Читать книгу Grain - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Gander attended school with more or less regularity until he was ten years old. The qualification is rendered necessary by those frequent interruptions caused by rain storms, blizzards, illness and accidents—always regarded as godsends by young Gander—temporary embarrassments in the matter of wardrobe, and, it must be confessed, a few occasions when he had deliberately gone gopher-snaring at the cost of higher education.

Gander was dull; learning came to him with difficulty; books were bothersome, and he was not disposed to be bothered. After his first shyness had broken down he enjoyed mingling with the other boys; he gloried in the games at recess and during the noon hour; he never wholly disliked any teacher, but he hated study. For Gander was a farmer born and bred; he had an eye for horses and a knack with machinery; the mysteries of the self-binder he had solved before he was nine, but the mysteries of cube root he had not solved when he left school—nor since. He knew more than any of his teachers about the profession by which he was to make his livelihood, and he regarded their book-learning as nonessential and irrelevant—neither of which words would he have understood. He made chums of Tommy Burge, Dick Claus, and Freddie Gordon (of the school teacher's boarding-house), but particularly of Tommy Burge. And he developed a strange kindliness of regard toward Josephine Burge; a regard which, for all his blundering shyness, he in some way managed to disclose to the one individual who had most right to know.

The summer he was ten years old Gander began to take a man's place on the farm. Jackson Stake had added to the original homestead until he now had four hundred and eighty acres of land; rich, mellow, fertile prairie and scrub sod, with over two hundred acres under cultivation. His cattle and horse stables, his granaries and sheds, sprawled aimlessly about the log hut which was still his home, its numerous lean-tos marking, with some degree of precision, the periodical increases in his family; the new frame house, with lath-and-plaster finish, of which Susie Stake had dreamed for a decade and a half had not yet come into being, although every spring her husband had prophesied that if the crop "came off" the new house would surely be built the following season.

"What do you think about buildin' our new house this year?" she would say each May, when the prairie was a garden of flowers and a man's heart might be expected lightly to turn to rash commitments.

"Not this year, I am afraid, Susie; got to buy a new binder. Maybe next year, if the crop comes off."

Mrs. Stake was a bad but effective loser. "I'll believe it when I see it," she would close the discussion.

Meanwhile Jackson enlarged his stables and barns; abandoned the twenty-acre field idea which he had transplanted from his early Eastern environment to the broad measures of the West, and now farmed his land by quarter sections; abandoned the two-horse team for teams of four and six; abandoned the fourteen-inch single-furrow walking plough for two-and three-furrow sulky gangs; abandoned the broadcast seeder for the disc drill, and the six-foot binder for the eight; abandoned the grain sack for the bulk system of handling wheat; abandoned the old horse-power threshers whose metallic crescendo sang through the frosty autumn mornings of the 1880's for the steam and gasoline of the twentieth century.

Jackson Stake was but one unit in a hundred thousand who were making possible the great trek from the country to the city, a trek which never could have taken place but for the application of machinery to land, so that now one farmer may raise enough wheat to feed many hundreds of city dwellers. But if in this he was adding his weight to a gathering social and economic crisis he was quite oblivious to the fact; he saw no further than the need of bringing more land under cultivation, to grow more wheat; and even while he pursued this policy he would have told you that he lost money on every bushel of wheat he grew, and that it was the cows, the hogs, and the hens that held the farm together. And Mrs. Stake, had she been standing by, would have reminded him who it was that milked the cows, and fed the hens, and mothered the young chickens, and, perhaps, threw the chopped barley to the hogs. Mrs. Stake had a gift of mentioning such matters.

The summer Gander was ten he drove a two-horse team on the mower, and, later, a four-horse team on the binder. He was now a tall, thin boy, hump-shouldered from sitting huddled on his machines, grimy with oil and blear-eyed with dust; knowing nothing about cube root but able to harness and handle four horses abreast, and filled with the joy of a man's accomplishment. He was still too small to be of much service stocking sheaves or forking hay, and his natural aptitude for horses and machinery led to his being made teamster of the binder and mower. His brother Jackie, now eighteen, and his father, followed him in the fields, working the long harvest days until after sunset to save the thirty dollars a month which a hired man would have cost. But for Gander's services the hired man would have been inevitable; the statement that he was filled with the joy of a man's accomplishment is, therefore, no figure of speech. True, Gander did not get the thirty dollars a month—nor did he expect it. He was working for his father and with his father, and that was enough. Gander was still in the tribal stage of development; his individualism was swallowed up in the family group.

Not so Jackie. Jackie discussed it with his father.

"Dad, I'm doing a man's work and I think I ought to get a man's pay," he said one day in harvest, as they sat in the shade of a stook for a few minutes after eating the four o'clock lunch which Minnie brought from the house. "I ain't a kicker, but I could get thirty dollars workin' on any other farm 'round here, and not work any harder, either."

His father chewed meditatively on a straw. There had been something in Jackie's mood in recent times which rather had prepared him for this conversation.

"An' how much would you get in winter?" he asked.

"Perhaps somethin', perhaps nothin'," Jackie returned, doggedly. "Or I could go into Winnipeg and hit somethin' for the winter."

"Hit a soup kitchen, mos' likely. I guess there ain't no jobs chasin' young fellows like you up and down the streets o' Winnipeg in January. Some fellows don' know a good home when they got it."

"I suppose you're alludin' to that log shack we eat and sleep in," Jackie retorted. "Yes, it's a pretty classy residence. You've been goin' to build a frame house as long's I can remember, with lath and plaster inside——"

Jackson senior paused in the mastication of his straw. His big red face hardened. When he spoke it was with the finality of an ultimatum.

"Lath an' plaster don' make a home, an' sometimes poplar logs do. I built that place with my own saw an' axe, an' you didn' help me, nothin' partic'lar. It was good enough for me then, an' it's good enough for me yet, an' any day it aint' good enough for you perhaps you'd better buzz round a bit an' find somethin' more to your likin'."

There was a silence in which both men gazed blankly at the shimmering heat away through the avenues of stooks.

"I don' mean that remark to be took too literal," the older man conceded at length. "You've been a good help on the farm—I'll say that for you—an' I'm not handin' you any grand bounce. What I can't understand is why you wan' to leave it."

"I ain't sayin' I want to leave, but I think I'm worth as much as other men that's gettin' paid."

"Well, we're not quarrelin' on that, either, but, there's more ways of payin' than writin' a check. You get everythin' you need. You charge it up at Sempter's store, an' I settle for it. Besides, I been payin' instalments on you ever since you was born, Jackie, an' before. Seems like the new generation nowadays don' take that into consideration. They think the old man should be like a stove-pipe—everythin' goin' out an' nothin' comin' in. I figger on bein' fair, Jackie, but it don' seem to be as you have any kick comin'."

"I know all that, Dad, but every time I want a dollar I got to go bowin' an' scrapin' to you, just like Mother does. When I go into Plainville I see other fellows there with money to rattle in their jeans—workin' on the section, dollar and a quarter a day, and quit at six o'clock, and pay sure every month. They don't work as hard as I do, and if they want to treat some o' their friends to ice cream or—or—anythin' else, it's nobody's business."

Jackie was reaching the gravamen of his indictment. He paused, gulped, and plunged on:

"One day this summer you gave me fifty cents to go to a show—after I'd asked you for it—and I went and—took a girl along, and the tickets were thirty-five cents, and there was I standin' at the door tryin' to squeeze four bits till it looked like seventy cents, and the door-keeper—it was a travelin' show, and he didn't know me from a load o' hay—he says, 'Well, well, young man, what's the delay?' lookin' at me like I was a lump o' cheese. I'd a mind to soak him one for luck right there, but when you got a girl with you you got to be a gentleman, and just then Jim French came along—he's workin' on the section now—and says, 'What's a-matter, Jackie, old boy?' and I says 'Guess I must 'a' lost my money, Jim; had it down town a few minutes ago,'—lyin' a bit to cover my family pride, you understand—and Jim sticks a dollar bill in my hand and says 'Pay me any time you like,' and in he goes. Well, it made me so mad I felt like jumpin' the whole thing right there. I'm just a clod-hopper, a farmer's lout, but I got some feelin'." Jackie's emotions were not far from tears. He came to silence, swallowing hard.

His father took his time in answering. Then:

"Ever pay Jim back his dollar?"

"Well I guess I did. Very next time I was in town."

"Where'd you get it?" his father sprung on him. Jackie had walked into his trap.

"From you. Had to ask you for it, though."

"Yes—from me. An' you could 'a' got it before the show, just as well as after, if you'd said so, an' saved your wounded feelin's. An' it's my notion that a boy that gets money for the askin' ain't so darn' bad off as he might be. I don' get mine that way—an' never did."

Jackson glanced at the shadow of the stook, creeping around to the eastward. His legs were stiff with toil and he rose with a groan, but once upon his feet he strode quickly through the crisp stubble. Gander drove up at the moment, the binder clattering as it came. The young teamster saw his father through the corner of his eye, and his chest swelled with manly pride. Not for an instant did he deflect his attention from the job in hand. He cracked his long whip over the backs of his four bays and by they want on the half-run, the binder snapping out its great sheaves of golden wheat and its drive-chains singing in the hot afternoon. Just as it passed Jackson it tripped another sheaf; the ejecting arms swung upward; the needle ploughed the resilient stalks until its polished point protruded through the knotter, for all the world as though it were sticking out its tongue at its lord and owner; the compressing finger came up; the cord tightened; the beak, with two threads of twine in its jaws, made its revolution, too quickly for the eye to see, and the knot was tied; the knife cut the string, and the sheaf fell on the carrier. Then the loose chatter of the packers, as, the strain for a moment relieved, they thrust fresh wheat into the loop of twine left by the needle when it receded into its sheath. It was done in a second, or, at most, two; every six or eight yards around that half-mile field the operation was repeated, and a boy of ten was the magician who slew those serried ranks of wheat in less time than a score of grown men with aching backs swinging cradles in the days of his grandfather. An industry which has been so mechanized can spare a Jackie now and again—and does.

There was a glow of pride in Jackson Stake's eye as this young farmer drove past; he followed him for a moment with his glance, then turned to his stooking. A stoop, a grab with his bare hands into the waists of two sheaves; a swing of the elbows and the back which brought them into upright position, heads together, butts slightly tapering out, in the form of an inverted V; then a swift, sharp, downward stroke, planting them firmly in the stubble. Around this nucleus other sheaves were set in a circle; butts out, heads tapering in, to turn the rain; not less than eight, not more than twelve, and father and son moved on to the next. By the time all the field was cut it would be a sea of stooks, ready for two or three weeks of curing in the autumn sun and rain, and then for the thresher. A business this which lays heavy tribute of risk and labor upon its devotees; which rewards them sometimes handsomely, sometimes sparsely, sometimes not at all; but which has in it the elemental fascination of the soil.

The Jacksons, senior and junior, plied their work without another word. To the father no further discussion seemed necessary. Jackie was restless, and a bit ungrateful; when he was older he would realize the advantages of having a home he could call his own, in foul weather as well as fair.

"I'm ready to do what's right with Jackie," the elder Stake assured himself. "The far quarter can be his when he marries, an' a team, an' the use o' the machinery until he can buy his own; but I'm not tellin' him that—not jus' now. No use startin' foolish notions. Time enough. An' if the crop comes off all right I'll slip him a little cash after threshin'; maybe a twenty-dollar bill to do as he likes, an' no questions asked. I don' blame him for bein' sore, held up there at the door o' the hall; dang it all, when I was his age I'd 'a' bust my way in, but times is different now. Wonder who the girl was? He didn't say, did he? Well, Jackie's gettin' along; eighteen now, but it seems like yesterday I walked the post road to Plainville for him, an' Susie." Over the gap of years the advent of his first-born came back to him, poignant and overwhelming, and a mist which was not from the red rust of the wheat sent the sea of stooks swimming before his eyes. "Dang it all, I'll make it fifty, if the crop comes off, so help me!" he promised himself.

But he didn't make it fifty dollars, or twenty dollars, or any other sum, when the crop "came off." For on Friday of that week Jackie drove to town with cash for two hundred pounds of twine, and a boy from the livery stable brought the team home, saying Jackie had taken the morning train to Winnipeg.