When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the
island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted
long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which
duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their
heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which
swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying
any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a
Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of
them grew.
But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it
then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes
of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were
necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the cornfield
beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a
different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I
were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.
I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of
ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We
had then begun to build our new house. The frame had been raised, as the
custom of that country still was, in a frolic of the neighbors, to whom
unlimited coffee and a boiled ham had been served in requital of their
civility, and now we were kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. To
do this we had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright
all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had
set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire.
This fire had to be watched night and day, and it never took less than
three or four boys, and often all the boys of the neighborhood, to watch
it, and to turn and change the boards. The summer of Southern Ohio is
surely no joke, and it must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I
remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn,
whose ears we spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the
red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same
time.
But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became
intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing,
reduced almost to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the
river. In those days one went in swimming (we did not say bathing) four
or five times a day with advantage and refreshment; anything more than
that was, perhaps, thought unwholesome.
We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed
through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the
swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and
there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.
We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-snakes in our
swimming holes, though we never saw any. There were some fish in the
river, chiefly suckers and catfish in the spring, when the water was
high and turbid, and in summer the bream that we call sunfish in the
West, and there was a superstition, never verified by me, of bass. The
truth is, we did not care much for fishing, though of course that had
its turn in the pleasures of our rolling year.
There were crawfish, both hard shell and soft, to be had at small risk,
and mussels in plenty. Their shells furnished us the material for many
rings zealously, begun, never finished; we did not see why they did not
produce pearls; but perhaps they were all eaten up, before the
pearl-disease could attack them, by the muskrats, before whose holes
their shells were heaped. Sometimes we saw a muskrat smoothly swimming
to or from his hole, and making a long straight line through the water,
and lusted for his blood; but he always chose the times for these
excursions when we had not our trusty smooth-bore with us, and we stoned
him in vain.
I have spoken of the freshets which sometimes inundated our island; but
these were never very serious. They fertilized it with the loam they
brought down from richer lands above, and they strewed its low shores
with stranded drift. But there were so many dams on the river that no
freshet could gather furious head upon it; at the worst, it could back
up upon us the slack water from the mill-dam below us. Once this took
place in such degree that our wheels stood still in their flooded tubs.
This was a truly tremendous time. The event appears in the retrospect to
have covered many days; I dare say it covered a half-day at most.
Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passes in
that latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could
not have been much sledding either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter
Parley’s _First Book of History_, of the coasting on Boston Common, and
we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened
hopelessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never
had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in
the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and
mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might often have used
sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads,
and lasted all winter.
There were not many boys in our neighborhood, and we brothers had to
make the most of one another’s company. For a little while in the winter
some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there
was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log-hut,
and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No
impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the
turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks.