The Baobab Tree

By Margaret E. Guthrie

This is the story of Laney McKelvey, growing up on a farm with her horse Hank, her dog Muttley but no dad.  What happens when the possibility of a step-dad seems likely?  And what happens when Laney and Hank meet with an accident?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Margaret Guthrie
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507026366

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Margaret E. Guthrie

327 E. Hortter Street

Philadelphia, PA 19119

© 2015 Margaret E. Guthrie

The Baobab Tree

Chapter 1

We've got a big, old ugly tree up by our mailbox.  It's got a thick, black trunk and a scrawny, tangled, thorny top that doesn't get many leaves.  Mom doesn't know what kind of a tree it is and she always knows that kind of stuff.

After I got a book out of the library about Africa I told Mom it was a baobab tree.  It isn't, but we liked the sound of it so much that's what we call it - the baobab tree.  Only one outside of Africa.

Me and mom live on a farm that my uncle Pete owns.  He says he and mom are partners on this farm and that's okay with mom.  My uncle Pete, my mom's brother, owns three or four farms and he raises cattle.  On this one that me and Mom run, we keep the cows and their calves, Black Angus, mostly.

Uncle Pete lives on the big farm down the road some with my Aunt Fay and my cousins Ray and Lila.  Ray and me are the same age - twelve; Lila's fourteen and stuck up.  Boy, is she impossible sometimes.

Uncle Pete is about the same height as my mom, a little taller maybe, and more square.  Kind of short for a man, but tall for a woman.  They look some alike, but not as much as Ray and Lila do, for instance.  Uncle Pete's eyes are small, while my mom's are big and kind of yellow, cat's eyes.  Uncle Pete's being smaller look kind of red and mean when he's had a couple of beers.  Then he makes me think of the pigs my aunt Fay raises.  She raises four every year, her dad's a hog farmer and she just loves the taste of pork and says the only good pork is that you raise yourself. 

At our farm, besides the Black Angus, we've got a Jersey cow my mom named Lulubet.  Mom says there's nothing like a Jersey for cream.  We trade some of the milk to Aunt Fay for pork.  It's my job to milk Lulubet every morning and night.  I feed her too, and muck out her stall, keep her clean, watered, and happy is what mom said.  We've also got chickens, just a few for eggs.  They're different kinds because my mom doesn't like Leghorns, she says the poor things have been bred to be egg laying machines.  So, we have some New Hampshires, which are a cross of the Rhode Island Red and something else - I think my mom won't have the Rhode Islands because of the name, but I'm not sure.  Anyway, she likes the New Hampshires 'cause their combs don't freeze in cold weather.  And then we have some Barred Plymouth Rocks.  I like them because of their stripey black and white feathers.  I have to feed and water them, too, and bring in the eggs.

Better even than Lulubet, though, or the Black Angus who don't even have names except on the papers that Uncle Pete keeps, are our horses.  We've got two because we help with the cattle and horses are best to work cattle with, anyone knows that.  Anyway, my mom has a big black quarter horse named Sunday.  He's coal black without a white spot on him anywhere.  My horse's name is Hank, he already had that name when I got him for my birthday a couple of years ago.  He's a mutt, you know, mixed breeds, and he's cute.  He's dappled black over dun, which Uncle Pete says is unusual. I like it because Hank changes color with the seasons like trees do.  In the winter he's real dark when long black hair grows in and then in the spring it begins to fall out and his dapples show.  It's almost as good as having two horses.

I don't have a dad, at least not here.  He left my mom and me when I was a baby so I don't remember anything about him.  I don't like to ask mom about him because she gets this look in her eyes like a dog that's been kicked for no reason.  I guess when I grow up I'll go to Rhode Island where he's from and I'll just walk up to him and say, Thank you very much for walking out on me before I had a chance to say anything about it.  Sometimes I practice saying it.  Anyway, he's back in Rhode Island somewhere, back where he's from, and that's all I know.

Sometimes when I go up the drive to get the mail, I'll lean against our baobab tree and watch the sky.  The baobab tree is a good place for me to think because there's nothing else around but the mail box.  Sometimes when I'm up there I see a hawk circling lazily, just cruising, or ducks overhead, winging somewhere fast like they always seem to do.  And I wonder how it would be to be free like that, to just go where you want.

And I see the jets high overhead crisscrossing the country, so high up the people in those planes don't have the faintest idea of what it looks like down here, they've never seen anything like our baobab tree, I bet.  I think  about how ten years from now that could be me up there on my way to Rhode Island, wearing high heel shoes maybe, to meet my dad, and tell him what I think of him for leaving when I was just a baby.

I asked Aunt Fay about my dad once and she said, Oh, honey, don't ask me.  I can't talk about him without saying what I think and he's your dad.  I shouldn't badmouth him to you.  Aunt Fay worries a lot about right and wrong.  She doesn't like to say bad stuff about people behind their backs.  I know better than to ask Uncle Pete about my dad.

I guess even though I don't have a dad right here, I'm pretty lucky because I have Mom, and Aunt Fay, Uncle Pete, Lila and Ray, and Grandma, Mom and Uncle Pete's mom.  Ray and I are best friends, at least for now.  Lila, like I said, is pretty stuck up.  Lila and Ray look pretty much alike except he's browner in summer like me, and he's skinnier than Lila but to me she looks kinda soft and pale.  And she's always squinting in the mirror, twisting her face around looking for spots.  They're there, too.  I guess if you look for something hard enough, it'll be there.

My uncle Pete is a good judge of livestock, everyone says, and friends and neighbors sometimes ask him for his opinion when they're going to buy an animal.  He and Aunt Fay are 4-H leaders and that's the part that Uncle Pete does, the livestock part.  He teaches kids how to judge livestock, how to raise an animal right, what to feed it and stuff like that.

He's so good at judging animals he's supposed to be able to just look and tell how good the animal really is, whether it's a dairy goat, a horse, a Holstein cow or a Black Angus bull.  Most times he lets me and Ray come along, if we're not in school or something, and it's fun to watch him.  He never says anything much, just looks and looks, walks all around the animal, nods his head once or twice.  If it's a horse, sometimes he'll get the owner to get the horse to walk or trot a little, and then he'll tell the buyer just what to expect from that animal, whether it's a good price or not and all that stuff.  Or whether the animal should even be bought at all.

On the way home he'll explain to Ray and me why the animal he was asked to look at was good or why it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  I'm glad he explains because now I'm starting to see some things for myself.  Also, it helps Ray and me do okay in the livestock judging contests at 4-H.

Uncle Pete claims my dog Muttley is part pony because Muttley is pretty huge.  He's part German Shepherd and part Doberman Pinscher.  When Uncle Pete said he thought Muttley was really part pony, I laughed and said, Yeah, some livestock expert you are.  So now it's a joke between us.  When we're working the cattle sometimes he asks me how come I'm not riding Muttley and giving Hank a rest.

So that's pretty much what my life was like at McKelvey Farms before Uncle Pete brought Casey Niedecker home that time.

Chapter II

The night we all