Kittens and puppies abounded and new chickens, pigs, and calves or colts provided constant interest. Once when two insignificant little dogs were assisted out of the world little Sue took comfort in thinking they would look very cute in Heaven tagging around after God every time He went for a walk.
The son of the house staged one spring a new entertainment. His father took great pride in his first litter of twelve thoroughbred Berkshires, and every day each member of the family inspected the new pigs. One day the son of the chief dairyman dared the boy to kill them, which dare he immediately accepted, doing the execution with a pitchfork. Then followed a thrashing, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and no more slaughterings!
I was not involved in this affair, but I cannot claim blood-guiltlessness. I recall with a shudder my participation in the stabbing of fat frogs in a shallow pool; even then it sent shivers up and down my spine, but I could do almost anything the boys could. I did draw the line at knocking down swallows nests and feeding the baby birds to the cats, although Harry maintained that this was necessary to prevent the introduction of bed-bugs from the nests into the house. A year or two later the boy went out with a new gun that had been given him, but came back telling me that he could not shoot turtle doves who sat in so friendly a fashion together on the fence rail and made mournful sounds, neither could he shoot rabbits, for they looked at him. He was a sensitive boy and the earlier killings belonged to our primitive stage of development.
In those days I frequently watched, in spite of mother’s wish that I should not, the daily butchering of a sheep, not so much the actual slaying, but the skinning and the removal of the slippery, interesting insides; a daily course in anatomy. And blown-up bladders made wonderful playthings.
One of the most interesting features of the Alamitos was the cheese-making that was done on a large scale, two hundred cows being milked for the purpose night and morning. To improve the milk for this Uncle John imported some of the first registered Holsteins into Southern California. There was great excitement among us children, and undoubtedly a fair degree of it among the grown-ups, when a carload of fine animals arrived from New York, prominent among them being several members of the Holstein family of Aaggie, a magnificent bay stallion, and about a dozen Shetland ponies. For a number of years Mrs. Bixby’s span of these harnessed to a tiny buggy were a familiar sight about Long Beach.
She was a skillful driver and I shall never forget a night ride I had with her when I was a little girl. I was going home with her from Los Angeles for a few days at the ranch. We took the train at the Commercial street station at about five o’clock, and when we reached Wilmington at six it was already dark. We went to the livery stable where the teams had been left for the day, and then set out for the ranch, Uncle John in his gig with Fred, the small boy, tucked in under the seat. In the wide, single-seated buggy drawn by two lively horses, Aunt Susan drove, with me between her and the nurse, who held the baby girl. The night was so dark and the fog so thick that we could not see the horses’ heads, much less the road. We followed close to my uncle, who called back every few minutes, and found the way across the bridge and started along Anaheim Road, not a street lined with houses as it now is, but just a track across the bare mesa. It was before the day of Long Beach.
Slowly, slowly, we went along, almost feeling our way, blindfolded by the mist. There was not a light or a sound, and soon we lost Uncle John, but Aunt Susan did not fail in courage and told us she was going to give the horses their head and trust them to take us home. Bye and bye, after two hours they came to a stop and we found we were on the brow of the hill, above the wool barn, just a few steps from the house. It was relief enough for me to have come home, what must it have been to the woman driving!
One other foggy drive I took many years later. I was fifteen and had been for several days at the Alamitos, among other things drawing the spots of several new Holstein calves on the blanks of application for registration, that being a privilege reserved for me, the wielder of the pencil among us. In order to be back in school Monday morning, I had to be taken over to Long Beach to meet the first Los Angeles train. How many times have I eaten lamp-lit breakfasts in the old ranch dining room and started off in the sweet fresh morning, to watch the dawn and hear the larks sing as we drove!
This foggy morning Uncle John was driving and as it was April there was a pearly light over every thing. Every hair of his beard and eyebrows was strung with tiny drops of water; we had a most happy hour, drawn by Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The next day came word of sudden sickness. In ten days my merry young uncle was dead. It did not seem possible. It was my first realization of death. And childhood ended. When my mother had gone I was ten, and while it seemed strange, it did not stand out from all the strangeness of the world as did this later coming face to face with the mystery. In the case of my mother I missed her more as years went by than I did at the time of the actual separation.
Aunt Martha was distressed when after mother’s death she came to us, to find how often we children played that our dolls had died. We held a funeral service and buried them under the sofa in the parlor after a solemn procession through the long hall. We wore towels over our heads for mourning veils, copied not from any used in our family, but from those of two tall, dark sisters who sat in front of us in church, whose crepe-covered dresses and veils that reached the floor were a source of unfailing wonder.