By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 31, 1935.
“Hang it,” said Jimmie, Frise, “now I’m in for it.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’ve been inviting my relatives down to the Exhibition for years,” said Jim, “and they can never come because of the threshing. So last winter, I was kidding them and told them if they would come this year, I’d come up and give them a hand.”
“With the threshing?” I asked delighted.
“Yes, and now here’s a letter from Aunt Fanny saying that if I was in earnest, I could come, because they really are short-handed. And if I come for two days, they’ll come to the Exhibition.”
“Well, that’s plain enough,” I said.
“She says if I can bring a friend,” said Jim.
“Why not?” I cried. “I come of a long line of agriculturists.”
“But threshing,” said Jim. “Boy, that’s work.”
“Nonsense, Jim,” I laughed. “It’s all done by machinery. Farm life is all modernized these days.”
“Would you care to come with me if I went up to Aunt Fanny’s?” asked Jim.
“I’d love it, Jim,” I assured him.
“I’ll write her I’m coming and bringing a friend,” said Jim eagerly.
The drive to Jim’s aunt’s was through lovely country, with shorn gleaming fields and tall corn.
“Tell me about the threshing,” I said. “It’s a machine, isn’t it? I’ve passed a huge steam engine hauling something like a circus wagon after it on the road.”
“Well, it’s a machine,” said Jim. “Sometimes it is owned by a man who comes with the outfit and hires out to the different farmers. Sometimes the farmers band together and own a threshing outfit amongst a group.”
“Communism,” I said.
“Yes,” said Jimmie. “Well, anyway, the farmers have put away their grain, in sheaves, up in their barns, out of the rain, to ripen and dry. The threshing machine backs up under the loft of the barn. Some of the hands throw the sheaves down on to a conveyer belt that carries the sheaves into the chopping machine, where knives chop the straw fine and the grain is shaken out.”
“I don’t see where men come into that much,” I said.
“The steam engine,” said Jim, “which drives the belt and the chopping knives, also blows a powerful wind which is strong enough to blow the chopped straw out the blower, a sort of big stove pipe, while the grain, blown clean, slides down a hopper and out a spout. That’s where the work comes in.”
“How?” I asked.
“Somebody has to carry the boxes into which the grain flows; there’s about a bushel to a box, and grab them fast and run them to the wheat bins, while another man has to shovel the wheat in the bins back. It’s all very fast, you see? The wheat is pouring out. The boxes have to be grabbed and carried away. The bins have to be kept shovelled back. And then there is the straw stack.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“The straw,” said Jim, “comes blowing out of the big pipe and rapidly makes a straw pile. Somebody has to steer the big blower pipe, see, and somebody, with a pitchfork, has to be on top of the straw stack, stacking it. It’s quite a job.”
“It doesn’t sound too bad, chucking a few sheaves down out of a mow,” I said, as we sailed along. “Carting a few boxes of wheat. Making a stack. What do you suppose we’ll have to do?”
“We’ll do what we are told,” said Jim. “I imagine they will put us carrying the boxes.”
“It will be near noon before we get there,” I commented.
So Jim stepped on it, and the miles fled by.
As we drove down Aunt Fanny’s lane, we could hear and see the threshing in progress.
And as we pulled in beside the farm house, a thin shrill whistle blew, the engine stopped its roaring, with a whine the whole business slowed down and stopped.
“Lunch,” said Jim.
And we stepped in to meet Aunt Fanny just as a group of six men, red and perspiring, shrugging their shoulders as if to loosen stiff muscles, trooped into the farm house and lined up at the kitchen wash basin.
“I never believed you’d come, Jim,” said his aunt.
But she had places set for us at the big kitchen table, and we joined the company of shy big men, in their overalls and their shining faces, rubbing their hands, and making bashful jokes with one another, to a lunch that would knock a horse over. There were jugs and pails of ice cold water, jugs of lemonade; there were big plates heaped with bread, and platters heaped with sliced head cheese and cold red beef; vegetable dishes staggering under plain boiled potatoes, another with beets, another with squash. There were bowls of pickles and bowls of relish; jugs full of green onions and jugs full of celery.
“Here, here, take a helping,” said the man next to me when I took one boiled potato, and one slice of head cheese.
“No, no, this is far more than I usually eat at lunch,” I assured him.
“You’ll need it before you’re through the day,” said the neighbor.
But the rest of them just dug in, and they ate, and they reached, and they packed a layer of fresh bread on top of each helping of meat and vegetables; and they took four or five helpings of pickles, especially a long-legged man at the end of the table called Sid, who had bright red inflamed eyes and a kind of gray look about him.
“Hay fever? I asked him, indicating his eyes.
“No, straw fever,” he said, and everybody laughed.
And when the bowls and dishes and plates were all empty, Aunt Fanny came in with pies, blueberry pies, apple pies, pumpkin pies, and a cream pie that seemed to go very well, because it never reached me.
The teapot finished the meal, with the men all sitting angular and arms and legs bent, at the table, looking shinier and damper than ever.
“Where would you like us?” asked Jimmie.
“On the boxes,” said the boss of the threshing machine, another big man with a large moustache. “Or can you handle the sheaves?”
“My friend,” said Jimmie, “has to send for a stenographer whenever he needs a new ribbon in his typewriter.”
“Aw, say,” I said.
“Two of you on the boxes, then,” said the boss, whose name was Wesley somebody. Not Wes. Wesley.
“Do you need two of them on the boxes?” asked Sid.
“Well, they can handle the bins, too, and that will free one of you to help haul that barley off the south twenty,” said Wesley.
“Oh, barley?” said Jimmie.
Aunt Fanny had old clothes laid out for us. We dressed. The engine started. We all took our places, like in a square dance. Square dances are just an artistic shaping of the movements of the farm; thrashing, plowing, hoeing, stooking.
And then the big blower, a huge pipe. began coughing out a terrific cloud of straw and dust, the big machine shook and thundered, and out of the hopper underneath flowed a regular flood of barley. The box set below filled so quickly, I hardly had time to straighten my hat and shift my suspenders. Jim shouted above the din, and I picked up the box.
When the Blower Blows
It was heavy. I had to rest it on my leg fronts. I staggered with it into the barn, while Jim set a new box and stood ready. It was deafening and it was exciting. I dumped the box into the bin and hurried back, but even so, Jim was already drawing the other box from under the hopper and signalling me frantically.
I slid my box under and Jim dragged his out. Away he went. Before he got back, my box was overflowing and I signalled him fiercely. Out came my brimming box and under went Jim’s.
“We musn’t let it get ahead of us,” Jim shouted in my ear.
And so, starting right after lunch, it went. Not 10 times, not 25 times, but endlessly, endlessly. It became startling. It became frightening. The sun seemed to stand still in the sky.
And while we toiled around one end of the outfit, out of the blower belched a torrent of gleaming dry straw and dust, a cloud, swirling and whirling, which fortunately a little wind blew away from us, though we got plenty of it in occasional gusts. Up above, a man steered this huge pipe, and another man, stamping and pitchforking for dear life, stood atop the straw stack, shaping it, forking it, stamping it into an ever-growing pile. He was hardly visible. He was the man with the red eyes and the straw fever. He worked in a cloud.
“Don’t we break off for a smoke or anything?” I shouted to Jim.
“No,” he answered, staggering away with his box.
The bin had now grown so full that something had to be done, so Jim waded deep in the grain and shovelled for all he was worth while I tried to do double duty on the boxes.
But the second trip. I yelled at Jim in the bin:
“She’s getting ahead of me, come on!”
“I’ve got to shovel this back,” he yelled back excitedly.
Anyway, he came, and there were now about two boxes of barley on the ground, and the box was hard to shove under on account of the pile.
Wesley looked down from the engine, where he was fixing something, and suddenly he tooted the whistle and everything groaned and whined to a stop.
“I guess,” said Wesley, “we ought to put somebody else on the boxes, eh?”
“How about the blower?” Jim called up.
“The little fellow on the blower and you on the stack?” asked Wesley.
“Or vica versa,” said Jim. “We’ll toss.”
Jim tossed a coin.
“Heads,” he called, opening his hands. It was heads.
“You get on the straw stack, and I’ll steer the blower,” said Jim.
There was a ladder against the rising stack and I climbed up it. Jim got on top of the machine by the blower pipe.
“All ready?” yelled Wesley.
I do not say that Jimmie actually aimed the pipe at me, even when it seemed that he did, but at any rate, there was just a hot belch of air and a cloud of dust and chopped straw, and the more I struggled to stamp the silly stuff down, the deeper I sank into it. If I tried to shift it with the fork, none would stay on the fork. The din prevented me from shouting to him to tell him where to aim the big pipe. If I opened my mouth, it got full of dust. I squinted my eyes, and stamped and tramped and forked, and sank to my middle in the stack.
“Heavens,” I said, “suppose I start sinking and they bury me in this stack!”
And I waved the fork of Jimmie, but he just let it belch and roar at me, and there was nothing to do but keep hopping and jumping up and down to avoid being sunk in what seemed to be quicksand.
Something itching and twitching and sharp and raspy got in my eyes, mouth, nose; down my shirt, front and back. I have since learned that barley has what they call a beard. And this, chopped up, was like granite sand in the air, hotly, storming on to me.
First I got tired, and then I got numb, and then all feeling and lastly all thought left me. The sun went slowly, slowly over the barn, and there I jumped and forked, and tramped a thousand miles. My eyes stung, until I tried closing them; but that was dangerous, because I might fall off the stack. My lungs burned, so that if I did try to shout, I felt they would tear loose.
“Well,” I said to myself, not using any voice, but just thinking, “so this is the best science can do for the farmer, eh?”
And as I leaped and jumped and walked uphill forever on a cloud of straw and dust and thistles and grit, I thought of the way this cruel world, with its marvellous inventions, its motor cars and trains, aeroplanes and trolley cars, its radio and movies, and electric refrigerators and elevators and everything else for the comfort of man, had so terribly neglected the farmer.
Whenever I got far enough up on the straw, I would try to signal Jim, but he says now he saw me so busy he was sure I was enjoying it. And, anyway, he said he didn’t feel we should interrupt the threshing again, after failing with the boxes and letting the hopper get ahead of us.
At any rate, after so long a time that I felt the Great War was only about third of the length, the sun kept falling far below the barn, and evening drew on; supper time came and went, and still that awful engine roared and clattered, and still the sheaves came tumbling out of the mow, and still that terrible rampant pipe, its vast mouth open like a serpent, belched its storm of straw and dust and sand and thistles on top of me, rising higher with every foot the stack gained.
It was actually dark when the little thin whistle blew, and the whole contraption groaned to a stop; and all I did was lie down. I just lay down.
I heard the men talking and joking loudly, no longer bashful. I heard them tinkering with the machine and putting things away. I heard Jimmie’s voice down on the ground, telling somebody how it all came back to him and that he felt he was an old-timer now.
But I just lay there. I lay there when I heard them going towards the house. I lay there when I heard Aunt Fanny’s voice calling them to close the gate.
I lay there and heard cows come into the barnyard. Even when I heard them come up and start breathing and whooshing around the straw stack, I just lay there.
But when I heard the rattle of dishes and the lively sound of a pump handle, and when I smelt, amongst other things, bacon, me thinking I would never smell anything ever again. I sat up.
There had been a ladder up the straw stack. How else did I get up? But there was no ladder I could see now. The stack was bigger above than below. And there were nine cows around the stack, cows with turned-up horns. It was thirty feet to the ground.
“Shoo,” I said, “beat it.”
The cows didn’t even look up. They stayed right there. Around the stack.
“Hoy.” I yelled, my throat flaming. “Hoy, Jimmie!”
I yelled and yelled. But the din of dishes was loud in the farm house, and the hum of voices; and a radio had started.
I gave up shouting. It stung too much. I just sat, feeling the slow sweet ache in my legs, back, neck, head, shoulders, arms…
“Modern agriculture,” I sneered at the dark.
Then Jimmie came suddenly out the back door and looked, in the lighted door way, towards the stack.
“Hoy!” I yelled.
And Jim came running, with a piece of bread and butter in one hand.
“What on earth are you doing up there?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t be interested.” I said.
“Here, here’s the ladder,” said he.
“Shove the cows away.” I said. “Their horns are turned up.”
I cramped down the ladder.
“My dear boy” said Jim, “why didn’t you call?”
“Jim,” I said, “is your Aunt Fanny coming to the Exhibition?”
“Sure,” said Jim.
“I’d like the privilege” I said, “of showing her around for an afternoon.”
So I went in and had what was left at the table, which wasn’t much.
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in So What? (1937).
Leave a Reply