Beginning Again Read Free Page B

old cabin and never stirred until roused by the rooster crowing from the log barn. How I grew to hate that bird! Mr. and Mrs. McNish and their girls slept in a newly built house of timbers that had been squared at the Coleman sawmill. There we ate our meals, but all the boys preferred the old cabin where they could make as much noise as they pleased. Cade and I were as well treated as the McNish boys, and more important, well fed. And we learned a lot in those few months.
    Most of the ploughing, if you could call it that, had been finished before we arrived. The few acres where trees had been felled were full of stumps, and you had to dig the ground between them. We did have a plough and an elderly cow to pull it. But often it was worse than useless because it kept getting caught on tree roots.
    Mr. McNish apologized over the stumps. “They're so big the best way to get rid of them is to wait a few years till they rot,” he told me.
    I found I could work more soil loose with a wooden spade. We were in time to help plant the seed wheat and seed potatoes, and a few carrots and turnips, and in more than enough to help clear land. I thought my hands were tough from wielding a blacksmith's hammer, but chopping with an axe or pulling one end of a saw while Cade pulled the other soon had them well blistered. Cade's were not quite as bad as mine, since he had spent more time working with Papa, but he found chopping and sawing a trial.
    â€œMy shoulder's killing me,” he complained one afternoon when we had been sawing most of the day.
    â€œI'm not surprised,” said I, wondering at his seeming lapse of memory. “That's the shoulder the militiaman hit last year.”
    â€œSo it is,” he replied, rubbing it. “Haven't thought of that for some time.”
    He certainly was a cool one. If a soldier had put a bullet in me, I would not have overlooked it so casually. “I think we should stop now,” I said. “We've plenty of brush to clean up and that'll be easier on you.”
    Cade frowned. “I hope this doesn't mean I won't be able to pull my weight when we clear our own land.”
    The tree felling was the part I liked the least, though I knew how much of it lay ahead. What I did like was caring for the animals. The McNishes, like almost everyone else, had only a few and some were old. The cow had long been dry, and was too aged to be bred if there had been a bull in the country. There were a sow with a litter of fourteen squealing piglets, some hens with their fluffy chicks scratching around the buildings, and a duck with downy yellow ducklings which swam about on a pond created by digging a big hole and letting it fill with water. Mr. McNish had kept some seed wheat to feed the fowl, and the adult ones were fat, their feathers shiny. One of my tasks was to split rails and build an enclosure for the pigs. When Mr. McNish showed me how big he wanted it, I was surprised.
    â€œIf it's too small,” he told me. “They'll soon have it all churned to mud. Pigs love to be clean, and I hate to see them lying about in filth with nothing to do. I want them to have room to root about and to stay dry.”
    â€œIn Schenectady everyone let their pigs run loose,” I told Mr. McNish.
    â€œThat's against the law here,” he replied. “If an animal is found on someone else's property, its owner can be fined. The magistrates insist on cash, which hardly anybody has.”
    Each Saturday at dusk, Cade and I set out for home. Mama was usually standing on the stoop below the cabin door, waiting for us and smiling. By the time we had washed in a wooden basin on a stand outside, Elizabeth would have a meal served. We seated ourselves at the round butternut table Papa had made and tucked into fresh bread that had been baked in an iron kettle on the hearth. With it went hearty stew, lumpy with carrots, onions and potatoes, and fish which the younger boys had caught, or, if we were