Plowing On Sunday — Inside the Classic

ng had come rushing up the Mississippi valley out of the warm Gulf states, out of the bayous and river bottoms bringing the fragrance of wet earth and leaf mold, the sweet smell of sap running in the maples, the acrid smells of dung and marshland. At Rock Island, Illinois, spring, and the wild fowl, had turned off the main stream to follow the Rock River valley up through Rockford, Beloit, Janesville, until at last with a final onslaught they had taken Lake Koshkonong and the farms and oak woods along its shores.

Overnight wildflowers bloomed on the hills, buttercups, anemones, dog violets, real violets, and the gaudy dandelions which children held beneath each other's chins to discover with great certainty who did and who did not like butter. Pickerel began to run up the creeks and back into the marshy bays of the lake; the little streams were flooded, and furry buds no larger than the ears of mice began to show on the black, gnarled branches of the oak trees.

And spring to Stanley Brailsford meant plowing.

"Hi up there, Bess!" he shouted. "Get a move on, Jinny."

He guided the plow with one hand for a moment, using the other to slap the reins sharply across the sweating flanks of the team of mares. He turned them with an expert grace at the end of the furrow, went down along the fencerow and around the outer edge of the field.

A dozen white chickens, two or three bold robins, and Shep, the mischievous young farm dog followed the furrow in an absurd parade. The birds were greedy for the pink angle-worms, fat, purple night-crawlers, and succulent grubs. The dog delighted in making the chickens leap six feet into the air with playful passes at their proud white tails.

"Get along you lazy hunks of horseflesh," Stud told the team. "Pretty near time we had this twenty planted. What you horses going to eat next winter, sawdust?"

He stopped for a moment to wipe his forehead with his red bandana pulled from the voluminous depths of his overalls pocket, gazed back over the neatly pleated acres of moist, black soil to the meadow beyond, and to the sandy beach of the big lake beyond that. A pickerel splashed in the shallow water.

"Holy Moses, that must've weighed twenty pounds," Stud told the dog.

Even the fish were frisky today. Shep was frisky and so was Stud. Ulysses S. Grant was acting like a wild boar, Napoleon more like a Texas longhorn than a Jersey, while Admiral Dewey, the Shetland pony stallion was the worst of the lot.

The Admiral had a habit of biting bigger horses' legs, then leaping about, prancing and whinnying. Stud knew it was a bad policy to let a stallion run loose in the pasture but he couldn't find it in his heart to shut the little rascal in the barn. The Admiral and Mrs. Dewey were the happiest married couple he had ever seen. They had been running together for five years now. Five pony colts had made Mrs. Dewey look a bit matronly, but the little Stallion was still a holy terror.

"Sarah's a bit like Mrs. Dewey," thought the man. "Quiet, and good and sort of sweet. But me, I'm like the Admiral."

The dinner bell cut across his thoughts with its distant hollow clangor, now full and near as the breeze brought it directly to his ears, now remote and thin as the wind veered. The horses pricked up their ears and stamped impatiently, Stud, whistling loudly and merrily, unsnapped the tugs and clucked. Released from their dragging burden the team trotted over the soft earth at such a pace that Stud Brailsford had to break into a run; and the three of them, the two beasts and the man, came into the barnyard in a whirl of leaping, screeching chickens, hissing ganders, and the hearty hallo of Early Ann.

On the broad kitchen stoop Brailsford scraped the black dirt from his shoes, then, whistling, went in to wash. Sarah hurried to prime the cistern pump which wheezed and creaked as it gushed forth a clear stream of clean-smelling rain water. He scrubbed face and hands with a coarse yellow soap, dried himself vigorously on the crash roller-towel, ran the family comb through his curls, and hesitated for a second to look at himself in the uneven glass of the old walnut-framed mirror.