THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM
Little Eastern children, transplanted in their babyhood to the far West, have to leave behind them grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the dear old places associated with those best friends of childhood.
Of our cañon children, Jack was the only one who could remember grandfather’s house, although Polly had romanced about it so much that she thought she could remember. Polly was born there, but as she was taken away only eighteen months afterward, it’s hardly likely that she knew much about it. And Baby was born in the cañon, and never in her life had heard the words grandpapa or grandmamma spoken in the second person.
For the sake of these younger ones, deprived of their natural right to the possession of grandparents, the mother used to tell everything she could put into words and that the children could understand about the old Eastern home where her own childhood was spent, in entire unconsciousness of any such fate as that which is involved in the words “Gone West.”
The catalogue of grandfather’s gates always pleased the children, because in the cañon there were no gates, but the great rock gate of the cañon itself, out of which the river ran shouting and clapping its hands like a child out of a dark room into the sunlight, and into which the sun took a last peep at night under the red curtain of the sunset.
Grandfather’s gates were old gates long before Jack began to kick out the toes of his shoes against them, or practice with their wooden latches and latchpins. Most of them had been patched and strengthened in weak places by hands whose work in this world was done. Each had its own particular creak, like a familiar voice announcing as far as it could be heard which gate it was that was opening; and to Jack’s eyes, each one of the farm gates had a distinct and expressive countenance of its own, which he remembered as well as he did the faces of the men who worked in the fields.
Two or three of them were stubborn obstacles in his path, by reason of queer, unmanageable latches that wouldn’t shove, or weights that a small boy couldn’t lift, or a heavy trick of yawing at the top and dragging at the bottom, so that the only way to get through was to squeeze through a wedge-shaped opening where you scraped the side of your leg and generally managed to catch some part of your clothing on a nail or on a splinter. Others fell open gayly on a down-hill grade, but you had to tug yourself crimson in order to heave them shut again. Very few of those heavy old field gates seemed to have been intended for the convenience of boys. The boy on grandfather’s farm who opened a gate was expected to shut it. If he neglected to do so he was almost sure to hear a voice calling after him, “Hey, there! Who left that gate open?” So on the whole it was no saving of time to slip through, besides being a strain on one’s reputation with the farm hands.
Some of the gates were swinging and creaking every day of the year; others were silent for whole months together; others, like the road gate, stood open always and never creaked, and nobody marked them, except that the children found them good to swing upon when the grass was not too long.
The road gate had once been a smart one, with pickets and gray paint, but it had stood open so many years with the grass of summer after summer cumbering its long stride that no one ever thought of repainting it, any more than they would of decorating the trunk of the Norway spruce which stood nearest to it, between it and the fountain that had ceased to play and had been filled up with earth and converted into a flower bed.
The road gate being always open, it follows that the garden gate was always shut. The garden was divided from the dooryard by the lane that went past the house to the carriage-house and stable. Visitors sometimes spoke of the lane as the “avenue,” and of the dooryard as the “lawn;” but these fine names were never used by grandfather himself, nor by any of the household, nor were they appropriate to the character of the place. The dooryard grass was left to grow rather long before it was cut, like grandfather’s beard before he would consent to have it trimmed. Dandelions went to seed and clover-heads reddened. Beautiful things had time to grow up and blossom in that rich, dooryard grass, before it was swept down by the scythe and carried away in wheelbarrow loads to be fed to the horses. It was toward night, generally, that the men wheeled it away, and the children used to follow load after load to the stable, to enjoy the horses’ enjoyment of it. They always felt that the dooryard grass belonged to them, and yielded it, at the cost of many a joy, as their own personal contribution to those good friends of theirs in the stable—Nelly and Duke and Dan and Nelly’s colt (which was generally a five-year-old before it ceased to be called “the colt”).
The garden gate was a small one, of the same rather smart pattern as the road gate. The grapevine which grew inside the fence—and over, and under, and through it—had superadded an arch of its tenderest, broadest, most luminous leaves, which spanned the gate-posts, uplifted against the blue sky, and was so much more beautiful toward the middle of summer than any gate could be, that no one ever looked at the little garden gate at all, except to make sure that it was shut.
It had a peculiar, lively click of the latch, which somehow suggested all the pleasures of the garden within. The remembrance of it recalls the figure of John, the gardener, in his blue denim blouse, with a bunch of radishes and young lettuces in his clean, earthy hands. He would take a few steps out of his way to the fountain (it had not then been filled up), and wash the tender roots, dip the leaves and shake them, before presenting his offering in the kitchen.
There was another figure that often came and went when the garden gate clicked: the little mother, the children’s grandmother, in her morning gingham and white apron and garden hat, and the gloves without fingers she wore when she went to cut her roses. Sometimes she wore no hat, and the sun shone through her muslin cap. It came to a point just above her forehead, and was finished with a bunch of narrow ribbon, pale straw-color or lavender. Her face in the open sunlight or under the shade of her hat had the tender fairness of one of her own faintly tinted tea-roses. Young girls and children’s faces may be likened to flowers, but that fairness of the white soul shining through does not belong to youth. The soul of a mother is hardly in full bloom until her cheek begins to sink a little and grow soft with age.
The garden was laid out on an old-fashioned plan, in three low terraces, each a single step above the other. A long, straight walk divided the middle terrace, extending from the gate to the seat underneath the grapevine and pear-tree; and another long, straight path crossed the first one at right angles from the blackberry bushes at the top of the garden to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the bottom. The borders were of box, or polyanthus, or primroses, and the beds were filled with a confusion of flowers of all seasons, crowding the spaces between the rose-bushes; so that there where literally layers of flowers, the ones above half hiding, half supporting the ones beneath, and all uniting to praise the hand of the gardener that made them grow. Some persons said the garden needed systematizing; that there was a waste of material there. Others thought its charm lay in its careless lavishness of beauty—as if it took no thought for what it was or had, but gave with both hands and never counted what was left.
It was certain you could pick armfuls, apronfuls, of flowers there, and never miss them from the beds or the bushes where they grew.
The hedge ran along on top of the stone wall that guarded the embankment to the road. In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle Townsend’s meadow!
When the first crop of organ-grinders began to spread along the country roads, Jack, atilt like a big robin in the hedge, would prick his ear at the sound of a faint, whining sweetness, far away at the next house but one. After a silence he would hear it again in a louder strain, at the very next house; another plodding silence, and the joy had arrived. The organ-man had actually perceived grandfather’s house, far back as it was behind the fir-trees, and had stopped by the little gate at the foot of the brick walk. Then Jack races out of the garden, slamming the gate behind him, across the dooryard and up the piazza steps, to beg a few pennies to encourage the man. He has already turned back his blanket and adjusted his stick. Will grandmother please hurry? It takes such a long time to find only four pennies, and the music has begun!
All the neighbors’ children have followed the man, and are congregated about him in the road below. Looks are exchanged between them and Jack, dangling his legs over the brink of the wall, but no words are wasted.
Then come those moments of indecision as to the best plan of bestowing the pennies. If you give them too soon, the man may pack up the rest of his tunes and go away; if you keep them back too long, he may get discouraged and go, anyhow. Jack concludes to give two pennies at the close of the first air, and make the others apparent in his hands. But the organ-man does not seem to be aware of the other two pennies in reserve. His melancholy eyes are fixed on the tops of the fir-trees that swing in a circle above Jack’s head, as he sits on the wall. “Poor man,” Jack thinks, “he is disappointed to get only two pennies! He thinks, perhaps, I am keeping the others for the next man. How good of him to go on playing all the same!” He plays all his tunes out to the end. Down goes the blanket. Jack almost drops the pennies in his haste to be in time. The man stumps away down the road, and Jack loiters up the long path to the house, dreamy with the droning music, and flattered to the soul by the man’s thanks and the way he took off his hat when he said good-day. Nobody need try to make Jack believe that an organ-grinder can ever be a nuisance.
The road gate, the garden gate, and the gate at the foot of the path were the only gates that ever made any pretense to paint. The others were of the color that wind and weather freely bestow upon a good piece of old wood that has never been planed.
Jack became acquainted with the farm gates one by one, as his knowledge of the fields progressed. At first, for his short legs, it was a long journey to the barn. Here there was a gate which he often climbed upon but never opened; for within its protection the deep growl of the old bull was often heard, or his reddish-black head, lowering eye, and hunched shoulders were seen emerging from the low, dark passage to the sheds into the sunny cattle-yard. Even though nothing were in sight more awful than a clucking hen, that doorway, always agape and always dark as night, was a bad spot for a small boy to pass, with the gate of retreat closed behind him and the gate of escape into the comfortable, safe barnyard not yet open.
The left-hand gate, on the upper side of the barn, was the children’s favorite of all the gates. The barn was built against a hill, and the roof on the upper side came down nearly to the ground. The children used to go through the left-hand gate when, with one impulse, they decided, “Let’s go and slide on the roof!” This was their summer coasting. Soles of shoes were soon so polished that the sliders were obliged to climb up the roof on hands and knees. It was not good for stockings, and in those days there were no “knee-protectors;” mothers’ darning was the only invention for keeping young knees inside of middle-aged stockings that were expected to “last out” the summer.
It was a blissful pastime, to swarm up the roof and lie, with one’s chin over the ridge-pole, gazing down from that thrilling height upon the familiar objects in the peaceful barnyard. Then to turn round carefully and get into position for the glorious, downward rush over the gray, slippery shingles! It could not have been any better for the shingles than for the shoes and stockings; but no one interfered. Perhaps grandfather remembered a time when he, too, used to slide on roofs, and scour the soles of his shoes and polish the knees of his stockings.
The upper gate had another, more lasting attraction; it opened into the lane that went up past the barn into the orchards—the lovely, side-hill orchards. Grandfather’s farm was a side-hill farm altogether, facing the river, with its back to the sunset. If you sat down comfortably, adjusting yourself to the slope of the ground, the afternoon shadows stretched far before you; you saw the low blue mountains across the river, and the sails of sloops tacking against the breeze. One orchard led to another, through gaps in the stone fences, and the shadow of one tree met the shadow of its neighbor, across those long, sun-pierced aisles. The trees bent this way and that, and shifted their limbs under the autumn’s burden of fruit. The children never thought of eating a whole apple, but bit one and threw it away for another that looked more tempting, and so on till their palates were torpid with tasting. Then they were swung up on top of the cold slippery loads and jolted down the lane to that big upper door that opened into the loft where the apple bins were. Here the wagon stopped with a heavy creak. Some one picked up a child and swung it in at the big door; some one else caught it and placed it safely on its feet at one side; and then the men began a race,—the one in the wagon bent upon filling a basket with apples and hoisting it in at the door, faster than the man inside could carry it to the bin and empty it and return for the next.
These bins held the cider apples. The apples for market were brought down in barrels from the orchards, and then the wagon load of apples and children went through still another gate that led to another short lane under more apple-trees, to the fruit-house, where, in the cool, dim cellar that smelled of all deliciousness, the fruit was sorted and boxed or barreled for market. And in the late afternoon, or after supper, if the children were old enough to stay up so late, they were allowed to ride on the loads of fruit to the steamboat landing.
It is needless to say that this gate, which led to the fruit cellar, was one Jack very early learned to open. In fact, it was so in the habit of being opened that it had never acquired the trick of obstinacy, and gave way at the least pull.
When Jack was rather bigger, he was allowed to cross the road with his cousin, a boy of his own age, and open the gate into Uncle Townsend’s meadow. This piece of land had been many years in his grandfather’s possession but it was still called by the name of its earlier owner. Names have such a persistent habit of sticking in those long-settled communities where there is always some one who remembers when staid old horses were colts and gray-haired men were boys, and when the land your father was born on was part of his grandfather’s farm on the ridge.
A brook, which was also the waste-way from the mill, ran across Uncle Townsend’s meadow. Sometimes it overflowed into the grass and made wet places, and in these spots the grass was of a darker color, and certain wild flowers were finer than anywhere else; also weeds, among others the purple, rank “skunk’s cabbage,” which the children admired, without wishing to gather.
Water-cresses clung to the brookside; in the damp places the largest, whitest bloodroot grew; under the brush along the fences and by the rocks grew the blue-eyed hepatica, coral-red columbine, and anemones, both pure white and those rare beauties with a pale pink flush. Dog-tooth violets, wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, came in due season, and ferns of every pattern of leaf and scroll. Later, when the wet places were dry, came the tall fire-lilies and brown-eyed Rudbeckias, “ox-eyed daisies” the children called them, together with all the delicate, flowering grass-heads and stately bulrushes and patches of pink and white clover,—and all over the meadow there was a sleepy sound of bees, and shadows with soft edges lost in deep waves of grass.
Of course the brook did not stop at the meadow. It went on gurgling over the stones, dark under the willows; but there were no more gates. The brook left the home fields and took its own way across everybody’s land to the river. That was a long walk, which Jack took only when he was much older.
Another journey, which he grew up to by degrees, was that one to the upper barn. How many times over did he repeat his instructions before he was allowed to set out: “Go up the hill, past the mill, until you come to the first turn to the left. Turn up that way and follow the lane straight on”—but this was a figure of speech, for no one could go straight on who followed that lane—“till you come to the three gates. Be sure to take the left-hand one of the three. Then you are all right. That gate opens into the lane that goes past the upper barn.”
Near the upper barn were three sugar-maples—the only ones on the place that yielded sap; and in one of the neighboring fields there was a very great walnut-tree, second in size only to the old chestnut-tree in the burying-ground which was a hundred and fifty years old and bigger round the body than three children clasping hands could span.
Those up-lying fields were rather far away for daily rambles. Jack knew them less and so cared less for them than for the home acres, which were as familiar to him as the rooms of grandfather’s house.
But when grandfather’s children were children, the spring lambs wintered at the upper barn; and beauteous creatures they were by the following spring, with broad foreheads and curly forelocks and clear hazel eyes and small mouths just made for nibbling from the hand. Often, of a keen April morning, when the thawed places in the lane were covered with clinking ice, the children used to trudge at their father’s side to see the lambs get their breakfast of turnips, chopped in the dark cold hay-scented barn, while the hungry creatures bleated outside and crowded against the door.
Half the poetry of the farm life went into the care of the sheep and the anxieties connected with them. They were a flock of Cotswolds, carefully bred from imported stock. Their heavy fleeces made them the most helpless of creatures when driven hard or worried by the dogs, and every neighbor’s dog was a possible enemy.
On moonlight nights in spring, when watch-dogs are restless, and vagabond dogs are keen for mischief, the spirit of the chase would get abroad. The bad characters would lead on the dogs of uncertain principles, and now and then one of unspotted reputation, and the evil work would begin. When the household was asleep, a knock would be heard upon the window, and the voice of one hoarse with running would give the alarm:—
“The dogs are after the sheep!”
The big brother would get down his shot-gun, and the father would hunt for the ointments, the lantern, and the shears (for cutting the wool away from bleeding wounds), and together they hurried away—the avenger and the healer. Next day, more than one of the neighbors’ children came weeping, to identify a missing favorite. Sometimes the innocent suffered for being found in company with the guilty. There were hard feelings on both sides. Even the owners of dogs caught with the marks of guilt upon them disputed the justice of a life for a life.
There is one more gate, and then we come to the last one—the gate of the burying-ground.
A path went over the hill which divided grandfather’s house from that of his elder brother, whose descendants continued to live there after him. Uncle Edward’s children were somewhat older, and his grandchildren were younger than grandfather’s children; but though slightly mismatched as to ages the two households were in great accord. The path crossed the “line fence” by a little gate in the stone wall, and this was the gate of family visiting.
That way the mothers went of an afternoon with their sewing, or the last new magazine, or the last new baby; or in the morning to borrow a cupful of yeast, or to return the last loan of a bowlful of rice, or to gather ground-ivy (it grew in Uncle Edward’s yard, but not in grandfather’s) to make syrup for an old cough. That way came the groups, of a winter evening, in shawls and hoods, creaking over the snow with lantern-light and laughter to a reading circle, or to one of those family reunions which took place whenever some relative from a distance was visiting in the neighborhood. Along that path went those dear women in haste, to offer their help in sudden, sharp emergencies; and with slower steps again when all was over, they went to sit with those in grief, or to consult about the last services for the dead.
That was the way the young people took on their walks in summer—the stalwart country boys and their pretty city cousins in fresh muslins, with light, high voices, pitched to the roar of the street. That way went the nutting parties in the fall and the skating parties in winter. All the boys and girls of both houses grew up opening and shutting that gate on one errand or another, from the little white-headed lad with the mail, to the soldier cousin coming across to say good-by.
Between the two neighboring homes was the family burying-ground: all this pleasant intercourse went on with the silent cognizance and sympathy, as it were, of the forefathers who trod the path no more. The burying-ground was by far the best spot for a resting-place on either of the farms,—in a hollow of the hills, with a stone fence all round, draped as if to deaden sounds with heavy festoons of woodbine. Above the gray granite and white marble tombstones, rose the locust-trees, tall and still. The beds of myrtle, underneath, were matted into a continuous carpet of thick, shining leaves which caught the sunlight at broad noon with a peculiar pale glister like moonlight. The chestnut-tree stood a little apart, with one great arm outstretched as if calling attention, or asking for silence. Yet no child ever hushed its laughter as it passed the little gate with the gray pickets, overhung by a climbing rose, which opened into the burying-ground; and when, in the autumn, the old chestnut-tree dropped its nuts, the children never hesitated to go in that way and gather them because of the solemn neighborhood. They had grown up in the presence of these memorials of the beloved dead. But no one ever opened that gate without at least a momentary thoughtfulness. No one ever slammed it, in anger or in haste. And so it became a dumb teacher of reverence—a daily reminder to be quiet, to be gentle, for the sake of those at rest on the other side of the wall.