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Iowa Kids 1910, v1
Farm Boy
by Phil Stong
Illustrations by Kurt Wiese
Chapter 1
The Farm
Anyone likes to go places and anyone likes to ride on trains, but after four hours of starting and stopping and looking at cornfields, Harlan began to wish that he would reach Pittsville. Of course, it was an enormous distance from Des Moines -- over a hundred miles -- but on the other hand he had been on the train for an enormous time.
The car window was pretty well blurred by now with spots where he had pushed his nose against it and, though he did not know it, his face was pretty well blurred from the train having pushed the sooty window back against his nose. He had been very active in the seat as he grew more anxious to reach his stop, and by moving around on it he had managed to catch most of the cinders down his neck, keeping the cushions fairly clean. The cinders had begun to scratch.
Harlan was anxious to get to Pittsville so that he could see his cousins and tell them all about the city, where, he knew, they had never been. They had never seen a skyscraper -- like the big six and eight story buildings on Locust Street -- and they had never seen a streetcar, nor, since this was in the early 1900s -- had they seen an automobile.
He thought of many other things they had never seen -- the Union Park Zoo, Ingersoll Amusement Park, the Capitol -- why, they had never seen anything but the farm which, as every city boy knew, was made up of nothing but pigs and cows and horses, and some hay and corn. He would have a lot to tell them. Harlan felt that he had seen a great deal of this world and he felt sorry for Carl and Guy. At nine years old or so they were just -- well, you'd almost have to call them "rubes".
Harlan wondered why his father had said, "It's time for Harlan to see some of the old place." He'd seen at least a million farms already from the train. Or maybe a thousand.
The train was slowing down as it began to run between scattered houses.
"It's your stop, young fellow," the conductor said, and picked up his grip. Harlan followed him to the vestibule and a minute later the train "ZZZZzzzzzzzzed" and stopped. Harlan jumped down on the platform before the conductor could set out his little step and bumped squarely into two boys who would probably have bumped into him if they had not been tightly held by a white-headed, white-bearded old man in a black slouch hat. Grandpa had visited in Des Moines so Harlan knew him.
"This is Carl, Harlan," Grandpa said, pointing to the older boy, who was Harlan's own age. They shook hands. "And this is Guy." The brothers looked a great deal alike, both sun-browned, stalky and cheerful, with smiling blue eyes and brownish-blond hair.
Guy and Carl seized Harlan's grip and rushed back to the hitchingpost behind the red station. Following them, Harlan saw Grandpa's buggy, and, hitched to it, one of the largest and sleepiest horses he had ever seen. Behind the seat a bit of the bottom of the buggy stuck out and the boys first put Harlan's grip into this, then jumped in themselves and stood up, holding on to the back of the seat.
"You sit up with me," Grandpa told Harlan. "I'll let you drive us over." He handed the driving lines to Harlan, tied up the hitch-rein, and climbed in. "Giddup, Bird," he said.
"I never drove much," Harlan said doubtfully, looking at the very large horse.
Grandpa and the boys laughed, but kindly. Even so, Harlan turned a little pink.
"I wouldn't worry about Old Bird," Grandpa said. "She used to be a good workhorse, but she's a little old for that now. She's twenty-seven."
"Twenty-seven -- is that old?"
"One horse-year is more than three man-years," Grandpa explained.
"Eighty-one," said Harlan, who was good at arithmetic. He felt a little better about driving a horse that was as terribly old as eighty-one man-years.
Grandpa had touched Old Bird with the whip and she was jogging along. Harlan heard a whoop behind him and looked around. Guy and Carl were running behind the buggy, kicking up the dust with their bare feet and hanging on to the back of the package box so that it pulled them.
Grandpa chuckled. "Carl stepped onto a blacksnake in the road with his bare feet one time, that way, and he yelled a mighty different sort of tune."
"I'd think he'd be afraid to do it any more."
"Blacksnakes? Blacksnakes won't hurt you. Just s'prised Carl. Blacksnakes are good snakes on a farm. They kill mice and rats that eat up the grain. Some farmers keep them, like they keep cats."
They rattled on to a bridge -- as long a bridge as Harlan had ever seen even in Des Moines. It crossed the same Des Moines River.
"There's the farm," Grandpa said, pointing up the river.
Harlan saw, a half-mile away, a long farmhouse with many trees around it. Near it was one high red barn and several smaller buildings; far out in the fields he could see another barn. The farmhouse sat on a long sloping hill above the river. The river was bordered with small trees; above them, on the flat bottom land, there were groves of larger trees that looked like they might have some Indians in them. The bottom fields were close to the bank of the river, where the black, rich dirt had dropped out of the wash of the stream in many hundreds of years of floods.
Harlan mentioned that. Grandpa laughed. "I've seen Indians in them, a-plenty. I'll tell you after supper."
They rattled across another, a shorter bridge, Chequest Creek.
"This is Linwood Farm," Grandpa said. "Welcome to Linwood."
They drove up the lane, and Harlan, who was beginning to feel quite safe with Old Bird by this time, yelled "Whoa!" very loudly, even though Old Bird had stopped at the hitch-rack.
The boys had already jumped off with Harlan's grip and run toward the house. Harlan started off after them but Grandpa said, "Wait a minute."
A tall, brown, solemn-faced young man had appeared from nowhere and taken the horse's bridle.
"This is Lee, the hired man," Grandpa said. "Lee, this is Harlan."
Lee nodded that he had known it all the time. "If he's as ornery as his pop was, there'll be plenty of orneriness around here," he said sadly.
Carl and Guy had come back and they showed Harlan to his room; then they took him down to the pump and taught him how to slosh himself from the washpan and how to scoop soft soap -- made on the farm by mixing wood ashes and hog fat -- from the big barrel oil the kitchen porch. They took off their shirts and had a good time splashing.
Clean to the waist, all three went in to supper.
