A Horse Called Molly

(Dairy Farming in 1948)

 In 1947 I transferred from Boston Latin School to Jamaica Plain High School, to
pursue college preparatory studies in animal husbandry. I had decided I would one
day 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 hard
labor on a dairy farm in central Vermont. For thirty dollars a month plus room and
board, no less. According to the 1968 film, Will Penny, saddle tramps got $30 a month
plus 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 who
delighted 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 first
meeting, 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 pet
rabbits 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 work
boots, then went out to the kitchen and said I was hungry. The wife said, "Lunch was
over 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 the
left 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 grabbed
the horse behind the knee with both hands to lift her big leg, which probably weighed
as 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 her
breath 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 rode
uphill behind the house to a potato field where the farmer told me to pick rocks and
add them to a stone wall in progress. He explained how to voice-command the
mares. 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 too
sharp less'n you bust my wagon tongue." The farmer turned and walked back down to
the barn
I liked working alone with the mares. Even on the city milk route, working with
horses always established an ancient sense of pace. And peace. A few modern
conveniences 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, which
came early in the valley, I had added three wagon-loads to the wall, at no time using
the reins.

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'. The teeth 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.

Each day followed the same hellish routine -- up

at five AM to the blare of radio march music, do
the milking and other morning chores, wolf down
breakfast, then take the horses into the forest and
spend the rest of the morning felling trees for a
silo the farmer planned to build. It was
back-breaking work, wielding the two-man saw,
sledge-hammering big iron wedges into the cut to
keep it from binding the saw, then limbing the
felled trees with heavy axes. The heat made me
reel, but the farmer would suffer no breaks until a
log was clean as a whistle and ready to haul.
Each morning we felled and limbed at least two
large trees, skidded the logs out to the road with
horse-drawn chains, and stacked them for later
Felling axes transport to a sawmill.

Between fellings we visited one of the farm's

many springs. Never had I tasted anything like cold spring water, fragrant with leaves
and 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 the
broiling sun, and would continue through much of the summer, each field yielding two
crops 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
 and wagon were horse-drawn. All other work,
including mowing with scythes what the
machine missed, and pitching the dried hay
onto the wagon with four-tined forks, required
considerable manpower and sweat. Each load
of hay brought in from the fields had to be
pitched again from wagon to hay-lofts in the
Summer 1948. Me, Dolly (who disliked me), & barn. It was hot dusty work. The remedy for
already antique haying rake. By this time I had dust-parched throats was vinegar water, glugged
muscles in my stools, and spoke like a fahmah.
from a common one-gallon jug hung beneath
the wagon.
As weeks passed and the lower lofts filled
up, 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 rumbling
along the track and I yanked a trip line to drop
the hay so I could spread it by hand, the air
buzzed with angry wasps. I would spend many
hours in that loft, choked by dust, exhausted by
heat, and stung by wasps. Almost daily I
threatened to quit, but this meant losing credits
and having to repeat my junior year, and the
Summer 1948. Me with new calf. Gordie with
unknown, probably one of his rabbits. Probable farmer knew it. I had no choice but to stay.
photographer, Mona, Gordie’s kid sister. When a cow near term failed to show up
for 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 told
us where it was hidden. Somewhere in the tall grass near the woods we’d find the
calf 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 ten
thousand quarts of milk. When a cow dried up, it was sold for beef and got its final
reward, a pointed sledgehammer through the forehead. No place for sentiment in
farming.
The farm offered so few diversions that I often spent my free time, what little I
had, with the children. We watched the farm's half-wild cats hunt rats in the barn, and
bet how many mice would run for cover when we opened a feed bin. We fished for
brook trout and watched great blue herons hunt frogs and fish in the brook. We found
a fox den and watched the kits at play.
Sometimes, just after dark, I waylaid big rats stealing food from the chicken
trough. The rats' only escape route was through a shoulder-high hole in the wall, so I’d
dash for the hole while the children latched the door and the dog kept the rats at bay.
At a signal from me, the dog went on the attack and the rats started leaping for their
escape hole. One even jumped on my shoulder, and then through the hole. While I
batted 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 looked
back 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 on
Sunday 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 beneath
the 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 us
approach quite close. Maybe it was curiosity. How often did wild critters thereabouts
see people riding horses in the deep forest?
The old mare moved like an overweight Arabian, head and tail high, ears
pricked and nostrils flared to catch every sound and smell. Clearly she was loving
every moment.
Before long we were in deep timber. Great trees soared, some a hundred feet
high and straight as temple columns. Between them slanted brilliant sunbeams,
through which flashed birds and insects of every description. I saw many white-tailed
deer. In the cover of deep timber they seldom ran, but instead skulked from tree to
tree. At one point a prime buck, antlers in velvet, paused in a shaft of sunlight and
licked 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 her
fawn were cooling themselves. The deer bounded off into the forest. I stopped at the
stream 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, peanut
butter 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 heron
descended 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 the
heron 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 she
continued 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. The
only creature I missed more when I returned to Boston was a college girl who had
been visiting at a farm next door, but that's another 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
fell after World War II. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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