Fields of Home by Ralph Moody

“Good Lord sakes alive, what ails you? You ain’t been nipping at that bottle a’ready this morning, have you? Leave me be, Levi, afore you get my hair a-looking like a rat’s nest.”
    Uncle Levi took one arm loose, pulled Millie up tight against his hip, and spanked her a good sharp one. “That’ll learn you not to sass your elders,” he told her as he swung her around again, but they were both laughing when they came back to the table.
    If there was anything the matter with the apple pie, I didn’t find it, and nobody else seemed to either. Grandfather was only half finished with his sausage and eggs, but he pushed his plate right back, and dished a big slab of hot pie onto his tea saucer. He seemed to have caught some of Uncle Levi’s excitement and, as he waved his knife with a mouthful of pie on it, sang out, “By gorry, Levi, we’ll make the hay fly now! With three stout hands of us, we’ll have it all fetched into the mows come Sunday fortnight. I and Ralphie’ll grind the scythes whilst you’re putting new teeth in the handsweeps.”
    I’d never seen handsweeps, and I didn’t think much of them when I did see them. They were hay rakes about four feet wide, with eight-inch wooden teeth, and a handle that looked like a short, slim wagon tongue. The ones Grandfather had must have been a hundred years old. The handles had been worn thin, they were weathered almost black, a quarter of the teeth were broken, and, where bolts were missing, they were hitched together with rusty wire. When Grandfather got them down from the carriage house attic, Uncle Levi’s mouth went the way it did when he was looking at the breakfast, then he almost hollered, “By hub, Thomas, why in tarnation don’t you take a little care with your tools? It’s a God’s wonder they hold together ’twixt one time and another when I come down here.”
    Grandfather yelled back from the attic, “They held together all right whilst you was off homesteading in Dakota. By fire, if you don’t want to fix ’em, go off and do something else. I and . . . ”
    I didn’t want to be there if they were going to fight, so I wandered off toward the barn. The blisters on my hands were pretty sore, and I didn’t feel as if it would be a bit of fun to drag one of those handsweeps all around the orchard. I’d noticed a couple of broken-down old horserakes lying with the other junk machinery out behind the sheep barn, and I went down there to look them over.
    One of them was a complete wreck. It looked as if it had been run over by a freight train, but the other wasn’t too bad. One of the wheels was smashed, the tongue was broken, five or six teeth were missing, and it had been robbed of nuts and bolts. I looked it all over carefully, and there didn’t seem to be much the matter with it that couldn’t be fixed in a few hours. One of the wheels on the wrecked one was in pretty good shape; just bent a little, but it could be heated and hammered straight. The funny thing was that the lift handle was missing from both machines, and somebody had taken the trip gears off the better one and put them back onto the wrong ends of the axle.
    When I went back to the carriage house, Uncle Levi had split a maple block into little sticks that looked like kindling. He’d pushed the junk on the bench back a way from the vise, had one of the little sticks in it, and was shaping it carefully with a spoke shave. Grandfather had driven the broken-off teeth out of the sweeps and, just as I came into the carriage house, he snapped, “Let be! Let be, Levi! Time flies! Just whittle the shanks down a dite and drive ’em home tight!”
    I only let Uncle Levi get as far as, “Thomas, it’s a God’s wonder . . . ” before I said, “Couldn’t we fix up one of those old horserakes down by the sheep barn about as easy as to make new teeth for the handsweeps? There’s one of them down there that doesn’t look too bad, and . . . ”
    “Worthless!