Читать книгу Wheat Fields - Joseph A. Byrne - Страница 4

It’s a beauty,” the young man declared as he looked down from his perch high above the others. “I can’t believe it’s finally here,” the man continued as he started to climb down, hoping the others were as impressed with it as he was.

I’ll bet it is worth more than my house,” one of the men on the ground called at him. This caused the young man to smile slightly. He hid his chin in his jacket to try to conceal it.

“It’s worth more than mine, that’s for sure,” the young man called back as he lowered his left leg onto the top rung of the second ladder.

“Watch your step,” another called up. “That shiny new paint is slippery,” he continued just as the young man slipped a little, caught himself on the hand rail, which caused him to flex his arm muscle. He tried hard to hold on as his body swung out over the ground below.

“Nice catch,” the man called at him from the ground as the other strained to hold on. “Come down. It’s safer on the ground,” the man continued as everyone who had gathered there laughed a little, mostly from the relief they felt as their young colleague held on without falling.

As he said it, a small truck pulled slowly into the driveway, pulling behind it an enormous grain head that was easily forty feet in length.

“What the heck is that for?” one of the men stated softly as he shook his head.

“That’s a combine head,” Emus said. Emus, the young man who had been at the top of the combine was now standing with his feet safely on the ground.

“Where do you plan to use it?” Jig asked, relieved he was no longer directing his cat calls upward.

“Around here,” Emus answered simply. “We’ll use it around here. Don’t you think the combine is big enough to handle it?” Emus continued.

“Oh, it’s big enough alright,” Jig answered. “It’s not the size of the combine I’m worried about. You’ve got lots of machine there. It’s the small fields and narrow roads that worry me.”

As he said it, an old man slowly walked around the corner of the barn. His head was lifted as he shuffled forward, his eyes glued to the shiny new paint on the combine. As he approached the machine he stopped at once, raised his cane and said, “you know the most money you will make with that combine is from the work you do on it every morning, inspecting it, looking for trouble, and fixing before you go to the field.

This caused Jig to laugh. “Why? Have you run a machine like this before?” he asked with a scoff.

“The machines are all about the same,” the man replied simply. “They all break down. But it’s the breakdowns during the heat of a good combining day that cost you the most money. You have to head those off.”

With that, a period of silence set in. Emus continued with his inspection of the enormous machine. Jig moved from place to place looking at the machine, checking behind the fender here, and a panel or two there, but not showing any real interest in the machine. The old man, on the other hand, slowly and methodically, checked out the heart of the machine. He was not interested in size, capacity or the like. Rather, he checked the threshing unit, the separation system, the grain elevation system, and such. Finally, he made his pronouncement.

“It’s quite a machine,” he started, then quickly added, “but, you know, these machines have not really changed that much in terms of basic design. The biggest thing they did was they took the old threshing machine, made it mobile, then they combined the operations of cutting the wheat straw and threshing it. The rest is the result of a whole lot of field testing.”

“Is that right?” Jig mocked. “But what would you really know about it?”

The old man did not reply. He merely continued with his examination of the threshing unit. It was Emus who was next to talk. “Tell us about it. Would you tell us how you started combining?”

The old man slowly moved along the side of the machine before sitting on the rim of one of the large tires. Beside him sat an ornery looking block of wood that the men had used earlier as a base for their jack. After sitting there a while, he said simply, “it is hot. If a little wind comes along, it might turn into a real good combining day.” Then he got to the heart of his thoughts. “I like the look of this machine,” he continued. “I like the simplicity of it. It reminds me of the old Massey Clipper. The Clipper was a simple pull-type combine, with few moving parts. When you went to the field with it, it worked, and it worked all day. It had a five-foot cut, and a threshing cylinder that was almost five feet wide as well. It had a straw walker system that made it very hard to plug.”

“Well, this is no Massey Clipper,” Jig chided.

“I hope it is,” the old man replied quickly. Jig was left without any understanding of why the old man had said that.

Finally, it was Emus who said, “Jig, let up a little. I want to hear what the old man has to say”.

There was a considerable silence before the old man said any more. Then, he started.

“In 1934, I bought my first combine, with my brother, God rest his soul.” With that the old man paused. It seemed that even after all these years, he could not think about his late brother without breaking down. “When we bought that first combine, the immobile threshing machine was king. Many of the old timers thought that a mobile combine was not a functional tool for their farms.

When we brought that first combine home, a combine that was bought with hard earned money, my dad wouldn’t let it onto the farm. He made us park it on the road. That was a hard blow to the two of us.

We had bought that machine with borrowed money. We needed to combine a lot of acres of wheat to pay for it. But, as soon as my dad refused to even let it come onto his property, we knew we had an uphill battle on our hands. We knew then that it would be hard to convince people to even let us harvest a few acres with it so we could demonstrate the capability of the machine.

They resisted us fiercely. It was as though we were upsetting the social order on the farms. The large families, who lived on the farms in those days, were used to having a lot of work to do. They were used to needing their large families, large families who were needed to do all that work on the farms.

Threshing provided them with a lot of work to do. More importantly, it set the tone for all the other work that had to be done around the farm. The kids in those days were expected to work. They were not expected to bring combines or other play toys home to the farm.

To make matters worse, 1934 was the hottest, driest year, anyone could remember. To give you an idea of how dry it was, we planted hills of corn in April that year, in dry dirt, and we never did get enough rain to bring the corn up. The oats straw was so short that the horse drawn mowers couldn’t cut it. The oat straw would simply bend in front of the knife, and pop back up behind it. I remember, we turned the cattle into one field and within two days, there was almost no evidence left that it was ever an oat field.

Matters were compounded by the fact that there was absolutely no money on the farms in those days. The price of oats had fallen to fourteen cents per bushel, and we didn’t even have any to sell at that price. We proved one thing that summer though. You can live on home grown rhubarb and homemade apple sauce, but it gets monotonous.”

“If it was that bad, then why did you buy the combine?” Emus asked.

“That’s a good question,” the old man acknowledged. “Some of us had real bad allergies for dust and wheat pollen. Some called it hay fever.

In my case, I couldn’t handle the wheat dust. I sneezed constantly, while I worked in it. My eyes watered and I felt weak. We sneezed just as badly for several days after we had worked in it as well.

But to the farmers of that time, hay fever, like our combine, was seen as a synonym for ‘lazy’. It would not have been surprising if there had been a rebellion against the demands of work on the farms in those days. The threshing beat continued day after day all summer. It was usually hot, dusty, dirty work without thanks or pay. As an added bonus, on some days you might even get kicked by a horse.

No one was interested in putting our combine to work in 1934. Of course, the reality was that even if they were, most of them didn’t have the money to pay us for the work we would do. No, we worked on the threshing beat in 1934. We worked on it all summer there along the Middle Road.”