“Hell, son, anybody works as hard as you do can sleep in my barn for free any time. And we’d be happy to have you to supper, too.”
“Much obliged, sir.”
“Name’s Walter Christian, Walt to you.” He offered his hand and Charlie shook it, telling him his own name.
“Mr. Cody, our photographer, is also staying to supper. He’s not so good at camping out, and there aren’t a whole lot of hotels around here.”
“None, I would say.”
“That’s what you’d say, all right. You can wash up over by the pump house. It’s okay to get some dirt in the cattle tank, but mind you don’t get any soap in it. Makes the horses real sick. Supper in half an hour.”
Supper was mostly leftovers from the big noon meal—baked ham, mashed potatoes shaped into patties and fried in butter, baked beans with brown sugar and bacon, peas, and cut corn. And of course, fresh bread. During the harvest, Mrs. Christian, whose name was Violet, baked three times a day. The whole house smelled like a bakery.
“These peas are really special,” said Charlie. “Best I ever had.”
Farmer Christian smiled with obvious satisfaction. “Lots of folks nowadays don’t keep a vegetable garden, but I like my greens fresh.”
“What do your neighbors do instead?” said the photographer.
“They put every square foot of land they have into wheat, and then they buy their food in town, in them new-fangled tin cans. Ed Henkie has already got a pile of empty cans behind his granary, so high that you can’t see over it. He don’t keep chickens or milk cows or hogs anymore, either.”
“And neither should you,” said his wife. “You could make eight hundred dollars a season on that field you keep in pasture.”
“We’ve been over this before, Violet.”
“And we’ll go over it again. Ed Henkie’s wife says they made over ten thousand dollars last year, and they only have half a section of land. Cash farming is the new way. Ordinary folks just like us are getting rich.”
“Right. That’s until the government quits guaranteeing the market price or the European wheat blight finally makes it across the Mississippi River or the rains don’t come any more. Then you’ll be damn glad for those chickens and cows and a few porkers.”
“Rain follows the plow,” she said, stubbornly jutting out her chin.
“I’ve heard that before,” said the photographer. “What does it mean?”
“It means some people are damn fools.”
“I’ll thank you not to swear at the table, Walter.”
“Some people,” said Charlie, “believe that just the act of clearing more land somehow affects the weather, brings more rain.” He shrugged.
“You believe it?”
“I don’t know. No offense, Mrs. Christian, but it seems to me the place I most often see it is in advertisements for farm machinery or seed.”
Walter Christian guffawed. His wife glowered.
“You’re a smart young man, Charlie. I don’t suppose you’d be looking for a regular job? We lost a son and a daughter to the influenza, and things been real pushed around here since then.”
Mrs. Christian started to say something, but then bowed her head a bit and crossed herself.
“That’s really kind of you, sir, but I think this is a little too close to home.”
“You think your folks would have some problem with it? Hell, I can go talk to them, tell them—”
“It’s not that.”
“Well, what the hell is it, then? You don’t like my woman’s cooking?”
“This is the last time I’m going to tell you about swearing, Walter.”
“Oh, relax, Mother. Charlie’s heard it all before, and the pastor isn’t here. What do you say, Charlie?”
“Your wife is a fine cook, sir.” He looked over and saw her smile slightly. “It’s just that it took me twenty-three years to get up the nerve to leave home. Now that I finally did it, I feel like I ought to go farther, somehow. I guess that doesn’t make much sense, does it?” And worse yet, he thought, if I don’t go any farther than this, I might be tempted to go back.
“Makes sense to me, anyhow. My old man was a no-good, worthless son of a bitch.”
“Walter!”
“Well, he was. Stole from his own kids. Not worth the cost of the powder to blow him to hell or the match to touch it off with. I spat in his eye and came out here from Ohio when I was nineteen. You could still get decent homestead land back then, and I lied about my age to file a claim. It was a whole new life. Looks to me like you’re a man looking for a new life, too. I hope you find it.”
“What do you want to be?” said the photographer.
“I’m not sure. Something with machinery, I think.”
“Up in Saskatchewan last year, I saw a machine called a ‘combine.’ It was like a reaper and a threshing machine, all put together. It took twelve horses to pull it, and a gasoline engine to run all the inside works, but it could move through a field mowing a twelve-foot wide swath and threshing it, all at the same time.”
“What do they have for a crew?”
“Four men can bring in the whole harvest.”
“Good heavens,” said Mrs. Christian.
“That doesn’t seem right, somehow,” said Charlie.
“It would be the death of the threshing bee, that’s for sure,” said Walter.
“Well, it was definitely the end of my business,” said the photographer. “If everybody farmed like that, I’d be back to shooting nothing but weddings and portraits.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?” said Mrs. Christian. “The harvest is the best time of the year. There are neighbors we never see any other time. It’s better than Christmas or Easter, even. It’s the time when we’re, um… Well, I would just cry if it all came to an end.”
“Violet, my dear, I think we have finally found something we can agree on.”
It had never occurred to Charlie that he might live long enough to see the passing of an entire era. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He turned to the photographer.
“Can you promise delivery of one of your pictures by Christmas?”
“Sure. Everybody always wants that.”
“Then I would like you to send one to my sister. Could you also put in a note saying, ‘Merry Christmas from your loving brother?’”
“Easiest thing in the world.” He produced a notebook from inside his coat and flipped to a clear page. “You don’t figure you’ll be making it home for Christmas?”
“Maybe not for a lot of them.” He paid the man his three dollars, gave him the name and address, and got up to go to the barn to make his bed.
“Breakfast at dawn,” said Walter.
“I’ll make you some lunch to carry, too,” said his wife.
Charlie hoped Walter was right about the best way to farm. He really wanted him and his wife to prosper.
Chapter 4
Bringing in the Bacon
Charlie’s next job didn’t go so well. After a day and a half of walking, he caught up with the same Nichols and Shepard Red River Special machine that had done his own family’s threshing, and he hired on for the following day. He agreed to work as a spike pitcher, feeding forkfuls of grain from the constant line of hayrack wagons into the vee-shaped conveyor belts of the separator apron. It was the hardest job on the crew, the job that nobody else wanted, and the only job where there was never a moment’s letup. The farmer agreed to pay him five and a half dollars plus his meals. The pay was to come directly from the farmer, since the custom thresher operator, who owned the machines, had only a fireman, steam engineer, and separator man for a crew. It was a common enough arrangement.
For Charlie, the worst part of any heavy labor was the anticipation of it. He had never been afraid of hard work, but he always wondered if this would be the day when his body betrayed him with muscle spasms or cramps or heat exhaustion. He didn’t worry about pain
or even injury, but he would rather die than look as if he wasn’t holding up his end of the work. He never had, even in that autumn of his thirteenth year, when he had wielded a scythe for twelve hours. But he always thought it was possible.
He ate breakfast with the other hired help at 5:00 and then filed out into the dim predawn light. The sky was mercilessly clear and there was no wind. He walked over to the well pump and filled his canteen, plus a two-quart Mason jar the farmer’s wife had loaned him, with cool water. He made sure the jar had a tight-fitting lid, to keep out the dust. Then he put on three bandanas, one on his head, one rolled tightly under the collar of his shirt, and one tied more loosely around his neck, from where it could be pulled up to cover his nose and mouth. He buttoned all the buttons on his chambray shirt and kept the sleeves rolled down, protecting as much of his flesh as possible from the irritating chaff and dust. It would be hot, but he would be working in the dirtiest area of the whole site, and he knew from hard experience that nobody but a complete fool took his shirt off there.
Finally, he put on a pair of soft leather gloves. That was a tradeoff. His grip on the pitchfork wouldn’t be as good as with bare hands, so his arm muscles were more likely to cramp up, but he would also be less prone to single or multi-layer blisters. He had worked with blisters so deep they bled, both on his hands and on his feet, and he never wanted to do it again.
He walked over to the apron of the threshing machine, passing another stiff, who looked up at the sky and said, “She’s going to be a bitch.” There was nothing to be said to that.
As the sun was still barely edging above the horizon, the steam engineer set the big belt in motion, and the work of the day began.
The fields in that county were uneven and rocky, so the sheaf-binding attachments on the McCormick reapers didn’t work reliably. Instead, the farmers used the “headering” method. Huge wagons with high frames on one side only were heaped as high as possible with the new mown wheat, straight from the reaper. When the threshing machine arrived, two men on each wagon pitched the load into a pile next to it, called a header. The spike pitcher, Charlie, would fork it up from there and throw it into the feed belts. He made it a point of pride never to let the belts get empty.
After half an hour, his shirt was plastered to his back, and his own sweat would have poured in his eyes and blinded him, but for the bandana on his head. But then he slipped into the peculiar mental and physical state that he expected and welcomed but could not have easily described. Sometimes he thought of it simply as “getting oiled up.” It was a form of intense concentration and indifference to discomfort. He saw the piles of wheat, and his hands and arms found exactly the best way to pick them up and move them, but nothing passed through his conscious mind at all. Everything was reflex and instinct, blind speed and easy power. He became a machine, an automated spike pitcher that never tired or slowed down. Now and then he would pause to pour some water on the bandana around his neck and to take a carefully measured drink from his canteen, but most of the time, he was locked in an unbroken rhythm. His mind, not being needed for the task at hand, drifted.
He thought about that first, endless field that he had scythed. The handle of the scythe was cleverly curved so the blade balanced from side to side. But it was still very heavy for his young muscles to hold up. So after the first day, he thought he would try putting a counterbalance on the end of the handle away from the blade. He rummaged around in his father’s tool shed and found a big monkey wrench that seemed about the right weight, and he fastened it to the scythe handle with wrappings of heavy twine.
It did exactly what he wanted it to. He finished mowing the rest of the field with far less effort than the first half. But when his father saw what he had done, he accused him of stealing tools he didn’t need. He broke the scythe handle, saying it was ruined, stuck the blade in a tree trunk, and beat Charlie within an inch of his life. The following year, he bought a McCormick reaper, so a scythe was never needed again. As far as Charley knew, the blade was still stuck in the tree trunk.
“What a horse’s ass,” he said aloud. Then he laughed, out of pure joy at being able to say it. In the roar of the machines, nobody heard him. His body continued to pitch wheat while his mind floated. He pondered over what his mother had ever seen in that man. Had they once been a loving couple? It was hard to imagine.
The popular story was that his mother, Hanna Clayton, had gone on a date with young Bob Krueger to the Mercer County Fair, one Saturday night in September. Knowing that when it came to demon rum, he could resist anything but temptation, she had taken a pint of whiskey along, hidden in her purse. As the night wore on, she freely plied him with the liquor. Late in the evening, when he was so drunk he couldn’t find his head with both hands, she pulled him up onto the stage of a carnival sideshow, where the barker offered a ten dollar gold piece to any couple who would get married as part of the show. It was a common stunt, and a guaranteed crowd pleaser. A minister, by prior arrangement, was recruited from the crowd, the notary public who traveled with the carnival produced a license, and after three or four prompts, Bob Krueger said, “I do.” And Hanna Clayton Krueger was a married woman with a mortgage-free quarter-section farm. The only problem was that her new husband never sobered up. And even that would not have been so much of a problem, but about twelve years later, he turned into a mean drunk. Charlie couldn’t remember if he had been a decent human being before that.
The day wore on. At the morning coffee break, Charlie was too tired to eat, so he stretched out on a feed belt and grabbed a short nap. He had found, many times, that he didn’t have the endurance of the older men, but a short rest let him almost completely regain his energy. An old man, he knew, could work much, much longer, but when he finally got tired, there was no quick or easy recovery. He wondered if there was a crossover age, when he would have the best of both abilities. Or the worst. He was sure he would find out.
Finally, after fourteen hours of gleaning the wheat berries, the threshing machine emptied its storage bin for the last time. The steam engineer blew a long blast on his whistle to signal the end of the day, and people all around began laying down their tools. Horses and mules still had to be watered and fed and put away, and the threshing machine made ready to travel, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. He pulled his filthy bandana down from his nose, stuck his gloves in his back pocket, and went back over to the pump where he had started the day. He bent down and ran water over his head and hands for a long time, then rinsed out his bandanas, blew his nose, and went to look for the farmer, to get paid.
But instead of paying him, the fat, moonfaced farmer got a funny smirk on his face, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his new bib overalls, and stared off into space. Charlie knew that look. As poor as he was at reading people, he knew all the looks that led up to some kind of meanness. That was the look his father used to wear when he was thinking up some excuse to beat him or take something away from him.
“I said, ‘sir, you owe me five-fifty.’ Now would be a good time to settle up, I think.”
“How was that lunch, boy? That roast beef was straight from heaven, wasn’t it?”
“The lunch was fine, but it doesn’t spend at the general store, sir.”
“And that cherry pie? You have more than one piece of that pie? Somebody did, because we run all out of it.”
“Are you going to pay me what I honestly earned, or not?”
The farmer drew himself up to his full height and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls, as if he were about to deliver a sermon. He jutted his several chins out aggressively and scowled.
“What the hell are you accusing me of, boy? You better watch your tongue, you know what’s good for you. I’m a respected member of the community here. And you’re nobody but a drifter, if you get my drift. Show a little respect. I always pay my bills.”
“That’s good, sir. When?”
“Now there you go again. You are aggravating me so
mething terrible, you are. I ought to just cut you off, send you packing. But because I’m a fair man, I’ll tell you what: you get your money the same as all the folks here, after I get my money for selling the crop. But first, of course, we got to get it to the railroad at Willow City and then off to the market in Minneapolis or Fargo. That’ll take about a month.” He grinned again, pulled a toothpick out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Maybe you’d like to do another job, meantimes, helping with the hauling.”
Charlie could see there was no point arguing, even less point calling the man a horse’s ass and a crook, which he obviously was. Instead, he turned away and walked to the curing shed, which was attached to the granary, which in turn was next to the hog run. He went inside and picked out a nice-looking side of bacon that was hanging from a hook on a rafter. Then he went to the chicken coop and helped himself to a dozen eggs, making a point of taking all the time he needed to pack them away carefully.
“You listen to me, you damn snot-nosed kid. You steal from me, you’ll answer to the sheriff, and that’s after I get done giving you a good whipping. You better just—”
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