Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (16 page)

 

AMOS TODD'S VINEGAR

P
A WAS
a stubborn man. Often and again, Ma said to him: “Amos Todd, you're a hard and unforgiving man.” But Pa said the Todds had vinegar in their blood, and that was the case as long as he could remember.

“Well any child of mine that has Todd vinegar,” Ma said, “I'll just tar the stuffings out of, and that's all.”

But she couldn't do much with Pa. I guess there wasn't a more stubborn man in all the state of Kansas. 'Way back in the nineties, when they were first married and Pa was breaking out his first quarter section, four drunken Indians came along and burnt his barn.

Another man might have been content to call the sheriff, swear out a warrant, and then go back to building a new barn. Seeing that the Indian wars had been over and done with so many years, that would have been the sensible thing to do. But not Pa. Pa took his gun, saddled a horse, and went after those four Indians. He chased them into Oklahoma and then into the panhandle. He chased them all the way across New Mexico into Arizona. He caught up with two of them in the desert, hog-tied them, and went after the other two. One of them died of thirst, but Pa brought the other three all the way back to Kansas to stand trial.

He was gone three months, but he had his satisfaction. His farm went to seed that year, and Ma didn't know whether he was alive or dead, but he had proved to folks that Amos Todd was a mighty hard and stubborn man.

Well, all this that I'm going to tell about now started because Lucy went to visit her Aunt Effie up in Nebraska. Aunt Effie was Pa's sister, but Pa hadn't spoken to her in twenty years. That was because Aunt Effie had married a Nebraska hardware dealer, and Pa had been against the match.

Ma wrote to Aunt Effie regularly, and every Christmas Aunt Effie sent presents for each of us, even for Pa, although he never opened his presents and the lot of them were stacked up for twenty Christmases back.

Another man would have forgotten and forgiven by and by, but Pa was too proud of the Todd vinegar. The only thing that happened during the twenty years was that Pa got such a feeling against Nebraska men that he wouldn't even buy a tube of toothpaste if it was made by a Nebraska firm.

Lucy had turned nineteen and was pretty as a picture, when Aunt Effie wrote and said that nothing would please her better than to have Lucy come up to Nebraska and visit for a while. She said that here was her only niece, and she had never seen the body of her, but only pictures. And Lucy—wellshe had never been further than Topeka, and the thought of going up to Omaha, living there for a month, and perhaps making a trip to Chicago, was enough to keep her awake nights. She spent hours in her room, putting up her hair, the way she had seen in pictures, and trying every dress she owned and most of Ma's.

“She ain't going,” Pa said. “I won't have Effie influencing my daughter.”

Ma just tightened her lips. She was an Amslee, and if the Todds had vinegar in their blood, the Amslees had pepper in theirs.

“She's going a week come Monday,” Ma said. “You can browbeat me, Amos Todd, and you can browbeat your hired help, but Lucy's going to live gracious if no one else in this family does.”

“Effie's ideas—” Pop began.

“You leave Effie out of this! You ain't spoken to Effie in twenty years, and you don't know any more about her than the man in the moon does.”

“Who's going to help with the kitchen chores?” Pa demanded, taking a new tack.

“I'll do them myself,” Ma said grimly. And nodding at me, “Jackie will help me, if I need help. Effie's your own sister, bone and blood, and Lucy's got a born right to go and visit with her.”

Pa went off muttering about Nebraska men, and Ma and Lucy set to packing for the visit. Lucy couldn't kiss Ma enough, and if I had let her, she would have kissed me too. Her cheeks were pink and pretty, and her blue eyes were shining like stars.

Pa went on working the farm, only now half again as hard as he had worked before Lucy left. Mealtimes, he would sit and mutter under his breath about Effie and Nebraska. Lord, but that man hated Nebraska. To hear him talk, the white man's world ended at the north Kansas border.

One day, a drummer drove into the yard with an automatic potato peeler. You set it up, poured in water, poured in the potatoes, turned a crank, and before you knew it, your potatoes were peeled. Ma liked the idea, because as she put it she couldn't serve a meal, breakfast, dinner or supper without potatoes as a side dish. She had the drummer set up the machine in the kitchen, and when Pa and the men came in for dinner, there she was sitting, calm as pie, turning a handle and peeling the supper potatoes in half a minute.

“Now, Pa,” she said, “I do like this contraption. It's a pleasure to know that five minutes a day will peel all the potatoes you men can eat.”

“If Lucy wasn't off, learning fancy ways from Effie, then you wouldn't have no worry about peeling a few potatoes,” Pa said.

“Never mind Lucy. I peeled potatoes twenty-seven years, and I think it's high time I made the work easier. And if a boughten machine can save a body work, then I'm for the machine. Indeed, I dreamed enough about a machine that would peel potatoes.”

“Seems you're for anything to save a little work.”

“And when you a bought a thresher,” Ma came back, “and the children didn't get clothes or me a dress for two years—”

Well, they went on like that for about fifteen minutes until Ma had pretty well worn him down. He was almost ready to buy, when suddenly he cocked an eye at the drummer and said:

“Who puts this out?”

“Adams and Cornwall,” the drummer said comfortably.

“And where are they at?”

“Lincoln, Nebraska.”

Pa's mustache bristled up and his eyes narrowed. “Get out!” he told the drummer. “You take that confounded contraption and get out!”

The drummer blinked foolishly, and Ma said: “For land sakes, Pa, you can't hold a thing like that against a potato peeler.”

“I can and I do.”

“But Adams and Cornwall have a reputation for fine kitchen products,” the drummer pleaded.

“Take it out,” Ma said resignedly. She knew better than to argue with Pa when he was set on anything. “I peeled potatoes for twenty-seven years, and I can go on peeling them. Take it out.”

Pa sat down to eat without saying a word.

After the incident of the potato peeler, one thing after another seemed to go wrong. Moss Jackson, the hired man who had been with Pa for eleven years, quit. “I can take cussedness,” he told Ma, “but just so much cussedness.”

“It's just as well,” Pa said. “This farm won't make bread and butter for us, let alone hired men.”

Then there were Lucy's letters. She wrote at least every other day, and her letters were such a satisfaction that Ma couldn't keep from reading them aloud to Pa. She would wait until after supper when she had finished the dishes and Pa was smoking his pipe at the table, and then she would put on her spectacles and read the letters aloud. Only whenever she came to some direct reference to Aunt Effie, she had to tone down and sometimes leave whole sentences out. Otherwise, Pa would get up from the table and stalk away.

Now it seems that Lucy was having a marvelous time in Omaha. Aunt Effie took to her right from the start, and Uncle Ely said there wasn't a sweeter girl on earth, even if she was Amos Todd's daughter. They spread this news around town, and soon Lucy was having more dates than she knew what to do with. This boy took her dancing and that boy took her to the movies, and this girl gave a party for her.

“Frivolous foolishness,” Pa said. “Next thing, she'll up and marry one of them soda fountain boys.”

So Ma took to easing off here and there in the letters, and presently, she wasn't reading but one or two letters a week. And even in those letters, she couldn't keep down Lucy's preference for one of the boys. His name was Tom Patterson, and right from the start, Pa was against him. That was because Tom had just finished agricultural college. Pa had never held with college for farmers.

Pa held back for a long time, but at last he burst out: “Effie or no Effie, I don't want a daughter of mine taking up with a no-account Nebraskan college farmer. You write Lucy it's time she came home.”

“I will,” Ma said quietly.

But a week went by with no letters from Lucy, at least none that Ma read at the supper table. Pa gnawed his mustache, and finally demanded why Lucy didn't write.

“She did write,” Ma said gently.

“Well, is she coming home or not?”

“She'll be home this week,” Ma said.

“I'd like to hear what new nonsense Effie drilled into her head,” Pa said. “So read me that letter.”

Ma fussed around, but couldn't find the letter. “It was nothing,” she told Pa. “Just neighbor talk—nothing at all.”

That was enough for me. I fussed a little harder and found the letter in Ma's sewing box. And this is what Lucy had written:

“Mother dear, I told you in my last letter how it had come about. You said I should do what I think is right, and I think it's right to marry a man you love. I would want you and Dad at my wedding, and that's what makes me so unhappy—in the middle of my happiness. I remembered what you always said about Amos Todd being the stubbornest man in Kansas. I couldn't give up Tom, so we were married here, at Aunt Efiie's home, a very quiet wedding. I know you'll forgive me, and I know that when Dad sees Tom and sees how wise he is when it comes to a farm, he will love him as much as I do. So prepare him just a little, and we will be home Thursday.”

You can imagine the way it was in our house between then and Thursday. I knew and Ma knew, though she didn't know I knew. I watched Ma and I watched Pa. I said to myself, “She ain't forgot that peeling machine, and she'll stand up to him.”

But Tuesday came and Wednesday came, and then Thursday morning came, and Ma hadn't said a word to Pa. And then at breakfast she said, sort of simple like:

“Lucy's coming home today, Pa.”

“Well, it's just about time.”

“It is,” Ma agreed. “You know, Pa,” she went on curiously, “our Lucy's not the same any more. She's all grown up, and one of these days she's going to look around and say, ‘There's the man my heart's set on to marry and raise children with.'”

“I suppose so,” Pa agreed.

“It would be nice.”

“Depends on the man,” Pa said.

“Yes, it does. But our Lucy wouldn't have anything but a nice boy. And suppose she met some real nice boy over there at Effie's. Why she might just take it into her head to marry him.”

“What!”

“Well, just supposing—”

“Suppose nothing!” Pa roared. “I seen Effie throw herself away on that no-account Nebraska hardware dealer twenty years ago. Any daughter of mine that takes—”

“No need to yell,” Ma said.

Pa looked at her keenly. “What's all this aiming at?” he demanded.

“Nothing—nothing at all.”

“All right. Lucy will be home today.”

“Yes,” Ma agreed. “She'll be home today.”

That was all for the time being. Pa finished his breakfast and went out, and Ma shook her head and turned to the dishes. But she was troubled; she kept looking toward the road, and she kept shaking her head.

After she had finished the dishes, she sat down and clasped her hands tightly in her lap, like she always did when she was troubled. She looked at me and said:

“Childhood's a blessing. There's nothing but trouble and more trouble when folks grow up.”

I could see that and agreed with it.

“I'd better set to baking,” Ma nodded, glancing at the old blue wall clock. “Trouble comes soon enough even if you don't count the minutes.”

Pa came in from the fields early, went upstairs, washed and shaved, and put on his white shirt with the blue stripes. Ma had baked two big apple pies, the kind that look like mountains from being stuffed high with filling, and two butter yeast cakes that set the whole house full of perfume. She had baked a whole ham with cloves and brown sugar and apple slices.

Pa went around sniffing the apple pies and breaking bits from the crust of the ham. “Lord, but I love baked smoked ham,” he smiled.

Ma just nodded.

“Now what's bothering you, Ma?” he wanted to know. “Here's Lucy coming home and the house full of good things to eat, and you got a face as long as a mile.”

“Nothing—”

“Maybe you'd like for her to stay on up there at Effie's. Maybe it don't seem right to you that a man should halve his family around him?”

“Maybe,” Ma said. Then she began to set the table, fumbling with the dishes like she had never set a table before in her life. Pa had gone over to the window, and all of a sudden he stiffened and said: