Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

8

Amos Todd’s Vinegar

AMOS TODD’S VINEGAR

PA WAS a stubborn man. Often and again, Ma said to him: “Amos Todd, you’re a hard and unforgiving man.” But Pa said the Todds had vinegar in their blood, and that was the case as long as he could remember.

“Well any child of mine that has Todd vinegar,” Ma said, “I’ll just tar the stuffings out of, and that’s all.”

But she couldn’t do much with Pa. I guess there wasn’t a more stubborn man in all the state of Kansas. ’Way back in the nineties, when they were first married and Pa was breaking out his first quarter section, four drunken Indians came along and burnt his barn.

Another man might have been content to call the sheriff, swear out a warrant, and then go back to building a new barn. Seeing that the Indian wars had been over and done with so many years, that would have been the sensible thing to do. But not Pa. Pa took his gun, saddled a horse, and went after those four Indians. He chased them into Oklahoma and then into the panhandle. He chased them all the way across New Mexico into Arizona. He caught up with two of them in the desert, hog-tied them, and went after the other two. One of them died of thirst, but Pa brought the other three all the way back to Kansas to stand trial.

He was gone three months, but he had his satisfaction. His farm went to seed that year, and Ma didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, but he had proved to folks that Amos Todd was a mighty hard and stubborn man.

Well, all this that I’m going to tell about now started because Lucy went to visit her Aunt Effie up in Nebraska. Aunt Effie was Pa’s sister, but Pa hadn’t spoken to her in twenty years. That was because Aunt Effie had married a Nebraska hardware dealer, and Pa had been against the match.

Ma wrote to Aunt Effie regularly, and every Christmas Aunt Effie sent presents for each of us, even for Pa, although he never opened his presents and the lot of them were stacked up for twenty Christmases back.

Another man would have forgotten and forgiven by and by, but Pa was too proud of the Todd vinegar. The only thing that happened during the twenty years was that Pa got such a feeling against Nebraska men that he wouldn’t even buy a tube of toothpaste if it was made by a Nebraska firm.

Lucy had turned nineteen and was pretty as a picture, when Aunt Effie wrote and said that nothing would please her better than to have Lucy come up to Nebraska and visit for a while. She said that here was her only niece, and she had never seen the body of her, but only pictures. And Lucy—wellshe had never been further than Topeka, and the thought of going up to Omaha, living there for a month, and perhaps making a trip to Chicago, was enough to keep her awake nights.

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