The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County Read Online Free

Ambrose surely didn’t consider himself “slow.” He liked reading and doing math. He liked writing. He liked school, but he didn’t care for his fellow students, who couldn’t move past teasing him every opportunity they got.
    When he was in seventh grade, and well past five feet tall, husky and strong because of all the farm work he had been doing, an eighth grader pushed him to the limit one day. They were both carrying in wood for the woodstove in the school. “D . . . d . . . n’t know you . . . you . . .” He didn’t finish his mocking sentence. Ambrose took a piece of wood and whopped the eighth grader over the head. The eighth grader fell to the ground in a heap, the wood sticks he was carrying spilling on the ground in front of him.
    For that little outburst of temper, Ambrose missed two weeks of recess. He never enjoyed recess anyway, so he spent his time in the schoolroom reading books.
    Ambrose’s parents didn’t say much about the trouble he got into at school. But later that week his mother gave him a little notebook and a new number 2 lead pencil. “Why don’t you write down things that are happening around the farm?” she suggested. And that’s what he did. He wrote about the weather, especially about storms that rolled through that part of Ames County regularly. Fierce summer thunderstorms and wicked winter blizzards that made farm life challenging and left farm families isolated sometimes for days on end.
    He wrote about what it was like to be different from other kids, and how their teasing and constant reminders of his inability to speak like other kids never ceased to make him feel inadequate, some days downright worthless. It was as if what was bothering him and causing him so much unhappiness had moved from his mind to the page in front of him.
    He wrote about farm life, the crops his father planted and the livestock they raised. He wrote about harvesting hay, mostly by hand as their team of horses did only the heavy work such as pulling the hay mower and the hay wagon on which they pitched cured alfalfa and clover. Ambrose described in detail how to chop and split wood with an ax, which he and his pa did every fall.
    He wrote about the coming of spring and how he looked forward to it after winter had dragged on and on, never wanting to give up its grip. And as strange as it may seem, after a long, hot summer of never-ending work, and an equally busy fall with the grain, potato, and corn harvests, he wrote about looking forward to winter when everything slowed down and life was more pleasant—until a blizzard blew in from the northwest and made the Ambrose family miserable for several days.
    He wrote about the seasonal cycles on the farm and his reaction to them. Somewhere he had read that all of life is a circle and that people return to earlier places again and again as they live their lives. That was surely true for people who lived on farms. Each year you did the same thing: spring planting, summer caring for crops, fall harvesting, and winter resting and planning for the next year. It was the same each year, but it was always different too, as weather, markets, and a hundred other things added spice and challenge to farm life and made what might seem predictable quite unpredictable.
    His stuttering continued, especially when he was in a group and the situation was stressful, such as when the teacher called on him. Ambrose discovered that if he relaxed and was speaking with but one person, he could string several words together in a sentence—the stuttering was still there, and it took a while for him to say the words, but it certainly was an improvement. Ambrose guessed the teacher figured that if he could communicate with one other person, he could communicate with several. Of course she was wrong.
    Something else made Ambrose strange in the minds of many people who knew him; they believed he could talk to animals. Ambrose first