top so there’s an air space for the heat to travel forward, surround the whole stove with the insulation, cover it with more steel or aluminum siding, push the modified back against the bricks of the butcher stove, and presto, we’ll have a working oven.”
“Least we think we will,” Aaron added.
“Well it’s worth a try,” Jean said. “Get at it. Even if we don’t have flour yet, we can still use an oven.”
Joe jumped in, “I’ve been thinking a lot about our meat situation. If we kill a small hog, like Butch had today, there’s no problem. We can eat all the meat in a day’s time. But when we butcher a half-grown bull or heifer, or a full grown hog, or a cow, there will be a lot of meat to keep. In winter it will be less of a problem, but for this time of year I’ve come up with two solutions. I wish I would have thought of it this afternoon and told Butch, but any leftover meat can be heated to around boiling temperature and with a little salt be canned just like we did the soup we made from the freezer’s contents. Not to keep for months, but just to eat within a few days, so the jars are empty again for the next butchering.”
“The other way to preserve would be to dry some strips of meat. I know what parts to cut to make them real easy to hang. I wouldn’t want to depend on the sun to dry it like we did the fruits and corn or like the Indians once did, so again we’ll have to make use of the butcher house. We can build a nice rack out of some of the materials lying around here and position it around the stovepipe.”
Dad said, “We’re sure getting a lot of use out of this butcher house - cooking, laundry, eating, doing the dishes, soon baking and butchering. We’ll soon be falling all over each other in here.”
“Well it’s OK so far,” Jean said. “I suppose we’ll have to make some kind of schedule to keep us straight.”
“I suppose we will, Mother,” Harvey answered. “For now, let’s just call it quits for tonight; there are a lot of projects we have to tackle tomorrow.”
I said goodnight to Mom and Dad and headed back with Amy, Lynette, and Mel to Grandmom’s house. We stopped to check on Brutus, then off to bed. I kept thinking about what Robbie had said about Julie being a teacher. I really needed to talk to Dad about that tomorrow.
When I awoke Monday morning it was already starting to get light. I went out into the kitchen and found Jeremiah still there. “We’re late,” I said.
“No we’re not,” he answered. “While we were milking last night we had a little discussion about our milking times. As the hours of daylight lessen from now until Christmas, we know we will have to milk in the dark eventually. Even though we’re still in the month of August, the time for sunrise is rapidly becoming later and later making it very difficult to find our milking cows out in the pasture in the semi-darkness. Harvey had said we can afford to start later in the morning, wait the eleven and one half hours we usually wait to milk in the evening and still have light for the evening milking. By December it will get dark for the evening milking, too, but then we can at least gather the cows inside in daylight. He also said it was a good morning to make the switch because we started milking about a half hour later Sunday evening as we were up a Butch’s yesterday. His conclusion was that it wouldn’t bother the cows at all.”
“Some people would say we’re losing an hour of working time if we start milking an hour later and get to the fields an hour later. But we get the hour back in the afternoon because we don’t have to leave our fieldwork to start milking as early. The biggest change will be for Harvey who has been getting up at 5:00 AM for about 40 years. He’s finally going to get to sleep in a little, even if it’s just around an hour. I guess he’ll be able to handle it.”
“I know I’ll be able to,” I responded.
“Me too,” Jeremiah said.
“I guess that means Mom and Grandma can have breakfast ready at a little later time than usual and I won’t have to rush in to help them as soon?” I inquired.
“Grandma already knows,” he said. “Your mom will find out soon enough. And sure, you can help us a little longer.”
He and I went to the barn. I checked on Brutus then went with Larry and Patsy to bring in the milking cows. Patsy was his cow dog. Actually a Border collie, bred for herding sheep, but she worked well with cows, too. A Border collie doesn’t look like a regular collie such as Lassie. They’re smaller, maybe two thirds the size and often black and white, not sandy tan like Lassie was. Patsy was black and white and quite a go getter. No ornery Holstein pulled anything on her. We gathered the milking string together and had them headed toward the barn when I saw Harvey waving to me.
“Alyssa,” he called, “Come over here. I’ve something to show you.”
He was in the pen were the dry cows were kept. As I neared him I saw what he wanted me to see. Two more calves.
“With the one yesterday afternoon, that makes three,” he said. “And they’re all doing fine. Would you help me lead them into the barn?”
“Sure,” I answered. I always loved helping with the calves, especially feeding them milk from a bucket. To teach them I’d let them suck on my fingers, then lower my hand into the bucket so their nose would get into the milk and they would start drinking. Now, however, no one had to feed calves with a bucket. All of them were mixed in the pen with cows that they could drink from without our help. It saved a lot of our time, but I did miss it. It was amazing that the newborns would suck so soon after being born. I guess as newborns, we do too. Not that I remembered it. These two were no exception. As soon as I put my fingers at one’s mouth it knew what to do. Harvey did likewise with the other. We eased our way toward the barn, keeping our fingers right on their noses; the calves followed and right behind them their mothers. In this situation fresh cows can be a little dangerous sometimes, if they feel their young threatened. Jake and Patsy were soon out to help, just in case.
“That makes thirteen we need to milk now,” Jake said to Harvey. “I guess Alyssa will have to take one of these,” he teased.
“Oh, I guess she’ll get in for some share of milking duty sometime, but for now Joe, Jeremiah, or your dad can have the extra,” Harvey said. With everything settled in the barn, I headed for the butcher house to help Mom. Breakfast was uneventful except that while we were eating it started to rain. Not a storm, just a nice steady rain, but enough to keep us out of the garden. The men would still have to feed and move some animals around, but they could handle that. After breakfast, Dad and I went into the top of the barn to do some braiding.
Any farm that has animals to feed and makes a fair amount of hay and straw has a virtually endless supply of used baler twine. Twine held the bales together and had to be cut off the bales when the hay was fed or the straw was bed. It came in both sisal and plastic varieties and in different thicknesses. Back on our farm, Chester baled soybean stubble and corn fodder in large four by eight foot bales. They were very heavy so we could only move them using the skid loader or a tractor. Bales that heavy needed extra thick twine to take the pressure. For years farmers disposed of the used twine by burning it or if sisal, just throwing it in the dump to rot. Dad hated throwing anything away. So last year, he and I started braiding the extra thick plastic twine into a rope.
Braiding isn’t really that hard; it’s just like making pigtails in your hair except it goes on and on and on. You start with three strands then wrap left over middle, right over middle, left over middle, right over middle, and so forth. You don’t even think about it once you get going. We started three separate ropes with three strands each, and then braided the three newly created ropes into one thicker rope using the same method. It made the finished product nine strands strong. Each strand had a tensile strength of 450 pounds, so the new heavier rope had a tensile strength of just over two tons. We worked at it for months, but just on opportune occasions like rainy days. We quit when it was 245 feet long.
Dad put it behind the truck seat for emergency use. You never know when you might need to pull a tree off the road, or a bear up a steep bank in hunting season, to rescue someone that had fallen through the ice while skating, or to pull a vehicle stuck in the mud or snow. So be it, the twine wasn’t wasted. Today we were braiding sisal twine into rope. Although the braiding itself became boring sometimes, it was a great opportunity for Dad and me to talk. We had some good heart to heart discussions while braiding and I was hoping today would be no different. I really needed to talk to him. I didn’t need to beat around the bush with Dad either.
So I said, “Dad, you know that Julie lady with the twins is a teacher. You’re not going to make us go to school are you?”
Dad squinted his eyes, cocked a half a smile, took his hat off and with the same hand rubbed the side of his head just above the ear, a sure sign that the answer took some thought. He paused a little and answered, “Not now.” Dad was rarely accused of using too few words. I guess I’d have to pick up the slack.
“Let me ask you this,” I responded. “Do geese need to learn how to fly?”
Dad thought a little and answered, “I guess so.” It was a typical answer from Dad. He often said “I guess so” for “yes” and “I guess not” for “no”. His father did it also; showed they didn’t really want to commit to their answers. I’d have to accept that and go on.
“Do they have to be taught to fly?” I followed up.
“No, they can learn that on their own,” he answered.
“Without a teacher?” I retorted.
“Definitely, without a teacher,” he agreed.
“So if geese can learn without a teacher or a school, then so can I. Anyway I didn’t need a school to learn to do the things that need to be done around here, like pulling weeds, feeding Brutus, forking manure, putting wood on the fire, planting beans, drying vegetables, cooking, doing laundry, or washing dishes.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Dad answered. “But think of some of the other things that get done here. Dennis rewired the controls on Harvey’s furnace to make it work off of a battery. Don’t you think he learned that at school?”
“No, at work!”
“Poor example I guess,” he said. “But believe me there are some things we do around here, some problems we solve, using the knowledge we gained at school.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Dad appeared frustrated and in my mind, losing the argument. “Like all this corn Harvey has growing here. Just putting the seed into the ground doesn’t magically make a crop. Not taking anything away from God, now mind you, but a lot of book learning has gone into crop production in the last century. There’s been years of research and experiments, things someone learned in a school, that have enabled farmers to increase their yields. How do you think Harvey and Larry knew how much fertilizer to put on the fields this spring?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Well they had to read a report of a soil analysis done by a chemist that included a recommendation prepared by an agronomist, both of whom spent years in school learning. When Larry sprayed the corn for weeds, how did he know which herbicide to use, how much to put in each sprayer tank full, and how many gallons per acre to apply?”
“I don’t know,” I responded. “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“You got that right. I guess there is,” Dad continued. “He had to read instructions and make calculations. Yes, hard work will keep us going here for a while, successfully, out of necessity. But what’s going to advance us, make improvements to our situation, and actually cause progress to occur will have to come from book learning. Yes, and even from teachers. For centuries, few people went to school. Who needed to read or write or calculate? And what were we then? A bunch of people who thought the world was flat and that the sun revolved around us. We thought maggots were created from rotting meat and milk spoiled because of demons.”
“Yeah, I remember that from science class, Louis Pasteur and all,” I said.
“Oh, something from school?” Dad remarked.
To be continued… Mort
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