
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 10, 1941.
“Uncle Abe has invited me down…” began Jimmie Frise.
“I thought it was understood,” I cut him short, “that as far as your Uncle Abe is concerned, you and I are no longer partners. Every time I’ve visited your genial Uncle Abe it has turned out a lot of hard work.”
“It’s about his will,” explained Jimmie. “He wants to make some changes in his will, and I’ve always sat in with him…”
“Will my neck,” I assured him. “One time he had the lumbago and we ended up plowing. Another time he invited you down to get some maple syrup and we ended up mending his tractor.”
“No, it’s his will, all right,” said Jim. “He changes it about every two years. He’s been kind of poorly this winter and I have been expecting him to send for me. He likes to keep his will up to date.”
“Okay,” I said. “You go down if you like. But I swore I would never go back after that last time when we landed right into the barley threshing and I had the job on top of the straw stack.”
“It’s a swell time of year to visit a farm,” pleaded Jimmie. “There won’t be any work. All the plowing’s done and the seeding. It’s really his will, I feel sure. While I’m sitting in with him re-writing his will, you can wander over the farm looking at bird nests and helping Rusty stalk ground-hogs.”
“No, Jim,” I said finally. “You go yourself. A will is too intimate a document for a lot of strangers to be hanging around. Anyway, what the dickens has your Uncle Abe got to leave in a will?”
“Well, he’s got the equity in the farm,” said Jim, “and all the stock and implements. And his house and furniture.”
“Won’t he leave all that to his wife?” I demanded.
“Yes,” explained Jim, “but he’s scared to death he and Aunt Emma will be killed at the same time in a motor accident or something, and he has a hunch his relatives will get everything.”
“You, for instance?” I inquired.
“No, no,” said Jim. “There are a lot of relatives and he wants his will so fixed that certain of them…”
“Aaaaah,” I smiled. “So you’ve got your eye…”
“No,” protested Jim, “all he’s leaving me is an old walnut highboy, the most beautiful old thing you ever saw; and the farm bell.”
“Bell?” I queried.
“There’s a bell in a little cupola on top of the back shed,” said Jim, “that I have envied all my life. It is a regular farm bell. about the size of a church bell, with the sweetest tone. They used to ring it to call the hands in off the fields for dinner. But there haven’t been any hands to call now for thirty years and the bell is never rung.”
“What would you do with it?” I asked.
“Put it on my summer cottage,” said Jim, “to call the children in for meals.”
When the World is Young
“I wonder if any of the other farms in the neighborhood might have a bell they’d sell,” I said. “That’s not a bad idea to have a bell at the summer cottage to call the kids home.”
“There might be,” said Jim. “In fact, there’s sure to be. You come down with me. and while I’m closeted with Uncle Abe, you can roam around the neighborhood. In fact. Uncle Abe is sure to know if any of the neighbors have bells. You could probably buy one for $51.”
“Besides,” I admitted, “there is a rose- breasted grosbeak nesting in that woodlot on the hill back of Uncle Abe’s farm. The male bird will be singing like an angel at this season of the year.”
“I’m glad you’ll come,” said Jim. “There’s no time of the year so lovely on a farm.”
It is less than 100 miles, to Uncle Abe’s, and you can get there in two hours by main highways. But main highways are no way to travel in May. Highways are for traffic. And by traffic I mean something mean and greedy. The highways are filled with trucks rushing merchandise at the fastest rate possible in order to get to its destination before somebody else’s merchandise gets there. Highways are filled with salesmen racing at breakneck speed to beat all other salesmen to a dollar. Highways are really low-ways. From highways, people without greed in their souls should keep away. There is always a much nicer way of getting any place in the world than by the highways.
Especially in May, when all the world is like a girl of 17 or a boy of 21. So Jimmie and I went the round-about way to Uncle Abe’s, and we did it in three hours instead of the highway’s boasted two; but the extra hour bought us far more than an hour’s worth of pleasure. For we saw miles of countryside filled with farms where people live in quiet happiness though the world goes mad. And we saw villages and a couple of towns with a back-road quiet and content in them that was like a physical balm to the minds and hearts of us war-rasped denizens of cities.
“These people,” I declared to Jim as we drove through the villages and towns and farm lands, “are collecting the dividends of the investment their pioneer fathers made of themselves and their lives in a new world.”
“Canada doesn’t realize how lucky she is,” agreed Jim.
“The people who first cleared these fields,” I persisted, “and first built these little villages did not come away from the Old World because they saw an easy life ahead of them. They saw a hard life. The men and the women who took the awful chance of leaving their families and friends and homes and all the familiar world to venture across menacing oceans to come to a savage and wilderness land must have had a lot of courage.”
“Or a great discontent,” added Jim.
“Well, these people living here,” I submitted, “are the heirs of that courage and that discontent. I wonder if they realize what a great legacy has been handed down to them by their all-but-forgotten forebears.”
“If it hadn’t been for those venturers,” admitted Jim, “all these people would have been back in the Old World right now.”
“Every one of them,” I agreed.
Uncle Abe is “Poorly”
“Do you figure there is much courage or much discontent left in these people?” inquired Jim.
“Well, look at your Uncle Abe,” I cried. “An elderly gentleman troubled with lumbago the minute the plowing or the harvesting comes along…”
“Now you go easy on Uncle Abe,” warned Jimmie. “He’s never had much money. He never went to school past his entrance. He was born and lived his entire life on the farm. When he was young, Ontario farmers were our well-to-do class. There was no better or more profitable life in the province than farming. But Uncle Abe has lived his life through a period of change and revolution in which the whole trend went against the farmer. All the power of modern science and invention went to the benefit of the cities. Every new improvement in the art of living went to the cities. All the comforts and conveniences of civilization went to the industrial communities. The city mechanic, even the common laborer, lived a more comfortable and a more interesting and attractive life than the farmer. The control of prices and the development of marketing by transporting farm produce, meat, vegetables, fruit, milk and everything else from one part of the country to another has gradually pushed the farmer against the wall. Uncle Abe has lived through that great period of decline. Now, to make a living at all, he has to work harder than any laborer in a city. And he has no union to protect him.”
“Why don’t the farmers form a union?” I wondered.
“Some day they will,” assured Jim. “When things really get bad, the farmers will form a plain, ordinary trade union on the lines of industrial unions.”
“Why haven’t they done it already?” I insisted.
“Politics has always scuttled them so far,” explained Jim. “But, like the industrial workers, the farmers will one day realize that their politics are of secondary importance to their rights.”
So when we drove down Uncle Abe’s lane and up to the side of the house and found Uncle Abe in a rocking chair on the side porch, in the sun, I looked upon him with a warmer and friendlier eye than I expected of myself after past collisions with him.
“I’ve been poorly all winter,” he answered our first inquiries. “I don’t think I am long for this world.”
The old boy looked the picture of ruddy health and he was fatter and more genial-looking than ever.
We protested his fears and told him how well he looked. But when Aunt Emma brought chairs and we all sat down on the porch, Uncle Abe went into a detailed account of how poorly he had been all winter, and like a seed catalogue, he went alphabetically over his symptoms. It was obvious from the way he itemized everything that he had had plenty of practice at the job of recounting his poorly condition.
So at last I brought the matter to a head. “I understand you have some private business to talk over with Jim,” I said, rising, “so I’ll just go and prowl around…”
Aunt Emma took me down to the barn to see the new calves and the two colts. We also saw a new litter of pups that Trix, the farm collie, had borne. Then we heard Uncle Abe calling and we met him and Jimmie coming down to the barn.
“Uncle Abe was just going to show me the sheep,” explained Jim. “They’re ready for shearing.”
I walked around to the far side of Jim and gave him a sharp nudge. I pulled his coat. But he ignored me.
“One of the best sheep shearers in this country,” Uncle Abe was saying, “used to do mine. But this war has upset everything. He was a Scotchman. He went to war.”
Aunt Emma left us and said she had to go and get lunch.
“I only have 17 sheep,” said Uncle Abe, who was walking slowly with his back bent at the kidneys, one hand back holding himself there. “That Scotchman would have done the lot in an hour. You never saw the like. He just grabbed them, rolled them over, run the shears into them and laid that blanket off so slick. You couldn’t believe your eyes.”
“I’ve helped shear sheep,” said Jim excitedly. “But I don’t think I ever handled the shears.”
“It’s no trick at all,” said Uncle Abe. “It’s a lot easier than skinning a fish.”
And he gave me a look out of the corner of his eyes.
“I suppose anything is easy if you know how,” I agreed. “How are you going to get them sheared? Probably one of your neighbors…”
“The last offer I had,” said Uncle Abe, stopping and having a twinge in his back which made him roll his eyes in agony, “was 50 cents a sheep. Perfectly absurd. Fifty cents a sheep2. Why, that Scotchman worked by the day. Two dollars a day. And when he had finished the sheep, he plowed the rest of the day.”
“The war has certainly put an end to those good old days,” I confessed.
“And the war,” contributed Jim, “has done a lot of good by bringing out unsuspected qualities in men. I bet I could shear a sheep if I really tried.”
“Oh, Jim,” cried Uncle Abe, “would you? What a good lad you are! Always coming to help your old uncle at the very minute I’m stuck with a problem.”
“It would be a pretty patchy job,” submitted Jim.
“My dear boy, I don’t care how patchy,” said Uncle Abe.
“Could you hold them while I shear?” inquired Jim.
“Oh, I’m afraid my back…” said Uncle Abe helplessly.
And the two of them had the effrontery to stop and look straight at me.
The sheep were the most unpleasant gathering of animals I ever saw. They were shaggy and clotted and matted and filthy. They were full of burrs. They smelled high3. The ram, who was in a pen back of the rest was the most yellow-eyed devil of a rank old ram I ever saw.
“Would I have to hold them?” I inquired. “By the neck?”
“You have to hug them,” explained Jim. “I grab them, then you reach under and grab the off leg and throw them on their back, Then you sit and hold the sheep sort of on top of you while I shear it…”
“Jim,” I interrupted, “if it is anything like skinning a fish, I will do the shearing. You do the hugging.”
So Uncle Abe went and got the shears and then had to leave us to go and sit in his rocker because the ache was coming on.
The fool sheep seemed to know that something was coming. The lambs bleated anxiously and the sheep emitted silly, flat squawls and the ram in the inner enclosure kept taking little short back-ups and sudden short runs with his head down.
Jim climbed into the pen and cautiously, with arms spread, drove the sheep this way and that until one old ewe, with a high-strung face and a turn-down mouth that seemed to be made for bleating, was cornered. Jim jumped and grabbed her by the thick wool of the back.
“Hold her head,” he gasped, “while I throw her.”
At a Disadvantage
I got a half Nelson around her neck. She kept continually going ahead and backing up and it was a struggle to hold her. Jim got down and reached under.
“Now,” he grunted, giving the sheep a roll and landing her on her back, himself sitting down violently and getting under so that he had her forelegs and shoulders in the air and her hind legs waving madly.
The other sheep stood back aghast and a lone lamb came and bleated hideously in my ear.
“Hang one leg across her hind legs,” gasped Jim, struggling, “and then start the shears right there.”
He stuck his finger in the wool up near her neck.
“Then snip along, laying it off in a wad, like a blanket,” he directed.
The first one was a mess. The wool came off in various sized wads. I was afraid of nipping the animal, which trembled and shook as I snipped with the grass cutters. Some places I had the wool off right to the pinkish skin of the beast. Then would come a patch where I left it an inch long. I saw several ticks sticking horribly in the skin, fat blue slugs.
“Ugh,” I said.
“Swell,” said Jimmie, heavily. “Now easy up around the neck here.”
But I left a kind of ruff around that one’s neck. The second one came off easier, and almost in one piece. The third one was hard to catch and two lambs came and bleated in my ear while I labored. The others in the pen kept up the helpless bleating as if we were murdering them, instead of doing them a great favor for the coming of summer.
Jim swears he did not see the ram coming. I heard various thuds and bumps back in the inner pen. But it seems the crying of his wives and children had given the ram new strength. He broke down or vaulted the inner pen. And just as he came through the outer bars, I started to rise from my kneeling position to get at a new cut on the sheep. And he had me at the famous, the historic disadvantage.
On the way home in the car, I rode in the back seat, lying down crossways, with my knees up.
“Was it five times he hit me, Jim?” I asked.
“No, it was only three,” said Jim, kindly.
“Well, for the fifth time,” I stated, “I am through with visiting your Uncle Abe.”
Editor’s Notes: The title comes from a proverb, ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ (God is especially gentle towards those who are very vulnerable).
Uncle Abe and his farm are regulars in these stories.