"Hold up there, Jinny," he admonished, lifting her tasseled leg and catching the hoof between his leather knees. "This ain't going to hurt you a bit, Jinny. Nice new shoes for a pretty lady."
There had been a log house on the farm where the brick one stood now, and Stud had often heard his father tell how the deer came to eat the cabbages, and how one night a cougar had looked in at the window.... Rain came in through the cracks in the hand-split hickory shingles, it whipped into the faces of the eight children sleeping in the loft on the corn-husk mattresses ... rain and snow in the winter, mosquitoes in the summer. Cracks between the logs which no amount of mudding would completely fill.
Stud could just remember the log house; it had been torn down the year he was five. There were wide stone fireplaces at either end of the big downstairs room, tallow candles made in a mold brought over from England on the sailing ship, a flintlock rifle with which his father could hit a squirrel at one hundred yards. There had been sweet-smelling roots and herbs hanging from the beams, seed corn, hams, and traps for catching bobcats and foxes that came to steal the chickens.
And kids all over the place. Three girls and five boys.... Stud wished he could have a family of husky youngsters like that. He didn't blame Sarah for the fact that all of her babies had died except Peter. But he did wish that Peter could have been a real farmer. He wished that he would quit mooning around and find a girl and use his fists more often. He wondered if the boy would actually run away to Chicago to work in an automobile or trailer factory. It made him bitter to think that farming wasn't good enough for his son.
Stud drove home the tapered horse-shoe nails with a viciousness which made the mare dance like a tumble-weed.
"Whoa, there, you ornery piece of horseflesh. Act like a lady or I'll larrup the living daylights out of you."
Times were soft, Stud argued. Kids got notions in their heads. Like Peter wanting to build automobiles or trailers. Everyone riding instead of walking, talking about a device to milk cows by electricity, wearing gloves for husking in the fields.
When Stud was a boy men husked corn bare-handed. He could remember how his fingers cracked and bled in the cold, how one could follow his trail across the snow by the drops of blood. At night the men laughed about their split fingers, rubbed in hot tallow, and next morning went at it again.
Underwear was a luxury and almost unknown. Men wore their coarse homespun against their skin. The burrs in the virgin wool scratched like pins and needles.