Henry Ford’s Own Story/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
THE ROAD TO HYMEN
With William Ford's complete recovery and the coming of the long, half-idle winter of the country there was no apparent reason why Henry Ford should not return to his work in the machine shops. The plans for the watch factory, never wholly abandoned, might be carried out.
But Henry stayed at home on the farm. Gradually it became apparent to the neighborhood that Ford's boy had got over his liking for city life. Farmers remarked to each other, while they sat in their granaries husking corn, that Henry had come to his senses and knew when he was well off; he'd have his share in as good a farm as any man could want some day; there was no need for him to get out and hustle in Detroit.
Probably there were moments when Henry himself shared the prevailing opinion; his interest in mechanics was as great as ever, but—there was Clara Bryant.
He made a few trips to Detroit, with an intention which seemed to him earnest enough to revive the plans for the watch factory, but the thought of her was always tugging at his mind, urging him to come back to Greenfield. His efforts came to nothing, and he soon lost interest in them.
He was in his early twenties then. His ambition had not yet centered about a definite purpose, and already it had met the worst enemy of ambition—love. It was a choice between his work and the girl. The girl won, and ten million fifty-cent Ford watches were lost to the world.
"I’ve decided not to go back to Detroit," Henry announced to the family at breakfast one day.
"I thought you'd come around to seeing it that way," his father said. "You can do better here in the long run than you can in the city. If you want to take care of the stock I'll let one of the men go and pay you his wages this winter."
"All right," Henry said.
His work as a machinist seemed to all of them only an episode, now definitely ended.
He settled into the work of the farm as though he had never left it. Rising in the cold, lamp-lit mornings while the window panes showed only a square of darkness, sparkling with frost crystals, he built up the kitchen fire for Margaret. Then, with a lantern in his hand and milk pails clanking on his arm, plowed his way through the snow to the barns.
A red streak was showing in the eastern horizon; buildings and fences, covered with snow, showed odd shapes in the gray dawn; his breath hung like smoke on the frosty air.
Inside the barns the animals stirred; a horse stamped; a cow rose lumberingly; old Rover barked when he heard Henry's hand on the door fastening. Henry hung his lantern on a nail and set to work. He pitched down hay and huge forksful of straw; he measured out rations of bran and corn and oats; he milked the cows, stopping before he carried the brimming pails to the house to pour out some of the warm, sweet smelling milk for Rover and the cats.
Back in the kitchen Margaret had set the table for breakfast. She was standing at the stove frying sausages and turning corn cakes. The other boys came tramping in from poultry yards and hog pens. They took turns at the tin washbasin set on a bench on the back porch, and then in to breakfast with hearty appetites.
Afterward they husked corn in the big granaries, or shelled it, ready to take to mill; they cleaned the barn stalls, whitewashed the hen houses, sorted the apples in the cellar. In the shop Henry worked at the farm tools, sharpening the plows, refitting the harrows with teeth, oiling and cleaning the mowing machines.
After supper, when he had finished the day's work, milked the cows again, filled the racks in the calves yard with hay, spread deep beds of straw for the horses, seen that everything was snug and comfortable about the big barns, he saddled the little bay and rode six miles to the Bryant farm.
It was a courtship which did not run any too smoothly. Henry was not the only Greenfield farmer's son who admired Clara Bryant, and she was minded to divide her favor evenly among them until some indefinite time in the future, when, as she said, "she would see." Often enough Henry found another horse tied to the hitching post, and another young man inside the house making himself agreeable to Clara.
Then, welcomed heartily enough by her big, jovial father, he would spend the evening talking politics with him while Clara and his rival popped corn or roasted apples on the hearth.
But Henry built that winter a light sleigh, painted red, balanced on cushiony springs, slipping over the snow on smooth steel runners. No girl in Greenfield could have resisted the offer of a ride in it.
In the evenings when the moon was full Clara and Henry, warmly wrapped in fur robes, flashed down the snowy roads in a chime of sleighbells. The fields sparkled white on either hand, here and there lights gleamed from farm houses. Then the sleigh slipped into the woods, still and dark, except where the topmost branches shone silver in the moonlight, and the road stretched ahead like a path of white velvet. Their passing made no sound on the soft snow.
There were skating parties, too, where Henry and Clara, mittened hand in hand, swept over the ice in long, smooth flight, their skates ringing. Or it happened that Henry stood warming his hands at the bank and watched Clara skating away with some one else, and thought bitter things.
Somewhere, between farm work and courtship, he found time to keep up with his mechanics trade journals, for his interest in machinery was still strong, but he planned nothing new at this time. All his constructive imagination was diverted into another channel.
More than the loss of the Ford watches is chargeable to that laughing, rosy country girl who could not make up her mind to choose between her suitors. The winter passed and Henry, torn between two interests, had accomplished little with either.
Spring and the spring work came, plowing, harrowing, sowing, planting. From long before dawn until the deepening twilight hid the fields Henry was hard at work. Until the pressure of farm work was over he could see Clara only on Sundays. Then summer arrived, with picnics and the old custom of bringing a crowd of young people out from church for Sunday dinner at the Fords'. Now and then there were excursions up to Detroit for an outing on the lake.
By the end of that summer it was generally accepted among the Greenfield young folks that Henry Ford was "going with" Clara Bryant. But she must still have been elusive, for another winter passed with nothing definitely decided.
The third spring of Henry's stay on the farm arrived. Henry went over his bank account, a respectable sum, made up of his earnings on the farm and a few ventures in cattle buying and selling.
"Well, father," he said one day, "I guess I'll be getting married."
"All right," his father said. "She's a good, capable girl, I guess. I'll give you that south forty, and you can have lumber enough from the timber lot to build a house when you get ready."
Apparently Henry had made up his mind to settle the matter. No doubt, behind the ardor he showed Clara there was an unconscious feeling that he had spent enough time in courtship; he was impatient to get back to his other interests, to have again an orderly, smooth routine of life, with margins of time for machinery.
In April he and Clara went up to Detroit and were married. A couple of weeks later they returned to Greenfield, Clara with plans for the new house on the south forty already sketched in a tablet in her suitcase; Henry with a bundle of mechanics trade journals, and the responsibility of caring for a wife.
"A wife helps a man more than any one else," he says to-day. And adds, with his whimsical twinkle, "she criticizes him more."