Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

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Work? Of course, a boy had to work in a household where my mother was the ruler. She worked all the time herself and had prodigious energy. What awakened me every day was the clangor of iron lids on her cookstove before the sun was up. For years her kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in winter, and to reach its blazing comfort in a morning that was still night-black, often I had to scamper bare-footed across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. I shared a bed with my bigger brother Ed, who was three years and three months older. Before breakfast Ed had cows to milk, but I had other work to do.

Sometimes I was sent early to get the soup meat. Until I was six or seven, the few hundred people who lived in Ellis almost never got beef; we all ate buffalo meat. There was an abundance of it and it was cheap; some of it was shipped east to other towns. The rump was what my mother wanted. She would put a great hunk of this maroon-and-bluish gristled meat into the big black iron pot in which she made her soup. I have never tasted any other soup quite so good. She never served her soup on the day she made it, but, steaming hot, it would appear on the table the next morning when we had breakfast. What enormous meals those were with which a Kansas day began back in the '80's! Steaks, potatoes, pancakes, followed soup. Often we had hominy, but if we did, we owed it, every grain, to my mother. She soaked the yellow grains in lye water until the flintlike yellow coating vanished. A mound of hominy was material out of which to build a dike to retain a lake of gravy. My mother not only made the hominy but she grew the corn. She had a garden where no weed was ever tolerated. There was no task she ever dodged for lack of strength or skill or willingness.