OCR Text |
Show & CP UHt KM homer THE STORY THUS FAR: Amos Croy Icttled on a farm a,; Marysville, Mls-lourl, Mls-lourl, where be married and a son, Homer, Ho-mer, was born. Sunday meant church, company for dinner and steer weight uessing. Dehorning of the calves, coring cor-ing of hams, weaning of calves and sau-lage sau-lage making were Jobs that Homer had to help with. One of Homer's big thrills was helping Newt, a neighbor, break In his mules. Newt used bis own system, be would bitch the mule double to a wagon wag-on and force them to run away. He always al-ways said that a mule was no good nntil after It had run away, and be made money mon-ey by breaking mules, proving his system sys-tem was pretty good. The neighbors did not approve of bis method, however. , CHAPTER IX It took experts for this, for a crazy quilt is twice as hard as an ordinary quilt But Phebe knew how and would go from one to another, arranging patches and making suggestions. sug-gestions. And now, as the day's quilting drew to a climax, there would be a great hubbub as they tried to decide which color of thread went with which patch and what kind of stitch to use. But Phebe knew. She wouldn't fancy stitch at all herself, because she would be too busy showing others. Ma would . come in and stand in the background back-ground handing out patches and picking up the chalk when it rolled off on the floor. Phebe would lower her voice. 'Aunt, where do you want the cam- Sometimes it would keep on a year or two after your subscription ran out before it would whack you off. The one we took and the one that was most popular in our section was Comfort, published in Augusta, Maine, where they all seemed to spawn. I can still see the heading which said, COMFORT, Key to a Million Homes. The letters in Comfort Com-fort were strung along a gigantic key. It seemed to me there was no limit to human ingenuity. This, along with others of its tribe, carried "mail-order advertisements" which had to do with "How to Make Money Raising Belgian Hares," "How to Cure Bed Wetting," and "Big Money Mon-ey in Squabs." There was an ad that was tremendously persuasive to me "Send Ten Cents for Big Mail." I loved to get mail and so saved up and subscribed to one or two. Of course it was all advertising advertis-ing matter, and it never had my name right, but just the same it was something coming through the post office addressed to me. Sometimes Some-times I got more mail than Pa. He would say, "Homer, why do you want to carry all that trash home?" But I clung to it. I had many hours with nothing to fill them, so I pawed through it from "How to Get Rid of Chicken Worms," to "Make Easy Money Selling Soap to Your Friendly Neighbors." We had a "patent" washing machine, ma-chine, just as most of our neigh- I wrote it plainly on one side ol the paper as instructed, and sent it to Our National True Dream Contest Con-test without saying a word to anyone. The watch touch might not really work. I expected the winner would be in the next number, for I did not know that a monthly magazine had problems our weekly didn't have to contend with. One day I would be sure I would win; the next I would be sure I wouldn't, that being the nature na-ture of hope. One day Pa went to town alone, and when I saw him coming I rushed out to get the mail, as I always did. There, among the advertising matter, was an envelope addressed to me on a typewriting machine, the first I ever received. The big mall concerns wrote my name in lead pencil, pen-cil, except now and then when I seemed promising enough to have my name printed on a slip of paper and pasted on. When this happened I was sure to get mail from them for quite a while. But after a time they would get discouraged and I'd have to make new contacts. But there it was! I opened it "Dear Mr. Croy: We take pleasure pleas-ure in telling you that you have won first place in Our National True Dream Contest, and we are here-"ith enclosing check for first prize." I opened the check and there It was a check for a dollar. It was a thrilling moment. I went around to the side where Pa was unhitching and said with a tremendous effort at casualness, "Well, I got a check." He stopped with a tug in his hand and looked at me incredulously. "A check?" "Here it is." I fluttered the docu- "How much is it for?" f told him. "How did you get it?" I told him. "Take it in and show it to your mother," he said and led the horses down across the lot to the water tank. paign ribbon to go?" "In the middle," Ma would say. The women's voices would fall away to a hush, because they all knew what the campaign ribbon meant. It could not be finished in a day; sometimes it took a woman years, working alone winter evenings, to complete her crazy quilt. But it was helped along, and the women all wanted to say they'd had a part in the quilt. They would begin looking out the window to see if the men were coming. "There's Newt," Mrs. Kennedy Ken-nedy would say. One by one the men would arrive and stand in the lot talking to Pa, never dreaming to go to the house. One by one the carts and buggies would leave. Mrs. Gerilda Knabb would come out, but there would be no surrey now, so I would have to go to the granary and get two sawhorses. I would try to maneuver maneu-ver her horse up, but he had been standing all day and wanted to get home. Mrs. Knabb, standing on top of the sawhorses, would shout, "Whoa! Whoa! Stand still now!" and I would shout, too, to the prancing pranc-ing horse. Ma and Phebe would hear us shouting and would come to the door and begin calling warnings Ma thought it was wonderful. It wasn't long till Pa came up from the barn walking faster than usual, took off his overshoes, and sat down in his rocker. "Well, Susan, it seems the boy's got a check!" It was a supreme moment mo-ment for me. "How long did it take you, Homer?" "Two hours." " 'Two hours' " he repeated, and I could see he was doing mathematics. mathe-matics. "I guess you'd better read his piece aloud, Susan." I tried to look as modest as I could. As Ma read, the expression on Pa's face changed. He quit rocking rock-ing and sat there, puzzled and disappointed. dis-appointed. The piece about learnin' the calf to drink was fine; helpful; anybody could put it to use. But a dream I'd made up out of my head! He praised it a little, but only a little, for he wasn't a man to say something he didn't mean. Finally, choring time came and he put on his overshoes and started back to the barn lot But Ma wasn't disappointed. It was a fine piece. One day, shortly after this, as I was going down the street in town I saw in the window of the racket store a picture I knew, the instant I saw it, that I wanted. It was a panel containing pictures and a caption cap-tion which said, "Six Famous American Amer-ican Authors." Under each waa printed the name: Henry Wads-worth Wads-worth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Rua-sell Rua-sell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe. I looked at them and thought what great men they were and wished that I, myself, sometime could do something worth while. I was able, some way or other, to raise the money and bought the panel. When I got home my mother moth-er wanted to know what I hart. I was suddenly self-conscious and did not show it to her because my secret was so precious. She came up, after aft-er I had gone to my room, and there was the panel, unwrapped. She looked at me for a moment, seemed to understand my hesitation In showing show-ing it, and said: "I'll help you put it up." And she did, but neither of us mentioned the significance of the picture. In July my father would say to my mother, "I've just been through the watermelon patch and some good melons are coming on. I think we might have a swimming party." Then he'd say to me in his siy humorous hu-morous way, "Homer, would you mind telling the neighbors?" Of course I wouldn't, because nothing noth-ing was more fun than a swimming party. The evening of the party we'd get the chores done early and eat an early supper, then get the plates and knives and benches ready, and go out on the front porch to wait for the neighbors. It'd seem to me they'd never come, but at last we'd see them coming down the road in ' Newt Kennedy's spring-wagon. Pa'd 1 lean forward "I do believe he's got a new mule on the spring-wagon! He's goin' to kill snmebndy sometime, some-time, vu JUS! n ;trK n. sAOrd TP to Mrs. Knabb and instructions to me. And now, with everybody shouting, shout-ing, the horse would prance more than ever. Finally Pa would come up through the hog lot and take hold of the bit, and I would help Mrs. Knabb and pretty soon she would be on and going toward the main road, pulling and sawing at the frisky, snorting animal. "Homer, take down the frames," Ma would say, once more coming into charge. The people in our section took few papers, but the ones we did take were read and reread and stacked in a pile and treasured. We even kept our mail-order magazines. That was the final test. Everybody tried to subscribe to the home weekly, but there was a pinch; it was $1.50 a year. When Pa went to town Saturday and asked for the mail, there it would be with Pa's name written across the top in lead pencil. We couldn't wait till we got home, so Ma would put on her glasses and read snatches aloud as we jolted along in the hack. But it wasn't until after the chores were done, and the lamp lighted, that we really tore into it. Item by item, then. After nearly every one there was a discussion. Ma would read a name, and there would be a silence. Then Pa would say, "Why, I saw him not three weeks ago." Everybody took a farm paper. Or nearly everybody. Wallaces' Farmer Farm-er was the most popular, but The Iowa Homestead was on its heels. And there was The Mail and Breeze. But hardly any family took more than one. Two dollars a year, there. Ma. would read the Farmer aloud and it opened up a world the county weekly didn't know existed. There would be mention of towns we never even heard of, far off places in Iowa and Nebraska. Now and then there would be a mention of Ohio. Pa would lean forward a little. Every family took a religious paper. pa-per. Ours was The Ram's Horn. Sometimes, of an evening, Pa would be reading Wallaces' Farmer. Ma would be reading The Ram's Horn, and I would be breathless in The Youth's Companion. Especially in "Track's End." by Hayden Carruth, where the Indian came crawling thiough 'he snow tunnel. But 'hore was another kind of paper that everybody took. And that was what we called "the mailorder mail-order monthly." The reason everybody every-body took it was because it was cheap twenty-five cents a year Once the thing got coming, jt kept on coming It was not like The Youth's Companion which pave you two vc-ks' notice and meant it The one most popular in our section sec-tion was Comfort. bors had. The patent consisted of a big iron ball fastened to a pendulum. pendu-lum. When you pushed the handle back and forth, the pendulum with its iron ball swung' to and fro clumping clump-ing everybody on the shins. The printed notice pasted on the side said that running this machine was a pleasure. I would look at the notice no-tice and wonder what kind of man. had written that. My mother was not strong, so I always had to help with the washing. wash-ing. How long and dreary and harrowing har-rowing Monday was. Carry water from the wash boiler on the kitchen stove and dump it into the Ezy Family Fam-ily Washer, then push the damned handle back and forth till I thought I would die. Now and then Ma would come out, I would swing up the lid and she would peer into the steamy depths. A moment's rest and I'd hope the' clothes had been washed long enough. But they never nev-er had. The lid would have to go down and the pendulum again started start-ed swinging back and forth. I used to read as I pushed the handle. han-dle. A book was too heavy and too awkward to hold. But COMFORT, COM-FORT, Key to a Million Homes, was just about right. So I would grasp it in one hand and read about people in Newport. It did not take me long to discover they were a pretty bad lot. Also I thought I would like to have a fling at it myself. One day as I was pushing the pendulum back and forth, I read an announcement which said the magazine maga-zine was going to have a true dream contest open to any subscriber. (This was before the post-ofnee department depart-ment got ideas.) And that all you had to do was to write plainly on one side of the paper and see that your subscription was paid up. As I swayed the pendulum back and forth, I began to think up a true dream. A little trouble with my conscience, there. Still the Newport New-port set wouldn't have hesitated. I laid the scene in the Ozarks, although al-though I had never been there. The idea dealt with myself and a companion who had gone on a camping camp-ing trip in the Ozarks. The poor man got lost, and I dreamed where he was. and I went to the cavern where he had fallen and lowered a rope which I happened to have handy and pulled him out. Then we looked at his watch which had stopped when he had fallen into the water It had stopped at exactly the hour I had wakened from my dream I felt pretty hopeful about the watch ' touch. |