THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE

     
       I was no older than twelve then, maybe just eleven, a slender stripling who had years to go to reach anything resembling manhood.
      It was a difficult time, during the Great Depression, though we were lucky to be living on a farm. My mother had died two years before,leaving my father with a family of twelve, including a newborn. A brother and a sister were old enough to work in the table factory, where they were paid a dollar an hour. My oldest brother was working his way through college and a sister was married and living in Boston.
    To add to difficulties, our team of horses had aged, and no longer were fit for work. That became obvious when one, and then the other, lagged when pulling a plow or other implement, leaving the heavy pulling to the other. That led, reluctantly, to a decision to call Benson's Wild Animal Farm a few miles down the road, where, unemotionally, they ended up as lion food. My father had been extremely fond of his team of horses.
    But there was still the Fordson tractor, a treacherous, noisy and odiferous machine that nevertheless, through considerable effort, one June day delivered a field ready for planting corn for the silo.
    My father borrowed a horse from a neighbor to pull the corn planter, a dispenser with plow handles that plowed a shallow furrow, dropped seeds and fertilizer into it and covered them up.
    The horse was a huge, fiery eyed, ugly beast, gaunt and aged, that in other days might have been a war horse. He was clearly not too happy about having been offered up to do work. He had enormous hooves that waved around before taking the next step, hooves that hadn't been trimmed or shod in years, grown broad as a wash basin.
    I  remained  home from school to lead the horse in straight lines, row after row, until the field was done. To say I was terrorized is an understatement.  I had to reach high over my head to grasp the halter. Rather than lead the horse in a straight line, it was  an exercise to avoid falling under threatening hooves, and my father was none too happy about the serpentine trails I was leaving, sometimes overlapping the previous row. The situation did not improve, and in fact got worse. I heard loud curses behind me and took them to be meant for me.
    My father finally gave up. “You can go” he said. I fled to the woods in tears, and stayed there the day long. He finished the job the next day, with my brother driving the Fordson tractor. He attributed my failure to youth, and returned with neither rancor nor apology back  to his normally good nature.