第5章 THE OLD RED SCHOOL-HOUSE(3)
The "piece" had bread-and-butter (my grandma used to let me churn for her sometimes, when I went out there), and some of the slices had apple-butter on them. (One time she let me stir the cider, when it was boiling down in the big kettle over the chunk-fire out in the yard. The smoke got in my eyes.) Sometimes there was honey from the hives over by the gooseberry bushes - the gooseberries had stickers on them - and we had slices of cold, fried ham. (Iwas out at grandpap's one time when they butchered. They had a chunk-fire then, too, to heat the water to scald the hogs. And say! Did your grandma ever roast pig's tails in the ashes for you?)And there were crullers. No, I don't mean "doughnuts." I mean crullers, all twisted up. They go good with cider. (Sometimes my grandma cut out thin, pallid little men of cruller dough, and dropped them into the hot lard for my Uncle Jimmy and me. And when she fished them out, they were all swelled up and "pussy," and golden brown.
And there was pie. Neither at the school nooning nor at the table did one put a piece of pie upon a plate and haggle at it with a fork. You took the piece of pie up in your hand and pointed the sharp end toward you, and gently crowded it into your face. It didn't require much pressure either.
And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make apples in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones, picked off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and winesaps, and seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind of apple that I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It was the finest apple I ever set a tooth in. It was the juiciest and the spiciest apple. It had sort of a rollicking flavor to it, if you know what I mean. It certainly was the ne plus ultra of an apple. And the name of it was the rambo. Dear me, how good it was! think I'd sooner have one right now than great riches.
And all these apples they kept in the apple-hole. You went out and uncovered the earth and there they were, all in a big nest of straw;and such a gush of perfume distilled from that pile of them that just to recollect it makes my mouth all wet.
They had a big red apple in those days that I forget the name of.
Oh, it was a whopper! You'd nibble at it and nibble at it before you could get a purchase on it. Then, after you got your teeth in, you'd pull and pull, and all of a sudden the apple would go "tock!"and your head would fly back from the recoil, and you had a bite about the size of your hand. You "chomped" on it, with your cheek all bulged out, and blame near drowned yourself with the juice of it.
Noon-time the girls used to count the seeds:
"One I love, two I love, three my love I see;Four I love with all my heart, and five I cast away.
Six he loves; seven she loves; eight . . . eight . . . "I forget what eight is, and all that follows after. And then the others would tease her with, "Aw, Jennie!" knowing who it was she had named the apple for, Wes. Rinehart, or 'Lonzo Curl, or whoever.
And you'd be standing there by the stove, kind of grinning and not thinking of anything in particular when somebody would hit you a clout on your back that just about broke you in two, and would tell you "to pass it on," and you'd pass it on, and the next thing was you'd think the house was coming down. Such a chasing around and over benches, and upsetting the water-bucket, and tearing up Jack generally that teacher would say, "Boys! boys! If you can't play quietly, you'll have to go out of doors!" Play quietly! Why, the idea! What kind of play is it when you are right still?
Outdoors in the country, you can whoop and holler, and carry on, and nobody complains to the board of health. And there are so many things you can do. If there is just the least little fall of snow you can make a big wheel, with spokes in it, by your tracking. Iremember that it was called "fox and geese," but that's all I can remember about it. If there was a little more snow you tried to wash the girls' faces in it, and sometimes got yours washed. If there was a good deal of wet snow you had a snowball fight, which is great fun, unless you get one right smack dab in your ear - oh, but I can't begin to tell you all the fun there is at the noon hour in the country school, that the town children don't know anything about. And when it was time for school to "take up," there wasn't any forming in line, with a monitor to run tell teacher who snatched off Joseph Humphreys' cap and flung it far away, so he had to get out of the line, and who did this, and who did that - no penitentiary business at all. Teacher tapped on the window with a ruler, and the boys and girls came in, red-faced and puffing, careering through the aisles, knocking things off the desks with many a burlesque, "oh, exCUSE me!" and falling into their seats, bursting into sniggers, they didn't know what at. They had an hour and a half nooning. Counting that it took five minutes to shovel down even grandma's beautiful "piece," that left an hour and twenty-five minutes for roaring, romping play. If you want to know, I think that is fully as educational and a far better preparation for life than sitting still with your nose stuck in a book.
In the city schools they don't think so. Even the stingy fifteen minutes' recess, morning and afternoon, has been stolen from the children. Instead is given the inspiriting physical culture, all making silly motions together in a nice, warm room, full of second-hand air. Is it any wonder that one in every three that die between fifteen and twenty-five, dies of consumption?