COUNTRYSIDE YARNS
Tall Tale or Truth? You Decide!
Brotherly Love?, Part 1
by Janis Stein

Mother and father had all but given up on their two youngest boys; the boys squabbled and bickered over everything under the sun – and then some. Where would it all end?

Richard and Robert had never seen eye to eye. From the time they were babes, it seemed they competed with each other in one manner or another. Their rivalry went from the crib to the schoolyard to the farm fields. Always, always, as soon as they resolved one disagreement, another followed on its heels.

With each passing year, their father had all but given up on a peaceful supper. Their mother, though, yearned for the day when her two good boys might get along a bit better. She held both Richard and Robert – as she did all her children – in high regard, for each had a good heart and supplied her with many a treasured memory.

With the boys born just nine months apart, Louisa knew their close age only enhanced their problems. Thinking back, before Louisa had reached her third month of pregnancy with little Robert, she knew bringing this sixth child into the world would be a bit more challenging than her fifth. Bedridden and weak, the doctor cautioned she’d best be careful to heed his advice or she’d not only lose the baby, she’d likely lose herself.

Louisa did the best she could during that long, cold winter of 1892. At 10, her oldest daughter, Anna May, tended to the meals and the housework with all the efficiency of her mother, while John, nine, looked after his three-year-old brother, William, and little Lucy, at age seven, tended to the needs of baby Richard.

Richard wanted little to do with Lucy though – only his mama would do, and Richard’s heart-wrenching wails had little Lucy delivering the wee babe to their mother’s bedside more times than the good doctor approved. Rather than tire her, little Richard’s nearness seemed only to give Louisa strength, and she coddled her beloved boy all she could.

Eventually, the summer sun replaced the gray winter days and, with summer’s arrival, so too came baby Robert. Not only did Robert survive despite the odds and the doctor’s doubts, Louisa, too, came through the pregnancy and birth with renewed energy. Goodness knows Louisa needed her newfound youthful vigor, for Richard and Robert demanded all of her time and energy, and William – already quite the little man in his bib overalls and the spitting image of his father – required the care and attention and love only his mother could provide.

From the onset, her two youngest boys repeatedly fought for their mother’s affection, one always trying to out-do the other. Louisa blamed herself for their constant bickering. She feared that perhaps she hadn’t given Richard enough attention while she had suffered during her pregnancy with Robert.

Louisa had done her best, she reminded herself, and thought with pride how all her children and Frank, too, her beloved husband, had rallied around her during that long winter when the doctor had confined her to the house. Louisa remembered fretting for hours over those new restrictions as she contemplated how she would be able to make it to the barn to milk the two cows, as was her duty, but Frank had anticipated her worries and happily led the cows, first one and then the other, to the back door, thus satisfying the doctor that she not leave the house. Crawling from her makeshift bed, which Frank had set up along the north wall within the sparse kitchen, Louisa had summoned the strength to walk to the back door twice each day. There, Frank had her milking stool ready and she quickly sat down and relieved each cow in turn. In no time at all, Louisa completed her milking chores, her skilled hands and steady rhythm making short work of the task and providing the milk her thirsty children gulped at supper.

As Robert and Richard grew, so too did their dislike for one another. When they weren’t rivaling for their mother’s attention, they competed on the softball field in the schoolyard, each determined to hit farther, run faster, throw harder, catch better. Inside the classroom, spelling bees and arithmetic matches became war among the brothers, and the teacher looked on with almost glee as all of her students’ grades rose steadily higher as the rest of the children picked up the desire to become smarter than their school chums.

Join in the continuation next month as Richard and Robert, now grown, become neighbors and vow to set their differences aside.