Farm Girl (7 page)

One time I found out that you could use Bon Ami, so Mother bought some of that, and I would clean the sink. Sometimes I dusted or swept the floor if I felt like it, but if I whined a little then I wouldn’t have to finish.

The screened-in front porch

Dad and daughter dressed for church

Chapter Six:
The Best Dad in Nebraska

My father was an established cattle farmer when he met my mother, the Norwegian hired girl. Handsome, dark-haired John Marker was quite a catch.

“All the girls were after him,” my mother would say proudly.

Mother worked as a hired girl, or live in servant, for Mrs. George Cather, glad to get away from home and make a little money. Back then that was what the immigrant girls did when they got old enough, instead of going on to high school in town. They hired out to wealthier farm families, or to people in Red Cloud, as live-in servants and earned some money to spend on themselves and to help out their families.

My mother had been going with my dad and thought he wasn’t coming to see her anymore, so she decided to leave her employment at the Cathers’ and move to Omaha. There she worked as a hired girl for awhile, but she was homesick in the city and only stayed a few months.

She was back at home when my dad came over in the buggy and said, “I’d like to have you come to Red Cloud with me. They have wedding rings on sale.”

She went with him to Red Cloud, where he bought two wide, gold bands for $5 apiece.

I don’t remember ever seeing my parents wear their wedding rings. Mother had arthritis in her hands and for Dad, working hard in the field and with machinery, a ring like that would be in the way.

I have a bracelet that Dad gave Mother. It was a beautiful soft gold, almost pinkish in color, and it felt so rich and satiny, not like hard metal. One time it came unfastened and broke, so she sent it away to get repaired. When it came back, it was a different bracelet, the same design but a hard yellow color, obviously not the same valuable gold.

Mother felt so bad about that. She didn’t know what else to do. Out there you don’t think about calling the police, there weren’t any police. There was a county sheriff, but he wouldn’t know what to do. Back then, you didn’t believe anyone would do such a thing, you just trusted people.

Mother didn’t want me around when she worked, but my dad let me work with him. I always wanted to help him and just waited for what he’d tell me next. I’d put the oats in the barn, one side for the horses, the other side for the cows. In between was an alley, with hay in the corner to take with a pitch fork and put in for the horses. There was a box in each stall for oats. Every horse got a half gallon of oats or more, two horses in each stall, each with their own box. Hay was there for the horses to eat, too.

Dad had four stalls for eight horses, but he never had that many in the barn at one time. Flora was a riding horse, Doc and Jim were big percheron work horses, one black and one white. They were to pull the plow, the corn planter and the cultivator. Dad had a mule for awhile, in the stall with Pat, another big horse though not a percheron. The far stall was for Prince, who was mainly for riding. I learned to ride on Prince because he was very gentle. Flora was larger and more spirited. I couldn’t ride her until I was ten.

I loved it when Dad and Uncle Ford put up hay. The hay mow made up the whole second floor of our barn. The roof went pretty high up so you could stack a lot of hay up there. There was a big hinged door on the south side of the barn, bigger than a garage door. There were pulleys and ropes to let the door down. When we put up hay, Uncle Ford always helped, and he and Dad would have the hay cut and put into piles.

They’d take out the hay rack and pitch the mounds of hay onto that rack. The hay went on top of the sling until the hay rack was partly full. Then they spread another sling over that and put hay on it until it was very high. I liked to ride on top of the hay when the horses pulled it back to the barn.

They’d get the hay rack backed up to the barn door, then drove the horses forward and that tightened the ropes in the barn. The tightening ropes rolled the sling of hay into a big round roll. They kept going until the sling pulled into the hay loft. Dad had some way to trip the sling to make the hay fall into the barn. They did it again and again until both slings were lifted up and the hay dropped into the barn.

The barn was southwest of the windmill, from the barn you’d go a little east to the shop. On the west side of the shop was a big scale built into the ground. On top were bridge planks to make it level, so Dad could drive a wagon full of corn onto the planks to weigh it. Inside a cupboard was the apparatus that did the weighing. They always weighed the wagon empty first, then weighed it with the corn.

When it rained, Dad had a lot to do in the shop. He had an anvil on a wooden stump, and he’d take the bellows and big tongs to hold the heated piece. To sharpen his plow lays, he got it red hot in the forge then pounded it with the sledge hammer to make it thinner, to sharpen it.

An old leather punching bag from when he was young hung inside the roof of the shop. I liked to play with that and punch it. I found all kinds of things to do when my dad worked in the shop. I’d play with his tools, pound nails into a board, and I’d straighten up, picking up all the bolts and putting them in a container. We talked about all sorts of things, about when he was young, what he was planning to do on the farm, about my school.

Sometimes I went with him in the wagon to ride around the fields, through the pasture to cut out cockleburs, thistles and sunflowers. He didn’t like sunflowers. He’d take the hoe and we’d chop them down, all the cockleburs, thistles and sunflowers growing wild, to keep the roadway clear.

He often sharpened the parts on the mower. It had a lot of discs, or teeth about three inches wide and long, and down about one inch, screwed onto a long iron bar. He’d have me bring those discs, or teeth, to him as he sat at the sharpener, a big concrete wheel out by the ice house. The wheel went around as he held the disc against it to sharpen it, while pumping the pedal that turned the wheel. Sometimes he sharpened Mother’s knives, especially before butchering.

He always had things for me to do. “You run do this or you run do that.” He called me his little race horse because I ran so fast. I learned a lot about machinery by holding tools and helping my dad. When I was in tenth grade, we had a mechanical test in home room, and I got the highest grade out of thirty kids. The teacher couldn’t believe a girl had the highest grade on that mechanical test.

Southwest from the house was the windmill. Our well was about two hundred feet deep, and the windmill pumped and pumped to fill the round water tank in the basement. There was a horse tank next to the well and a milk house next to that. You could adjust the windmill to pump water into the horse tank. When I was little, after Dad cleaned that tank out, he let me get on my bathing suit and paddle around in the water. It was about 2½ feet deep and eight feet wide.

There was a hydrant by the windmill, a faucet, and that was the best water ever. A tin cup hung there, but usually I just put my mouth under and drank. We filled the bucket for the chickens from the hydrant.

The windmill had a wooden frame tower and a platform with boards. One time I had the idea to climb up the windmill and sit on the platform next to the wheel. Mother came outside and saw me. She was so worried about me getting up there and falling down, or the windmill turning and knocking me off. She scared me with her fears, so I never tried that again.

That’s how it often was with Mother and Dad. She thought I’d get hurt, but Dad would just laugh and say, “Oh she’ll be alright.”

A wooden platform at the base of the windmill had a removable lid covering a pit about seven feet deep and four feet across that Dad climbed into occasionally to adjust something for the well. There was no water in the pit, it’s walls were brick, and you could see salamanders climbing around down there on the walls.

The milk house had a big separator. After Dad milked the cows, Mother took out enough for kitchen use and ran the rest of it through the separator to take the cream off. What was left, the skimmed milk, didn’t taste good, so that went to the pigs. We put cream in the churn and made butter. Sometimes in very hot weather we had to crank it a long time to get butter, and Mother and I would take turns churning. No one liked the milk left over after churning, the buttermilk, so the pigs got that, too. A five-gallon pail in the house, our slop bucket, held whatever we didn’t want and that went to the pigs.

When the milk cow had a calf, Dad weaned it after the first few weeks and put it in the barn away from the cows. If the mother cow fed her calf, there would be no milk left for us. We’d fill a glass bottle with milk, it was like a pop bottle, with no nipple on it, just open on the end. It was my job to take this bottle and feed the calf. He’d guzzle that right down.

One time I wanted roller skates. The only cement went from the back porch steps to the fence, or if you went to the side basement door, there was a sidewalk. That’s where I learned to roller skate. I learned to ice skate, too. I went down to the pond when it was frozen and skated around on that. Dad went down with me to get me started, but neither he nor Mother ever skated. One time we had an ice storm, and I could skate right out on the ground, out in our driveway.

I never had to get up early to do chores. Most farm children had to do a lot of work, farm boys would have to milk the cows and feed the animals early in the mornings, but I never had to do any of that.

I was spoiled. I had things my own way, all kinds of animals to play with, and my dad around all the time. I loved to be with my dad. I never thought of helping him as hard work.

Drinking from a windmill hydrant