Chapter 12 The Wonderful MACHINE
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day Pa cut the heads from several bundles of the oats, and brought the , bright, yellow straws to Ma. She put them in a tub of water, to soften them ahem soft. The in the chair by the side of the tub, and braided the straws.She took up several of them, kheir ends together, and began to braid. The straws were differehs, and when she came he end of oraw, she put a new, long one from the tub in its plad went on braiding. She let the end of the braid fall bato the water a on braiding till she had many yards of braid. All her spare time for or days, she was braiding straws.
She made a fine, narrow, smooth braid, using seven of the smallest straws. She used nine larger straws for a wider braid, and made it notched all along the edges. And from the very, largest straws she made the widest braid of all.
When all the straws were braided, she threaded a needle with strong white thread, and beginning at the end of a braid she sewed it round and round, holding the braid so it would lie flat after it was sewed. This made a little mat, and Ma said it was the top of the of a hat.
Then she held the braid tighter on one edge, a on sewing it around and around. The braid drew in and made the sides of the . When the was high enough, Ma held the braid loosely again as she kept on sewing around, and the braid lay flat and was the hat brim.
When the brim was wide enough, Ma cut the braid and sewed the end fast so that it could not unbraid itself.
Ma sewed hats for Mary and Laura of the fi, narrowest braid. For Pa and for herself she made hats of the wider, notched braid. That as Sunday hat. Then she made him two everyday hats of the coarser, widest braid.
When she finished a hat, Ma set it on a board to dry, shaping it nicely as she did so, and when it dried it stayed in the shape she gave it.
Ma could make beautiful hats. Laura liked to watch her, and she learned how to braid the straw and made a little hat for Charlotte.
The days were growing shorter and the nights were cooler. One night Jack Frost passed by, and in the m there were bright colors here and there among the green leaves of the Big Woods. Then all the leaves stopped being green. They were yellow and scarlet and crimson and golden and brown.
Along the rail fehe sumac held up its dark red es of berries above bright flame-colored leaves. As were falling from the oaks, and Laura and Mary made little a cups and saucers for the playhouses. Walnuts and hickory nuts were dropping to the ground in the Big Woods, and squirrels were scampering busily everywhere, gathering their winters store of nuts and hiding them away in hollow trees.
Laura and Mary went with Ma to gather walnuts and hickory nuts and hazelnuts. They spread them in the sun to dry, then they beat off the dried outer hulls and stored the nuts iic for winter.
It was fun to gather the large round walnuts and the smaller hickory nuts, and the little hazelnuts that grew in bunches on the bushes. The soft outer hulls of the walnuts were full of a brown juice that staiheir hands, but the hazelnut hulls smelled good and tasted good, too, when Laura used her teeth to pry a nut loose.
Everyone was busy now, for all the gardeables must be stored away. Laura and Mary helped, pig up the dusty potatoes after Pa had dug them from the ground, and pulling the long yellow carrots and the round, purple-topped turnips, and they helped Ma cook the pumpkin for pumpkin pies.
With the butcher knife Ma cut the big, e colored pumpkins into halves. She ed the seeds out of the ter and cut the pumpkin into long slices, from which she pared the rind. Laura helped her cut the slices into cubes.
Ma put the cubes into the big iron pot oove, poured in some water, and then watched while the pumpkin slowly boiled down, all day long. All the water and the juice must be boiled away, and the pumpkin must never burn.
The pumpkin was a thick, dark, good-smelling mass itle. It did not boil like water, but bubbles came up in it and suddenly exploded, leaving holes that closed quickly. Every time a. bubble exploded, the rich, hot, pumpkin smell came out.
Laura stood on a chair and watched the pumpkin for Ma, and stirred it with a wooden paddle. She held the paddle in both hands and stirred carefully, because if the pumpkin burhere wouldnt be any pumpkin pies.
For dihey ate the stewed pumpkin with their bread. They made it into pretty shapes on their plates. It was a beautiful color, and smoothed and molded so prettily with their knives. Ma never allowed them to play with their food at table; they must always eat nicely everything that was set before them, leaving nothing on their plates. But she did let them make the rich, brown, stewed pumpkin into pretty shapes before they ate it.
At other times they had baked Hubbard squash for dihe rind was so hard that Ma had to take Pas ax to cut the squash into pieces. When the pieces were baked in the oven, Laura loved to spread the soft insides with butter and then scoop the yellow flesh from the rind a it.
For supper, now, they often had hulled and milk. That was good, too. It was so good that Laura could hardly wait for the to be ready, after Ma started to hull it. It took two or three days to make hulled .
The first day, Ma ed and brushed all the ashes out of the cookstove. Then she burned some , bright hardwood, and saved its ashes. She put the hardwood ashes in a little cloth bag.
That night Pa brought in some ears of with large plump kernels. He he ears, shelling off the small, chaffy kernels at their tips.
Then he shelled the rest into a large pan, until the pan was full.
Early day Ma put the shelled and the bag of ashes into the big irole. She filled the kettle with water, a it boiling a long time.
At last the kernels of began to swell, and they swelled and swelled until their skins split open and began to peel off.
When every skin was loose and peeling, Ma lugged the heavy kettle outdoors. She filled a washtub with cold water from the spring, and she dipped the out of the kettle into the tub.
Then she rolled the sleeves of her flowered calico dress above her elbows, and she k by the tub. With her hands she rubbed and scrubbed the until the hulls came off and floated on top of the water.
Often she poured the water off, and filled the tub again with buckets of water from the spring. She kept on rubbing and scrubbing the between her hands, and ging the water, until every hull came off and was washed away.
Ma looked pretty, with her bare arms plump and white, her cheeks so red and her dark hair smooth and shining, while she scrubbed and rubbed the in the clear water. She never splashed one drop of water on her pretty dress.
When at last the was done, Ma put all the soft, white kernels in a big jar in the pantry. Then at last, they had hulled and milk for supper.
Sometimes they had hulled for breakfast, with maple syrup, and sometimes Ma fried the soft kernels in pork drippings. But Laura liked them best with milk.
Autumn was great fun. There was bbr>?９９ｌiｂ?</abbr>so much work to do, so many good things to cat, so mahings to see. Laura was scampering and chattering like the squirrels, from m to night.
One frosty m, a mae came up the road. Four horses were pulling it, and two men were on it. The horses hauled it up into the field where Pa and Uncle Henry and Grandpa and Mr. Peterson had stacked their wheat.
Two more men drove after it another, smaller mae.
Pa called to Ma that the threshers had e; then he hurried out. to the field with his team. Laura and Mary asked Ma, and then they ran out to the field after him. They might watch, if they were careful not to get in the way.
Uncle Henry came riding up and tied his horse to a tree. Then he and Pa hitched all the other horses, eight of them, to the smaller mae.
They hitched each team to the end of a long stick that came out from the ter of the mae. A long iron rod lay along the ground, from this mae to the big mae.
Afterward Laura and Mary asked questions, and Pa told them that the big mae was called the separator, and the rod was called the tumbling rod, and the little mae was called the horsepower. Eight horses were hitche<bdo>?９9liｂ?</bdo>d to it and made it go, so this was a-horsepower mae.
A man sat on top of the horsepower, and whehing was ready he clucked to the horses, and they began to go. They walked around him in a circle, each team pulling on the long stick to which it was hitched, and following the team ahead. As they went around, they stepped carefully over the tumbling rod, which was tumbling over and over on the ground.
Their pulling made the tumbling rod keep rolling over, and the rod moved the maery of the separator, which stood beside the stack of wheat.
All this maery made an enormous racket, rackety-banging and ging. Laura and Mary held tight to each others hand, at the edge of the field, and watched with all their eyes. They had never seen a mae before. They had never heard such a racket.
Pa and Uncle Henry, on top of the wheat stack, were pitg bundles down on to a board. A man stood at the board and cut the bands on the bundles and crowded the bundles o a time into a hole at the end of the separator.
The hole looked like the separators mouth, and it had long, iroh. The teeth were chewing. They chewed the bundles and the separator swallowed them. Straw blew out at the separators other end, and oured out of its side.
Two men were w fast, trampling the straw and building it into a staan was w fast sag the p grain. The grains of oured out of the separator into a half-bushel measure, and as fast as the measure filled, the man slipped at>..t>ty oo its plad emptied the full oo a sack. He had Just time to empty it and slip it bader the spout before the other measure ran over.
All the men were w as fast as they possibly could, but the mae kept right up with them. Laura and Mary were so excited they hardly breathe. They held hands tightly and stared.
The horses walked around and around. The man who was driving them cracked his whip and shouted, Giddap there, John! No use trying to shirk!" Crack! went the whip. "Careful there, Billy! Easy, boy! You t go but so fast no how.”
The separator swallowed the buhe golden straw blew out in a golden cloud, the wheat streamed golden-brown out of the spout, while the men hurried. Pa and Uncle Henry pitched bundles down as fast as they could. And chaff and dust blew over everything.
Laura and Mary watched as long as they could.
Then they ran back to the house to help Ma get dinner for all those men.
A big kettle of cabbage a was boiling oove; a big pan of beans and a Johnnycake were baking in the oven. Laura and Mary set the table for the threshers. They put on salt rising bread and butter, bowls of stewed pumpkin, pumpkin pies and dried berry pies and cookies, cheese and honey and pitchers of milk.
Then Ma put on the boiled potatoes and cabbage a, the baked beans, the hot johnnycake and the baked Hubbard squash, and she poured the tea.
Laura always wondered why bread made of eal was called johnny-cake. It wasnt cake. Ma didnt know, uhe Northern soldiers called it johnny-cake because the people in the South, where they fought, ate so much of it.
They called the Southern soldiers Johnny, Rebs. Maybe, they called the Southern bread, cake, just for fun. Ma had heard some say it should be called journey-cake. She didnt know. It wouldnt be very good bread to take on a journey.
At noohreshers came in to the table loaded with food. But there was oo much, for threshers work hard a very hungry.
By the middle of the afternoon the maes had finished all the threshing, and the men who owhem drove them away into the Big Woods, taking with them the sacks of wheat that were their pay. They were going to the place where neighbors had stacked their wheat and wahe maes to thresh it.
Pa was very tired that night, but he was happy. He said to Ma:
"It would have taken Henry aerson and Pa and me a couple of weeks apiece to thresh as much grain with flails as that mae threshed today. We wouldnt have got as much wheat, either, and it wouldnt have been as .
"That maes a great iion!" he said.
"Other folks stick to <bdo>.</bdo>old-fashioned ways if they want to, but Im all fress. Its a great age were living in. As long as I raise wheat, Im going to have a mae e and thresh it, if theres one anywhere in the neighborhood.”
He was too tired that night to talk to Laura, but Laura roud of him. It a who had got the other men to stack their wheat together and send for the threshing mae, and it was a wonderful mae. Everybody was glad it had e.
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