So they hustled, and when they were far enough ahead Almanzo plucked a grass-stem and made it whistle between his thumbs. Alice tried, but she could not do that. She could pucker her mouth and whistle. Royal teased her.
“Whistling girls and crowing hens
Always come to some bad ends.”
Back and forth across the field they went, all morning, all afternoon, for three days. Then the potatoes were planted.
Then Father sowed the grain. He sowed a field of wheat for white bread, a field of rye for rye ’n’ injun bread, and a field of oats mixed with Canada peas, to feed the horses and cows next winter.
While Father sowed the grain, Almanzo followed him over the fields with Bess and Beauty, harrowing the seeds into the earth. Almanzo could not sow grain yet; he must practice a long time before he could spread the seeds evenly. That is hard to do.
The heavy sack of grain hung from a strap over Father’s left shoulder. As he walked, he took handfuls of grain from the sack. With a sweep of his arm and a bend of his wrist he let the little grains fly from his fingers. The sweep of his arm kept time with his steps, and when Father finished sowing a field every inch of ground had its evenly scattered seeds, nowhere too many or too few.
The seeds were too small to be seen on the ground, and you could not know how skillful a sower a man was, till the seeds came up. Father told Almanzo about a lazy, worthless boy who had been sent to sow a field. This boy did not want to work, so he poured the seeds out of his sack and went swimming. Nobody saw him. Afterward he harrowed the field, and no one knew what he had done. But the seeds knew, and the earth knew, and when even the boy had forgotten his wickedness, they told it. Weeds took that field.
When all the grain was sowed, Almanzo and Alice planted the carrots. They had sacks full of the little, red, round carrot seeds hanging from their shoulders, like Father’s big seed-sack. Father had marked the carrot field lengthwise, with a marker whose teeth were only eighteen inches apart. Almanzo and Alice, with the carrot seeds, went up and down the long field, straddling the little furrows.
Now the weather was so warm that they could go barefooted. Their bare feet felt good in the air and the soft dirt. They dribbled the carrot seeds into the furrows, and with their feet they pushed the dirt over the seeds and pressed it down.
Almanzo could see his feet, but of course Alice’s were hidden under her skirts. Her hoops rounded out, and she had to pull them back and stoop to drop the seeds neatly into the furrow.
Almanzo asked her if she didn’t want to be a boy. She said yes, she did. Then she said no, she didn’t.
“Boys aren’t pretty like girls, and they can’t wear ribbons.”
“I don’t care how pretty I be,” Almanzo said. “And I wouldn’t wear ribbons anyhow.”
“Well, I like to make butter and I like to patch quilts. And cook, and sew, and spin. Boys can’t do that. But even if I be a girl, I can drop potatoes and sow carrots and drive horses as well as you can.”
“You can’t whistle on a grass stem,” Almanzo said.
At the end of the row he looked at the ash tree’s crumpled new leaves, and asked Alice if she knew when to plant corn. She didn’t, so he told her. Corn-planting time is when the ash leaves are as big as squirrel’s ears.
“How big a squirrel?” Alice asked.
“Just an ordinary squirrel.”
“Well, those leaves are as big as a baby squirrel’s ears. And it isn’t corn-planting time.”
For a minute Almanzo didn’t know what to think. Then he said:
“A baby squirrel isn’t a squirrel; it’s a kitten.”
“But it’s just as much a squirrel—”
“No it isn’t. It’s a kitten. Little cats are kittens, and little foxes are kittens, and little squirrels are kittens. A kitten isn’t a cat, and a kitten isn’t a squirrel, either.”
“Oh,” Alice said.
When the ash leaves were big enough, Almanzo helped to plant corn. The field had been marked with the potato marker, and Father and Royal and Almanzo planted it together.
They wore bags of seed corn tied around their waists like aprons, and they carried hoes. At the corner of each square, where the furrows crossed, they stirred up the soil with the hoe, and made a shallow hollow in it, dropped two grains of corn into the hollow, and covered them with dirt and patted the dirt firm.
Father and Royal worked fast. Their hands and their hoes made exactly the same movements every time. Three quick slashes and a dab with the hoe, a flash of the hand, then a scoop and two pats with the hoe, and that hill of corn was planted. Then they made one quick stride forward, and did it again.
But Almanzo had never planted corn before. He did not handle the hoe so well. He had to trot two steps where Royal or Father took one, because his legs were shorter. Father and Royal were ahead of him all the time; he could not keep up. One of them finished out his row each time, so that he could start out even again. But he knew he would plant corn as fast as anybody, when his legs were longer.
Chapter 12