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Show fCPUWtKM homer, j Vii vAj croy Sag ? V A w.n.u. service 'Hijnfif THE STORY THUS FAR: Amos Croy Settled on a farm at MarysvLUe, Missouri, Mis-souri, where he married and a son, Homer, Ho-mer, was born. Homer's earliest recollection recol-lection was of a cyclone which blew the sod barn, down and wrecked the orchard. Sunday meant church, company for dinner din-ner and guessing the weight of the steers. Dehorning of the calves was always a big event on the Croy farm. Curing of hams was a distasteful Job to Homer, as he had to clean the smoke house and get the fuel ready, then keep the fires burning. burn-ing. He was well repaid, however, when his mother started to serve the baked and fried ham. Homer did not like farm work, although he enjoyed the fruits of bis efforts. enced the joy of creative effort. And the pain, too, for they seem to walk hand in hand like a brother and sister sis-ter toddling off to school. Now that I had it done, I didn't know what to do with it, lost as I had been in creation. I copied it, however, and with my secret-locked in my heart wrote a letter to my friend Mr. Wallace, Wal-lace, for he seemed that near and real to me, and when we went to town Saturday, shoved it in the brass slot at the post office. One. Saturday, when Pa brought home the Farmer,, there it was! Something I had written. My name. I showed it to Ma, not quite able yet to show it to Pa. She gazed at me wonder-eyed; and yet she wasn't quite surprised, for she thought I was wonderful. You know mothers. Pa came in from slopping the pigs and Ma said, "Sit down, Amos, I want to read you something." I tried to look casually out of the window. Pa leaned forward as he recognized recog-nized the idea. There, at the bottom bot-tom where It was printed, Ma read my name. It took Pa about a minute to speak. Finally he said, "Homer, did you really write that?" "I guess I did," I said, trying to pretend it wasn't anything. "Let me ee the paper." He put on bis glasses and looked suspiciously, suspi-ciously, as If Ma and I had perpetrated perpe-trated some sort of hoax, then read It to himself from beginning to end, bis lips moving to form the words. "That'f real helpful Information, Homer. You was smart to think of writin' It up and sending it to a paper." It was a splendid moment. But other things had to be done; the CHAPTER VI The ordinary way to feed a calf, when it is being weaned and made to drink out of a bucket, is to put the bucket on the ground and push the calf's head in and try to hold it there till he has to gasp for breath; in doing this, he is supposed to get the taste of milk and finally learn to drink out of a bucket. It works after a fashion, but I shudder to think of the Sunday suits that have been sprayed with milk, for a calf has no good opinion of having its nose held under the milk, so raises his head and blows the milk like a paint sprayer. Sometimes I was in a hurry and thought the calf would not do that tonight; so I would not 'change my clothes, when I got back 'from town, and I would go to him Jwith the bucket of milk. The eye-Iiight eye-Iiight of calves is that of eagles and the moment I would get inside the 'calf lot, he would come flying at 'me, having some fool notion that I iiiwas his mother. The moment had arrived. I would seize his empty head and shove it to the bottom of the bucket and hold it there, hoping hop-ing to God everything would be all right. It never was. He would lift bis head out of the warm sweet milk and lope to the other end of the lot and bawl for his mother who was going crazy on the other aide of the fence. I would follow with the bucket and hold it out temptingly; but he knew there was nothing in it but disappointment and would have nothing to do with it. I would try again; he then would get the smell of the milk and would begin be-gin to butt and plunge harder than ever. The accepted way was for me to get the calf's head in the bucket, then hold up my finger and let him think I was his mother; his tongue would wrap around my finger and his sides would go in and out and his tail would give little tremors. At last, a trickle of milk would get into his mouth and I would stand beside him till he had his meal. The next morning, or the next evening, eve-ning, it would be the same thing over; then bit by bit I would slip my thumb up my finger and shorten my grip until at last he got only a button; then came the day when he would discover he didn't have to have my finger in the bucket and could do the job alone. That was a Im'ct Aw falf jn WPanpd. most people who believe everybody is a rascal and can't be trusted out of sight. Sometimes, I think, we discover in people what we look for. My mother looked for the best and she usually found it She also was the "quietest" teacher teach-er I ever knew. Sometimes I did not know I was being taught; sometimes some-times the impact of what she had taught did not hit me until long after. At this time the farmers were putting put-ting in croquet grounds, so of course I wanted one. This meant work, for I had to get our spade and level off some of the humps in the yard and fill in the holes, but I got the work done and my father brought home a long wooden box with a little iron hook and eye on the side. I was delighted with the wooden mallets. Each had a band of color around the handle and each ball had a band of color, too. The stakes wore a rainbow. It was a fine croquet set and I was thrilled. Ma and Pa and Phebe (my mother's niece) and the hired man and I would play. I would stop work any time. One day, when I was in town, a neighbor boy Earl Trullinger came to see me. He had become bored by having to play alone and had banged things about. Then he left. When I got home, two of my precious pre-cious mallet handles were broken. I was mad, and that night after work I sat down to write Earl a letter. I could not wait till I saw him. I wanted my revenge then and there. I told him exactly what I thought of him; then I went back and told it all over again Just to make sure. My mother kept watching me, as I destroyed Earl, and when my masterpiece was finished, she asked me to read it aloud which I did with a great deal of pleasure. As I read she kept nodding her head and sayimg, "Myl my! that's going to scorch him," "That's it, Homer, give it to him!" I was pleased with her approval, and went back and added some fine touches. "That's the best one yet. Tear into him again." I tore into him until pretty soon Earl was in a worse condition than my mallet handles. When my letter was completed and I was glowing, she said, "I think you can improve on that. Tackle it again tomorrow night" I was for getting it into the mail while the thing was still sizzling, but under her advice, I waited. The next night I got out my letter and read it through again. It did not seem quite so good. "Tear it up," she said. I looked at her in amazement. "Tear it up?" I repeated, flabbergasted. flab-bergasted. "Yes. You must never mail a letter you've written in anger. Write it, but don't mail it. Now write him a nice polite letter and ask him to come over and play croquet with you." I wrote the letter (muttering to myself). It wasn't nearly the masterpiece mas-terpiece the other was, but it did ask him to come and play with me. I took it down to the mailbox and put it in, thinking my mother didn't know much about boys. A few days later Earl came to see me, and brought with him two mallets from his own set with the exact colors of the ones he had broken. He said he was sorry he'd broken mine. Then he saved his face. He had been getting ready to bring the mallets over when he had received my letter, he said. It wasn't long before Earl and I were whooping and screeching and banging the balls about in the utmost ut-most good fellowship. My mother did not mention the matter and it was not until some time later that the full force of what she had taught hit me. In January my-father would say, "I expect we'd better get ready to butcher," and my heart would go down again. More work. "I'll help you carry out the kettle. Homer." Another of his sly jokes,, for he would have to do most of the carrying. carry-ing. We'd get the big black iron kettle and carry it out and put it on an old tumbling rod from a threshing thresh-ing outfit. It was my duty, when the kettle was dangling on the rod, to bring wood and a basket of cobs to start the fire. Pa would be cutting and sharpening the gambrels; when that was done we'd haul out the bobsled. bob-sled. Work, work, no end of work; that's the way it seemed to me. Yet kind of exciting, too, for tomorrow there'd be lots of people, and lots of laughing and codding. The next morning I could hardly wait till I'd see the neighbors coming com-ing down the road. By the time they arrived, the fire would be leaping, leap-ing, the scalding platform and the cutting tables would be ready. One of the neighbors would be Newt Kennedy Newt with his overcoat held together in front by the huge brass safety pin, his trousers stuffed into the tops of his felt boots, and his butcher knives in his hands These he'd lay carefully on the cutting cut-ting table, for one man wouldn't dream of using another man's knives unless given permission. Then N'ewt'd head for me, because Newt and I liked each other, and we would talk about rabbit hunting and mule breaking and where we'd seeD prairie chickens. (TO BE CONTINUED The brash on his tail flapped back and forth. . farm work had to go on, and, bit by bit, my glory faded. My mother had the quality of "believing" "be-lieving" in people. No matter how unconscionable a rascal a person was my mother always found something some-thing about him to believe in. Sometimes Some-times we would tell her that So-and-So was a no-good. But my mother still clung to the unwavering faith she had in human beings. As a result our place was a regular regu-lar halfway house for tramps. I've heard that tramps have a way of making a private mark on the gate, or a post, to show that a gullible person lives there. Well, there must have been one at our farm, for they all turned in. And, what is more, they all got fed, no matter how busy, or how tired she was. She would even stop while bluing the clothes to get up a plate of food for some wretch who said he was hungry. hun-gry. But she .would always tell them (very sternly, here) that she wouldn't give them a bite unless they earned it. Then she would ask them if they were willing to work. They always were. Or so they said. She would send them to the woodpile wood-pile and pretty soon they would be whacking away. Sometimes they would develop a splinter in their hand, or a sprain in their back. She would feel sorry for them and tell them that at least they showed a willing spirit and that they could now come and sit down on the edge of the back porch and eat the little we had. She always said that. Yet we always al-ways had abundance. As "they ate. she would draw up a chair and sit, just inside the screen door in the house, talking to them and suffering with them as they told of their frightful fright-ful hardships. No matter how wild the story was, she always believed It, and she always believed in them. But one day a different type of tramp came along. Hungry, of course; just about starving, he said. My mother began her regular speech. She would give him something some-thing to eat. but he would have to earn it The tramp looked at her without speaking, evidently making up his mind about something. But on the whole this quality of my mother's to believe in people never really harmed her. Now and then she was duped, but, on the whole, she got along better than One day I took a piece of rubber hose off the steam-cooker and cut it into about a five-inch length and nailed one end of this to the wooden bottom of the bucket. There was a . hole through it, of course, sd that milk would travel up to it. When feeding time came and the calf made a flying tackle at me, I shoved my hand into the milk and when he tried to find my finger, I slipped the tube into his mouth. It was a breathless, breath-less, exciting moment. , A satisfied glaze came into his eyes; the brush on his tail flapped back and forth, his gullet went up and down, his sides went in and out. I called Pa and showed it to him and he said it was the first time he had ever heard of this being done. If it was anything about farming. Pa would know. That night he told Ma about it, but not in a way to go to my head because he didn't believe in boys getting too much praise. My mother thought it was wonderful. Day after day it worked. No spraying. No calves bawling up and down the fence. No cows going crazy. I was what the people in my section sec-tion called a "book boy." The printed print-ed word fascinated me, as machinery machin-ery fascinated some boys. And ideas fascinated me. Sometimes it seemed to me an idea well expressed was one of the most lovely things in the world. Things that I liked in our farm papers, I would read over and over. I would ask what the words meant; sometimes Pa and Ma knew and sometimes they didn't, but that was all right. I would wait patiently until I saw that word again and maybe this time I could make sense out of it We had no dictionary, But, like everybody else, we had a good horse-doctor book. At night before I would blink off to sleep In my chair, I would read and reread Wallaces' Farmer. We also took the county weekly and that I would read, too, but it wasn't the world of enchantment that Wallaces' Farmer was. One section was devoted to new methods and discoveries; dis-coveries; then and there an idea was born. I set to work on it, without a word to my father or mother. At last it was lying on the kitchen table, ta-ble, my words, my thoughts, my ideal Never before had I experi- |