Back on the Farm: Volume 1 and 2

By Harold W. Sullivan

Back on the Farm is a collection of 176 humorous stories Harold Sullivan wrote for his grandchildren about growing up on a farm in Comet, West Virginia, during the '30s and '40s. The moments that were the basis of the stories were frozen in time for the author, and his fond retelling--"When I was a boy, back on the farm"--recreates that life in the reader's mind too.

His stories are of small triumphs, giant failures, and a few in between. They are funny tales of his relationship with his younger sister, whom as one story recounts, he convinced to let him shoot her with a homemade BB gun. This sister then pretended it didn't hurt so she would shoot him too! Many of the stories are about his hardworking mother, such as the time Harold and his sister made mud pies with eggs from the farm (a huge financial loss in the Depression) and Momma spanked them twice--once for the act and again when she found they had taken all the eggs.

The hero of many of his stories was his father, a "big man" in many ways, whose battle with the "pushy cow" showed the personality of the man--and of the cow.

Harold's stories are of a way of life that doesn't exist anymore in the tiny community of Comet, West Virginia, which doesn't exist anymore either. But for the people who lived there, or for anyone who has lived on a farm, the tales from Harold's memory bring back a simpler time worth revisiting. These stories, of a boy growing up among hardworking and close-knit family and community, are a love song to life, Back on the Farm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685709235

Book preview

Dad, the Man

Many of the stories contain references to Dad. Before we go any further, let’s take a look at Dad, the man, both by physical characteristics and by the kind of person he was. Otherwise, by reading these stories, it would be all too easy to categorize Dad as some guy about a half bubble off plumb, which is miles from the truth. You should be so plumb.

Dad was a big man. He was about six feet tall, weighed from 220 to 230 pounds most of his adult life (his doctor thought 203 was about right, and Dad gave the doctor permission to weigh that) and had astonishing strength. He was made in large proportions. His hands were the largest of anyone I ever saw, professional wrestler and all. When he got a wedding ring, they had to buy two and weld them together to get one big enough to fit.

Dad was never outside without his hat. Like the cowboys of the old West, the first thing Dad did when heading for the door was to put on his hat. He said he could do without his coat, even on a cold day, but never his hat. At night he slept with a skull cap on his head. This probably got started because his hair didn’t want to behave, and he held it down with a night cap; however, I’m sure he felt more comfortable with his head covered. He used the top of a silk stocking, cut off and tied with a knot, as a skull cap. During the daytime, he wore a felt fedora made by Stetson, although for a short period he wore a straw fedora in the summertime. I think someone gave it to him. Most of the time, his hats were over-the-hill dress-up Stetsons.

Dad never had a lot of clothes but what he bought were of quality, like the Stetson hats. As far as I know, he wore a suit every day he ever taught school, along with a white (or at least a very light colored) dress shirt and tie. He opted for gabardine or other durable weave and wool fabric in most of his suits. Dad was a handsome man, and he wore his clothes well. Even in work clothes covered with sawdust and dirt, Dad still looked like a gentleman. With the exception of one short period when he lost his mind and bought gray, Dad wore tan work outfits from Penny’s or Sears, decorated most of the time with either sawdust or hayseed.

Dad behaved like a gentleman, at least when he was not farming. As a farmer, he behaved like a man possessed by demons a lot of the time. There were parts of the farming he liked, but animals that didn’t obey or endless, repetitious tasks such as putting up hay or cutting brush day after day just were not his cup of tea. He did it, mind you, but not without comment. As soon as I left the farm, he gratefully sold it and began working in carpentry during nonschool hours. He loved building and was good at it. He built many houses, including two for me, and his birch cabinets grace the kitchens of many a Jackson County home.

When we were back on the farm, and the Great Depression was just ending, no one had any money—especially for tools. I’ve seen Dad use a plate of water as a level. He had one claw hammer with part of the claw broken off, a good handsaw, a good axe, a tiny little tri-square that wasn’t worth throwing away, and a miserable wooden hand plane that he seldom even tried to use. We also had a small hand grinding wheel and a reasonably good framing square. That was it. Today, I have more tools than that in my pocket. Dad made do with what he could afford and on the farm during those years he built a big barn, a tool shed, two chicken houses, a bathroom addition to the house, and thousands of small items such as gates, crates, doors, and boxes. During the big flood of 1938 when we were marooned by high water for two weeks, Dad and Romie Burgess, who rented the old log cabin on our farm, tracked over the hills to a sawmill way back up some hollow and carried home on their backs enough lumber to build a Jon boat.

We had to have a boat so we could get chicken feed in from Kalt’s store. If you ran out of the brand of chicken feed the chickens would almost inevitably molt, which put a stop to the egg laying. We depended on the sale of eggs for our groceries and the molting problem could not be tolerated. The situation called for rather stern measures. I guess it was just plain good luck that the men could follow the ridges and get to a sawmill without being blocked by backwater from the Ohio River.

Unless you have had to carry on your shoulders a couple of green-lumber boards, you cannot really appreciate what Dad and Romie endured carrying that much lumber all those miles. They sagged a little as they ate the late meal Mom had waiting, but after her third cup of thick coffee, they immediately started the boat building. Neither had ever built one, but by the end of the next day, a new Jon boat was sitting in the floodwaters swelling its joints closed. It floated beautifully and with a couple of oars made from a board, served to ensure that chicken feed was ferried across the great lake that two weeks previously had been a friendly, quiet creek lined with maple and willow trees. Those same trees were now covered with many feet of cold, muddy, unfriendly water. As a schoolman, Dad was hard to beat. His students loved him without reservation. Even students he never had in his classes hung around him just like they were his and I never once heard of him treating a student, or anyone else for that matter, unfairly. His idea of fair, however, was rather rigid, and if fair might not be exactly what you wanted, fair was exactly what you were going to get anyway. Every few years some parents that didn’t know Dad or his reputation would get bent out of shape over something inflicted on their little darling and would come in and have it out. The bout seldom lasted more than about a minute. Dad had a presence in those situations that made him appear to be even bigger than he was. If you had to choose the most likely ending for these scenes, it would be that the parents left planning to beat their little angel to a pulp.

Dad had an explosive temper, but it was never out of control when he was in a schoolteacher situation. In his later years, following many terms as a teacher of one-room schools all over the place, he served as dean of boys at Ravenswood High School, in addition to teaching math, and his temper never came into being in any school situation. He got mad at little things, like something falling on his foot, or Mom trying to tell him what to do, or a cow running him down, or the horses not allowing him to catch them so that we could put up the hay, or a heifer turning at the last minute and galloping over the hill instead of going on through the gate. He often told me that inanimate objects had little devious minds that caused them to hide, fall, break, or to do whatever was most likely to cause a person to swear and throw things.

Dad’s temper caused him some consternation, largely because he could never quite equate his reaction to life’s minor aggravations with his role as a Sunday School Superintendent. Not a lot of consternation, now that I think of it. He had a spot picked out for your kiss if you took too many liberties in assisting him in protecting his moral life.

Dad was not the most organized being there ever was. When he finished a job, he mostly left the tools where they dropped, planning to put them away later. Then he never could find them and would always start the cry, Some dirty bastard came in here and stole my square! I was very organized and never really could understand why Dad didn’t neatly hang up his tools and rack up his supplies by kind. Dad never really cared whether I understood it or not.

He used to throw things. Our original farm was always called Over on the Hill, and over on the hill he had a set of posthole diggers I know he threw away at least five times. They were terrible, all loose in the joints where the holes had worn out, and the handles would come together and pinch your fingers. After about the second blood-blister, Dad would rear back and hurl those posthole diggers as far as he could send them. One time they went over a big hill and into a gully filled with half-rotten brush. He had to go dig them out and sheepishly come trudging back to continue work. I was very small, but smart enough even then to keep my mouth shut.

Heaving unwieldy objects at great distances took it out of him, however, and he developed what we now know as tendonitis in his shoulder. Back then we called it throwing your arm away. Whatever the name, it was sufficient to curtail the throwing and during his later years, he mainly confined his efforts to trying to hit cows in the head with rocks whenever they wouldn’t go where they were being driven. Dad would never have qualified for any position on a baseball field. He threw only when angry and his throw contained more velocity than accuracy. I never saw him hit anything he threw at except, maybe a few times, the ears of Dixie, our problem-child horse.

When Dad felt that it was necessary to correct one of his children, he let the method fit the occasion. If it was out in the fields, he let you have it with both barrels and there was little chance of misunderstanding. If, however, it was when other folks were around, the signals were different and woe betide you if you ignored them. There were only two signals. The first one was just a glance. If you were acting up, he gave you a glance. That doesn’t seem like much when you see it in writing, but let me assure you, that glance could peel the bark off an oak tree. There was no way in the world you could escape its meaning: cease and desist or die.

I did, a few times, pretend not to catch the glance. He didn’t waste a second look; instead, he quietly snapped his fingers. Once. I ignored that signal, too—once. Dad believed in corporal punishment, capital punishment, or whatever it took to carry the freight.

Neighbors in the Comet community were astounded at the relationship Dad and I had. They’d remark in awe that they’d hear us laughing long before we came into sight and that we acted, not like a father and son, but like best friends. They were absolutely right—Dad and I were the best of friends. He had a wonderful sense of humor, enjoyed life, was good at what he did, felt good about himself, thought his family and friends were a little bit of all right and was surrounded all the time by people who thought he was also a little bit of all right.

In 1991, twenty years after his death, the Jackson County Board of Education contacted me asking for an 8×10 photo of Dad. They were installing him in the Ravenswood High School Hall of Fame. When I go back to the county, it is very common for someone to say, Sullivan! You wouldn’t happen to be related to W. D. Sullivan, would you? Let me tell you what he did for me back in…best teacher I ever had…never did ask him for a thing but what…etc., etc., etc.

Dad was a big man.

Dad’s Mailbox

It’s a federal crime to damage a rural mailbox, although no one ever heard of anyone going to jail over such a transgression. Millions of people have committed federal offenses and gotten by because they were just dealing with the law; it was an entirely different proposition if you were dealing with Dad.

As you travel along the road, you seldom see where a car has hit a mailbox. They hit ours all the time. The road grader would come along scraping the berm. After he passed, the wooden mailbox post would be so damaged it would need replacing. A drunk would run off the road and down would go our blasted mailbox. The highway crew would come by patching the blacktop; the mailbox would be knocked askew, the flag hanging limp. We moved the mailbox so far back from the road that we had to have a second zip code, but all for naught. Two or three times a year, down went the mailbox.

I had just learned to weld when Dad asked me to fabricate a mailbox support with some muscle in it. He wanted the upright post made of thick wall five-inch steel pipe, braced with at least three-eighths inch steel plate because, he declared, I want the next son of a  that hits my mailbox to tear the whole side off his car!

Dad also wanted whomever it was to tear his own side off; however, he was just too tenderhearted to mention it. No doubt.

We made the mailbox holder as Dad wanted, set the post in concrete, and waited a few years. Amazingly, it was never hit again. Dad said it wouldn’t be and was bitterly disappointed.

That didn’t mean Dad’s mailbox troubles were over; they just took a different turn. Once in a while it was a fad for teenage boys to drive by with a 2×4 sticking out the window and smash newspaper boxes. They got Dad’s mailbox twice, and although I doubt he could have done what he said he was going to do with the 2×4 if he ever caught the culprits, I wouldn’t have bet a dime against it.

Dad often woke up during the night. He was a fitful sleeper, snoring like a Suzuki for a few minutes, then tossing around like a walrus on dry land, and then waking for a few minutes and swearing the next day that he had not slept a wink. One night he’d just finished the Suzuki bit and was in the process of waking up when he heard a noise outside.

There were lots of outside noises you could hear in the country and Dad knew every one of them. That is, he knew them all but this one, which was a sound he’d never heard before. The clock said 2:10 a.m., and he spent a few seconds in thought before deciding the unidentified sound was someone tearing his mailbox down. The scary part is that he was right.

Half dressed, hat clamped on his head, and his revolver, which was always loaded, in one huge hand, he hurried over to the road to confirm his suspicions. Sure enough, the mailbox was gone. The steel post set in concrete was still there.

Dad got in the car and instinctively chose the correct direction to start his one-man posse. Within half a mile, he overtook two men, both about twenty years old, walking along the road. As he coasted to a stop, Dad recognized both men as having been students many years before. Either they had forgotten Dad or didn’t know it was his mailbox. In either case, it was of no consequence to Dad, but it was completely TS for the culprits.

Dad herded the men back toward our homestead. Neither wanted to go and professed less than any knowledge about his, or anyone else’s mailbox. Courts of law sometimes believe perjurers, but Dad never claimed to be a court of law. As the protests mounted, the men were making good progress toward the Sullivan place, shank’s mare. Dad drove along behind.

Dad had told the two that when they came to wherever they had thrown the mailbox, he’d stop so the car lights would let them see to get down over the hill and get it. Dad was all heart in such cases. Despite previous protests of innocence, the men had called a halt and floundered down toward the creek through the weeds and gathered up Dad’s mailbox. They handled it so carefully, that he let them carry it the rest of the way.

Arriving at the naked mailbox post and being instructed tersely to reinstall the mailbox, the men wailed that they had no screws and no screwdriver. Dad was unmoved. He handed them a dim flashlight to assist them in locating the screws in the mud underneath the ripped-off mailbox shelf. After a long and dirty search, three of the four missing screws were found. Dad, giving the men their first hint that they might live through the night, said three would be enough.

Laments about no screwdriver left Dad contemplating the skyline. He resolved that, if the men had been able to get the mailbox torn down with no screwdriver; they could get it up the same way. He did mention that they might use a dime as a screwdriver but he didn’t offer them one. They fished around in their pockets, found a dime, and hastily used it. In going three-for-four on the screws, Dad had cut them the only slack they were going to get.

After the dime was ruined, Dad checked the workmanship, declared it shoddy but acceptable, and then, totally in character, told the two men to hop in the car and he’d take them to the mouth of Beatty’s Run. They lived up that hollow a mile or so but it was not passable by car in the winter.

Not much was said on the trip. Dad kept his window open because he hated the smell of beer; the two men kept their mouths shut because they felt no inclination whatsoever to press their luck.

Dad let them out with only a mild reference to the evening’s activities. Boys, he said, don’t mess with my mailbox anymore.

They never did.

Mud Pies

Entertainment for two little tykes on our farm in the Comet community of Jackson County was not provided. Farm kids learned early that fun and games came after the chores were done and it was mainly the responsibility of the kids to think up their own entertainment. Leona, who was nearly two years younger than I, leaned heavily upon me to do the thinking. She would have been better off to have been more choosy about which of my ideas we used since a lot of the time mine caused a good deal of pain to our backsides. A case in point is the mud pie episode.

We were ages five and seven, it was midsummer, and Leona and I were strapped for ideas of what to do. The men had been pitching horseshoes on Sunday, and the horseshoe pit was full of the nicest, softest dirt you ever saw. On Saturday, Mom had made three pies for Sunday’s dinner, and Leona and I hung around during the mixing because we were allowed to lick the bowls. From the combination of these two components, the horseshoe pit and the pie making, came the exercise that got us the biggest flailing of our lives.

We began innocently enough. We got a can of water and a couple of sticks and began mixing up the dirt in the horseshoe pit into dough just like Mom. We stirred and patted and pretended, but we longed for a more realistic imitation of Mom’s procedure. You see, she mixed several ingredients together. So far, we just had dirt and water.

Mom always used eggs. She broke the eggs, often separating the whites and the yolks for a reason we kids never understood, and put the shells into the bucket we used to feed the hogs. She said the calcium was good for hogs. We never knew. What we did know was that the chicken house was full of eggs and that we could sneak down there and get a couple. We knew full well, although we’d never been told, that mixing eggs with dirt for a mud pie was not allowed. There are a few things kids know without being told and we were quite aware that Mom sold the eggs for money. However, things were slow that day.

Keeping an eye on the house, Leona and I slipped into the chicken house and got three eggs from one of the nests. Returning unobserved to the horseshoe pit, we broke the eggs into our mud batter and stirred. It was wonderful—the eggs caused the mud to get even slimier and therefore, more like the dough Mom made. It was an easy decision we made to go back for more eggs.

Leona held up her dress tail and I loaded it with eggs. We made two trips. On the last trip we noticed Rich Burton, a man we hired to work on the farm sometimes, come down the lane and head toward the house, and we also noted that Rich gave us a long and hard look. We discussed the problem of the living witness and decided, unwisely, that good old Rich wouldn’t tell on us.

We had just broken the last egg into the mud mess when Mom appeared, hurrying through the dining room door and descending on us at a trot. Rich had told. As a matter of fact, he had to repeat himself a time or two since Mom said positively that her kids wouldn’t break even one egg to make a mud pie. When she arrived on the scene she was astonished. She was also mad.

Scolding us nonstop, she swatted us a few times on the bottom, then went off to the chicken house to assess the damage. It was late afternoon and most of the chickens had laid all the eggs they were going to that day, so Mom had a good idea of the number of eggs that should have been in the nests. Here count showed a shortage of about three dozen, of which she discounted maybe a dozen for late-laying hens. That meant her little darlings had broken and mixed with the dirt about two dozen eggs. The bottom-swatting she had previously administered had been based on the assumption that we were talking about half a dozen eggs, or even fewer. Two dozen eggs would buy quite a lot of groceries.

So Mom reappeared at the horseshoe pit, where we had been rather rejoicing that we got off so easily. This time Mom had visited her favorite peach tree and had broken off one of the suckers that were so perfect for the job she had in mind.

It was the only time in our lives that we were ever given a second, or follow-up punishment. Leona and I didn’t resent it at all; in fact, we’d have forever felt guilty about breaking the eggs if we had slipped by with only the bottom-swatting of the first encounter.

The second encounter was enough to let us feel good about the mud pies the rest of our lives.

Why Chickens are in Cages

On our farm in the Comet community, particularly during the 1930s and ’40s, we depended on a flock of White Leghorn chickens to provide eggs for our family and enough extra to sell and buy all our groceries. Every year we’d buy one hundred pullets and twenty-five mixed chicks, taking the eggs from the hens and eating the roosters. Raising the chickens was Mom’s job, and she was welcome to it. Chickens are the dumbest animal on the farm.

Everyone knows the standard answer to the riddle, Why does a chicken cross the road? However, the answer, to get to the other side, implies that a chicken has a reason for crossing the road. The perpetuator of this idea doesn’t know anything at all about chickens. A chicken, as far as I can tell, has no reason for crossing the road or for that matter, anything else it does. A chicken wanders around in a daze, panic-stricken over a regular, everyday occurrence one instant and absent-mindedly preening the next.

Take the case of the molly grub. In the midst of aimless scratching, a hen might overturn a piece of board, under which she finds a fat, white molly grub. A normal insect-eating animal would simply devour the molly grub, congratulating herself on the lucky find. Not so with the hen. She looks furtively around, imagining that all the other chickens have observed her prize and are ganging up to steal it. So the hen grabs the molly grub in her beak and starts running wildly through the barnyard, making abrupt turns, flopping her wings, and doing all sorts of weird things that are sure to attract the attention of every hen in the yard.

Now, the other hens have no idea of what’s going on but they’re not going to be left out, whatever it is, so they rush in wild pursuit. The original imbecile hen circles the barnyard until she, followed closely by a string of equally stupid hens, drops the molly grub because she is so out of breath she has to pant. Immediately the molly grub is grabbed by another hen with an equally low I.Q. and the rush around the barnyard continues, with the exception of hen number 1, who is exhausted and has forgotten what all the excitement was about anyway.

By the time the second hen has run down, it is likely that she has attracted the attention of a young pullet who runs better than her older companions. When the molly grub is dropped this time, however, the uninitiated young fowl, who doesn’t know how to handle the touchy molly grub problem, just eats it. All the other hens stand around in awe-struck admiration, not in the least bit surprised that they didn’t get the tidbit and wishing they were as smart as some people. The first hen, after such strenuous exertion, promptly molts and doesn’t lay another egg for a year.

Chickens love to eat. No one food is a favorite and they’ll scratch enthusiastically in manure piles, straw, dirt, feed troughs, under water pans, and anywhere else their toenails can reach, not excepting each other. Of all the animals on the farm, the chicken is the only cannibal. Let’s say a hen notices a spot of dirt on a fellow hen and, approaching, pecks at the dirt spot. She doesn’t need a reason; she pecks because it is there. A second chicken notices the action and comes over to help, and her arrival heralds a pecking onslaught by every hen that can get close enough to make contact. As soon as the first drop of blood appears, the hens go hysterical with grief and tries to peck away the hurt, chasing the poor hen all over the place in their merciful ministrations. This goes on until the wounded hen finds a hiding place, or until the poultry man paints the injured area with used motor oil. Of course, the injured hen molts and doesn’t lay another egg for a year.

A hen is a pure, unadulterated coward. Let any strange or unusual noise or object present itself, and the hen will fly blindly into a wall, over a cliff, or down the valley so far it will take her half a day to walk back. If the scare happened inside the chicken house, a riot will immediately break out among the maidenly hens.

Let’s suppose a terrible beast, like a mouse, ventures out on the floor of the chicken house, intent on stealing a mouthful of laying mash. The instant it is sighted, a tremendous cloud of dust will almost obscure the sun as all the hens arise at once, crashing into walls, colliding rudely in the air, and knocking themselves silly while upsetting as many feeders and waterers as possible. After the original flight the survivors will alight on the floor, craning their necks and wondering what all the excitement was about. If the poor mouse is still around, every hen will end up in the procession chasing it, in spite of the fact that they were all mortally terrified ten seconds before. The mouse always escapes, of course, but the excitement is enough to make many of the hens molt and not lay another egg for a year.

Dad had to carry the laying mash to the chicken house and empty it into the barrels because laying mash came only in 100 pound sacks. He knew to carefully pick up the strings whenever he opened up a bag of feed because, to a chicken, a string looks like a worm. A rather long, somewhat skinny, worm, but a worm nevertheless. The first hen that finds it will try to eat this nice skinny worm, starting in the middle, but of course, is interrupted by several other hens with the same idea, and all starting at different places. Finally, one hen will get the string down her throat far enough so that she can neither swallow it nor get it back up. When the others lose interest, she wanders around, the string hanging out of her mouth like a ribbon on a monocle, looking as stupid as she really is. This situation doesn’t allow her to eat or drink until the poultry man arrives and pulls out the string, so the deprivation of food and drink, plus the anxiety of trying to figure how such a long, skinny worm will cause her to molt and not lay another egg for a year.

Hens on our farm had a widely varied diet consisting of molly grubs, undigested corn kernels from manure piles, bits of indigestible matter from the floor of the chicken house, chaff from the nest boxes, eggs other hens had laid, each other, and, of course, laying mash. Of all this hodge-podge, there was only one food that had any ill effect when taken internally by the hen, and that was the laying mash. Not that the mash had any ill effect as long as it was exactly the same as she had eaten all her life, right down to the same brand name. If a disaster such as a flood caused a shortage of the kind of laying mash her precious babies were used to, Mom about went nuts. She knew full well that just as soon as she changed brands, or had to fall back on good farm-grown corn and wheat for a day or so, the flock would molt and not lay another egg for a year.

You can’t call chickens hypochondriacs. A hen doesn’t imagine she is sick; she really is. A chicken suffers more ailments of more organs than any inbred hypochondriac could possibly imagine. Poultry remedies are legion; the cost immense. A hen needs no reason to die and the statement, Here today, gone tomorrow was probably first said by a poultry man. There is, however, one ceremony which each hen performs before she crosses over to that big hen house in the sky. She systematically tries to infect every other hen in the building. Since the hen usually chooses a waterer as her sickbed, spreading the germs is really no problem. Even a light epidemic of almost any poultry disease will cause a general molt and stop egg production for a year.

Periodically, hens are seized with a bad case of the mothering instinct. The hen spends several days warming up, clucking hoarsely, ruffling her feathers, restlessly wandering around, and laying no eggs. After assuring herself that she’s caught everyone’s attention, she climbs aboard a handful of eggs that she didn’t lay since she was busy clucking, and crossly warns everyone that she is expecting. Unfortunately, the poor poultry man is unaware of Mrs. Grouch’s condition and so receives a peck when he reaches for the eggs which are under her. The success of the beak attack depends on the humor of the poultry man at the time. He may grab Mrs. Hen by the neck and slam her up against the wall, or he may place her in solitary confinement in the corn crib. Since there is no audience in the corn crib to witness her labor, recovery is accomplished in a remarkably short time. Of course, the loneliness, coupled with the poor food and water because the poultry man forgot her for a few days, will inevitably cause the unsuccessful mother to molt and not lay another egg for a year.

We should not, however, blame the poultry man for his action of putting the budding mother in solitary. He knows full well that the hen wouldn’t have sat on the eggs more than three days before she wandered off, wondering why she had been sitting there anyway. Of course, on our farm, even if we had left her on the nest the full 27 days it would have served no purpose; we hadn’t had a rooster with the laying flock for ten years. Hens that get bred lay half a dozen eggs or so, then sit on them and don’t lay another egg for a year.

Modern poultry men put laying hens in little cages barely big enough to turn around in; with any more space, they’d just find more ways to hurt themselves. Never was there an animal more bent on self-destruction, more old-maidish, or more deranged than the common farm chicken. A modern poultry man, if he is to keep his flock laying and even hope to make a profit, must use cages.

A padded cell would be even more appropriate.

Dixie’s Treachery

Horses were put on this earth, we assume, to be of service to the human race. After all, they pull things, tote loads, race for sporting purposes, and stand out in fields with white fences, looking pretty. Those are the ones the Lord put on the earth. The Devil also took his turn, especially with one born on our farm and which we named Dixie.

Dixie spent his entire life within a half-day’s walk of where he was born. Although not of superb intelligence, he had a cunning artfulness he used at frequent opportunities to cause Dad and me extreme disgust and displeasure.

Dixie’s mother, Bess, was the first horse owned by Dad and Mom when they began farming, and Dixie was her only foal. The name Dixie was used only when he was good, which meant it went entirely out of circulation by the time he was two years old. For the rest of his life, he was called Dick. In addition, he was called other things not mentioned in genteel company. He richly deserved every vulgar name directed at him, and neither Dad nor I ever wished we could recall some of the verbal barbs we shot into his thick hide.

Dick was solid black, except for a small spot in the center of his forehead, from top to bottom. He had been neutered as a colt and reached his adult weight of 1,300 pounds before his faithful mother, Bess, went to her eternal pasture. Dick started his war on our nerves early; as a half-grown colt, Dick nearly ended my life.

I was eighteen months old and barely walking, but I managed to toddle out to the barn where Dad was putting the harness on Bess. Dad had closed the barn door, with both Dick and Bess inside, and had ignored Dick while getting Bess ready for work. I waddled up to the barn door and pulled it open, supposedly so I could go in where Dad was. Dick, seeing an open door, bolted for the bright sunlight, ignoring one little tyke standing in the way.

As Dick ran toward me, I tried to get out of the way but merely fell over backward. One of Dick’s hooves left a dirty mark along my head as it came down. A little to the left, and there would have been a funeral. Dick capered off; Dad sat down in the barnyard and trembled for several minutes.

After the passing of Bess, we purchased Maude, who was from the West and was branded with Box and R. She and Dick provided all the horsepower for the farm until I went to college. Maude behaved herself. Dick, who could certainly have stood some more good training by his mother, learned to work on the right of Maude and began his thirty-year stint of trying to drive us all crazy.

When he wanted to cooperate, you couldn’t ask for a better horse to use in cultivating field corn. Dick would walk on the left side of the row as he had been trained and carefully set his feet when turning at the end of a row so he wouldn’t step on any corn. That period of the day usually lasted until about noon, when Dick decided independently that it was time to quit. He announced his decision by stepping on hills of corn.

No horse always avoided every hill of corn when turning. Farmers planted up close to the fence, and every now and then, any horse would squash down a hill or so. When Dick wanted to quit, he began by smashing the last hill of every row.

That failing to set him free from the harness, he would step on the second hill in every row or so if he could do it without seeming to be too awkward. Still required to work, Dick would stumble a time or two in midrow, stomping out a hill or two, and sit back to wait for reactions. Nothing profitable coming of all this, he would trot out his last resort, which was unhooking the trace chains.

Horses are hitched to a cultivator with trace chains, one on each side of the horse’s body, which are fastened to a singletree by hooking the chain’s ring into a hook on the singletree. The hook was over bent, and it required the trace chain to be slack to unhook. Dick was a master of slack chains. He would let one side of the singletree lie on the ground as he turned and, in about half his tries, he was able to get the trace unhooked. As he started the next row, the plow, now hooked unevenly, would sometimes plow out another hill or so of corn before the system could be shut down.

It was strange that Dick learned so well how to avoid work by goldbricking, but he never caught on to the inevitable end product. The plowman, now red in the face with veins on his forehead and his neck standing out like ropes, and with a voice that was hoarse from tracing Dick’s lineage clear back to the rock he crawled out from under, would unhitch and take Dick to an area for retraining.

The area chosen for retraining had to have three characteristics: (1) it had to be out of the corn field and away from anything where serious trampling would spoil crops, (2) it had to contain a tie down strong enough to hold Dick to when he desperately wanted to leave, and (3) it had to have a tree or large bush that would furnish a club that could be cut with a pocket knife.

The correction activities over, a subdued Dick would work for days without the need for remediation. I never knew him to go through a cultivating season without need for one confrontation and I never knew him to need more than two a year.

Naomi Gandee wasn’t born in the Comet community I called home, but she and her nice family moved there when I was about fifteen years old and starting to take an interest in the girls. Naomi was petite and pretty and behaved quite properly in the little farming community. I’d met her a time or two, and it was in her presence that Dick staged his greatest triumph.

Farm people in those days walked everywhere, and it was not at all uncommon for a pretty young miss like Naomi to be going to the store and back, on foot and alone. Dad and I were headed somewhere on the horses and I, as always, was riding Dick. Naomi paused to chat a moment, absolutely making my day. A pretty country girl, a bright spring morning, puppy love budding and Dick seized this moment to pollute the atmosphere.

All horses are somewhat flatulent, but Dick was way worse than most in that department. With Naomi and I trying to exchange pleasantries, and with Dad pretending to be absorbed in something else, Dick started his gaseous blowout with a long, wailing whistle. He then got down to some serious deep-throated booming as he expelled enough gas to fill the Hindenburg.

The conversation trailed off, me being absolutely speechless with embarrassment and Naomi even in worse shape than I. Unfortunately, Dick continued. Following the drop! slop! drop! of the evacuation of his bowels, he added a postlude of a few more moist bleeps, finally sizzling to a stop just about the time Naomi disappeared around the bend at the top of the hill.

Dad had remained stone-faced throughout the entire affair, quietly sitting on Maude and apparently memorizing every vein of a couple of maple leaves growing on a tree down by the creek. After Naomi’s departure, Dad looked over at Dick and said, Dick, you dirty old bastard, you!

As a statement, it was inadequate. Furthermore, when he said it, Dad chuckled. Then he laughed. Then he roared. Then he chuckled…and he kept this up all morning. I couldn’t do a thing about Dad, but I did upgrade his inadequate statement about Dick.

Why Our Pig’s Tail Didn’t Curl

Back on the farm, we didn’t have much in the way of mechanical toys, and nothing at all like the motorized four-wheelers the kids ride these days. I had a little red wagon, which I used and abused all the time, and we also had the animals.

Most rideable were the two big draft horses. If I found a horse in the barn, I would slip up and shut the door. Then I could crawl up into the manger where the horse was trying to eat, hold out an ear of corn so the horse would come back to the manger, and grab his halter. After persuading him to unclamp his teeth, I could put a bridle on him and lead him outside. His chin was higher than my head, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was getting his back, which was about four feet above my cap.

I’d lead the horse up alongside a fence, then try to keep him from moving while I climbed up the fence and scrambled over on his back. Sometimes the old fool would stand still and let me get on; other times he sidestepped about the time I made my scramble, and I ended up eating dirt under his feet.

All this trouble riding the horse led me to think of having a smaller animal to ride. Since the big, fat hog often slept, and since I could easily sneak up on the hog while it was asleep, and since the hog was far smaller than the horse, I thought it would be just a super idea if I sneaked up on the hog, jumped astride, and went for a ride when it woke up.

All my ideas didn’t turn out to be completely super. My first attempt to prove the idea’s worth was not what one would call an unmitigated success. I crept up on the hog, sprung on its back with no problem, but about then my plan showed its weakness. When I straddled that hog, he came out of his sound sleep with enormous suddenness. Letting out a roar, that porker shot out of there at Olympic speed. I never had a chance. A hog’s back is arched way up, even if he isn’t scared half to death, and there is nothing to hold on to except the ears and they’re too far away to reach. Even the hair is slick. I lasted about half of the first jump and landed on my back in the mess of the hog pen, while the hog departed to the far reaches of the hog lot.

That ended round one.

With me, super ideas die hard. Besides, my cousin Rolland, who was fully two months older than me, was coming to visit. It seemed to me that the elderly Rolland would have more experience and could, perhaps, saddle-break the hog for me. Then, when I wanted to ride, all I’d have to do would be to go out and get on the hog and ride off.

Rolland did not profess any particular proficiency in bareback hog riding. Additionally, he did not show any interest whatsoever in riding the hog, no matter how much fun I told him it would be. But even Rolland could be worn down and by the end of the second day of his visit, he had concluded that riding the hog would be a real blast and that, by golly, he’d do it! Two minutes later, he started finding excuses not to ride, complaining that the hog wouldn’t stand still while he mounted, that it was so tall he couldn’t get on, that it would bite him, and so on and so forth.

The boy with the super ideas also had super methods to implement those ideas. The solution to Rolland’s problems was really quite simple. When the hog was asleep, I’d tie his tail to the fence. Then, Rolland could get on, I’d untie the tail, the hog would get up, and Rolland would go for a nice ride.

We waited until the hog lying close to the fence, went to sleep. I crept up, reached through the fence, and gently wrapped the tail around a fence wire. I was just starting to make another wrap when the hog woke up.

Lurching to his feet, that pig snapped his tail off as cleanly as if I’d cut it off with a knife. With this added insult, and streaming blood from where his tail used to be, the hog left the region. I was left holding a dirty pig’s tail in my hand.

Rolland, vastly relieved that his bareback ride was called off for lack of a mount, thought the whole affair was a scream. While he was laughing himself hoarse, I handed him the pig’s tail. He stopped laughing, threw the tail over the hill, and immediately thought up this great game of cowboys and Indians. We played it a lot after that. Neither side was mounted.

Our Lord Didn’t Farm, Either

For most families during the Great Depression years, money to spend on recreational reading was scarce, and this was very true in the little farming community of Comet. Cows sold for as little as three cents per pound, which meant that an average cow would bring something like $24. The Sullivans were luckier than most, however, and Mom and Dad always made sure Leona and I had reading material. We took The Pennsylvania Farmer , Reader’s Digest , and perhaps another magazine; we also always bought Grit whenever the neighbor boy selling it at the time came around.

In addition to the magazines, we took a daily newspaper, which was mailed to us. The fact that it was always a day or two behind the current date wasn’t important; it still kept us up with things. Most Comet families couldn’t afford any reading material.

We even had a little library at home. The books were kept in a bookcase made of rough lumber that had been smoothed with a hand plane, then varnished. We had two or three Gene Stratton Porter books, The Robe, Grapes of Wrath, and a dozen or so others. I had Robin Hood and Black Beauty, which I read several times, and then there was the book that calls to mind this story. The book, Through Missouri on a Mule, had lost both the front and back covers, but all the pages were there. It was a lot of little stories written by a man who toured through the state of Missouri, riding a mule. Most of the stories were funny.

One such anecdote concerns a high-tempered farmer who had a mule that balked every now and then. When a mule or horse balks, it means that the animal won’t go, or won’t pull, or do anything it is supposed to. This mule in the story, when it decided to balk, just stood still. Whips, stones, or curses had not the slightest effect on it; it just stood there. According to the author, the farmer owning the mule was not the type to tolerate such insolence by a lowly mule. After wearing his arm out beating the obstinate creature, the farmer finally got some hay and sticks and built a fire under the mule. That got some results. The mule moved forward enough to escape the flames, causing the wagon to catch fire and burn up.

Dad wasn’t of the temperament to accept a balky animal, either, but he had one in Dixie. Whenever Dixie decided that the load he was to pull was more than he wanted that particular day, he started prancing and snorting and doing all he could to work himself into a frenzy. If he was properly handled during this balk-preparing routine, he could be talked out of it, and most times Dad humored him enough so that the balking never actually took place. There were notable exceptions, invariably happening when Dad was in a bad humor anyway.

Whenever Dad was unwilling to accept deviant behavior and Dixie was in a mood to quit for the day, the groundwork was laid for a balk. Dixie would go through the prancing and snorting routine, as scheduled, and then add tossing his head wildly and trying to turn sideways to the wagon. This always bumped poor old good-hearted Maude, who was nervous. Maude would violently shy away from Dixie, evidently expecting him to climb up on her back, and Maude’s evasive tactics seemed to serve to stimulate Dixie’s errant behavior. Thus encouraged, he would paw the air a few times with his front feet, then would stand on his hind legs and paw the air as high as he could. This meant his head was something like fifteen feet in the air, his ears back, his nostrils almost snorting fire, and his front feet striking out wildly as if to spar with an invisible opponent.

Dixie’s real opponent was on the ground and not at all invisible. He wasn’t inaudible, either! Dixie’s outburst, climaxed by the standing on his hind legs and snorting fire and brimstone, always ended the same way, but he never learned. As soon as he had four feet on the ground, Dad was there to unhitch him. Poor stupid Dixie, as the unhitching proceeded, seemed to feel he had won the argument, and he’d quiet right down, looking forward to being taken to the barn and fed a manger fully of hay. Brother, was he ever wrong!

What he got was being tied to a stout tree and fed the cutting edge of a hickory switch. Sometimes the routine by Dad varied to the extent that he’d use a switch cut from other than hickory; the rest of it stayed the same.

After being chastised in the only way he understood, Dixie would be a model of good behavior for months. There are those who would say Dad was guilty of animal abuse; then there are those who would say that Dixie needed everything he got, plus a few licks more. We never had time to get all the work done anyway, and Dixie’s promenade, and subsequent beating, would take the better part of an hour’s work time. All for nothing! Dixie still had to pull the load, which had not been too much in the first place, and all he got out of it was a little toughening of his hide by hickory switch massage.

There was another story in Through Missouri on a Mule that was so true to life. It concerned a preacher who was traveling by foot on a road that bordered a field in which a farmer was laboring. The farmer was trying to sort out and reload a large number of wheat sheaves that had fallen off the wagon when it hit an unseen rock and upset. The farmer was all out of sorts, and his language nearly darkened the sky. The preacher had heard a few choice words before he even came into view and had accepted the fact that before him was a sinner who was abusing one of the Ten Commandments, like taking the name of the Lord in vain. The preacher vowed to speak to him on the subject.

Hailing the farmer, the preacher proclaimed in holy tones, Brother, our Lord and Savior, when He was on earth, never found it necessary to curse and swear!

No, snarled the unrepentant tiller of the soil, but he didn’t farm, either!

Dad and the Green Beans

In the Comet community in the 1930s, everybody—and I mean everybody —raised a garden. Anyone without a garden would have been called a ne’er-do-well, or subversive, or pervert, or something worse, and no one would have given them the time of day. We had two gardens.

Our garden provided us with most of what we ate. Each fall, we butchered two hogs, and during the year, we bought beef every now and then, but we produced all the vegetables we could use and preserve by canning, fermenting, or drying. In the days before pressure cookers, we used a method called cold-packing in canning, and some people used a little different method called hot-packing. It’s a wonder we didn’t all die of botulism a dozen times, especially when it came to consumption of green beans that had not been reheated. Food was good and plentiful, even during the Great Depression years, because we raised bountiful gardens. Mom was the driving force.

Dad was not a garden person. He was more of a ten-acre cornfield, fifty-acre hayfield kind of person. Precision tilling left him yearning for the wide open spaces, particularly when the garden tilling foreman happened to be Mom. She had ideas about how close the plow should get to the plants, especially her blessed half-runner beans, but our plow horse, Dixie, marched to his own drummer. Dad, caught in the middle between hundred-pound Mom and 1,300-pound Dixie, shouted at Dixie. Mom shouted at Dad, the dog ran barking up and down the end of the garden, and we kids stayed out of sight lest both parents find something for us to do instead of us Standing around thar like a couple of worthless farm workers!

Garden tilling time was not a fun time.

When he was on his best behavior, Dixie tried to keep from squashing the vegetables with his big feet, but Mom believed in letting no ground go to waste and planted smack dab up to the fence. There never was half enough room for Dad and Dixie to turn, and after a few rows of unsuccessfully trying to please Mom by thwarting a few physical laws of depravity, Dad and Dixie changed channels and tuned Mom out. It never was real safe to tune Mom out.

Before the garden was half plowed, Dad would be raging and Dixie would be nervous. When Dixie got nervous, he was a menace to anything in the range of his feet. We never harvested anything from the last few hills; Dad and Dixie annually turned that area into a desert.

Top priority in our gardens was given to half-runner snap beans. Dad didn’t really care one way or the other; he liked bush, pole, snap, lima, soy, or any other kind of bean. His taste was not what you would call delicate. For Mom, dinner without half-runner beans was a meal not worth eating, an attitude that may have somewhat explained her bean-patch protectiveness.

One time, just after school had started in the fall and Dad was teaching at a one-room school such as Trace Fork, Odaville, Comet, or Hemlock, he hired Rich Burton, a relative by marriage, to cut corn. In those days, corn was cut by walking up to a hill, which was usually three stalks of corn growing close together, surrounding it with one arm, and whacking it off with a corn-cutter, which is a big knife much like a machete. Rich finished one field a little after noon and started on the next. Having received no special instructions or warnings from Dad, he paid no attention to the weeds and other plants growing around and up the cornstalks. It was an omission he was to regret.

As Rich put it, Mom descended on him like a mother hen defending her biddies. Some of those plants growing up the corn that Rich so blithely ignored were half-runner beans, just coming into production. Mom countermanded Dad’s orders in a flash, ordering Rich out of the field and stating that if he couldn’t find corn to cut that wasn’t her half-runner field, he was done for the day.

Rich said he never saw a madder woman and that if she had told him to climb a cornstalk, he wouldn’t have stopped to ask which one.

When it came time to pick beans, Dad was ordered out of the garden, equivalent to throwing Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. Dad was no good at picking beans and I’m not at all sure he didn’t practice lying a few hills to waste from time to time just to reestablish his ineptness. He hated any job that required him to work in a squatting position, and his huge fingers dwarfed about anything that was picked, like beans and berries.

Mom was always overworked, and every now and then when she was really, really overworked, Dad would offer to help pick beans. I remember twice when she let him. It was awful.

Mom gently plucked the beans, one at a time, from a vine with such a delicate touch the vine didn’t even know it had been robbed. Half-runner bean vines for Mom produced for weeks and weeks, happily blooming and growing snap beans which she harvested and canned. Mom could get more beans off one row than most families could get off a patch—if she could keep Dixie from tramping the row flat and Dad from helping pick.

Dad, grunting, would get down in what he thought was a squat, and stare at the long row of green beans hanging on green vines covered by green leaves. Defeated before he even started, he would grasp a cluster of six or eight beans and pull them off the vine. He would also, in some instances, pull the vine right off the cornstalk or trellis to which it