I'll Send You Away

Henry’s temper was always just below the surface, and we never knew when it would flare up.  The winter of our first year on the Ontonogen farm, he had an episode I will never forget.  There was a shed attached to the back of the house and it was my job to carry in wood for the cook stove.  There was linoleum on the shed floor.  In the winter, it could get down to 30 degrees below zero outside, and the shed was not heated.  One morning, Henry had been out to milk the cows and he came into the shed with a sixteen-quart pail of warm milk.  He was going to pour it through the strainer so it could be separated.  He spilled a few drops from his pail, and was suddenly furious. He flung the pail around the room and it was so cold that the milk immediately froze onto everything.  We had stove wood piled up neatly on the side-wall, and the wood was covered in droplets of frozen milk.  Elsie and I worked at getting the milk off of everything for a long time.  The butter fat in the milk made the linoleum floor very slippery.  We had to put rugs down until it warmed up enough for us to scrub.  Then the rugs had to be washed by hand.

After that episode, I had to stand in that tiny pantry and run the separator myself.  To this day I cannot drink milk. 

Henry had a violent temper and was never sorry for anything he did.  We never dared complain because we never knew what he would do next.

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Every morning, we would milk the cows and run that separator to divide the cream from the milk.  We sold both milk and cream. We also made butter and sold that.  We didn’t have a churn, so we would put the cream in gallon can and shake the can until the cream turned to butter. The only problem was that when you lifted the lid off the can to let the gasses out, sometimes the lid would fly off.  That happened to me once and I was covered with cream.

We sold butter to our neighbors, and we had a hard time convincing them that we did not add color to the butter.  In the spring when the cows ate nice fresh grass, the butter was bright yellow.  (In those days, margarine came in a bag. It was white and it looked like lard.  There was a dot of color in the bag and we had to work the color in by squeezing the bag.)

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We had just moved to the country when a stray dog came to our place.  The dog was large with black and white spots – some mix of breeds that we never did figure out.  Every day, I would sneak him a little food to encourage him to stay.  My folks liked animals and eventually decided to feed the dog and keep him.  We called him Pepper. 

[INSERT PHOTO – BETTY WITH PEPPER]

Pepper did not like Elsie’s brother, Gerald.  Gerald always seemed to think he was better than our family, but Pepper was not impressed with the “self-made man.”  Once Gerald brought his two little kids for us to look after while he and his wife went on a vacation.  (Somehow, we were always good enough for that.)  Gerald got out of the car first, and Pepper barked his head off and made a dash for Gerald.  He jumped back in his car and his big top hat flew off.  Elsie really enjoyed that.  Dogs are good judges of character.

We had a neighbor who would kill deer out of season in our back forty acres.  Not only that, but he would just take the best part of the meat and leave the remains on our land.  Henry knew what he was doing because Pepper would lead him to the spot.  Or sometimes Pepper would drag some of the deer bones home to our house.  No matter how many times we asked, the neighbor would not stop this nasty cycle.  He knew it was our dog who was giving him away, so he poisoned the remains of a deer carcass. Pepper got terribly sick from the poison. We nursed Pepper in a box in the house but we couldn’t save him.  The vet did what he could for Pepper but he had too much poison. He had a terrible death.  Henry took his shotgun and went over and talked to the neighbor about killing deer out of season, and about killing our wonderful dog.  It didn’t do much good.