Our lives centred around warmth
and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when
they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands cracked
and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously: feed and
water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs. When
supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of their
bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather read his
paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the stove,
`easing' their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their cracked
hands.
Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to
sing, `For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong,' or, `Bury Me Not on the
Lone Prairee.' He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing when
we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.
I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see
the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good
fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept
faith with!
Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner; had wandered
all over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though,
as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
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