Read Online The Cross Timbers by Edward Everett Dale - Free Book Online

have been at a very early age. Yet I cannot recall doing much before my mother’s death except help pile brush when Father was clearing land. Also, of course, I had such chores as gathering up the eggs, bringing in chips or corn cobs for the kitchen stove, running errands, and pulling up weeds in the garden.
    After my sister Alice became our housekeeper, however, I gradually began to do more to help in the household work and to do some work in the fields. My father encouraged and taught me to do farm work. He had grown up in an era when a farmer raised his own help, just as he raised his own fruit, vegetables, and meat. Four or five husky sons, if properly taught, were a distinct asset. Otherwise it would not have been possible to feed and clothe a family of ten or twelve, which was not considered unusually large seventy-five years ago.
    Even as a very little youngster I realized that carving a farm out of even a small tract of timberland required an enormous amount of hard work. Many times, when I was only four or five years old, my father would take me with him when he went to work in the woods. To me it was most interesting to watch him cut down the big post-oak trees and trim off the branches. It was also fun to watch him split a log into rails. For this he used a maul, which he made of hardwood, and an iron wedge to start a split of the log. Once a crack had been opened he used two or three hardwood wedges called “gluts” to widen it and at lastsplit the log wide open. The two halves were then further divided by the same process into rails.
    Even at that early age I could help a bit by piling brush or taking Father a drink of water. Our large peach orchard usually furnished us with far more fruit than we could use. Father had a light spring wagon commonly called a “hack.” He would load this with peaches about wheat-harvest time and peddle them out among the wheat farmers on the prairie, who seldom tried to raise fruit of any kind on their black, waxy land. Their wives needed fruit very much at harvest time because threshing grain, and sometimes even cutting and shocking it, was a cooperative enterprise. This meant that a threshing crew of a dozen or more hungry men had to be fed and every housewife sought to outdo all the neighbor women in feeding them.
    Wheat harvest, however, seldom lasted over three or four weeks at most; moreover, many of our peach trees were seedlings that produced the small freestone type of fruit that was hard to sell and therefore had to be dried. For weeks almost every summer “all hands and the cook” worked at cutting peaches in half, tossing the seeds aside, and setting out the peach halves with the cut side up on any flat surface to dry in the sun. Since, obviously, even a small child can cut a peach in half and put it out to dry, I very early put in weeks every summer helping to dry peaches. We also had about a quarter of an acre in blackberries, and picking blackberries was part of the work for George and me to do every summer.
    When Alice became our housekeeper, I helped quite a bit in the house by washing and drying dishes, doing the churning, and bringing in wood and kindling.
    One day George and I were in the orchard when peaches were ripe and we saw a woman and a little girl in a buggy drive up to our yard gate and go in the house. Neither of us knew them but presently I heard Alice calling me. George grinned as he said, “I’ll bet she wants you to bring that little girl out to the orchard and get her some peaches.”
    I was sure that Alice wanted me to bring in some wood so I leaned back and stuck my chest out, answering, “Not me. If she asks me to do that I’ll tell her to let th’ little dickens go and get peaches for herself if she wants ’em. I’m not waitin’ on any baby girl like her.”
    When Alice called again I yelled “Comin’” and started for the house in a lope, secure in my certainty that