Ron Joseph’s maternal grandfather, Florian Yeaton, hauling ice to the farm’s ice house in 1916. Joseph family photo

From the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, my twin brother Don and I spent much of our childhood on our maternal grandparents’ 105-acre dairy farm in Mercer. It was an idyllic place for a child. The farm’s livestock ponds teemed with frogs and dragonflies. The summer hayfields were home to foxes and nesting meadowlarks and bobolinks. During summer nights, tucked in our beds, we were lulled to sleep by singing whip-poor-wills perched on the farmhouse’s ridgepole.

The family homestead fostered our love of nature. Now approaching 73, my brother and I reminisce about those magical farm years. Don often remembers stories I’ve forgotten, and I remind him of ones he’s forgotten. The story we both fondly recall is the day Ralph True delivered his two traumatized workhorses to our grandfather, trusting he could rehabilitate them.

It was a cool, early June morning in 1960. Eight years old, we had been in the barn since 5 a.m. helping Grampa with the morning’s milking and brushing, and feeding his two Belgium workhorses, Tony and Prince. Nobody had to wake us up because we loved being in the barn with Grampa and the livestock. Some years, when our mom kept a flock of sheep, we were often in the barn by 4 a.m., helping her with ewes struggling with deliveries.

With that June morning’s milking finished and manure-shoveling ahead of us, we sat at the kitchen table with Grampa eating hot oatmeal, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Mr. True’s workhorses.

Everyone in town knew that they were headed to our farm because Bea made sure of it. She was our local Ma Bell operator who eavesdropped on phone calls and then spread the news. Those with telephones (mostly party lines) forwarded Bea’s reports that a barn fire had made Mr. True’s Belgian workhorses dangerously unruly. Bea told Grammy that Ralph had considered putting a pistol to the horses’ heads until she reminded him that despite my grandfather Florian’s illiteracy, “He knows how to read and handle horses, grow sweet corn, and find underground water with a forked willow twig.”

Don and I were dumping a wheelbarrow load of cow manure when brothers Ralph and Albert True pulled into the barnyard in a Mack truck. Standing atop a mushrooming mound of manure, we watched them unload two blindfolded chestnut workhorses.

“Florian,” Ralph said, “I’d be mighty obliged if you could put ’em right. They’re no good to me plumb mad.”

Holding the reins, Grampa silently led the horses into a 2-acre fenced paddock. With the reins and blinders removed, the wild-eyed beasts wheeled and thundered across a green pasture dotted with buttercups.

“I’ll see what I can do, Ralph,” Florian said. “It might take a couple of weeks.”

The following morning, Tony and Prince stuck their heads over the paddock’s fence, eagerly awaiting their daily treat. As hoped, the new arrivals trotted over and stood beside our workhorses. Grandpa gave each horse a small, sliced McIntosh apple, a carrot, and a handful of molasses-coated oats (my brother and I often reached into the wooden barrel to stuff our mouths with a handful of sweetened horse oats). With that first positive step accomplished, Grandpa retreated to the milking parlor.

Ron Joseph’s maternal grandfather, Florian Yeaton, cutting hay with a horse-drawn sickle bar mower in 1946. Joseph family photo

As he sat on a three-legged stool milking Ginger — a sweet, tawny Jersey cow — the four horses watched through open barn windows. I had no way of knowing if the sight and hiss-hiss sound of steaming milk squirting from an udder into a stainless-steel pail calmed Mr. True’s horses, but it sure eased my frayed nerves. And when Don filled two porcelain bowls with warm milk, giving one each to the barn cats and our border collie Bonnie, a row of horse heads stretched into the milking parlor. Ginger chewed her cud rhythmically and stared indifferently at the equine gawkers. Her large brown eyes, accentuated by long, beautiful eyelashes, caused Mother to once quip, “Ginger’s eyelashes would make Elizabeth Taylor turn green with envy.”

When Mr. True sought Grandpa’s help, he was unaware that my grandfather had handled horses since childhood. Mother’s cousin Jennie often regaled my twin and me with stories of Grampa. His schooling ended in second or third grade because he was needed to work on the farm. Without schoolboy friends, according to Jennie, he bonded with his father’s workhorses.

“In the winter of 1906,” she said, “when Florian was 12, his father’s workhorses fell through the ice-covered Sandy River while hauling water to the barn for the livestock.” The horses nearly died of hypothermia. “For three nights,” she told us, “Florian slept on a bed of straw in the horse stable, tending the horses every few hours by replacing their wool blankets with others he’d warmed in the cookstove’s oven. After they recovered, those horses followed your grandfather everywhere, including back onto the river ice.”

On Day 3, Grampa studied the traumatized horses’ eyes, facial expressions, ear and tail flicks, whinnying, and head shakes. He was convinced that they were not beyond help. Rehabilitation began in earnest by teaming one and then the other with Tony, our laid-back draft horse. Over a nearly two-week period, the duos twitched pine logs from the woodlot to the barnyard, pulled a Eureka potato planter, harrowed cornfields and delivered hay-filled oak wagons to the barn.

On Day 13, Mr. True’s horses, teamed up for the first time since the barn fire, faced their most challenging test: they were hitched to a noisy J.S. Kemp manure spreader.

Grandpa flicked the reins and clicked his tongue, and the wagon lurched forward. Don and I, seated next to him on the driving bench, held our breath. Clear of the paved road, we awaited Grampa’s signal. He nodded and we pulled the iron lever backwards, engaging a center chain that dragged dry manure patties to the wagon’s rear where it was shredded by a churning wheel of spiked beaters and hurled over fields of timothy and clover. Tension turned to laughter when chunks of manure bounced off Bonnie’s head and back. The horses performed flawlessly. That evening Grammy phoned Mr. True with news that his Belgians had passed their final test and would be ready for pick up in the morning.

Shortly after sunrise, Ralph True stood in our barnyard and silently studied his well-adjusted horses; he then looked at Florian with saint-like reverence. Neither man wasted words, and none were exchanged. Grandpa had saved his few words for the horses. Lovingly moving his large, calloused hands gently across their necks and sides, he spoke so softly that only the horses heard his words. With the animals loaded in the Mack, Mr. True shook hands with my grandfather and brother. He turned to shake mine, too, but my hands were firmly wrapped around our rooster, fearful that he’d spoil the reunion by attacking Mr. True or his horses.

Ginger, who had been mooing since Mr. True’s arrival, was now bellowing. Grandpa looked at his silver pocket watch and said, “She’s complaining because I’m late milking her.” With his arms around Don and me, we approached the sliding barn doors. “Hold onto your horses, ol’ gal,” he said. “We’re a’comin’.”

Throughout my mother’s lifetime and ours, Grampa always farmed with a team of workhorses. Following his death in 1972, Grammy sold his old, arthritic workhorses. A proud and stoic Yankee, she had never displayed emotions until that day when she cried watching Grampa’s horses being hauled away. She knew, more so than any of her five children and grandchildren, that his workhorses were the farm’s heart and soul.

Ron Joseph of Sidney is author of Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist, published by Islandport Press