Never Sleep Three in a Bed

by Max Braithwaite

  “Hey, a picnic,” I quipped. “The fondest thing I am of! You are an angel of mercy. You have saved my life.” Then as she got back into the truck, “Aren’t you going to eat with us?”

  “Nope. This angel of mercy has other men to rescue.” With a roar the Model-A pickup bumped off and I was left with Blooming ‘Arry and the dry, dry stubble.

  Finally the day wore to an end, and the next and the next. For the first week I ached all over, but gradually I began to–as they say on the farm–toughen up. My arm muscles grew hard, and I developed one on each side of my spinal column that felt like broom handles. I even learned to set up stooks that wouldn’t fall over, and I gained as much satisfaction from the acquisition of that skill as I have from any other. Harry remained as taciturn as ever, and to mitigate the loneliness and monotony of the long days I developed the habit of talking to him. I told him about our home and the kids I knew and what I thought of them, and I discussed the problem of making up one’s mind about the future, and about Mary Patterson, who was currently breaking my heart.

  Although he never answered–or perhaps because of it–I opened up to him completely, telling him things that I’d never told anyone. Apart from an occasional grunt or mumble, he said nothing in reply, and I thought he was totally uninterested in my youthful confidences. It wasn’t until later that I discovered how wrong I was.

  Finally the grain was all cut and stooked, and we were ready for threshing. While the rest of us had been finishing up the last few acres, Wick Thompson and an engineer from town had been working on the tractors and separator so that there’d be no breakdowns during threshing. It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to realize how important time becomes during those fall days. All through spring and summer the farmer had helplessly waited for that wheat to grow, all five hundred acres of it. He’d watched the sky endlessly for signs of rain or hail. He’d poisoned grasshoppers and gophers. He’d stood many a night in late August looking at the clear, star-filled sky, dreading an early frost. The wheat had survived all these hazards, had been cut and stooked, but it wasn’t worth a cent until it was threshed.

  A drastic change in the weather, a long rainy spell, an early snow, could lower the grade of the grain and cost the farmer all his profit on the entire year’s work. Every day that it rained meant hundreds of dollars lost. The sight of a dozen men sitting around on their tails eating their heads off was a nightmare to the farmer. He daren’t let the men go during bad weather, because he might not be able to find others. So, every day that was good had to be used to the full.

  The crop that year was what Morley described as “fair to middlin’ ”, which meant that it wasn’t any “bumper crop” nor was it a “failure”. It would run about twenty to twenty-five bushels to the acre, and since the price that year was about a dollar and a half a bushel there was “an awful lot of money sitting in that field.”

  The weather remained favourable. The sun shone every day and there was little wind. This is the best time of year on the prairies. The winters are too cold and too windy; the summers are too hot and too windy; the springs are too wet, or too dry, and too windy. But the fall is often gorgeous. The big sun sits in the sky, too low to cause much heat but warm enough for comfort. And at night the great harvest moon comes up and rests on the horizon like a round ball of fire, slowly rising in the clear sky to take its place among the endless stars.

  Each night I sat alone in the bunkhouse except for Harry who lay in his bunk reading, so unobtrusive that I forgot he was there, and wrote a letter to Mary, describing the moon, making funnies about the other characters in the harvesting gang, and pouring out my boyish heart. My God–I wrote poetry–I quoted Shakespeare–I was inspired.

  But then we started threshing. Threshing! I had thought that I’d seen the ultimate in back-breaking toil while stooking, but compared to threshing it was a game of marbles. There is no work in this world, I’m convinced, as difficult as pitching bundles. I mean, of course, for the beginner. It kills your back, ruins your hands, and fills you with dust and chaff. You’re convinced that you’ll never be able to walk another step. And along with all that there are the horses.

  I don’t know why, but there is absolutely no rapport between me and horses. They hate me. The first morning of threshing Morley took me into the steaming interior of the big red barn, walked up beside a nice, gentle horse and showed me how to curry-comb and brush him, and then to put on the bridle and harness.

  “After you get your team harnessed, you just run them out of the stall and they’ll go to the trough for a drink and wait for you to come and hitch them up.” He did it. His horses did it, and I tried the same thing with my two.

  Their names were Gent and Lady. Believe me, she was no lady and for that matter he was no gentleman. I walked up into the stall beside him and said, “Whoa, boy, whoa,” as I’d heard Morley do, rubbed his nose gently as Morley had done, took the bridle off the peg as Morley had, and tried to put it on. But instead of nuzzling his nose down into it like Morley’s horses, this damned fool tossed his head about eighteen feet in the air, where I couldn’t possibly reach it. And he wouldn’t bring it down. Finally I had to climb up on the manger, leap at his head with the bridle extended and, dangling there, work the bit between his clenched teeth. It took four tries, but I managed it. He was equally unco-operative when I put the collar and harness on him, leaning over against me and crushing me against the side of the stall, just for good measure.

  After a half-hour struggle I got both horses harnessed, and turned them out into the barnyard as directed. Did they go to the water trough for a drink, as all the other horses had done, and as they themselves had done every blasted morning of their evil lives? They did not. No sooner had they got outside the barn door than they tossed their heads in the air, dilated their nostrils, whinnied, kicked up their heels and galloped out of the gate into the field. How about that?

  “I’ve never seen that team do a thing like that before,” Morley averred when he could stop laughing. “They’ve caught on that you’re a greenhorn. Horses’ll sometimes do that to a greenhorn. They can always tell.”

  He jumped on one of the other horses and rode out after the runaways. They didn’t avoid him. They came back calm as lambs, but I noticed that they were watching me from the corners of their mean little eyes, and I could have sworn one winked at the other.

  Then came the hitching to the hayrack. This was a simple enough manoeuvre. You snapped one end of the neck-yoke onto each horse’s collar, slipped the end of the wagon-tongue through an iron ring on the neck-yoke, hitched the traces to the single-trees, threw the lines up onto the rack, jumped onto it, shouted “Ha”, clucked your tongue a few times and the team proceeded in a forward direction, dragging the rack behind them. Nothing to it.

  Nothing to it, that is, if one horse will step over the wagon-tongue to get on the other side of it and if both horses will stand still while you do your thing, and not swivel their rumps away out at an angle so that you can’t get the traces hooked. They will do all these things just fine all year round until a greenhorn gets hold of them and then, like mischievous kids, they do everything wrong. Act as though they’d never seen a hayrack before in their misbegotten lives, and had never been hitched to anything.

  At last I got Lady and Gent hitched to the rack and was ready to go. Morley had told me, “Just two things to remember: always go through a gate straight on, at right angles to the fence, or the ass-end of the rack will hit the gate post. And don’t turn too sharp or you’ll break the reach.” (The reach is the long pole that “reaches” between the front and rear axles of the wagon.) I wish he’d never mentioned those two things.

  I jumped onto the rack and clicked my tongue for the horses to begin. I was a little self-conscious because all the others who were already hitched hadn’t driven off but, instead, were waiting for me to go first. I soon discovered why. I’d hitched the horses on the wrong sides so that the reins were reversed. Let me explain. At t
he end of each rein there are two straps, a long one and a short one. The short one snaps onto the outside of the bit of one horse, while the long one snaps onto the inside of the bit of the other horse. So, when you pull on a line, you are pulling on the same side of each bit. But if you get them reversed, it’s the short straps that cross over to the other horse so that when you pull on the reins you pull the horses’ heads together. They walk along like a couple of lovers, with heads tight together and rumps V’d out on each side. It looks very funny, and just about kills the old hands who wait around for the greenhorn to do it. I’ve never heard men laugh so loud.

  Well, I finally got the horses reversed and out of that gate into the field, where the neat windrows of stooks stood waiting to be loaded onto the racks and hauled to the separator. Morley showed me how to drive the team along beside the windrow and fork the sheaves into the rack, building the load carefully so that the sheaves wouldn’t fall off when it got high.

  “Just two things to remember,” he cautioned (him and his damned “two things”), “you’ve got to keep your turn at the feeder. Cap McLaren goes in first, and then Bowser, and then you. Don’t get behind or you’ll have a hell of a time catching up. The other thing is to pull in good and close to the feeder, so you won’t have so far to pitch the sheaves. Okay, you’re on your own.”

  So I began pitching bundles. Very easy, actually. You have this long-handled, three-tined fork. You jab it into the sheaf and pitch it onto the rack. As the load gets higher you jam the sheaves down hard on the side, with their butt ends out and heads in, and keep pitching sheaves into the centre. When you are finished you’ve got a load that is a good seven feet high, and looks like a square box except that it’s rounded at the top. While you are loading, the team, who are used to this work, walk along beside the row of stooks and you don’t even have to drive them. Just shout at them.

  So I began loading my rack in a good steady pace–one sheaf at a time. Felt kind of good. My muscles were hard from stooking, and I considered that this job wasn’t going to be bad at all. I’d just nicely got the bottom of the rack covered when I looked over to see how Cap was getting on. He’d already built half his load. I watched him in awe. Working like a machine, in perfect rhythm, he jabbed his fork into the stook, picked up not one but three sheaves at a time, and pitched them onto the load. Right there he was tripling my speed. He had other tricks, unnoticed by me at first, that increased his advantage tenfold. There and then I quit dallying, dug my fork into the stooks and heaved like a madman. And I never slacked that crazy pace.

  It availed me little, however. Before I was half loaded I saw Cap perched atop his sheaves jostling his way towards the threshing outfit, which was now ready to start transforming those sheaves into wagon-loads of grain and huge stacks of straw.

  The tractor started up, the long, sagging belt between it and the separator began to move, all the wheels of the separator whirred and rattled, the whirling knives of the feeder flashed in the sun. Cap moved his load in beside the feeder, stood up on it, and began tossing sheaves down into its hungry maw. Wisps of straw spouted out of the blower to drift leisurely to the ground, and the threshing had begun.

  I was too busy pitching those bundles onto my load to watch it, though. Long before I was loaded I saw Cap driving his empty rack away from the feeder, and Bowser pulling his full one right in behind so that there would be scarcely a pause during the transition. Frantically I redoubled my efforts, and by the time Bowser pulled out I managed to limp up to the outfit with about two-thirds of a load.

  Now I had to direct my fickle team up close to the feeder to pitch off my load. A threshing outfit was a noisy, dusty place, redolent with the clangs, squeals, rattles and bangs of hundreds of moving parts. To me it was like running the gauntlet with sure disaster barely inches away. In order to see properly, I had to stand up on the load, precariously balanced on uneven and shifting sheaves. Somehow I made it, and there, four feet below me, was that awful feeder with its revolving canvas floor and its murderous chewing knives. Horrible stories were told of greenhorns who had fallen into a feeder and been mangled by those blades. It was a picture that haunted me.

  The expression “separate the men from the boys” is a tired cliché but an apt one when it comes to a threshing gang. That is one place where you become a man, or you don’t. You are judged by nothing save your ability to keep your turn, to build a good load, to pull your weight, to work like a man. Nobody to help you or to coddle you along or make allowances. You damned well do it or you don’t, and you are forever pegged by the gang as a “good worker” or a “bum”. Like most other aspects of life on the plains, threshing is ruthless, tough, and painfully revealing of character.

  Not that I was thinking of any such things during my first day of threshing. I was too busy getting my load off, and urging my team back to the stooks for another. And inside me was developing a cold fury – such as invariably comes over me at times when I am feeling particularly inadequate. I would damned well show these hicks, I told myself, that I could pitch bundles better than they could. Of course I never did, but the fury kept me in there pitching. It wouldn’t let me quit.

  And I was to need all the backbone I could muster before that day was over. I never did catch up. Cap and Bowser and the others were constantly “working themselves into a rest”. They’d pull into the threshing machine with a magnificent load while there were still a couple of loads waiting to get into the feeder. Then they’d lie in the sun and doze, or kid around with each other, thoroughly enjoying themselves. But me–I barely managed to get to the feeder as the empty rack ahead of me was pulling away, and then, immediately, I had to begin unloading.

  When, at last, the long day ended I was in for one final humiliation from my benighted team of horses. Each of the other men, I noticed, unhitched his team from the rack when the outfit finally closed down, and left his half-filled rack where it stood. Then he simply leapt onto the back of one of his horses and rode the mile back to the barnyards I tried this, too, but when I climbed onto Gent’s back the damned brute bucked me off. Then I tried Lady, and she did the same. The first time I at least managed to hang onto the reins to prevent the team from running away. But the second time I had only one rein, and when I pulled on it the horses began to gallop around me in a wide circle, like circus horses in the centre ring. Round and round they went, with me in the middle hollering madly at them. Faster and faster they sped, until I became dizzy and let go. Then they galloped wildly across the field, trampling the reins to bits.

  One half-hour later I dragged myself into the barn to find the team standing in their stalls. They still had to be unharnessed and fed. Outside the barn it was quite dark. I could see the lights of the house where I knew the rest of the gang were already eating, and probably regaling each other with tales of the greenhorn. Further along I could see the dim, unlighted shape of the bunkhouse where I could collapse onto a bed. I was a terrible mess. My feet were swollen and sore. My down-at-the-heel oxfords were no good in the stubble field. My hands had blisters as big as twenty-five cent pieces, and were so swollen I could scarcely make a fist. Finally hunger won out over fatigue, and I staggered to the house, washed up in the shed, and filled myself with roast beef, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, green peas, fresh bread, two kinds of cake, and two pieces of pie. After that I didn’t feel quite so sad.

  The next day was a little easier, and the next and the next. Gradually I learned enough to be able to function as a bundles-pitcher. I never managed to work myself into a rest as Cap and Bowser did, but I came to realize that it was futile to compete with those experts. They were professionals at their job; I would never be anything but a clumsy amateur.

  For two full weeks all went well with Wick Thompson’s threshing. The sun shone. The grain poured out of the spout and was hauled off to the elevators. Strawstacks grew on the stubble fields like great golden shaggy beehives. And then the rain came.

  There was still about a week’s threshing to do, s
o Thompson couldn’t let all of his gang go. Cap and Bowser and Red went back to town, agreeing to return when again the weather was good. Morley had his regular chores to do, and that left old Blooming ’Arry and me alone in the bunkhouse.

  There was no reading matter in the bunkhouse, and I envied Harry his private stock. Finally, in desperation, I asked him if he would lend me a book. He looked at me with his watery blue eyes, and then dug into his pack and produced a tattered volume. “Ever read this one?” he asked. “It’s my favourite.”

  I took it from him and glanced at the faded title on the cover, Three Men in a Boat.

  “No … I never have,” I said, “but I’d like to.”

  “Don’t know if you’ll care for it or not. Kind of old-fashioned.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “About England, too.”

  “I’ve read lots of books about England. Hardy is my favourite.”

  “He is? Well then, you may like this.” His attitude suggested a fond dog-owner who is afraid that a stranger may not appreciate his pet. I took the book from him and began to read, conscious of his beady eyes upon me.

  Well, anyone who’s ever read the book can guess what happened. After about two pages I was giggling, two more and I was roaring, a couple more and I was rolling on the bunkhouse floor holding my sides. When I finally looked up there was old Harry beaming on me with a most beatific smile. “Well now,” he said, “you’re human after all.”

  Thus I was introduced to Jerome K. Jerome, who had died just two years before at the age of sixty-eight. I have re-read his great, funny book many times since that first time I discovered it by the dim, yellow light of a coal-oil lamp in Wick Thompson’s bunkhouse. And every time it makes me laugh just about as hard as it did then.