Читать книгу Always October - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 4

Haying season in farm country is all about speed and cooperation. You have to cut and stack the hay before it rains, which is not a job for one man or even one family. In my day, farm families took turns helping each other. Town folks turned out as well—including my dad, who hoped to sell machinery to the farmers. Talk about hard work, especially for townies who weren’t used to such grueling manual labor.

Minnesota’s not a state blessed with a friendly climate. I’ve already said how the winters were bitter cold, which you’d think would mean the summers were mild. That wasn’t the case. No, sir. Haying took place in July, when temperatures reached ninety degrees in the shade. Sweat? You don’t know the meaning of the word till you’ve spent a day raking newly cut hay into haycocks or loading hay bales onto a wagon bed.

My point here is not to complain about the hard work. In fact, the memory I’m workin’ at happened when I was too young to help out much. I was brought along because this was Momma’s baking day and she didn’t want me underfoot. What I saw on that day has stuck with me for a lifetime.

By the time I had made my appearance on this planet, most farmers had switched from hand tools to machinery, horse-drawn side mowers, and side rakes that let a single farmer, perched up on a seat, do the work of ten men. Not Thomas Beckmeyer and his boys, though. They sweated for every stalk, wielding their scythes—Bear County Minnesotans called ’em sighs—hour after hour. As if they were born to it.

We started out right after breakfast. My father hitched our horse, named Cinnamon, to the small wagon we used for deliveries. Off we went—my father, Annie, and I—leaving Momma behind. The day was already warm, the sun bright in a cloudless sky. Main Street was still quiet, and it would remain that way until haying season was over. Only the town barber, Carl Golson, was about. He was perched at the top of an extension ladder that reached the roof of his little shop, paintbrush in hand.

“Howdy, Samuel,” he said as we passed by. “Thought I’d catch up on the chores while the catchin’ was good.”

“That’s fine, Carl,” my dad replied. “Maybe after you finish, you could do my place next.”

“With that strong, young man sittin’ next you? No, sir, you don’t need my help.”

We were past the barber shop and almost out of town before I realized Mr. Golson was referring to me.

Now, I know I said Louristan was the county seat. The courthouse was located on Main Street, and we had two doctors, a dentist, and two lawyers. But Louristan was still a small town by American standards. Main Street, which ran all of three hundred yards, featured two clothing stores, a meat market, two grocery stores, a small restaurant, a bank, a feed store, my dad’s shop, and churches for the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, and Seventh Day Adventists. A pair of taverns, the blacksmith’s forge, the livery stable, and the Bear County Clarion were located on our two side streets, First and Second. The grain elevator and the creamery were down by the railroad station at the southern edge of town. They were cooperatives even back then, the farmers organizing to counter the power of the mills and the railroad to dictate prices.

Beyond the edge of town, all was cultivated fields and woodlots. It didn’t take long to cross the little, stone bridge spanning the creek and be out in what Dad called the country.

“Tell me again, Annie, what we’re gonna do?” I remember asking.

“We’re going to rake the windrows.”

“Windows?”

“No, windrows.”

“What’re windrows again?”

“I’ve already explained it five times.”

“Tell me one more time and I won’t ask again.”

“Lucas, you are an exceptionally tedious child.”

Annie was five years older than I, a world-weary girl saddled with looking after her little brother when our parents released us for play. Myself, I figured all sisters were bossy by nature, and I didn’t argue with her.

Haying season had only just begun and the fields we passed were lush with hay—timothy grass the most common, but also clover and alfalfa. Timothy grass produces a long flower stalk lined with pink-purple blossoms. With the breeze moving through acres and acres of the grass, the fields I stared at were a magic carpet—at least they were to me at that moment. I’d played in timothy grass, even chewed on the stalks, a habit Annie pronounced common but I’d never seen it exactly that way. The grass swayed and recovered with the ebb and fall of the breeze, giving way, coming back, as if the grass and the wind had cut some kind of deal. I remember the stalks were bright green, like they were proud to be alive, and the flowers rose at the ends of the stalks like the tail feathers on a peacock.

I was impressed enough to stay pretty quiet on the short ride to the Beckmeyer farm. Not so Annie, who argued, as she’d done the night before, that she should have been left behind to do the baking so Momma could open the store. This was ridiculous because no farmers purchased machinery—or much of anything else in town—in July. All their energies were directed toward cutting and curing the hay before it rained.

My dad was a talkative man back then, back in the good years—talkative by nature. I suspect that was why he chose to live in town. If he’d followed in his father’s footsteps and stayed on the farm, he’d likely have talked to the horses. The answer he gave my sister, then, was the same he’d already given two or three times.

“Think for a minute about life without farmers, Annie. You’re old enough now.”

And I wasn’t, obviously. I kept my mouth shut, and Dad went on without so much as glancing in my direction.

“That roof over your head? The one that keeps you warm in the winter and dry in the rain? That roof wouldn’t be there if farmers didn’t buy the machinery I sell. And the food your momma sets on the table, the food that keeps your stomach full? Farmers provide that, too, and not only when they patronize the store. Somebody has to grow the food you eat, and farmers are the ones who do it.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the baking.”

“The baking will get done without you.”

“The haying will get done without me, too.” Annie had her arms folded across her chest by then, a sure sign she’d stopped listening.

“It’s not all about us, Annie. We’re small pieces of a community that comes together when the need is greatest, like in haying season and threshing season. By coming together in the name of the community, we admit we depend on each other. Depending on each other is just the way humans are made.”

I’m pretty sure Annie had a comeback. She had an answer for everything. But as we rounded a grove of trees, I spotted Thomas Beckmeyer and his sons in their field, whereupon my sister’s protests fled my little brain like field mice scurrying from a side mower. I was that scared.

Annie was big on picture books and, every so often, when she was in a generous mood, she’d read me a story. One story was titled “The Grim Reaper” and right there, on the first page, old man death was pictured in all his dark glory. I suppose we’re all familiar with that image—a skeleton dressed in robes, carrying a scythe. Only I didn’t know the instrument used by the grim reaper even had a name. I only remembered his skull face and that long, curved blade. The Beckmeyers had their backs to us when we first sighted them. They might have had skulls for faces—imagination has a tendency to run wild at five years old—but there was no mistaking the blades on the scythes they wielded.

My first instinct was to jump out of the wagon and make for home as fast as my little legs could take me. As it was, I grabbed my dad’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

“What’s wrong, Lucas?”

“He’s takin’ souls,” I responded, which was what the grim reaper did in Annie’s book.

“Taking souls?”

“The grim reaper. He’s takin’ souls.”

I seem to recall my dad stifling a laugh at that moment. “No, he’s not, son. That’s Thomas Beckmeyer and he’s only cutting his hay.”

My father’s quiet tone reassured me just enough to take another look, and sure enough, every time Thomas and his boys swept their scythes, swaths of clover fell to the earth. Then the smell reached me, strong enough to forever mark itself in the center of my being.

Suddenly I became aware of the rhythm of the work. Scything a field is slow business. A step, a swing, another step, another swing. The reapers work behind each other and their bodies rotate with each step, turning until their heads face backwards. The sweep follows—not too fast or the grass will bend, as it does before the wind, only to recover a second later. But not too slow, either. Too slow will produce the same effect—the grass springing back to life. Every stroke has to be the same, a stately progression as formal as any waltz, each man working at exactly the same rate. If not, the back man is liable to cut off the foot of the man working in front of him. The blades are that sharp.

Beckmeyer and his sons stopped when they heard the wagon—not to greet us, though they did, but to sharpen their scythes. The cut grass lay behind them in three neat rows, called windrows, where it would be left to dry for a day or so. I recall my dad pausing to admire the perfectly straight windrows before approaching Mr. Beckmeyer to shake hands. Then he formally introduced me and Annie.

“How do?” Thomas Beckmeyer said to each of us. His boys just nodded as they ran their whetstones across the edges of their blades. Flies buzzed around their heads and their bodies were soaked with sweat. Most likely their thoughts were only of the water jug resting in the shade of a tree. They would take long drinks before they resumed cutting, the only real pleasure they would know until their momma brought their lunch.

Other families had made appearances before us. They were in a field cut two days earlier, raking the windrows into what folks called haycocks, which looked to me like the igloos I’d seen in one of my own picture books. My father and Annie joined them, and pretty soon they were as sweaty as everyone else.

I was too young to wield a rake and so was left to myself. I didn’t mind. I climbed up on the wagon and watched the Beckmeyers, father and sons, return to their labor. Mr. Beckmeyer was the master there, his back arrow straight, his body swiveling, the blade of his scythe cutting through the grass exactly parallel to the ground. Low enough to leave only stubble behind, yet high enough to avoid the occasional rock or clump of earth.

Step, turn, whoosh. Step, turn, whoosh. Again and again and again. There was something about their labor that captured my attention, something large, and something else, too—something that stayed with me for many years but I couldn’t name. Everything was locked up with everything else: the tools, the men, the waving grass, even the occasional partridge that shot up out of the grass in a flurry of wings that sounded like an explosion. I didn’t know what to make of what I saw, but at my young age I didn’t feel a need to provide everything with a name, and so I kept my feelings to myself and just watched.