In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

40 My Father’s Hoe Either side the clock in my workroom hangs a weapon.1 On one side is a fearsome musket that one of my ancestors is said to have captured in the War of the American Revolution. On the stock is crudely punctured the legend, “Samuel Mash, 1777.” The bayonet and its leather sheath are still in place; I shudder to think what horrible traffic that blade may have executed. There is also the bullet-case, made of a block of wood into which two dozen holes are bored for the balls, three-fourths-inch wide and nearly three inches deep, enclosed in a crude leather case with a flap over the top and a pocket on the front. The old flintlock and the primingpan are yet in condition and the flint itself is in place. Empty of its contents and lacking the ramrod, this gun weighs eight and one-half pounds. It is four feet eleven inches long from muzzle to butt; it should have sent its bullet straight. It was a hardy man that wielded this laborious firearm, in frontier days of crude equipment and of long journeys by sinking roads. Not many men could it have dispatched, for it must be loaded again by the muzzle after every single discharge; the loose powder was poured in, proper wads were inserted, the great homemade bullet placed, and all rammed home with the rod; the flint was adjusted; the pan was primed; and the weapon was ready for destruction, if it did not get wet or misfire. But this weapon, and others like it, did their work well and we in the later day enjoy the fruits of their conquests; yet it has not taught us to abolish weapons for human slaughter. I like to think that the old gun hangs on my wall as a silent monitor of yet better days. The other side the clock hangs my father’s hoe. No other object is so closely wrought into my memories; my father left it hanging in the shed 1. From The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 135–142. “My Father’s Hoe” 41 before the summons overtook him to leave the farm forever, and I brought it home with me that I might know it every working day. There is not merely a hoe. It is a symbol of a man’s life. One of my persistent memories is the sound of that hoe in the early morning when the lids of sleep were so slowly slowly opening, and I knew that he was in the garden and all was well. Clish, clish, clish in an even rhythmic easy subdued cadence the hoe moved up and down the rows, never chopping, never hacking , never faltering, for my father was a hoe-man as another man might be a welder or a wheelwright, taking pride in the skill of his handiwork. Very smooth and even the ground was left, with a thin loose surface such as in the later sophisticated days we came to know as the earth mulch. Six-footone he stood, and yet he scarcely stooped; with his right hand he grasped the handle near its end and always in the same way, with the thumb lengthwise on the wood, the four fingers clasped underneath, and the end of the stock not projecting from the back of the hand. Four inches from the end, a hollow has been worn by the ball of the thumb, and underneath are furrows where the fingers grasped. When the job was finished, the hoe was cleaned and hung in its own place; no one else ever touched it. There was no proscription on it, but we would not think to use his hoe any more than to wear his shoes or his hat. For how many years he used that hoe I do not know, but my memory does not go back to the time when it was not a part of him. In his later years, he felt that the old hoe was becoming too much worn and the handle too weak, so he hung it away and purchased another. This other hoe, much worn away, is also preserved, but it is relatively a modern affair and of a different breed. Wonderful execution the old hoe has wrought. It would be difficult to estimate how many millions of young weeds have succumbed to it...

Share