Chapter 40

“Why are the window shutters all closed?” asked Yi as they approached the cabin. Yi was carrying a basket that contained just over a dozen eggs and her hand had several scratches from chickens that were less than happy to meet her.

“Sshhhhh!” Madeline held a finger up to her lips. “Momma and poppa are kissing!” she whispered loudly.

“Kissy, kissy, kissy,” said Sandy as she eased the main door open quietly.

The interior of the cabin was warm and dark. The only light came from the fire in the wood stove and a narrow light leak from one shutter. They found Paul and Andi blissfully napping on the couch, snuggled under their plaid blanket. Yi found herself transfixed by the slowly dancing flames in the stove; their motion muted by the restricted flow of oxygen to them. She heard Andi speak of the slow flames but didn’t understand what she meant, and now Yi knows, and would love to see this kind of flame in the parlor fireplace too.

A fit of giggling brought Yi out of her reverie, the twins had pulled off their coats and boots and crawled onto the couch and pulled the foot of their parents blanket over them and were trying to entice Wonka to jump up on the couch with them. Their wriggling around woke Andi, who looked down at the other end of the couch and said, “Hey babies! Did you get a lot of eggs?”

“Uh, huh! And Pecky didn’t peck Yi neither!” smiled Sandy.

“I find that hard to believe,” mumbled Paul, his face hidden by Andi’s hair as he nuzzled her neck. Andi giggled and rolled her eyes as Paul found that particularly sensitive spot to plant kisses. That, and she had to agree with him, Pecky pecks everybody. The only way that Yi could avoid getting pecked was by avoiding Pecky’s roost completely, eggs or no.

Yi started opening the shutters. “No, she got me, and it hurt a lot.”

Madeline stood in front of Yi, crossed her arms, and huffed. “But there was no blood,” she said as she glared up at her governess. “Momma says, ‘If there’s no blood, it’s tattling,’ right?”

Sandy came up beside Madeline and struck the same pose. “Right!”

“And that’s an excellent rule,” said Yi as she opened the window shutter to the right of the wood stove. There are two shutters for every window, exterior storm shutters and interior security shutters. Paul had only closed the interior shutters today, but back in December during the big storm, he had closed the exterior shutters. Turning to Paul, Yi asked, “What do we have to do today, boss?”

“Clean out the chicken roosts and burn the old nasty straw, scrape the ice off of the driveway, dig back the snow drift out by the front gate, plow out the drive to the hayloft, collect empty gas cans and take them to Morton’s Corners and refill them, haul that chicken feed up to the coop, and feed the birds.”

“Whew! Sounds like you’re going to be busy.” Yi sat down on a kitchen chair and put her feet up on another chair. “I’ll make sure the girls stay out of your hair.”

“We have a few tasks for you too,” said Andi. “Familiarize yourself with the kitchen, including all the appliances, check the food stocks and generate a shopping list. Keep in mind, we don’t buy bread, eggs, milk, beef, pork, or c – h – i – c – k – e – n. We provide it all ourselves.”

“Really?”

“We barter eggs for milk, and we have a quarter of beef and a half pig in the freezer back in the village,” said Paul as he reluctantly gave up his wife’s delightful neck and pulled on his boots.

“And what about the bread?” asked Yi.

“There’s a bread machine here and one in the village. I hope your bread is as good as Paul’s,” smiled Andi.

Paul stood, pulled on his coat and hat, and held his hand out to Andi. “Come my princess, today we make a woman out of you and teach you to drive the Ford 8N.”

“Wooo!” grinned Andi with a smile that said, “I’m going to have fun!” as Paul led her out of the cabin.

The Ford 8N was the old gray and red tractor Paul had used to rescue Andi and the twins back in December when they first met. It was purchased new back in 1950 by the previous owners of Paul’s farm and it has spent its whole life resting in Paul’s barn and working in Paul’s field. Years ago, it was a solid agricultural workhorse, plowing fields and harvesting crops, but now that the fields are slowly returning to forest land, the old gray Ford is now primarily a lawn mower and a snowplow, with some agricultural work on Paul and John’s big garden. And now with the twins, its newer task will be to provide horsepower for hayrides.

Paul loved that old tractor, it reminds him of a peaceful time, back when he first bought the property and he spent a month rebuilding the motor and cleaning up the implements that comes with the tractor – the side cutter, the dump scoop, the brush hog, the three-bottom plow, the disk cultivator, the drag plow, and of course his favorite – the hay wagon. The only reason he likes the hay wagon so much is because it is a John Deere 963 wagon. He spent a year cleaning and repainting the wagon until it looked almost new and pulled like a dream. But Paul dearly wants a John Deere tractor. Not just any old John Deere, but an “unstyled” two-cylinder John Deere, either a model A or model B, and spoked wheels for the main tires would be awesome.

“Your chariot awaits, m’lady,” Paul said with a flourish as he opened the side door of the main barn, revealing the old Ford in all her glory.

“Why not the Kubota?” Andi asked.

“This old girl is actually better at scraping the ice off the driveway with that drag plow than the Kubota.” The ice Paul was referring to was from their vehicles driving over the snow as they came up nearly every day to check on the chickens. Their coming and going eventually compresses the snow on the driveway to ice. “Besides,” he patted the big gray fender next to the driver’s seat, “I think once you get the hang of this old girl, you may like her better than the Kubota. It just sounds right; it doesn’t have a hydraulic transmission, so there’s no whining and shrieking like the Kubota has when you work it.”

“Ok, let’s give it a whirl,” said Andi as she scrambled up to the seat. Once seated, she gave the seat an exploratory bounce and her smile showed it was acceptably comfortable. She mashed her feet down on the pedals. “I got it, clutch on the left, brake and gas on the right.”

“Close but not quite, that’s clutch on the left, then on the right it’s left brake and right brake.”

“Where’s the gas pedal?” Andi was getting confused.

“There isn’t one, this lever here...”

“Not the turn signals?”

“No,” he smiled, “this is the hand throttle. Here’s the choke, the starter, the PTO, that lever down there is your three-point hitch up and down, hand brake, and this one is the gearshift lever.” He went on explaining the theory of operation until Andi felt comfortable with the idea of not having an automatic transmission, fuel injection, and Bluetooth stereo.

She put the tractor in neutral, pushed down on the clutch, set the throttle, pulled out the choke and hit the starter button. It coughed to life, and she eased in the choke slowly as the engine warmed up. Soon she felt courageous enough to put it in gear and ease out the clutch, but when she did, the tractor jumped, and it startled her, causing her foot to come off the clutch, which caused the motor to stall. It started easier on the second try, and this time she eased out the clutch gently, ready for that jump. This time, the motor bogged down a little as it moved, but it didn’t stall. She eased out of the barn with a proud grin and followed Paul’s hand directions to back up to the drag plow. He coupled up the three-point hitch and stepped aside as Andi lifted the blade and set out to clear the ice from the driveway.

Hearing the familiar putt-putt-putt of the Ford tractor, Sandy and Madeline dragged Yi out on to the patio to show her the tractor and were surprised at what they saw. “Mommy’s driving the good tractor!”

“That’s a gray tractor, your Aunt Macy said that the orange tractor is the good tractor,” said Yi, who was bored to tears on Andi’s Dream listening to tractor conversations.

“No, that’s the good tractor. Poppa gave us a ride with that tractor,” said Sandy.

“A hay ride! With Thundersnow!” agreed Madeline.

“Thundersnow? I think you guys have been out in the sun for too long. Let’s go finish our inventory and make a menu because your funny momma and your goofy poppa want to spend the storm here with us.”

“Maybe we’ll have Thundersnow,” said Sandy hopefully.

“And a steamy bath!” said Madeline, who loves pushing the steam button.

“Steam bath? Now I know you’re both crazy,” said Yi as she herded her charges into the cabin.

Meanwhile, Paul topped off the Kubota and the snowmobile with gas from his metal 5-gallon jerry cans and put the empty cans into the back of the Ranger, then drove around the back of the main barn and headed up to the henhouse. The side of the barn away from the cabin is built into a hillside so you can drive up to the hayloft where the henhouse is located. Once up there, he unloaded the bag of high protein feed and hauled it into the henhouse and then set about cleaning the roosts.

Once the roosts were clean, the chickens fed and watered, and the old straw taken out and burned, Paul hopped in the Ranger and headed out toward the driveway. He met up with Andi at the gate as she cleaned the snow away from the gate, allowing it to open easier. She hopped off the tractor and walked up to the truck. “Where are you headed?”

“Going to Morton’s Corners to fill up the gas cans, wanna go with?”

“Sure!” Andi ran back to the tractor and moved it out of the way, then shut it off, then hopped in the Ranger. She’s heard of Morton’s Corners but has never been there and she had wondered what a town named “Morton’s Corners” looks like. They took Trevette road to 39 and turned west on that highway until they came to a historical marker on the road and turned there. “It looks kind of desolate out here,” said Andi, looking at a lonely farmhouse as they drove past.

“Wait for summer with the trees in full leaf, or autumn when the maples are in color. It’s beautiful,” Paul said. “This is winter in the snow belt, the whole world just kind of hunkers down and waits it out,” said Paul as he pulled up to the gas pump in front of an old-fashioned General Store.

Morton’s corners isn’t just small, it’s Tiny with a capital T. Other than a few houses, all that Andi could see was a tractor repair business, an Agway Farm & Garden center, a church, and the general store/gas station they were now in front of. Andi’s eyes grew wide as she saw the items displayed in the store’s front window. “I’m going in,” she announced, and she hopped out of the truck.

Paul just smiled, tooted the horn twice to let the proprietor know he was there, then hopped out of the truck and went around back to open the jerry cans. By the time he finished filling up the cans and truck with unleaded, it was snowing, a dry, blustery, windy snow. He entered the store and the old-fashioned bell on the door announced his entrance with a cheery tingle.

“Be right with you Doc,” called a voice from the back of the store. “Have some coffee. I just made it today.”

“Will do,” he called as he found a Styrofoam coffee cup and poured himself coffee from a tin percolator that was atop the beautiful Victorian parlor stove, then sat down in a rocking chair and leafed through a well-worn Field & Stream magazine. “Hey Elmer, I hope that lady isn’t giving you any trouble.”

“No, but she is helping me clear these shelves,” called out the storekeeper. As he said that, Elmer and Andi appeared from the back of the shop, her arms loaded with her treasures and a huge smile adorning her pretty face.

“I found so many awesome things,” said Andi, as she laid her treasures on the counter. “I found everything we need for our cookies and look!” she held up a rolling pin with deep groves cut into it and what looked like paint stirring sticks with Norse patterns painted on the handles. “lefse!”

“Oh, lefse,” said Paul, not comprehending.

“He doesn’t get it,” she said to Elmer.

The old man smiled. “He doesn’t have any Viking blood in him.”

“Wait a minute, he’s been to North Dakota, he knows lefse!” she pointed at him with the rolling pin.

“All I know about lefse is that if you make a burrito with one, using thanksgiving leftovers at the O club, the waitress gets upset.”

She shook her head and held up what looked like a waffle maker and a wooden cone with a handle. “Krumkake!” Then she showed him a stack of tiny, fluted tart pans “Sandbakkels!” Then she held up what looked like a very ornate branding iron. “Rosettes!”

He simply shrugged at the mention of each item. She gave him a well humored look of admonishment. “And I thought you could cook.”