Heat waves writhed from the ground. The air was devoid of moisture. The combines strewed the wreckage of the stalks and wheat heads and puffed the dust high with their ponderously rolling tires. The sun flashed in the sickles and the flitting reels of the twenty-foot headers. Around the two red combines and to and fro across the field hurried the trucks, going fast, then slow, but always moving as fast as their loads permitted and forcing up dust in clouds into the waterless air. The machines were so hot, they steamed and popped like melting metal. Insects in the wheat hardly moved, and rabbits and mice hid in the uncut thatches diagonally across the field where the combines turned. A little after six o’clock, the heat began to break. The pitch of the engines went up slightly as the engines cooled. The field darkened in the flattening shadows.
The harvesters saw a small blue and white car coming softly over the white stubble. They have been over many acres, and the car was so far off they could barely see it. In a minute or so, it was there. Hair tied in a red, light scarf, a young woman got out with three children, opened the trunk and took out food and drink. The children, the oldest no more than five, ran helter-skelter. The truck drivers talked with her and started eating fried chicken and drinking from large glasses of tea. They leaned against the car. A moderate breeze blew across their faces and through their matted hair and the slightly billowing spaces between the buttons on their shirts. The older of them, a man about thirty of slender build, just more than average height and a freckled nose bent sharply at the bridge finished his food and jogged to the wheat where a combine approached. He glided onto the lower step that led to the cooled, booth-like cab and opened the door to let himself in. He and the driver, a big blond, changed places, and the blond dropped to the ground from the level of the cab, rolled and came to his feet jogging easily toward the car. In the same way, the other truck driver, a young man with sand-colored hair, changed with a tall youth in the second machine, and the combine drivers ate while the others went three times around the wheat.
After the woman and children left, the shadows lengthened into the sky, and the combines burned their battery of lights into the twilight-dimmed wheat and the stubble all around them. On and on they bounced and jounced and softly rolled on the soft ground. The work went faster than before and went on faster and smoother as the night matured. The combine drivers hummed to themselves. They turned the tiny air conditioners down on the ceilings of the cabs because they became too cool. The drivers of the trucks worked as they had during the day but now went to the combines on the signals of their comrades flashing the lights. When they were not driving the trucks, they lay silently on the cool seats or stood outside, and smoked and talked with each other. Sometimes when a combine was close as the signal was made, the driver in the combine saw an amber light flare on the instrument panel of the truck and show the downturned face of the other man.
Even in the dark, the harvesters could see the day had been successful. The field was getting smaller. There was the sense of a border’s being neared. They worked until it was almost eleven o’clock, however, and were not finished. The bent-nosed man parked his truck at the end of a long side of uncut wheat and snapped his headlights off and on and off and on. The combines cut through to the end and wheeled around on each side of the truck; they shot the wheat in shushing, cool waves that splashed over the oaken boards of the truck bed floor. The tremendous headers were eased to the ground while the hoppers emptied.
The tall youth and the man put the tarp over the wheat, got into the truck and drove away. The other two, the big blond and the sandy-haired one, rode in the other truck some distance across the field to the pickup truck, where the hand pump on a big gasoline tank in the back was raised straight out like a defending arm. They rolled the windows up to keep the dew out of the truck, put up some laid-out tools and battened down the gas pump. The other truck was out of sight. The boys laughed at riding in the smaller vehicle as they moved toward the road. On the smooth asphalt, the sandy-haired one drove with his arm stretched out into the warm, flowing air, and the blond lay back, his head half out the open window, and let the dark warmth pervade his senses.
Chapter Two - Race against the Rain
The woman cooked on the small stove against the wall, and her children awoke to the food smells in the back of the trailer house. Her husband came into the kitchen from the bathroom, where he had shaved and washed his face.
“Morning, Johnny,” she said.
“Morning,” he said, smiling.
“Think you’ll get done today?”
“If it don’t rain.”
She was a tall woman, about five feet nine, and strong bodied at about a hundred and fifty pounds. She put her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and asked, “How are the boys?”
“Okay. They’re catching on good for two days on the job.”
“They’re smart.”
“Not too smart, evidently.”
“I worry about that.”
“Don’t. If they get in too much, I’ll send their asses home.”
“Can you afford to do that?”
“I can always find somebody if I have to,” said Johnny. But I think they’ll be okay. Quinton ought to help.”
“Benny was wild before they had all that trouble. Did his daddy get in on the car wreck and all? That was right after their union blew up and they had that shooting.”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Maybe him and his daddy weren’t getting along.”
“He may have just wanted to get away from Victory after all the trouble. Boys nowadays go on wheat harvest like they used to go on cattle drives. It’s the closest thing there is to a trail drive in modern times. It even has a lot of boys on it. That’s why they called ‘em cowboys.”
“D.W. and Quint will probably get in as much as Benny. Not to knock Quint, but D.W. is the best kid out of the three. He’s easy to get along with, and you couldn’t make him cuss with a cattle prod.”
“They’re just boys, even if they are just out of high school. I’m also going to work their butts off. They won’t have much time for orneriness.”
An old two-tone blue Ford burbled up outside, and the youths came into the trailer. With Johnny and his wife and the children coming in and going out, they filled the kitchen. They said little beyond greetings and took coffee and places at the table.
“You got something after this or will we be moving on?” one asked.
“This is it, Benny,” Johnny said. “I thought we’d go on up to Guthrie. Feller there promised me a job.”
“What’s his name?”
“Shuggs. Got oil wells among his wheat.”
The woman brought scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. The boys reached to help her and said, “Thanks, Alice,” in turn.
“Think it’ll rain?” asked the one with sandy hair.
“Somewhere along mid-afternoon, which means we’re gonna have to hit it if we don’t want to be stuck in Crow’s Corner for a week waiting to cut a hundred or two acres.”
“When it clouds up early in the day, you can bet on gettin’ rain by sundown,” the sandy haired one said.
“Quint, you’ve been on enough wheat harvests with Johnny and your daddy to know this stuff, but me and Chesson here, it’s all new to us,” Benny said. “It’s a big adventure, ain’t it, D.W.?” He shoved D.W.’s elbow and made him spill his coffee as he was about to drink.
“Byrd,” D.W. said, losing some of the liquid into his plate.
“Yeah, the Farnells been at it for a long time,” Quint said. “Harvest takes a long time to learn. Consequently, you see a lot of people in it who don’t know their butt from a reel bat.”
“I like drivin’ a combine,” Benny said. “I like the sound of the engine all the time.”
“You’ll get tired of it,” Quint said, grinning.
“It’s peaceful,” D.W. said. “You have lots of time to think.”
“I like it because it’s fast,” Benny said. “Time ne
ver passes slow when you’re movin’ fast.”
“We better move right now,” Johnny said. “It won’t take long to dry out.”
Johnny was the smallest of the four but harder physically and quicker in his movements than the boys. Ten years older, he was more confident even in his way of opening a pickup door. D.W.’s thin blond hair was white in the sunlight. At six feet one and two hundred pounds, he was low key in everything except his physical presence. Benny, black-haired and rangy, looked the same height as D.W. until they stood together and Benny’s head set higher by more than an inch. While D.W. was easy and calm, there was an edginess in Benny’s demeanor. Quint was bigger than his brother but not as tall as D.W. or as heavy as Benny. Quint’s large gray eyes were alert and neither soft nor hard. He got in after D.W. and Benny and shut the pickup door with his arm down the side and his hand open. Quint and Johnny unloaded the truck, which they had parked and locked at the elevator when they arrived too late the night before, and Benny and D.W. took the pickup. The brothers rested their arms on the open windows of the truck and enjoyed the low hum of the engine and the feel of the hard tires on the pavement.
“You know what I feel like?” Johnny asked.
“No, what?”
“A combine riding on the back of a truck without the chains.”
“Why?”
“No good reason, not after all I’ve done, trucking and combining since I was thirteen, or maybe that is the reason.”
“D.W. plans on going north, and Benny should do okay with us where he wouldn’t with somebody else,” Quint said.
“I need to get a lot of help out of you boys. I’m counting on you.”
“To make more for the combines.”
“That and take advantage of a good crop, good prices. You don’t get a chance to make it good but once every four or five years, and I’m going to cash in. Hugh thought I oughtn’t to get the big Masseys, but I’ll prove I was right.”
“Daddy’s too conservative.”
“I’m not even sure Alice thought it was a good idea.”
“How much did they cost?
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“A dollar a pound.”
They came a long way over the field to reach the combines. Taking turns, Benny and D.W. were pumping gasoline into the dust-filmed machines with one tiring out each arm twice before the other relieved him. Johnny and Quint walked into the standing, thigh-level wheat, broke heads off stalks and split them to grind the grains in their hands and feel the moisture.
“It’s eight-thirty,” Johnny said. “By the time we get the combines gassed and greased, it should be dry enough.”
The Farnells got grease guns from the tool chest in the pickup and began at the backs of the combines under the horizontal, propeller-like fans that scattered the chaff. D.W. went with Johnny and Benny with Quint to grease the zerks and learn their locations. With the greasing and refueling done, Benny and D.W., the combine drivers, started their machines and ran the headers while Johnny stood below, watched and listened. At five minutes till nine, Benny made a short run with Johnny behind the cab by the hopper, catching the wheat as a little red auger twirled it out. Johnny rubbed it in his hands, chewed it and signaled the boys to start. D.W. waited until Benny was two hundred yards out and followed. With the beginning they realized how much had been done the day before. They also saw stalks they’d missed in the dark. There were at least three hundred acres remaining, but they saw the barbed wire fence at the far end and knew the task would not take all the daylight to finish. The work grew tranquil in sameness. As Benny and D.W. watched, the stalks of wheat came into the bats, into the sickle blades and fell, fell, fell onto the polished metal behind. Sometimes they tried to watch a single stalk from the field to the silver, thrusting spokes in the center of the giant auger in the header, but the coming of more stalks and heads of wheat always diverted their gazes. Soon they were singing to the threshing’s beat.
Quint took the first load to the elevator and was told by the man who took the sample that the moisture count was fifteen, barely acceptable but normal for the first run. They made progress enough that morning to see they would finish within a few hours. As they had done the previous day, Quint and Johnny spelled Benny and D.W. when Alice brought lunch, and they watched far off continents of clouds grow in the western sky.
“Hi, what’s cooking?” Benny drawled when he approached the car.
“Not much till suppertime,” Alice said.
“That’s okay. Sandwiches remind me of a lot of people, cold and limp.” Holding it at the bottom, Benny shook his bologna sandwich back and forth in his hand.
She laughed and said, “I’ll have something better when y’all get done. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“I bet it rains by four or five o’clock. We might be through by then.” He chewed and looked at the clouds. The wind was starting to come, and the air was not getting hotter.
After Alice left, it was soon obvious that it would rain. The clouds were coming closer as though specifically to shower the field. Benny and D.W. pushed the combines relentlessly, running them over the flat dirt and around corners as fast as they would go. They kept the machines in second gear with the throttles most of the way open, and where the wheat was thin enough they put them into third gear, the one for road travel, and ran as fast as they could move in a field. Once Benny came into a shallow drop-off, and the light rear end of his combine floated off the ground. For a moment it ran more than twenty miles an hour on two wheels. But the imbalance was slight enough that the header skidded lightly on the ground, and Benny kept his foot off the brake and let the trailing wheels come down with a re-shifting of the weight. Quint and Johnny worked faster and more surely, but the harvesters in other fields were doing the same and the line of trucks got longer at the elevator.
The sky clouded completely over, and the first drops fell with about twenty acres left. Johnny waited in the truck while Benny and D.W. charged through the wheat and rain. They slowed in order not to choke the machinery, but the cutting blades were kept scything into the wheat. The boys saw they could finish with one more eighty-bushel hopper load each. The remaining wheat quickly became stubble. The grinding viscera of the combines groaned with wet wheat, but the rain did not come heavily until they were cutting out the corners, when there was not enough in the standing tufts to cause the machines to clog. Johnny had loaded the forward part of the truck bed first, rolling the tarp down over the unloaded, dry wheat to keep it out of the rain and reserving the back for the wetter wheat. He stood by the sideboards outside while the last of it was unloaded. Then he leaned far over and rolled the tarp over the end by himself. D.W. jumped down to help him secure it.
“They won’t mind a little wet if most of it’s dry,” Johnny shouted to D.W. as they met at the rear of the truck. “They won’t know the difference anyway since they take the sample up front.”
Quint had gone to the elevator in the brown truck, so Johnny and D.W. rode to Crow’s Corner in the smaller blue truck with Benny following in the pickup. The truck rolled stiffly off the highway and crunched wet gravel in the line to the scale in front of the elevator office. A man in a T-shirt and a plastic-wrapped cowboy hat came out carrying a long brass shaft with oblong holes down one side. He took loose two rubber fastenings on the corner of the sideboards by the cab, climbed onto the truck, plunged the shaft into the wheat and twisted a knob to cover the holes and get a sample. He went into the office, came out and yelled at Johnny over the engine, “Twelve-two, go ahead!”
The mouth of the unloading room yawned open darkly. The truck rolled in and vibrated across the smooth-worn pipes that covered the giant hole below. The brown truck was a dump truck with its own lift, but the blue truck was a bobtail that had to be elevated. A man wearing a bright orange cap backed up in front of it, motioning to Johnny until the front tires bounced up and into two troughs in a steel platform. Cables stretched from either side of the platform to a big steel dr
um near the top of the room. Chains caressed small sprockets on both ends of the drum and disappeared into the wooden ceiling. Johnny disengaged the transmission, and he and D.W. dropped to the floor. The man in the orange cap pushed a red button, the drum spun slowly and the truck reared up. A young man with a light layer of dust and chaff on his back and chest opened the small sliding door at the bottom of the rear sideboard, and Johnny stood there kicking the wheat when it balked. The young man did not care if some of the wheat was wet and went to the front. The man in the orange cap stayed by the button on the wall to raise the truck more as needed to empty the load quickly and yet avoid spilling wheat over the top or sides. With the moist part of the load disposed of, the rest fell easily, first in a flowing mass down the burnished truck bed and through the door and then in shushing particles through the pipes to diffuse into separate paths in the black hole. When the last had fallen, the truck descended. The room was quiet except for the clink of the chains and electric motor’s whir. Powdered residue floated weightless in the air. D.W. ambled back to the cab, and Johnny stood looking into the hole.
“Funny it makes so much noise,” he said.
The Byrds of Victory Page 11