| OCR Text |
Show 49 a large family of girls, doubled teams. Our implements for this job were wicked knives, broad-bladed and sharp, each with a hook on the end. This hook could snare a beet from the loosened ground and bring it to the opposite hand, stretched palm-up to disengage it from the hook, after which the tops were hacked off, and the beet thrown into a cleared "pile". These hooks could as equally well miss the beet and snare the shins; the knives could as easily slice off a portion of thumb, and the beets thrown at the pile could catch another topper in the eye. These minor accidents often happened, as my shins and thumbs can testify from scars still there. Once, at least, I sported a very purple eye. November was usually cold, even snowy and sleety. One raw autumn I caught cold and coughed every breath, my chest torn with knives of pain at every breath, spitting blood into the sharp wind and icy sleet, but Papa, who never had a sick day in his life, had little patience with illness. I was afraid to tell him, and he didn't notice. One year a hard freeze caught us with five acres of beets in the ground, but on the fifth of December there came a so-called "thaw. " I couldn't understand it in that term, because the day was so cold water froze into icicles on the bellies of the horses, even as the hind-gate was coming out of the river. Our breath came out in plumes and we had to crack ice from the bucket to get a drink, but the beets did come out of the ground, and we were able to top them if we didn't mind lifting and topping a block of frozen mud along with the beet. I was ten or eleven and I cried with the cold. |
