Millie Ferman knew this would happen. She didn't know why she even talked to her mom. It was always the same thing. "Go to the barn and wait for your dad."
It wasn't that big a deal. It wasn't like she got in trouble all the time. Why did it always have to be her dad who did the punishing? He wasn't mean or anything but you never knew what he was going to do. When Millie had kids, she'd decide what the punishment was and she sure wouldn't punish for dumb things like this. Anyway, it wasn't her fault.
Millie poked along until she got past the chicken coop. She stopped dead. She'd forgotten about them. The krauts were right there along the fence in the front beet field. One of them was looking right at her. It scared her at first but then he smiled and said, "How old you are, mien liebe?"
"Hey, you, get away from that fence!" Some guy with the tommy gun was yelling at her.
It was scary having all those guys with tommy guns on the place. When her dad said that he was getting German prisoners of war to work the sugar beets, she was a little excited but mostly scared. She thought they would be like that Hitler guy who was always screaming on the radio. She had always wondered what a Nazi kraut looked like. She thought probably like the Frankenstein Monster in the movies.
But these guys in the dark blue prisoner suits looked like everybody else she knew. They look - well - nice. They were working at pulling and topping beets. Millie Ferman wondered why they gave "kraut prisoners" those big topping knives. They had pointed curved hooks on the ends of them so you wouldn't have to bend over so far to pick up the beet. But you had to put the hook in the tops end. Mille didn't know why. You couldn't tell if a beet had a hole in it when it was made into sugar. But - everybody said you hooked the beet on the tops end. Maybe it was a law. Those knives could be a weapon but they gave them to prisoners anyway. They were dangerous but probably not much good against a tommy gun.
Millie's dad only let her use a topping knife once. He said she took too much beet with the top. He wouldn't even let Freddy top beets. He said Freddy had to wait until he was thirteen and by that time Millie probably wouldn't want to top beets anymore anyway. Besides, those dainty little fingers of hers looked so sweet on her dainty little hands. He wasn't taking a chance they might end up with the beet tops.
Freddy was her twin brother and it kind of tickled Millie. Freddy thought he was so big because he was a boy and got to drive the horses when haying. He got to do other stuff too but Freddy didn't get to top beets so he wasn't the big shot he thought he was.
Millie didn't care about the soldier yelling at her and running toward her with the tommy gun. If she wanted to talk to the kraut, she'd talk to him. She hadn't even thought of guards with tommy guns when her dad told them about the German prisoners. They were scary and bossy but this was her dad's farm and if she wanted to stand by the fence and watch the krauts and talk to them, no bossy soldier, tommy gun or not, would chase her away.
She didn't know want mien liebe meant but she knew how old she was.
"Eleven."
"Mein Gurta is eleven."
"I told you, get away from the fence! These guys ain't s'posed to talk to civilians."
"Why?"
"Look, kid, I'm just following orders. Don't give me any shit."
"You're lucky my mom didn't hear you say that. She'd wash your mouth out with soap."
"OK, sorry. Just get away from the fence."
"This is my dad's farm, and if I want to stand by this fence, I will unless he tells me not to."
"GET AWAY FROM THE FENCE!"
"What you going to do if I don't. Shoot me?"
"Jesus, kid..."
"Don't swear!"
"OK. Sorry. I'm just following orders. I was told to keep people away from the krauts."
"That's dumb. If they tried to hurt me, you'd shoot them. I want to talk to that guy over there."
"You can't."
"Well, you'll have to shoot me to stop me. I want to know about Gurta."
"Who the hell's Gurta?"
"I said, 'Don't swear!'"
"Come on, kid. Don't give me any shit."
"You did it again."
Millie yelled, "Is Gurta you daughter?"
"Ya." He started to say more but some other soldier said some stuff in German and the man just looked at Millie. He had tears in his eyes but he went back to work. The guy who was talking German must have told him not to talk to her. Millie thought that was the dumbest thing she ever heard of. How could talking to a kid mess up the war?
"See, Gurta is his daughter. He's crying. He misses her."
"He should have thought of that before he joined the Hun army."
"Did you join the army?'
"No, I got drafted."
"He probably did too. Did you ever think of that, smarty pants? "I feel sorry for him and I feel sorry for Gruta. If my Dad was in the war, I'd miss him and he'd probably cry for me too."
"Back to your post, soldier!" The guy's boss was yelling at him. He wasn't such a big shot either.
Millie went to the barn. She sat on a hay bale. This was the first year they had hay bales. Millie felt kind of sad. It was fun to watch the hay loader lift the loose hay onto the wagon. She felt kind of sorry for her dad because he had to work hard to spread the hay evenly on the load. He really sweated a lot and dry hay is dusty and dirt and chaff gets all over you. After there was so much hay on the wagon, he put some rope things on top of it. He called them slings. When the sling was down, they loaded more hay. He put three slings on a load.
Freddy got to drive the horses. He thought he was so big. Millie knew that she could drive the horses but her dad said that she was his little lady. "Field work is for men and boys, not pretty little ladies." She loved her dad but she'd rather drive horses than be a lady. Why did boys get to do all the fun things?
They still had two teams even now that her dad had his Oliver 66 Row Crop. You never could tell what Jack Ferman thought. Millie's mom said that her husband was the most adumbrative thing she'd ever seen. Her mom was like that. She always did and said things that no one else did. Millie looked up that word once. It meant like an outline but her mom said, "Words had more than one meaning." If her mom thought that her dad was just an outline with nothing inside him - she was wrong.
Irene Ferman was a bit out of the norm. She was in no way odd but her interests were not those of your average farm wife in the 40s. She was an avid reader and had a prodigious memory. Her vocabulary was vast and occasionally one or two of the words which meant nothing to almost anyone else would find their way into her conversation. She was not thought ostentatious. She was just Irene - who had different interests, an unusual sense of the creative and a love for classical music - but was friendly and kind. Her friends took some comfort, however, from the fact that Irene couldn't do some of the really important things. For example, she could not make a decent piecrust to save her soul - a skill that really distinguished a good 1940s farm wife.
The preacher had once said to her dad, "Jack, you're the most laconic man I've ever met." Millie looked that word up too. She liked that better. So her dad didn't talk a lot. Didn't mean he was empty inside.
Millie really loved her mom but she couldn't understand her sometimes. Some times Millie thought her mom was the smartest woman in the world. She read stuff like the Iliad (whatever that was) and had records of Mozart and Opera. She knew all these big words and stuff like that. Other times she thought her mom was the dumbest woman in the world. Like the time her mom made her a dress out of a feed sack.
The dress wasn't so bad. During the war everything had to be put to good use. What used to be just white sacks with a name like Purina or some other company printed on it now had flowers or stripes or other stuff so moms could make dresses or shirts - any kind of clothes, really. Before the war, they used to just burn the feed sacks, but now they put them to another use. It was good for the war effort like buying Saving Stamps or War Bonds. You could buy Saving Stamps at school every Friday.
Making the dress out of a feed sack wasn't the dumb part. Her mom was a really good seamstress. The dress was neat. The dumb part was crocheting "lace" for the collar and the sleeves out of binder twine. Her mom said it was poetic. It gave the dress an authentic rural motif. Her mom loved that word. The whole idea, however, made Millie want to throw up. Besides, the binder twine lace itched. Millie still hadn't figured out a way not to have to wear that dress to school and not hurt her mom's feelings.
For her mom, everything had a motif. The living room had a relaxing motif. The kitchen had a utilitarian motif. Millie's bedroom had a feminine motif. Freddy's bedroom had a farm boy motif. Millie thought the motif in Freddy's room should be called - mess.
Anyway, Millie could hardly ever tell what her dad was thinking but she could tell he was really proud of his Oliver 66 Row Crop. It was just a tractor but not to her dad. He never said, "My tractor." It was always, "My Oliver 66 Row Crop."
Millie was glad her dad got his tractor before the war because during the war you couldn't get tractors and her dad was so proud of that tractor. She guessed it did make some of the work easier. But Millie was also glad they kept the teams. Watching Dick and Bess pull the hay wagon was much more poetic than watching a noisy old Oliver 66 Row Crop pulling the wagon. Millie wasn't sure what poetic used like that meant but when her mom really liked something she said it was poetic. Anyway, when the war got over and you could probably buy tractors again, she knew that Dick and Bess and Bill and Prince would be gone and that made her sad.
Everybody wondered how Mose Hanaour got a new Case hay baler in the middle of the war. It wasn't fair. If you couldn't buy tractors, why could you buy hay balers? That noisy orange thing took all the poetry out of haying. You just ended up with ugly square things. You couldn't watch them pull the slings up to the mow and watch them swing the sling and then pop it open so the hay fell just where you wanted it. That was poetry. Those ugly square things were only work as far as Millie was concerned.
The other thing was, it wasn't fun to play in the haymow anymore. When the hay was loose it was kind of scratchy but it was soft and fun to jump in. Bales were hard and if you ever tried to jump on them you'd probably get stuck with one of those wires that held them together.
You had to have two kids on the baler. One poked the wires through and the kid on the other side "tied" the wires. They were boys. They thought they were so big. The poker got two cents a bale and the tier got a penny a bale. They also got filthy. Millie was glad that that was a boy's job.
But she couldn't worry about that now. She had her own problems. One of them was, "Why did they call nice people like Gurta's dad nasty names like 'kraut'?" He wasn't a monster. He was a dad - a regular person - a German person, maybe, but a regular person. She decided she'd never say kraut again. Gurta's dad probably didn't like Hitler any more than a regular American.
But her real problem was what to do about her dad. Her mom had sent her out to the barn to wait for him. Her mom always did that when she or Freddy got in trouble. Millie really didn't know why she was in trouble. Otis Bailey was such a baby. He'd gone bawling to his mom and she'd made a fuss to someone - oh, oh! Here he was.