A Violet Season Read Online Free PDF

monumental. It called for the help of most members of the family, as well as a good number of hired workers from the village, mostly older children who were out of school and women who would set aside their housework to earn a dollar a day. Even with extra hired hands, planting was a two-week job.
    They began the first week with the greenhouses behind Harold’s house in the old wheat field. It was an expansive level spot where they had constructed eighteen of their twenty-nine houses in three neat rows running north and south, a lesson they’d learned after buildingthe first three houses east-west on the hillside. These newer houses were pitched sixteen inches higher at the south end to allow the hot water from the stokehouse on the north end to rise and the cool water to flow downhill to the furnace. The heat would keep the cool-weather violets just warm enough to make it through the winter.
    This time of year, of course, no heat was needed, and to allow the air to circulate while the workers were planting, several glass roof panels were raised on a pulley system, the ropes tied off on large nails in the adjoining packing house. Each greenhouse had a single aisle down the center with deep beds full of fresh soil, which should be free of harmful nematodes that could stunt the plants. The beds began at thigh height and stretched back to the walls farther than any man’s reach; planting the rear half of the beds required the assembly of narrow boards on which the workers would lie in order to access them.
    This first morning Harold instructed the boys and the men to climb up on the boards and plant the rear of the beds. The women and the girls would stand in the pathways and plant what they could reach from there, a job that, despite the stooping, was easier on the body and could be interrupted to tend to the children and the meals.
    Experienced planters were assigned to help the inexperienced; Ida was paired with Joe Jacobs, the minister’s son. He had never been out on the boards, so Ida showed him how to hook his board on the heating pipe that ran along the wall and secure it to the bed frame at the lower end, then inch himself sideways up the slanting plank to the rear of the bed. There, he must balance on elbow and hip and reach down into the bed to set the plants in the fresh soil. He wobbled precariously on his way up the board, and Ida assured him, “It feels impossible at first, but you’ll soon feel stable. No one ever falls.”
    Joe waved his upper arm in the air for balance as he shifted his weight. “Most find it easiest to bend the lower leg—that’s right,” she said.
    “They didn’t tell me this would be a circus act,” he said.
    “It’s a business,” Ida told him as one of the boys set the first bucket of cuttings at her feet. “We can’t waste the space for lots of walkways. Every foot of it needs to be planted.”
    “Mowing the church grounds is looking pretty good right now,” Joe said. “What do I do next?”
    The men came along to set the planting grid with a spiked wooden bar that left holes in the soil ten inches apart, ten wide and four deep. Then Ida showed Joe how to set his trowel in each hole and make room for the cuttings. She set to work on her own planting, reaching her arm’s length into the beds to the point where Joe’s plants would have to meet her own. Next to them, Oliver helped the Hoskins boy through his first day; Joe and Oliver exchanged some talk about the war. Two of Oliver’s friends—Claudie’s brother Avery and Alan Harris—had already enlisted and were headed to Tampa.
    While Ida worked, Jasper amused himself with a pile of dirt and a wooden spoon outside the greenhouse door for a good long time, but by nine-thirty Ashley was beginning to squirm and fuss in his basket. Ida set her work aside and took him to the house for his nursing. While she was gone, Alice took her place at the beds with Joe. Later Ida nursed the baby again while she ate her lunch of