A Son of the Middle Border

by Hamlin Garland

My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen. This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long stick.

Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we joyfully gathered. I remember with especial pleasure the delicious shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow.

Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted, something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was a feast.

There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake! During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I, with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.

Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the ground, and he put a tine through it.

As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.

Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on the farm—and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his square jaws and poisonous fangs.

Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with if one kept to the daylight.

The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer, although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape.

Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die till sundown.