VIGNETTES a Horse Called Molly

8/9/2019 VIGNETTES a Horse Called Molly

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A Horse Called Molly

(Dairy Farming in 1948)



In 1947 I transferred from Boston Latin School to Jamaica Plain High School, topursue college preparatory studies in animal husbandry. I had decided I would oneday raise horses.

By June of 1948 I had completed my junior year with good grades, but full credit

wouldn’t be mine until I had earned my work credits by spending the summer at hardlabor on a dairy farm in central Vermont. For thirty dollars a month plus room andboard, no less. According to the 1968 film, Will Penny, saddle tramps got $30 a monthplus room and board in the mid-1800s. And they may have worked as hard as I did,but I doubt it.

I'll keep this short so I can get to Molly. The farmer was a tall rangy Scot whodelighted in my suffering. His wife was a florid sweaty woman of ample proportions.Her food was, like her, plain but abundant. She ended most declarative statements

with heh-heh. They had two platinum-haired children; a boy ten, a girl seven. On firstmeeting, referring to his sister's sun-top, the boy told me, "Mona wore her new tit-holders jes' fer you." Later he would show me, with his sister present, how his petrabbits made little rabbits. City boy learns facts of life from country tykes.

I was shown to my room and given an hour to unpack and change. I hung my good clothes in the old chifforobe, donned a blue denim shirt, dungarees and workboots, then went out to the kitchen and said I was hungry. The wife said, "Lunch wasover an hour ago, heh-heh," as she fed me a cold baked-bean sandwich and a glass of milk. I gagged. I was accustomed to thinned-down pasteurized city milk. This was

whole raw milk, so thick and flavorful that it took some getting used to.The farmer took me out to the stable and showed me how to harness the big

Percheron draft mares, Dolly and Molly. They had to be harnessed with Dolly on theleft because she was going blind in her right eye. Dolly immediately asserted herself

by standing on my foot. The farmer grinned his crooked grin as I cursed and grabbedthe horse behind the knee with both hands to lift her big leg, which probably weighedas much as I did. Dolly feigned innocence, then nipped me when I turned my back.

The other mare nickered and nuzzled my neck. I liked the oaty smell of herbreath and the velvety skin of her muzzle. It was mutual love at first sight.

Having often harnessed the milkman's horse when I delivered milk in the city, I was quick to master the double harness. We hitched the mares to a wagon and rodeuphill behind the house to a potato field where the farmer told me to pick rocks andadd them to a stone wall in progress. He explained how to voice-command themares. Come up, girls meant go ahead. Come up a step meant just that. Back a step,

girls. Back, girls meant back until I say whoa. Haw for left turn, gee for right. Back

haw, back gee. And the only familiar terms, stay and whoa. "Don't back-turn 'em toosharp less'n you bust my wagon tongue." The farmer turned and walked back down tothe barn

I liked working alone with the mares. Even on the city milk route, working withhorses always established an ancient sense of pace. And peace. A few modernconveniences aside, I felt as if had stepped back into the nineteenth century. My

wages certainly had.



The winter frost-heaves had raised a good crop of rocks. By sunset, whichcame early in the valley, I had added three wagon-loads to the wall, at no time usingthe reins.

Each day followed the same hellish routine -- upat five AM to the blare of radio march music, dothe milking and other morning chores, wolf downbreakfast, then take the horses into the forest andspend the rest of the morning felling trees for asilo the farmer planned to build. It was

back-breaking work, wielding the two-man saw,sledge-hammering big iron wedges into the cut tokeep it from binding the saw, then limbing thefelled trees with heavy axes. The heat made mereel, but the farmer would suffer no breaks until alog was clean as a whistle and ready to haul.Each morning we felled and limbed at least twolarge trees, skidded the logs out to the road withhorse-drawn chains, and stacked them for latertransport to a sawmill.

Between fellings we visited one of the farm'smany springs. Never had I tasted anything like cold spring water, fragrant with leavesand evergreen needles. I often saw deer tracks in the moist earth edging the springs.

Even worse than logging was haying, for this was done in open fields, in thebroiling sun, and would continue through much of the summer, each field yielding twocrops of alfalfa and clover. The hay was mown with a chattering cutter bar, left to dry,and gathered into windrows with a rotating side-delivery rake. Mowing machine, rake

The two-man saw has been around since the middle ages. This is called a 'cross-cut' saw because it’s designed to cut across the grain, for

example, to fell a tree. A 'whip saw' or 'rip saw' would cut with the grain to make lumber. Note the combinations of teeth and 'rakers'. Theteeth cut. The rakers scrape the cuttings away. Every saw must address two problems; cutting, and purging the sawdust from the cut without

binding up the saw in the process. This isn’t easy with a two-man saw designed to cut in both directions.

Felling axes



and wagon were horse-drawn. All other work,including mowing with scythes what themachine missed, and pitching the dried hay onto the wagon with four-tined forks, requiredconsiderable manpower and sweat. Each load

of hay brought in from the fields had to bepitched again from wagon to hay-lofts in thebarn. It was hot dusty work. The remedy fordust-parched throats was vinegar water, gluggedfrom a common one-gallon jug hung beneaththe wagon.

As weeks passed and the lower lofts filledup, the hay was lifted to the upper lofts by a

jeep-powered track fork that carried a third of a wagon-load. As each big load came rumblingalong the track and I yanked a trip line to dropthe hay so I could spread it by hand, the airbuzzed with angry wasps. I would spend many hours in that loft, choked by dust, exhausted by heat, and stung by wasps. Almost daily Ithreatened to quit, but this meant losing creditsand having to repeat my junior year, and thefarmer knew it. I had no choice but to stay.

When a cow near term failed to show upfor milking, the boy and I went looking for her.

We usually found her at the forest's edge, half wild and jumpy as hell, trying to lead us

away from her calf, and charging us when we got too close to it, which of course toldus where it was hidden. Somewhere in the tall grass near the woods we’d find thecalf curled up, as scent-free and still as a fawn, obeying instincts undimmed by millennia of domestication. And while the boy distracted the cow, I’d sling the calf over my shoulders and carry it up to the barn, there to wean it by getting it to suck my thumb in a pail of milk, then to drink from the pail. Bull calves were sold for veal

within weeks. Heifers were nurtured toward annual production approaching tenthousand quarts of milk. When a cow dried up, it was sold for beef and got its finalreward, a pointed sledgehammer through the forehead. No place for sentiment infarming.

The farm offered so few diversions that I often spent my free time, what little Ihad, with the children. We watched the farm's half-wild cats hunt rats in the barn, andbet how many mice would run for cover when we opened a feed bin. We fished forbrook trout and watched great blue herons hunt frogs and fish in the brook. We founda fox den and watched the kits at play.

Sometimes, just after dark, I waylaid big rats stealing food from the chickentrough. The rats' only escape route was through a shoulder-high hole in the wall, so I’ddash for the hole while the children latched the door and the dog kept the rats at bay.

Summer 1948. Me, Dolly (who disliked me), &already antique haying rake. By this time I hadmuscles in my stools, and spoke like a fahmah.

Summer 1948. Me with new calf. Gordie withunknown, probably one of his rabbits. Probablephotographer, Mona, Gordie’s kid sister.



At a signal from me, the dog went on the attack and the rats started leaping for theirescape hole. One even jumped on my shoulder, and then through the hole. While Ibatted my share out of the park with an ax handle, the dog broke backs. Meanwhile,the children watched through cracks in the door, and the hens on their roosts lookedback and forth like spectators at a tennis match. The record night's toll was ten rats,

which I photographed on the lawn next morning with the old collie sitting proudly beside them. The hunts seemed to give the old dog a new lease on life.

Monday through Saturday, I worked from dawn till well after dark. Even onSunday I had morning and evening chores, but the rest of each Sunday was my own.My first Sunday had been a day of rest, but on the next I packed a lunch and rode Molly bareback into the forest.

As the forest closed in behind us, I felt a keen sense of escape. The air beneaththe forest canopy was dark and cool, fragrant with evergreen and alive with birdsong.The horse's scent must have masked mine, for deer and many other animals let usapproach quite close. Maybe it was curiosity. How often did wild critters thereaboutssee people riding horses in the deep forest?

The old mare moved like an overweight Arabian, head and tail high, earspricked and nostrils flared to catch every sound and smell. Clearly she was lovingevery moment.

Before long we were in deep timber. Great trees soared, some a hundred feethigh and straight as temple columns. Between them slanted brilliant sunbeams,through which flashed birds and insects of every description. I saw many white-taileddeer. In the cover of deep timber they seldom ran, but instead skulked from tree totree. At one point a prime buck, antlers in velvet, paused in a shaft of sunlight andlicked his nostrils, the better to smell us.

All morning we wandered logging roads and any smaller trails that Molly could

negotiate. When the sun stood overhead, we came to a stream where a doe and herfawn were cooling themselves. The deer bounded off into the forest. I stopped at thestream and stripped to the waist. As I sat on the sun-dappled bank to eat my lunch,Molly moved to higher ground and entered a nearby meadow to graze.

Black-capped chickadees appeared and accepted food from my fingers. A chipmunk flitted and flowed along the opposite bank, then crossed the stream by way of a tree branch to feed from my hand. Even at the peak of summer's bounty, peanutbutter seems irresistible to many forest creatures.

I shared my last bit of sandwich with the animals, cooled myself in the brook,and lay against the steep grassy slope to dry myself in the sun. A blue herondescended through a gap in the canopy, waggling its great wings to avoid branches.The bird alighted and began stalking frogs and crayfish in the stream. I watched theheron for a while, then retrieved the mare. By this time, of course, I was totally lost.But I figured the mare could smell the way back, so I just said, "Home, Molly," and shecontinued downstream alongside the brook, which led us back to the farm buildings.This was how I spent nearly every Sunday that summer. That smart old horse knew

when Sunday came, too. When I went out to the stable to take her for a ride, she would be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with anticipation. I loved that old mare.



Oh, and there were the next-door neighbors a mile or two down the road, name of Bruce, and their daughter’s college room-mate came to visit. Dark and petite withElizabeth Taylor eyes. I could scarcely ask for seconds at supper, and I was invited to

supper a lot. One evening we all played hide-and-seek, and it was chilly so I lent hermy shirt and when I found her hiding in the barn she let me kiss her and touch herthrough my shirt and next morning I saw her driven off by her fiance. But that'sanother story, and this ain't the place fer it.

The Percheron is a breed of draft horses that originated in the Perche valley in northern France. Percherons are usually gray or

black in color. They’re well-muscled, intelligent, and willing to work. They were originally bred for war, but came to be used

for pulling stage coaches, and later for agriculture and hauling heavy goods. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Arabian blood

was added to the breed. Percherons accounted for 70% of the draft horse population in the United States, but their numbers fellafter World War II. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.



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VIGNETTES a Horse Called Molly