It was faced with what appeared to be Dutch tile, though I couldn’t believe it. I mean, who is going to import anything as useless as Ornamental tile all the way from Earth? Papa Schultz saw me looking at them and said, “My little girl Kathy paints good, huh?” One of the medium-sized girls blushed and giggled and left the room.
I had the apple down to a very skinny core and was wondering what to do with it in that spotless room when Papa Schultz stuck out his hand. “Give it to me, Bill.”
I did. He took out his knife and very gently separated out the seeds. One of the kids left the room and fetched him a tiny paper envelope in which he placed the seeds and then sealed it. He handed it to me. “There, Bill,” he said. “I have only one apple tree, but you have eight!”
I was sort of surprised, but I thanked him. He went on, “That place just this side of where you will build your house—if you will fill that gully from the bottom, layer by layer, building your soil as you go, with only a very little ‘pay dirt’ you will have a place that will support a whole row of trees. When your seedlings are big, we’ll bud from my tree.”
I put them very carefully in my pouch.
Some of the boys drifted in and washed up and soon we were all sitting around the table and digging into fried chicken and mashed potatoes and tomato preserves and things. Mama Schultz sat beside me and kept pressing food on me and insisting that I wasn’t eating enough to keep body and soul together which wasn’t true.
Afterwards I got acquainted with the kids while George and Papa Schultz talked. Four of the boys I knew; they were Scouts. The fifth boy, Johann Junior —they called him “Yo”—was older than I, almost twenty, and worked in town for the chief engineer. The others were Hugo and Peter, both Cubs, then Sam, and then Vic, who was an Explorer Scout, same as I was. The girls were the baby, Kathy and Anna, who seemed to be twins but weren’t, and Gretchen. They all talked at once.
Presently Dad called me over. “Bill, you know we don’t rate a chance at a rock crusher for several months.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat mystified.
“What are your plans in the meantime?”
“Uh, well, I don’t know exactly. Study up on what I’ll have to do.”
“Mmrn… Mr. Schultz has very kindly offered to take you on as a farm hand in the meantime. What do you think of the idea?”
14. Land of My Own
Papa Schultz needed a field hand about as much as I need four ears, but that didn’t keep me from moving in. In that family everybody worked but the baby and you could count on it that she would be washing dishes as soon as she was up off the floor. Everybody worked all the time and seemed to enjoy it. When the kids weren’t working they were doing lessons and the boys were punished when they weren’t up on their lessons by being required to stay in from the fields.
Mama would listen to them recite while she cooked. Sometimes she listened to lessons in things I’m pretty sure she never had studied herself, but Papa Schultz checked up on them, too, so it didn’t matter.
Me, I learned about pigs. And cows. And chickens. And how you breed pay dirt to make more pay dirt. “Pay dirt” is the stuff that is actually imported from Earth, concentrated soil cultures with the bacteria and so forth in it you have to have to get a field alive.
There was an awful lot to learn. Take cows, now–half the people you meet can’t tell their left hands from their right so who would think that a cow would care about such things? But they do, as I found out when I tried to milk one from the left.
Everything was stoop labor around the place, as primitive as a Chinese farm. The standard means of transportation was a wheelbarrow.