The Unplowed Sky

by Jeanne Williams

  And there was afternoon lunch in between! Hallie’s mind reeled, but Jackie looked so happy as he trotted about his chores that she resolved to somehow hold up her end of the work and not make Shaft sorry he had interceded for her. Besides, she wanted to prove her worth to that bewilderingly hostile Garth MacLeod.

  Shaft handed Jackie a long-handled metal spoon. “Go pound that on the bottom of the washtub fastened to the porch wall,” he said. “Bang hard so the men can hear.”

  Jackie complied with such ardor that Hallie clapped her hands over her ears. Shaft took advantage of the boy’s absence to say, “Hope you don’t mind my tellin’ the little feller what to do, Miss Hallie, but I reckoned he might pay more attention to me if I cautioned him to keep clear of the machinery.”

  “I appreciate it,” said Hallie earnestly. “Jackie doesn’t know me very well. I’ve just had him with me a few days. I’m so glad to get a job where he can play with a kitten and a dog and I can look after him—”

  Shaft gave her a searching glance. “If you want, I’d like to hear about it later. But you can count on me to help keep an eye on the tyke.” He glanced out the window, one of four arranged opposite each other to create a cooling draft. “Here they come! Better take the biscuits out of the oven and get set to pour the coffee.”

  Laughter and good-natured joshing came from outside and flowed into the house with the men, abating as they saw Hallie. Most of them smiled and spoke. “Your kitchen’s improved a hundred percent, Shaft,” Rory teased. He beamed at her but his brother gave her only the briefest of nods.

  Faces and hands scrubbed, hair slicked back, exuding the odor of pine-tar soap, the crew planted themselves on the closed-bottom benches on either side of the table and scooted around till each had enough room to ply his utensils. Their interest in the food was equaled only by their interest in Hallie, but they didn’t stare at or appraise her as Quentin Raford had. Instead, they stole glances when they thought she wouldn’t notice. The men helped themselves to the nearest bowl or platter and passed them. Hallie started the biscuits around—thank goodness, they were golden brown and smelled good!—and got a firm grip on the huge coffeepot.

  “Boys, this is Miss Hallie Meredith,” Shaft proclaimed. He set a hand on Jackie’s shoulder. “This is her brother Jack. It’ll take them a while to figger out which name goes with which of your ugly mugs, but we’ll make a start. When Miss Hallie brings your coffee, I’ll sing out your name and a little about you—what’s decent to say in front of ladies and kids, that is.

  “Jim Wyatt from Saskatchewan.” Hallie placed a steaming cup in front of a well-built young man with straight brown hair, warm hazel eyes, and a large white scar blotching one side of his face and neck. “He had his own engine till the durned thing blew sky-high a few years ago. Jim was lucky. He lit in the straw stack. He lumberjacks when he’s not threshing.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wyatt,” Hallie said.

  “Likewise. But my pa’s Mr. Wyatt. I’m Jim.”

  “Rory MacLeod you’ve met,” Shaft continued. “Every outfit has a cross to bear. He’s ours, but he’s a dandy engine man.”

  In a stage whisper, Rory said, “I’ll tell you the good things about me later, Miss Hallie.” His grin was infectious. Hallie couldn’t keep from returning it though she sensed the strapping golden-haired young man might like women as much as his older brother seemed to detest them. Look at that great stone face of his!

  “Cotton Harris hails from Texas,” Shaft said as Hallie placed a cup before a pale-haired man with faded blue eyes. He had one of those skins the sun burns but never tans, and his nose and cheeks were peeling where a hat couldn’t protect them. “Cotton works in the oil patch when he’s through threshing.”

  “Howdy, ma’am,” Cotton drawled. “Proud to make your acquaintance.”

  Pat O’Malley from Colorado still looked like a boy in spite of his beanpole height. He worked as a hard-rock miner when threshing finished. Huge yellow-haired Henry Lowen helped with the big family farm worked by his father and older brothers when he wasn’t on the road. He was so shy that he couldn’t even look at Hallie and blushed when he was introduced.

  “Now here’s our perfessor, Rich Mondell.” The thin, handsome man with curly black hair and green eyes looked up at Hallie and thanked her for the coffee with a friendly smile. “The perfessor ain’t been fired from the college over at Lawrence,” Shaft explained. “Says he just likes to change off from brain work and feel like he’s earnin’ an honest living for a while.”

  “I’m from a farm in the Flint Hills, Miss Hallie,” said Mondell in a well-modulated voice that was pleasant to hear. “Never have been able to convince myself that teaching’s really work.”

  “Don’t sound like it to me, either,” chuckled perhaps the oldest man of the group. He had red-brown hair and eyes and lots of freckles. “Though if it comes right down to it, I reckon I wouldn’t swap my little hardscrabble eighty acres in Oklahoma for your classroom.” He nodded appreciatively at Hallie. “Tip-top biscuits, ma’am. I’m Rusty Wells.”

  Next came a stocky thresher who was all one shade of light dust brown; eyes, hair, and skin. “Buford Redding can work at almost anything,” the cook said. “Buildin’ railroads, felling trees, swingin’ a pick in the mines. Owns that shiny new touring car. But his real claim to fame is he’s our onliest Wobbly.”

  “I’m sure not ashamed of it.” Buford’s dogged voice indicated that he was used to this kind of razzing. “The government’s jailed our leaders and done everything it can to smash us, but it’s not right for the guys on top to grind the rest of us, and you boys know it just as well as I do.”

  The bald man with coal black eyes and a walrus mustache sitting next to him snorted. “Ain’t right for Wobblies to come in a boxcar and make everyone join, neither. Thanks for the coffee, ma’am. I’m Baldy Tennant from Oklahoma. I’m a fireman on the railroad when I’m not a fireman or flunky for a threshing outfit.”

  Buford said grimly, “What’s right about railroad police with guns lining workers up, making the Wobblies buy tickets, and shipping them out of town the way they did me in Aberdeen, North Dakota a couple years back?”

  “Huh!” derided the bald one. “Seems it was Aberdeen where about four hundred Wobs paraded down the streets hollering they wanted to abolish the whole wage system. They didn’t just want an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work.”

  “That’s the kind of trick that’s got folks saying IWW means ‘I Won’t Work,’” Henry Lowen put in.

  “I’ll work, and you know it,” Buford retorted. “I don’t hold with everything the IWWs done, but at least the union stood up for the hoboes.” At Hallie’s startled look, he said, “A hobo’s not a tramp, miss. Tramps don’t want to work, they just bum around. Hoboes travel from job to job. They work when and wherever they can. The state and federal employment services are a joke. Railroads and newspapers are always saying lots of men are needed in a certain place, but by the time a guy gets there, the jobs are gone—or they weren’t there to start with. I’m sure glad I got on with Garth a few years ago.”

  “I’m glad you did, too, Buford.” Garth spoke for the first time. “I’d sure rather know I can depend on my pitchers than hire just anyone who comes along.”

  “Shucks, you can have your pick of hands. Can’t be anything fairer than the way you pay.” Hallie passed another batch of biscuits, and Buford explained to her; “When a farmer pays us off, Garth and Rory take out a wage we all agree is fair for them and the machinery—six dollars each a day is how we figgered it this season. The farmer furnishes the team for Meg’s water wagon, so she gets two dollars a day. The rest of us split up what’s left.”

  “Believe you me,” said Cotton Harris, “It’s a sight more than the two-fifty a day pitchers usually get. That’s promised us even if the MacLeods have to dig into their cut for it.”

  For all his dourness then, Garth had a good side. And he was clearly not the kind of man who wo
uldn’t eat with his hired hands. “That’s very generous,” Hallie murmured.

  “You get a straight wage,” he said with a cool glance that brushed her face like a fleeting wind.

  She felt her cheeks turn scalding hot. “I didn’t expect anything else. Are you going to charge me for Jackie’s board?”

  “Hadn’t thought of it, but—”

  “Garth!” Shaft’s tone was scandalized. “You know you wouldn’t be so stingy! Sides Jack is goin’ to earn his keep; I can already see that.”

  The boy looked anxiously at Hallie. Poor little kid! What in the world could he think with his world crumbled, his father dead, and his mother gone off to some mysterious place? Hallie darted a wrathful look at Garth MacLeod and gave Jackie a swift hug. “I’ll keep you with me no matter what happens,” she whispered in his ear. Straightening, she said, “You mustn’t worry when Mr. MacLeod teases. Why don’t you take Smoky outside, where it’s cooler?”

  Hallie was glad to see that Garth looked somewhat ashamed. He called after Jackie, “Laird’s under the shack. Keep close to him, and he’ll run off any rattlesnakes. He’s real glad we’ve got a boy he can play with.”

  Rattlesnakes! Hallie hadn’t even thought about them, but of course they could be a problem out in the fields. “Don’t fret about the laddie,” Garth said. It was as if he reassured her against his will from some kindly impulse he wished to deny. “Laird will keep an eye on him.”

  “Laird’s my dog!” Meg claimed. She had eaten fast and furiously, keeping a pair of suspicious eyes fastened on Hallie.

  “To be sure,” her father said equably. “But you’d never grudge the wee lad his company while you’re at your work?”

  Meg looked as if that were exactly what she’d like to do. “How come we just have ole canned peaches?” she complained. “Now Shaft’s got a helper—”

  “Great glorious gollywoggles!” Shaft pointed a ladle at the malcontent. “Think we can cook while we’re rattling over the road? Let’s have none of your sulks, Megan Catriona Mairi MacLeod, or you can just attach yourself to the other end of a dish rag and help redd up the kitchen so’s Miss Hallie and me can start some pies!”

  “You’re not the boss of me, Shaft Hurok! Is he, Dad?”

  “He is when he’s riled enough to give you all your names in the Gaelic,” Garth said, rising and stretching. “Leave the kitchen to him, lass. He doesn’t come out and tell you how to tend the water wagon. Come on, lads. Twenty minutes in the shade to let your food settle, and then we’d better get after it.”

  They left as quickly as they had come. Almost at once, the smell of tobacco wafted in. The men had either rolled their own or found a store that broke Kansas’s ludicrous ban against selling ready-mades, though tobacco in all forms was legal. Hallie stared in amaze at empty platters and bowls, at plates wiped clean with biscuits.

  “There’s enough bread and roast left to make sandwiches for afternoon lunch,” said Shaft as he planned, deftly sweeping up the plates on one side of the table while Hallie stacked those on her side and deposited them in the big dishpan. Shaft put a bar of Ivory on the plates and poured boiling water from the teakettle over it to make suds lively enough to cut the grease. “How about you doing the dishes while I whomp up some gingerbread and kind of show you where things are as I go along?”

  Hallie was full of questions about threshing, the crew, and especially Garth MacLeod, but this was no time to ask them. Garth must be married—married young to have a child Meg’s age—but it seemed strange that a mother would let a young girl go off for months with a threshing outfit even if her father was the boss.

  That was another puzzle. Hallie knew that the owner of the machinery was the boss. Often he was also the engine man, though he might just keep a watchful eye over the whole operation. When there was no other boss, the engineer was in charge of overseeing the threshing. In this case, though Rory ran the engine, Garth had the indisputable authority that marked him as the true chief.

  Such musings were pushed out of her head by the need to pay attention to Shaft as she washed, rinsed, and dried the dishes. The kitchen was organized for handiness and to keep things in place for traveling. “The tops of the benches lift up. Bedding and clothes are stored inside. You can put your things in one end, and we can stash your suitcase under them boxes of canned stuff in the corner.”

  “I don’t have any bedding.” Hallie wondered for the first time where she and Jackie would sleep.

  “Plenty in the benches,” the cook assured her. “The clean sheets are in the right-hand one, couple of pillows, too. Lessee, now. I can set my cot up outside and leave the shack to you. There’s another cot you can have. Think Jack can sleep on the table if it’s padded good with quilts?”

  “The table should be fine,” she said. “But I don’t like driving you outside, Mr. Shaft.”

  “It’s cooler. I usually sleep out anyway. We don’t have misters! Anyhow, my real name’s Milov Hurok. Bohemian. Shaft’s a nickname, short for Deep Shaft.”

  “Please call me Hallie, then. You’ve got an unusual nickname.”

  “Earned it fair and square. I used to make the best Deep Shaft in the Balkans.”

  “The Balkans?” Hallie searched what she retained of her geography lessons. “You mean Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro—countries like that?”

  It was his turn to look baffled. “Lord love you, no! I’m talkin’ about right over in southeast Kansas, though I reckon them hills got their name because they was settled by so many folks from them places. Lots of Italians, too. Mostly work in the mines. But when Prohibition come along, a good many started bootleggin’. Includin’ me.”

  “Oh.”

  Hallie had heard of bootleggers, of course, but had pictured them as machine-gun-toting Chicago racketeers. At her scandalized gasp, Shaft said defensively, “Well, most of us was raised Catholic and didn’t see anything wrong in drinkin’ wine or spirits at our tables or at parties. When the law came nosin’ around, we hid our stuff in old mine shafts. Let me tell you, Hallie, girl, Deep Shaft’s got a reputation that brings the highest prices all the way from Ontario to Mexico City. It sells for five dollars a pint in Detroit, though close to home a half-pint sells for two bits. Most of us made it just like we would for our ownselves.”

  Brought up in teetotal households, Hallie was fascinated. “How did you make it?”

  “Well, you dump a hundred-pound sack of sugar in a fifty-gallon barrel, add rye or corn and two or three pound slabs of yeast—none of that fast-actin’ stuff! Ruins it! Then you pour in water till the barrel’s about three-quarters full and keep it warm so it’ll ferment. Long about a week or more later, when it’s ready to distill, you dip out the solid leavings of the mash. Good animal food, but I’ve seen critters get drunk on it. Even some geese.”

  “Is the whiskey ready, then?”

  “Not by a long shot. It’s got to be cooked in the still and then run through a copper coil in a barrel of cool water—have to keep changing the water to keep it cool. To make sure there wasn’t no poison fusel oils in my batch, I’d filter it through an old felt hat half-full of ground-up charcoal. Pure and clear as spring water my Deep Shaft was. I never aged it in a Coca-Cola syrup barrel like some did to give it darker color, much less dumped in red rock candy. Al Capone hisself used to come buy five gallons at a time, which was all I’d get from distillin’ fifty gallons of real fine mash.”

  “Don’t people get poisoned on bootleg whisky?”

  “Sure. The distillin’ ain’t done right, it can blind a person or cripple—even kill ’em. Hallie, I hope you won’t ever drink, but if you take a snort, be sure it’s not cheap likker that even a drunk has to lace with cherry syrup to swallow or that rotgut Jamaica Ginger that’ll paralyze you.”

  Even Hallie had heard of jake and jakeleg. She forbore to ask Shaft why he advised her against drinking the brew he had described so pridefully. “If you were doing so well, Shaft, how come you’re cooking for a threshi
ng crew?”

  Shaft sighed and fitted three big pans of gingerbread into the oven. “Well, my cousin’s a deputy sheriff. Came on a raid with some federal Prohibition officers. They caught me sellin’ a jug to some Tulsa fellers. My cousin had to haul my still and the rest of that run of whiskey into the county seat, but when he told me to get whatever I needed to come along with him, he gave me a long, slow wink. I grabbed what cash I had in the mattress, scooted out the back window into my old jalopy, and I ain’t been back. Nothin’ in the pen that interests me that much!”

  “Does Mr. MacLeod know?”

  “Figgered it was only fair to tell him. He allowed as how he didn’t want me making any likker, but said his great-great-great grandmother distilled bootleg whisky on the Isle of Lewis—that’s off the west coast of Scotland, he says. That’s how she made her living while she was a widow. And that’s how quite a few widows in the Balkans keep food in their kiddos’ mouths, though more of ’em sell it than make it.”

  These fascinating disclosures were cut short by a motor wheezing to a stop outside the window. “Mr. Hurok!” shrilled a woman’s voice. “You interested in some butter, milk, eggs, and chickens? We got more green beans and watermelons than we know what to do with. I’d be obliged if you’d use all you could. Hate to see food go to waste—”

  She paused long enough for Shaft to say, “Howdy, Miz Brockett. If one of your kids could bring over a gallon of fresh milk after you’re through milking tonight, it’ll keep till morning. I can use four dozen eggs today, if you’ve got them, and three dozen tomorrow. Can you spare five pounds of butter? The men would sure appreciate the beans and watermelons. I can take about four chickens, providin’ they’re cleaned and plucked—”