Farmer's Glory

by A G Street

  He drove round the wood which sheltered the shanty and stable from the north-west, and in a few minutes pointed down a gap in the willow scrub. ‘There they are.’ Some two hundred yards away I could see two men. ‘You’re O.K. now, Blanchard. I won’t stop as I’m busy. Tell George I’ll ring him up to-night about threshing. Good luck.’

  I thanked him, and scrambled through the wood towards the two figures. As I drew near they looked to me like a couple of very ragged tramps. ‘It’s Blanchard, I guess?’ said one with a smile. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good! I’m Hartley. This is Gordon.’ We shook hands.

  ‘Who brought you out? Pop Henderson? Why didn’t he stop?’

  ‘He said he was too busy, but that he would ring you up to-night about threshing.’

  ‘Busy be damned. He knows Gordon’s cooking. You’d better take Blanchard back to the shanty, Gordon, and get supper. I’ll be along shortly.’

  I found Gordon easy to talk to, as we walked back to the shanty. Evidently he had not shaved for some weeks, and sported a black moustache and pointed beard, which gave him a Spanish appearance. He wore a faded khaki shirt, and a pair of bib overalls. These latter garments must have got torn in the fencing operations, for about nine inches of bare thigh was showing on one leg, and a large portion of his shirt-tail protruded from the seat. However, he was perfectly oblivious of these defects in his attire, and chattered to me about theatres and cricket in the Old Country quite gaily. I learnt that he was thirty years old, and had been a medical student in Edinburgh. Presently we entered the shanty, and about ten thousand flies rose up to greet us.

  ‘Blast the flies,’ he said. ‘They’re always bad in the Fall.’

  The furnishings of the shanty were simple in the extreme. A double spring-mattress bed was fixed in one corner, stove in another, table in another, and a crude washstand in the last. I watched my companion get supper with great interest. Having lit the fire in the stove, he examined the water bucket. It was half-full, with a dozen dead and dying flies floating on the surface. ‘I think not,’ he said, ‘seeing as how we got company like. Fresh water is indicated. Shan’t be a jiffy.’ He picked up the bucket and vanished. I sat down on a chair and lit my pipe. I began to think that my life at home had certain features to commend it.

  He returned with a full bucket, filled the kettle, placed it on the stove, rolled a cigarette, lit it and then gravely contemplated two frying-pans which were hanging on the wall. There was a trail of grease beneath each one, evidently the drainings of years. ‘Now which,’ said he, ‘did I use for fish the other day?’ He took down each, and sniffed carefully. ‘Got him,’ he said. He placed the chosen pan on the stove, and put some grease into it from a small tin pail. ‘Fried spuds,’ he explained, and then flumped down on his stomach in the middle of the floor. ‘Larder and cellar combined,’ he gurgled, as he lifted out three loose floor boards, thus exposing a small pit. ‘Ups a daisy.’ He reached down, and brought up three dishes each covered with a piece of newspaper. ‘Dust works through the floor as we walk about, so we’ve got to keep everything covered up.’ He uncovered the dishes and exposed one of cold boiled potatoes, a joint of cold beef in a baking tin, and a plate of butter. He replaced the boards, rose to his feet, put the beef and butter on the table, and tipped the potatoes into the frying-pan. Having chopped these up roughly with a knife, incidentally dropping in some cigarette ash as flavouring, he turned to lay the table.

  The beef and butter were covered with flies. ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘Wonder how long George’ll be? Better put ’em in the cellar.’ He did this, replaced the boards once more, dusted his hands on the seat of his overalls, and resumed his torture of the potatoes.

  The table was covered with what was originally white oilcloth, but which now presented a mottled appearance, cigarette burns and ink spots fighting for pride of place. Subsequently I found out that there were four layers of this on the table, the procedure being to nail on a new bit each year. Gordon next proceeded to lay the table. From a rough shelf he produced the necessary utensils, flipped them on the table with the ease of a conjuror performing a well-practised trick, turned to the stove to chivvy the potatoes once more, and then turned and beamed at me. ‘All done by kindness,’ he remarked, rolling another cigarette. ‘Ah, here’s George.’

  Hartley came in, hung his cap on a nail, and sat down to the table. He grinned at me. ‘Bit of a shock I guess,’ he said. ‘All set, Gordon?’

  Down on his tummy went that cheerful chef once more. He hauled up the beef and butter, and dumped it on the table. ‘Come on, Blanchard. Sit up. I guess you’re hungry,’ said Hartley.

  I drew up my chair, and George carved off three liberal helpings of beef, fighting and blaspheming the flies as he did so, while Gordon made the tea.

  ‘Spuds forward,’ said Gordon, ‘all ’ot like.’ He brought the frying-pan to the table, decanted its contents on to our three plates, gave it a scrape with a knife, tapped it on the wood box, hung it on the wall beside its fishy brother, and sat down.

  I was young, hungry, and the beef was tender, but I couldn’t help looking at the joint. It was one twizzling mass of flies. They soon proved too much for George. ‘Get the fly-paper, Gordon. I’ll teach the bastards.’

  Gordon fetched a tangle-foot fly-paper from the washstand. George waved his knife above the joint to disturb the flies, and then Gordon swiftly covered it with the paper, sticky side uppermost. ‘That’ll larn ’em,’ he said, and calmly sat down to his meal, while myriads of flies rushed to their doom.

  I laughed. It was too funny.

  ‘If only our respective mothers could see us now,’ grinned George. ‘Still, we keep fit on it, don’t we, Gordon?’

  ‘It’s British grit as does it,’ replied that worthy. ‘There’s always something in this damn bitch of a country. When it ain’t flies, it’s mosquitoes, and if it isn’t mosquitoes it’s so damn cold that you feel you could put up with both of ’em if it ’ud only get warmer.’

  We finished the meal with bread and syrup, and then George went down to the stable, while Gordon washed up, and I dried the dishes. When George returned we smoked and talked, while Gordon made bread.

  He had the dough in a bucket-shaped machine on a chair by the stove. Evidently it had risen satisfactorily, as it had overflowed down the side of the bucket. He placed the machine, a Universal Bread Maker, on the table, and turned the handle till the dough was all in a lump on the mixer. Having first floured the table, he scraped the dough from the mixer, punched it viciously for a while, then packed it into baking tins, and put it in the oven. ‘Talk about a ruddy marine,’ he said. ‘I could give ’em points.’

  The telephone rang, two long and one short rings. ‘That’s us,’ said George. He talked to the caller for a few minutes, and hung up. ‘Pop wants to see me,’ he said. ‘He’s going to start threshing on Monday. Damn! All the horses are out. Still, p’raps I can catch Duke. Don’t keep Blanchard up too late, Gordon. Cheero! He caught up his cap, and was gone.

  ‘That’s like all these folk out here,’ remarked Gordon. ‘Walk a mile to catch a horse to go a hundred yards. Henderson’s less than a mile away. He could be over there before he’ll catch Duke.’ However, Gordon proved to be wrong, for in a few moments we heard George ride past the shanty.

  After talking for a while, I began to yawn. ‘You turn in,’ said Gordon. ‘This damn bread’ll be another hour, and I guess you’re tired. You’d better sleep against the wall, then George won’t wake you when he gets back. I’m sleeping in the other corner on those blankets.’

  ‘But I don’t want to take your bed,’ said I. ‘Can’t I——?’

  ‘No, you can’t. I’m off next week to Winnipeg now you’ve turned up. That’s your bunk now.’

  I started to undress, opened my handbag, and took out my pyjamas.

  ‘Lumme,’ said Gordon. ‘Don’t they look lovely. We’ve each got a pair somewhere, but usually we sleep in our day-shirts. It’s, ahem, a dirty habit, I’m afraid, but you
see, we do our own washing. Oh, I forgot. Your trunk hasn’t turned up yet, has it? You haven’t got any working shirts, so you’d better use your ’jamas till you have.’

  I put on my pyjamas, got into bed and was soon asleep.

  I’d had a full day.

  CHAPTER IX

  I awoke next morning about six-thirty to the scent and sound of frying bacon. ‘Ought I to have been up before?’ I asked Gordon, as I scrambled out of bed. ‘Where’s Hartley?’

  ‘Don’t you worry your fat about getting to work. I guess that’ll happen fast enough. It’s all they think about in this country. George is down the stable. Guess he’ll be up in a moment.’

  ‘Say,’ Gordon went on, as I started to dress, ‘you’d better keep that suit for swell occasions. Give the girls a treat like. Your trunk’ll be up in a day or two. Ah! Here’s George.’

  Hartley came in, and between them they fitted me up with overalls and shirt. After breakfast, Hartley filled his pipe, and turned to me. ‘We don’t use surnames out here much,’ he said. ‘Can’t help it with Gordon. His name’s Cedric. We had to kick at that. So it’ll be Jim, I guess, from now on. Get me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Right! Now look here; my folks tell me that you’re a farmer. Can you do any work—hard graft, I mean?’

  I thought of my hoeing. ‘I can do any English farm work,’ I said.

  ‘You can pitch hay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good enough! Gordon, you take Duke and the buggy, and go to Barloe. You know what to get in the grub line, and I want two balls of barbed wire. Look out for Jim’s trunk, and you’d better get him some overalls. Come on, Jim. I want to get the loft filled with hay before we start threshing.’

  Apart from a short dinner hour—beef, bread, syrup, and flies—we hauled hay until six o’clock. George pitched the load from the stack, and I pitched it off into the loft window. I found that Canadian slough hay was like lead compared to the English variety, but I don’t think I did so badly.

  After supper, George asked me if I thought I could drive a stook team on Henderson’s threshing gang. Apparently this stook team business was important. I wondered, if I found myself unable to do it, whether I should be sent home as of no use to Canadian farming. Still, according to Henderson, it was only pitching sheaves, so I said that I thought I could manage it.

  ‘I reckon you will all right. ’Twon’t be such hard work as to-day. Sheaves are easier than hay, but it means pitching from six in the morning to eight at night, with only an hour out. I’m going to drive one team, and it’s money in my pocket if you drive the other. Henderson’s paying five dollars a day for a team. You’re supposed to get a hundred and fifty dollars the first year, aren’t you? Well, I’ll give you a dollar a day extra for every day on the gang.’

  I agreed, and asked what Gordon was going to do.

  ‘Oh, he’s off to the Peg. His folks have sent him a hundred and fifty dollars to take a course in salesmanship, and he’s going down to see about it. Most likely he’ll do in the money, and forget about the course. Here he is. Sounds as if he’d got a skinful.’

  George was a little unjust to Gordon. He was not full by any means. He had only helped Jack Smithers finish off the remains of the pair of boots which had arrived at Barloe with me the day before, and I found out afterwards that it took more than one bottle to fill him. Still, he was merry.

  ‘Got your trunk, Jim,’ he yelled, as we went to the door. ‘She weighs a ton. Had to rope the son of a bitch on the back. Stand still, Duke, you prick-eared little bastard. Ah, but darling, I loves you. Come to bye-bye with daddy.’ And he disappeared with Duke in the direction of the stable.

  George and I got the trunk into the shanty, and also some parcels and the mail, in which there was a letter for me from my father. It was a curious letter. First it gave me a lot of good advice as from a sorrowing parent to an erring son, pointing out that I had no safe background in this new country, but that I should have to stand entirely on my own feet. Then there was a lot of general farm news, which brought it all back. I thought of my home, of my dog, of the peaceful Wiltshire meadows. Should I ever wander through them again with my rod? I looked round the shanty. What a mouldy hole it seemed, and what a silly fool I’d been to come away from home to this. But the inherent love of the father to the son peeped out in the last sentence of the letter: ‘And may the Great Architect of the Universe have you in his keeping.’ It was many years afterwards before I really appreciated this last sentence.

  Still, I got very little time to think about my home people or about myself. Gordon went to Winnipeg a day or two afterwards, and then threshing started. The first farm to be threshed out was, of course, Henderson’s, and as this was a mile away we had to get up each morning at four o’clock. Gordon’s cooking job descended to me, while George got the teams ready. Thank heaven it was only our breakfasts for which I was responsible. We got dinner and supper with the gang at Henderson’s, returning home to the shanty each night about ten o’clock.

  In that first week I learnt many things. I found that in a few days it was possible to train one’s stomach to go without food for long periods of time. Having toiled from six to nine, I felt ready for a snack, but unless something went wrong with the machinery, we worked until noon without a break. By ten o’clock there would be an aching void where my stomach used to be. I thought of the orderly harvest at home. It was almost stately compared to this feverish thing. Here I pitched off a load of sheaves into the self-feeder. I then drove at a trot out to the pitchers, four husky French Canadians. They tried to bury me with sheaves. I arranged them in some semblance of order, balancing myself with difficulty as the wagon lurched from stook to stook. I thought of the carters at home; two loaders on each wagon, and a small boy to lead the horses and call out ‘Hold tight’ at each move. And as I was scrambling about, nearly up to my neck in sheaves, I would hear Jean, the boss of the pitchers: ‘Ho, fineesh. Machine, she wait.’ And away they would run to meet the next wagon, while I would scramble along to my reins, and drive the load to the thresher. Sometimes a large part of it would fall off on the way, and the next time I went out into the field the pitchers would pitch it up again, and Jean would say: ‘You lak make work? Yes! We no like. No!’ And I’d feel awful.

  The threshing machine, or separator as they called it, was only a small one. It could thresh about two thousand bushels of oats, or one thousand bushels of wheat in a day. Full-size outfits, I was told, could do five thousand and three thousand bushels respectively. But this one was big enough for me. It seemed insatiable. By eleven o’clock I was done. I could not go on. ’Twasn’t work, this: it was slave driving. What would happen if I didn’t go on? They’d laugh—these English farmers! No! Damn them! I toiled on as in a dream. Dinner time at last, thank God.

  I hitched out my team, took them to the stable, watered them, fed them, and went into Henderson’s house with the rest of the gang, about sixteen of us in all. They fed us well, and I learnt to eat large quantities of food in a few minutes, in order to get in a few minutes’ rest before the machine started again.

  About four o’clock, a bucket of tea and some biscuits were brought out to the machine by one of the grain-hauling teams. As your turn came to pull in with a load, you jumped down, dipped an enamel cup into the bucket, and gulped your tea, while Henderson pitched off your load, which took him exactly four minutes. Then on you went again until eight o’clock, when the insatiable monster ceased its clamouring until next day.

  After supper, George and I would get our teams from the stable and go home. There were always a few jobs to be done there; water and wood to be brought in preparation for to-morrow’s breakfast, and our teams to unharness and see to for the night. And then, bed, glorious bed.

  However, by the end of the first week I found that although I was tired each night, I was beginning to acquire a sort of mastery over the work: that I’d got a knack of balancing on my load no matter what happened; that, although my h
orses were only half-broken, they knew a lot more about the business than I, and also that they were much more important. Men could look after themselves—if they didn’t it was their funeral; but horses must be looked after and fed before men were considered at all. And there was no workmen’s compensation if you didn’t look after yourself either. I also learnt the blessed peace of utter physical exhaustion, coupled with a beautiful mental blankness. ‘Jist do your work, three square meals a day, and tobacco, what more do you want?’ said Haines, one of Henderson’s hired men. He also said one Saturday night: ‘that it was a bloody wise old feller who invented Sunday’; and I thoroughly agreed with him.

  As a matter of fact, in our case Sunday was not wholly a day of rest. The cooking had devolved on me, and this was the only day on which to bake bread. My first lot was awful, but we ate it the following week for breakfast, as there was no alternative. George never grumbled. ‘I hate cooking,’ he said, ‘and after you’ve eaten your own efforts for a bit, you’ll find out how to do better.’ I despaired at the time, but after-events proved him to be right, and I acquired quite a reputation as a cook before that winter was over.

  One night when we returned home, we found Gordon there. He had returned, as George had prophesied, broke to the wide but still cheerful. Having blown the money his folks had sent him for his training in salesmanship, he was now scheming to earn it so as not to let his people down. Accordingly, after much telephoning, he fixed up to go tanking on a steam outfit some twelve miles away. Henderson’s was a gasolene engine.

  In a day or so he left on a borrowed horse, and our outfit came to George’s farm, but Mrs. Henderson continued to cook for the gang, as the farms lay side by side. Whether this was due to the fact that I had become much too valuable to be taken away from the gang, or whether George feared bloodshed if I did the cooking, I do not know. I hoped it was the former reason, but in my inmost heart I knew it was the latter one.