“There!” said Mary Jane, as she clanked the last part into place on the shiny milk separator. “Ellie, if we slip outside right now, nobody can give us a job when we’re gone. It’s so nice outside this morning!”
“Well, I have some mending. My hem ripped out, and you know Mamma said we have to do those things ourselves now. Anyway —.”
“Mending! What are safety pins for? Oh, you can do it later! Come on! Let’s go!” sputtered Mary Jane.
Away they ran out the kitchen door; and for want of a better place to go, scampered playfully with the dogs up the hill towards the lane. A few half-grown calves, some of them real pets, grazed near a fence. They gave the girls a glance but did not bother to run away.
“You know what I have a big notion to do?” sparkled Mary Jane. “See Butterball over there, rubbing his rump on the fence post? I think I’ll ride him. I could climb on him real easy from the fence. Daddy said he reckoned I’d be a great rider. He couldn’t even buck me off his knee when I was little, and I’ve been practicing on Macy.”
“Ride Butterball!” and Ellen looked startled. “Oh, I think he’d be too wild. Don’t you dare! I mean, please don’t!”
“What do you mean ‘wild’? Why, we fed him his milk from a bucket a few weeks ago! Anyway, he likes me. Here I go! Now don’t you scare him away from the post.”
“Idiot! I’ll tell Mamma! Stop, Mary Jane!”
But Mary Jane had sidled up to Butterball, scratched his back a second, and nimbly walked up the fence post support. Before you could hardly say “Jack Robinson” she had made her rodeo debut.
“Ride ‘em cowboy!” she yelled as she grabbed a handful of fur and planted herself lightly on his wide plump back.
It took a second for the startled beast to recover from his shock enough to react. Although his action was slightly delayed, it was no less activated. Butter-ball lived up to everything ever said about bucking steers. Mary Jane’s teeth clanked shut on her tongue and the battle joined. His hide was fairly furry along the neck region, and in no time at all, this became the little girl’s brief and last stronghold. With every second that Mary Jane was able to retain her grip on his hairy neck, Butterball became more panic-stricken. He bucked and kicked and twisted as he charged down the hill. When his load was at last lifted, he continued to put tracks between them, seeming not to know or care that his old “friend and caretaker” was sitting in a cactus bed by the fence. Everything had happened so fast that dazed Mary Jane did not know her mouth was streaming blood, her shoes were gone, stockings were hanging down, and her little apron was ripped half off her body.
Ellen was screaming as she ran to the house, “Mamma! Daddy! Mary Jane’s getting killed!”
Cries of “Are you all right?” – “Can you move?” – “Are your legs broke?” tumbled from the lips of the family members within the range of Ellen’s alarm, as they rushed to her aid.
Mamma’s heart sank as she saw blood coming from her little girl’s mouth. She feared some internal injuries. “Don’t move, darling!” she breathed. “Lori, run tell Daddy to get Dr. Chandler quick!”
“Mary Jane!” shrieked Ellen. “Your mouth! I think I’m going to faint!”
“Yeah – bit my tongue! Mean old Butterball! See if I ever feed him again!” Hot tears began to flow.
“Thank the Lord!” sighed Mother in relief. “Hold it, Lori! I think maybe she’s okay. You’re in the cactus, Honey. Let Mamma help – easy now. There we go! What a nice pin cushion you made!”
“Ooh – ouch! How they sting! Oh, I’m ruined!” wailed the poor little girl.
It took Mamma nearly an hour to pick the spines from and dress the scrapes on the smarting little body. How loving they all were! It almost seemed worth it – all this love and tenderness – until Clara came in from the barn.
“What’s all the cluck cluck about? What did Mary Jane go and do now?”
Ellen almost proudly announced the news of her sister’s ride on the steer.
“Well – of all the – if that isn’t the boneheadedist, most idiotic thing I ever heard tell of! I s’pose you thought you were Annie Oakley or somebody ‘cause you’ve been riding Macey ‘round and ‘round in the barnyard! Well” – and she laughed – “I always say, ‘pride comes before a fall.’ And that, right smack in the cactus bed!”
Ellen, ever loyal to her little sister no matter the cost, almost spat out the words: “The Bible says that, not you!”
“What’s the matter with you? And what in this wide creation makes you think I don’t know that? Can’t I quote the scriptures to you kids when you need it?”
“Oh, Clara!” Mary Jane was glaring from the couch. She looked for Mother, but that lady had gone out for some more wtich hazel. “You’re so –! I’m glad I br—” and then a gasp escaped her lips. She looked almost tragic as she clapped her hand on her mouth. She had almost said, ‘I’m glad I broke your old comb the other day!” Clara had a nice vanity set and had forbidden anyone else to use it. Mary Jane had done so in a great rush on the way to the school bus, and had broken the comb. So cleverly had she later glued it together, that Clara had thought she herself had broken it the next time she used it. Mary Jane could almost feel the stinging slap she would have received had the truth come out.
Clara’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”
Mary Jane blinked. Her swollen mouth was set in as mean a line as the flesh permitted, “I’m glad I’m not mean like you!” she retorted.
The cruel stinging words struck home with unexpected force. The girls had not realized that in spite of Clara’s outspokenness and readiness to make fun of them, she had far more tenderness beneath the surface than appeared. Clara looked hurt, her stout exterior melted. She actually began to cry! And when Clara cried – which wasn’t often – she made quite a job of it.
“Oh boo-hoo!” she sobbed. “Nobody around here appreciates anything I do. I might as well be dead! Nobody loves me! So I’m mean! Mean! Just because I try to teach you some sense. I’m mean!”
“Oh, Clara! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” an awed Mary Jane burst out.
“You’re not sorry! You’re not! You do mean it!”
“But- but- not so hard – I mean –.” Then after a miserable pause, Mary Jane said hopefully, “Clara, Wilma Kloster at school said you make the best paper dolls in the whole school. I think so too.”
“But I’m supposed to be so mean!”
Ellen had been watching rather disgustedly. Now she spoke again: “You always make us feel so dumb – and that you know everything.” Then tossing her head, she measured the tones, “There is such a thing as tack, you know.”
“Such a thing as what?” Clara’s tears dried noticeably.
“Tack, T-A-C-K, tack.”
“Hoo boy!” and the old glint returned to Clara’s eyes. “Well, I reckon tacks are a mite sharp. But if you was meanin’ ‘tact’ T-A-C-T, tact, I call it ‘soft soap.’”
Ellen flushed at her mistake, but instantly saw how she could make “the worm turn”. “Well, it is tacks you’re al ways using on us – real sharp ones!”
“See, now there you are! You can’t take any correction! All I do is tell you when you’re stupid and you can’t take it without flying off the handle!”
“Here we go again,” groaned Mary Jane. “But Clara – really. Will you teach me to paint paper dolls like you? Please?”
“Oh, maybe, if I get time. But you have to get your own paints. You can’t smear mine all up, understand? I still think you look kinda guilty,” she remarked as she made a playful pass at her sister’s head. “You sure look awful. Now let me alone. I’m going to pull the weeds out of the garden – the job you didn’t do good enough yesterday. If I don’t, poor Mamma will be doing it.” She was gone, but returned for a second admonition. “If it wasn’t for me you’d get so rotten spoiled no one could stand you!”
“Did the witch hazen soothe the smarting some?” asked Mamma, returning. “And I thought I heard crying. Were you girls quarreling again?”
“Mamma, do you think Clara is trying to help us when she picks at us and calls us dummies all the time?” asked Mary Jane.
“If you ask me, she’s just being nasty!” and Ellen flounced off upstairs.
Mamma sighed. “Perhaps, in her way. She always tells me I’m spoiling you. But all my girls have many lessons to learn. Like Papa says, ‘Some folks are long on talk and short on walk and vice versa.’ You know, the Lord gave us a good story in Matthew 21. A man had two sons that he sent into his garden to work.
“One said, ‘I go, sir,’ but went not. The other said ‘no’ at first, but then went and did his bidding. Clara is rather like that. She does show her love by helping Papa and me. She needs to learn less ‘law’ and more ‘grace.’ But, my little Mary Jane, look to your own ways before God. Now my light bread is risin’ too high, I fear. I must run. You may rest until you feel better.”
As Mary Jane lay in the quiet of the living room, she thought of Clara and the parable Mamma had spoken of. Was it an accident that Mamma had used the word “garden”? She was pretty sure the Bible said “vineyard.” It was only too true that her weed-pulling job in the garden had been a farce. Mostly she had thrown over-ripe cucumbers and spoiled pumpkins at the tree trunks in the orchard. Then she’d found a water snake and chased him to the pond. And Clara, it seemed, had noticed; and she didn’t want Mamma to suffer for her naughtiness. Maybe she has some better points.
“Oh, well,” Mary Jane reasoned hard-heartedly. “Clara works in the garden to get out of doing dishes. She hates housework. I do want to learn to paint paper dolls, though.”
The shock of her accident had taken its toll, and in a few minutes, Mary Jane was asleep.
“Well, well!” Daddy’s voice boomed. “Now if my little pet isn’t a sorry sight! I guess we’re not ready for rodeo riding just yet, eh, Mary Jane?”
Daddy stooped beside the sleepy girl and kissed her cheek. “Daddy’s real sorry. Now you stay off of them frisky calves and steers. Feel like some dinner, Honey?”
The tantalizing odors of fresh baked bread. pumpkin pie and other tasties for the dinner table wafted in from the kitchen. A cozy clatter of dishes and scraping chairs, as things were readied for the final call, bespoke the need to rouse quickly. Mary Jane was starved.
As Daddy helped her up, he remarked, “Remind me someday to tell you how I got my first horse; had to win it by breaking her in myself. That was some ride, I hope to tell ya!”
A reverent silence fell on that dining room scene. All heads were bowed as Daddy asked a lengthy, but fervent blessing for the food, squeezing in a fair amount of gospel for the sake of old Charlie, the new hired hand. The room contained a very large table covered with a strawberry decorated oilcloth. A sideboard at one end of the room housed the dishes and groaned under the weight of several stacks of school books and sundries. A little pot-bellied stove looked lonesome in another corner as all the chairs were needed for the ten eager diners cheerfully gathered around heaping dishes of hearty, but simply food. There was plenty of freshly baked bread and home-churned butter. Mamma was rosy-cheeked from the kitchen stove’s heat and the men talked of farm jobs. Even Robbie joined in this conversation. Mary Jane used to spend many happy hours playing with Robbie, but more and more now he was going off with Daddy. He even drove the horses some to and from the fields. She missed her old playmate sorely. Ellen too was getting “airs” about her. She even liked to sit inside and sew. Mary Jane sighed and ate with difficulty, washing most of the food down with her milk.
Daddy was talking now to the girls: “You girls, now – that shower we had has got the bean shocks damp and musty. If we don’t get them turned and dried, we’ll lose the crop. So I want all of you that Mamma can spare out in the big field across the gulch right after dinner. (On the farm “dinner” was “lunch.”)
Ellen looked dejected. So did Lori. Jennie and Clara never seemed to mind. Mary Jane hated the job, but knew they’d all be easy on her today.
For the unfamiliar, a “shock of beans” is a little mound of newly-cut pinto beans heaped, according to the lushness of the crop, about three or four feet apart to continue drying in the Autumn sun. When they were ready and the threshing machine came, they would be tossed on a wagon and hauled to the threshing site to be shelled out. Naturally, they had to be dry. In a field of forty or so acres, the job seemed hopelessly large. The many hours the children spent plodding up and down these long rows would have dragged sorely had they not learned to entertain each other with stories and jokes and chatter.
How they had laughed one day when Robbie revealed his thoughts. He had lagged so far behind that they passed him coming back on the next round. Being so absorbed in a dream of his own he didn’t notice the girls, and waving his hand grandly over the field he commanded, “Beans, get in the shock!” If only the job could have been done that way!
Today Jennie was giggling gaily, hardly watching as she slipped her pitchfork under a shock. Instantly she felt a strange consistency to the ground. As she raised the bunch of half dry beans, an ominous, not too – loud but sinister sound buzzed out. In an instant she dropped everything and fled. “Rattlesnake!” Everyone else ran too. Apparently he had a hole nearby. Although Daddy searched all around, he was not able to find the snake. How warily they stepped and turned the rest of the day!
“What a day this has been!” groaned Mary Jane as she crawled into bed ahead of Ellen who was still kneeling in prayer. Mary Jane had a sore knee and had skipped through her prayers very sketchily.
“I’ll say!” agreed Ellen later. “If I have nightmares, do you promise to tell me a story if I wake up?”
“Of course, Ellen. You know our pact. You have to tell me one too, if I wake up. But be awful careful of my sore knees. I still think maybe I have some stickers left in my sitter! Good night, Ellen.”
Before long the two were sound asleep. The Autumn moon shone down upon the peaceful prairie homestead and the souls within the big house. Here were sheep of God’s pasture – a sanctified household. Each name, each heart was known to Him. Some were His children and some He had yet to lead in the right way. Had not each name come up before His throne even that morning?