“Temper it soft?” he asked. “Them rocks raises Ned with a brittle point.”
I’d heard Father talk about tempering metal so it would be hard enough to hold an edge. And when I’d asked the blacksmith in Littleton why he dunked hot steel into cold water, he said it was to temper it. I didn’t know what Grandfather meant by tempering it soft, but I answered right back, “Yes, sir, I did a good job on it. It’s on the bench in the carriage house if you want to see it.”
Grandfather rubbed one hand up over his head, and said, “Gorry, Ralphie, your old grampa ain’t as stout as he thought he was. He’s just about all tuckered out.”
I drew a breath to say it would be easier if he drove the team and let me hold the plow. Then I thought what the yella colt might do with Grandfather’s driving, and changed to, “Would it be all right if I tried plowing alone?”
“In them rocks? With the yella colt? Hmmff! Might as leave try to . . . ”
Millie was at the stove, picking pieces of pork out of the frying pan. She hadn’t said a word since I came into the house, but she broke in quickly, “I’ll drive the hosses for you.”
“No such of a thing! No such of a thing!” Grandfather snapped at her. “Ain’t going to have no women folks working in the fields . . . less’n it’s haying time. Cal’late I’ll have to let the plowing go till my legs gets a trifle stouter. Wanted to get it done afore all the good of the dressing leached off the crown of the hill. Wasted enough of it on the down-land a’ready.”
The more he talked about it, the more I wanted to try plowing alone, so I said, “It’s my fault it was wasted. I’d like to try plowing alone, if you’ll let me.”
Grandfather turned toward me quickly, and his face had a sort of puzzled look. “What did you say, Ralphie?” he asked.
“I said it was my fault that the dressing was wasted, and that I’d like to try plowing alone.”
“Gorry sakes! Didn’t look to hear you let on to it. Well, ain’t no harm in trying if you want to, but you take care the yella colt. He’s powerful high-strung.”
I ate my dinner as fast as I could fork it into my mouth. Then, while the horses finished their hay, I took the sharpened plowshare to the high field and put it on the plow. When I came back for the horses, Grandfather was fussing around with some pieces of board in the carriage house.
The plowing didn’t go the way I’d hoped it would. The yella colt had never liked me any better than I’d liked him. But, before I went back to Boston, he’d just about stopped balking, and would do fairly near what I wanted him to. Anyone could have seen that he hated me when I came back. And I’d made a bad mistake before dinner. Just because I’d unhitched him the second time he balked, he thought he had me buffaloed. He behaved pretty well till I had him hitched to the plow, and then he raised particular Cain.
It took me nearly an hour to plow a furrow the length of the field. Before it was finished, the yella colt had balked four times, thrown himself flat twice, broken the harness in a couple of places, and every time I’d go near his head he’d strike out at me like a wild stallion. There were times when I wanted to take a club to him, but it would only have made him worse, if possible. We were both dripping wet, and I’d used every trick I ever saw or heard of before he decided to settle down and work. And then the plowshare snapped, three inches from the point.
I never hated to do anything much more than I hated to take the broken plowshare in to the forge. When we’d hit the rock, it hadn’t dented the point at all, but had snapped it off like a piece of peanut brittle. I knew the fault was in the tempering, and I knew that Grandfather would know it. As I came nearer the buildings, I could hear him hammering in the carriage house, and in my mind, I could hear him call me a know-it-all, tarnal fool boy. There wouldn’t be a thing I could say, either, because he’d be right.
Grandfather was at the bench, mending a beehive, when I went into the carriage house. He looked up, and asked, “Yella colt balking on you, Ralphie? Why didn’t you fetch him in?”
“It isn’t the yella colt,” I said. “The plowshare broke.”
Grandfather came over to where I was laying the broken pieces on the anvil. “Didn’t I tell you to temper it soft?” he snapped. “Don’t call that a soft temper, do you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “It’s as brittle as ice.”
“Then why in time and tarnation did you tell me you tempered it soft?”
I wet my lips with my tongue, and said, “I don’t know how to temper soft. I guess I was ashamed to tell you.”
Grandfather looked up at me the same way he had done at the dinner table. Then he picked up the pieces, and looked at the break carefully. “Got a pretty good weld on it,” he said. “Didn’t bust at the joining. Think you could mend it again?”
“I’m not sure. That’s the first weld I ever made, but if I have good luck I think I could do it again.”
“S’posing you try it. Then your old grampa’ll learn you how to draw a temper.”
The first weld hadn’t worried me. It had never occurred to me that it might not come out all right. By the time I had the fire blown up hot and the pieces back in it, my mouth was as dry as the cinders. I knew I’d never be able to weld the two broken edges together; there’d be no way of getting at them to hammer them tight. As I pumped the bellows, I decided I’d have to flatten the end of the big piece a little, reverse the small one, and sandwich one piece on top of the other.
Before the red faded to pink, and the pink to white, I’d picked up each piece half a dozen times with the tongs. And when I lifted the larger one to the anvil, my hands were shaking a little. I hit it seven or eight hard blows with the hammer, pushed it back into the heart of the fire, and waited for the red to fade. I was holding my breath when I lapped the two white-hot pieces together on the anvil and whanged them with the hammer. They stuck, and I found myself panting as if I’d just finished a mile race.
Grandfather was still working at the bench when I began shaping the new point on the plowshare. I didn’t notice him again till I had it all finished and, from right behind me, he said, “You done it man-fashion, Ralphie. Now leave your old grampa learn you how to temper.”
He did the first part the way I had: brought the steel to a cherry red, then quenched it quickly in the water. As I pumped the bellows, he banked cinders at one side of the forge, placed the hardened plowshare so that the point lay over the fire, and said, “Now mark it careful, Ralphie, whilst the hardness draws away.”
After a while, he began lifting it from the fire and peering at it. “There! There she be! Straw color; that’s for butcher knives.” He put it back, and lifted it again, “Brown! That’s for a plow in the valley ground.” Next it was, “Purple, Ralphie! Sled runners! Tarnal good ones!” In another minute or two, he sang out, “There you be! Blue! That’s how you want your axe head; just coming blue. We’ll give her another dite for them rocks.” He gave it another minute’s fire, then swept it away from the forge, fanned it back and forth, and held it up for me to see. “Mark it, Ralphie! Mark the color; blue as the sky of a starry night! Tough as rawhide. You’ll dull it, but you’ll never bust it.”
17
Grandfather Finds the Bees
I PLOWED all the rest of the week in the high field. Every morning during the early part of the week, Grandfather would come to the field with me. I’d have to drive the team while he held the plow, and we always had trouble. His legs were still weak enough that the plow handles threw him around, and he drove the yella colt nearly crazy with his shouting. After the first two days, the colt never balked with me when I was alone, but with Grandfather’s shouting, he’d balk at least once on every round of the field. I found that the best thing for me to do was to bite my teeth together till we’d plowed two rounds. By that time Grandfather would be tired enough that I could get him to go hunting the lost bees.
One afternoon, late in the week, I heard Grandfather call my name from down over the hill at the east end of the field. His voic
e sounded as if he were in trouble and needed help in a hurry. I looped the reins over a hame knob, unhooked the yella colt’s traces, and went running as fast as my legs would take me. When I got to the brow of the hill, Grandfather was standing in the green meadow in Littlehale’s pasture. The minute he saw me, he waved his arm and called, “Come quick, Ralphie! Come quick! I found ’em! I found ’em!”
I hurried down across the pasture, and when I was still twenty rods away, Grandfather shouted, “Gorry sakes alive, Ralphie, they be thicker’n hops and a-loading heavy. I cal’late the bee tree ain’t far distant.” As I came near him, he opened the little cigar box he always carried when he was hunting bees. “Here, Ralphie,” he said, as he passed me a little wire hoop with a mosquito netting bag on it. “Take some of this cotton, and line a couple from that alsike clover patch yonder, whilst I line from hereabouts. By gorry, we’ll fetch ’em afore the hour’s out.”
I could see he was all excited, but if he had been talking Chinese, it would have meant just as much to me. I took the little net, and said, “I guess you’ll have to show me how to do it. I don’t know very much about bees.”
“Great thunderation!” Grandfather snapped. “What kind of a farmer boy be you? Didn’t your father learn you nothing?”
“Not about bees,” I told him. “We never had any.”
“Gorry sakes! Well, there ain’t nothing to it. Mark me, whilst I show you!”
Grandfather bent over and went ranging around like a beagle hound trying to pick up a rabbit scent. He was holding the veil of his bee hat in both hands as he went. After a minute or two, he swooped it down over a clover blossom, and sang out, “There, by fire! Got her! Got her!” The bee had come off the flower, and was buzzing in a fold of the veil when I got over there. “Now mark her, Ralphie,” Grandfather said. “Mark that wide black stripe ahind her wings. Them’s the lost ones; don’t take none other. Here! Fetch me my bee lining box whilst I show you.”
Grandfather had dropped the cigar box when he dived for the clover blossom. When I took it to him, he was turning the netting back from the bee that he was holding between his thumb and finger. He had it by the sides, with its legs up. Its tail kept flipping toward his finger with the stinger out. “Gorry, Ralphie, mark them legs,” Grandfather whispered. “Loaded, ain’t they? ’Twon’t be far to the bee tree. Now give me a smidgin of that cotton lint with a dab of glue on it.” There were loose cotton, short pieces of silk thread, and a little bottle of mucilage in the box. I picked off a bit of cotton, and started to take the cork out of the bottle, when Grandfather whispered, “Time and tarnation, Ralphie, how you cal’late she’s a-going to lug all that? Here, you hold her, whilst I fix the flag.”
I’d had all the bee handling I wanted when Millie and I tried to get the swarm out of the apple tree. The way that stinger was flipping didn’t look good to me, and it’s hard to pass a bee from one person to another. Maybe I was a little too careful, but I didn’t get a good hold when Grandfather passed her to me. I jumped when she buzzed in my fingers, and the next second she was gone. “Careless, heedless boy!” Grandfather snapped, as the bee darted away. “Why don’t you pay heed to what you’re doing? Now look sharp for another one.” He snatched the bee hat and went ranging around in the clover again. It wasn’t a minute before he pounced on another blossom. “There! There you be, Ralphie!” he sang out. “Now you pick a-holt of her through the veil. No, not that way! Get her by the back so she can’t sting you.”
I held on as tight as I could without mashing the bee, while Grandfather fixed the flag. He took a little wisp of cotton, not much thicker than a daisy petal, dabbed the end of it with the cork of the mucilage bottle, and stuck it to the bee’s up-curved back. “Now, Ralphie,” he whispered, “turn her loose and mark her close.” As I parted my fingers, the bee zoomed away with the white flag sticking to her. In a second the bee was out of sight, but the white speck of cotton circled higher and higher till it was above the tree tops. Then, as Grandfather and I stood watching with our hands shading our eyes, the speck shot straight away across the tree tops. Grandfather’s arm shot out in the exact direction the bee had taken. “Sight it, Ralphie! Sight it!” he called, as he held the arm stiff. “She’ll fly home straight as a musket ball. Mark the course a-past the nigh side this beech and yonder Getchell birch. Get me a stake to mark this spot.”
As soon as I’d found a stick and pounded it down to mark the spot, I wanted to follow the bee line and hunt the nest. Grandfather wouldn’t let me. “How you cal’late to know when you’ve gone far enough?” he asked me.
“Well, if they’re still making as much noise as they did in the orchard, we can hear them for a hundred yards,” I told him. “And if they’re on a tree in this line we should be able to see them, shouldn’t we?”
Grandfather shook his head. “Poor Ralphie!” he said. “With all your big ideas, there’s lots of things you don’t know, ain’t there? Why, you could stand right under the bee tree for a week and never know they was next nor nigh you.”
“Then how can you ever hope to find them in a whole woods full of trees?” I asked him.
“That’s what I cal’late to learn you,” he said. “You just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut and watch your old grampa.”
He gave me his bee hat to carry, picked up the bee lining box and the little net, and walked to the far end of the meadow. In a few minutes, he popped the net over a bee that was busy on an alsike clover bloom, let it rest there till he had the flag ready, then picked the bee up and stuck it onto her. When the bee had risen in circles to the tree tops, it shot away in a little different direction from the first one; a little more toward the south and west. Grandfather’s arm came up stiff and straight as the speck of the cotton flashed away above the trees. “Mark it, Ralphie!” he called. “Mark it sharp a-past this silver birch and the fork of yonder maple sapling. Get your stake down. Get your stake down, Ralphie.”
When the stake was down, Grandfather asked, “Think you can follow that line straight as a tight string? Keep a-sighting as you go. Don’t hurry, and don’t commence till I holler. I cal’late it’s about forty rods.” Then he picked up his little box and went back to where we’d driven the first stake. It was beyond a jut in the woods, so I couldn’t see him, but when he shouted I started straight down the line the bee had taken. I sighted carefully from one tree to another, and I made sure I didn’t get off the line. I couldn’t see Grandfather, but every few minutes, he’d call, “Where be you, Ralphie?” and I’d call back, “Here.”
After a little while, I could see Grandfather coming through the woods at my left, sighting from tree to tree as he came. The lines we were walking were at different angles, like the sides of a cut of pie. After I’d gone about the length of a city block, we came together at the point, and were under a big old beech tree that lightning had hit a long time before. Grandfather looked up into it for two or three minutes, then he said, “Good on your head, Ralphie! You laid a straight course and followed it. Mark that little hole just beneath the high crotch. There’s a hollow inside there. That’s where the bees is.”
I found the hole all right. It wasn’t any bigger than a half dollar. After I’d watched it a few minutes, I said, “I can see the hole but I don’t see any bees around it. Wouldn’t there be bees coming and going if the nest was in there?”
“I cal’late there is, Ralphie! I cal’late there is,” Grandfather said, as he peered. “But lacking sunlight on their wings, ’twould take a powerful sharp eye to see one.”
“Then what makes you so sure this is the nest?” I asked him.
“Gorry sakes, Ralphie, don’t you know a bee tree whenst you see one? Mark the dull bark beneath the crotch? Hollow inside, Natural hive. Didn’t ever you see bees going into a hole in a hollow tree?”
“No,” I said, “but I’ve heard they do. Do they make honey in there?”
“Gorry sakes! ’Course they do! Have to store provender for the winter, don’t they? I recollect
one time I and Levi found nigh onto a hundred pounds in a tarnal great hollow-hearted oak. Mostly sugared off. Some of it must have been there from ten years back.”
Grandfather stood four or five minutes looking up into the tree. At last he said, “Take an all-fired tall ladder to fetch ’em down . . . Curious things, bees . . . More sense than most people . . . Always providing ahead . . . Always laying away for more than one hard winter . . . Putting by something for the generation to come . . . Never tire a-watching ’em.” Suddenly he turned to me and said, “Lay down, Ralphie! Lay down here whilst I let you see ’em work.”
Father had once told me that, looking up from the bottom of a well, you could see the stars in the daytime. I thought maybe lying on the ground would let me see bees in the shade the same way. I did want to see them work, so I lay down on my back and looked up toward the hole.
“Now stay right where you be, Ralphie,” Grandfather told me, “whilst I go flag three–four for you to watch. I’ll holler whenst they line out. Keep your eyes open wide, and mark how quick they come in on a bee line.” Then he picked up his bee lining box, and started off toward the little meadow.
It didn’t seem as if I’d been there more than two or three minutes—just looking up toward the tree and thinking of what Grandfather had said about the bees—when I heard him call, “There you be, Ralphie!” I opened my eyes as wide as I could. In three or four seconds, a tiny white streak shot like an arrow over the trees from the direction of Grandfather’s voice. It dipped, and zoomed toward the trunk above me at a mile a minute. When it was close to the tree, it seemed almost to stop, then disappeared into the little hole.
Grandfather sent three more flagged bees; each from a different direction. And each one came straight from the sound of his voice as though it had been shot from a gun, dipped, zoomed in exactly the same way, braked, and disappeared into the hole. I was so busy watching and thinking about the bees that I didn’t hear Grandfather till he stopped beside me. “Curious, ain’t it, Ralphie, how the Almighty provided for all His critters? Did you mark how the bees come in straight as a taut line? ’Tain’t from seeing, I don’t cal’late, Ralphie. They’ll come into a hollow stump just as straight. It’s a gift of the Almighty’s, so’s they can hide their nest and always find it.”