The Bones of Plenty (36 page)

George came up to the road to watch it travel the last half mile. He was as excited as Lucy. He’d know, now, in a few more hours, what a difference planting the Ceres had made. It was hard to judge a yield just by walking through the wheat and plucking a head of it here and there. He waved his hat, when the rig got close, and the man driving the tractor waved a speck of white.

As the noise grew louder still, it was like the finale of a resolute, yet triumphant war song. The little parade of the tractor, separator, and truck was more throat-tightening to a man like George than any city street parade of bugles, drums, or bagpipes could ever be. He was grinning and swallowing as he watched it and listened to it. The cry of the final hours of fierce and iron-hearted toil was in the chaotic music coming toward them, but there was a cry of victory, too—an incredible, prayed-for, cursed-for, watched-for victory. Just two more days without rain or hail or wind or fatal accidents or locust migrations and the war song would be unequivocally a victory song when the parade moved on again.

The tractor driver leaned down to howl over the engine, “Where do you want her?”

With one hand George pointed toward the field where he and Giles had begun to work. With the other he made a megaphone to carry his voice through the six feet of noise between his mouth and the man’s ear. “Set ‘er up right in the middle over there,” he shouted.

The man swung as wide as the road would let him and managed to bring the threshing machine straight in behind the tractor. There was no room to spare on either side of the locomotive-like wheels as they rolled across the approach that spanned the deep ditch. He did a nice job, George was glad to see, and he seemed to take such a touchy piece of maneuvering in his stride.

George and Douglas and Lucy walked beside the rig till it stopped. The tractor driver shut off the engine and climbed down. He was the boss of the outfit and he hurried around giving orders to get the big machine ready to go. He walked past the hayrack and got a whiff of the wheat. “That sure must be damn smutty wheat!” he said. “Been a lot of smutty wheat this year, but I never smelt it any worse than I do right now. One time I got too many of them smut balls in a old separator and blew it all to hell. Damn near killed a thrasher, too.”

“You got insurance on this rig?” George asked.

“Ya, but none on the men. How you going to insure a crew when they change every week on you? Looks like I’m going to have to find another man this morning if my drinkin’ boy don’t show up. He got hold of some stuff last night and we couldn’t even find him this morning. Somebody said he went back down to Gackle.”

“Has the Marquis been smutty?” George wanted to know.

“Ya, pretty bad. They figure there’s some new kind of smut this year.
Everything’s
smutty. You can’t win. Even if you
do
get the stuff to grow, you can’t sell it, can you?”

“Oh, the price is up a lot over last year,” George said. He made up his mind not to wonder how much he’d get docked for the smut. In a few minutes now the crop that had required so much work and so much waiting would begin pouring out of the machine. Finally he had a little control. The crows he couldn’t control had left some seed in the ground for him; the freak late frost he couldn’t control had not come; the grasshoppers had not cleaned out the fields, though they tried; the black clouds had not brought tornadoes or hail.

Now at last there was a job he could do—a job to put all his strength into—a job that would quickly fill the truck, while he watched, with the results of all the work and the waiting. It was an intoxicating feeling. It made him want to slap somebody on the back and sing, even with his throat full of dust and chaff.

Despite the man-killing tempo set by the separator’s roaring appetite, the field was a festive place. Once every second the engine uttered a sharp, open-mouthed sneeze—“Ka-chung! Ka-chung! Ka-chung!” It was like the engines that ran the concessions at carnivals and fairs. Down below the people whirling around in capsules called Dipsy-Doodles, and down below the people turning in the great circles of the Ferris wheels would be the same sneezing engines and the oil-smudged men with their hands on the long throbbing levers that stopped and started the machines that made the rides go round. But this field resounding with one such engine was a thousand times better than a carnival to George.

Lucy stayed at a little distance from the machine, watching them get ready. There were so many belts and pulleys to slip over wheels and tighten, hatches to batten and unbatten, spouts to extend and bolt together, levers to adjust, and cranks to crank that turned grinding parts deep inside the machine. There were steadying blocks to put beneath the separator’s belly and finally there was the truck to be backed up under the grain spout and the hayrack to be drawn up beside the bundle chute.

Lucy saw her father high on top of the bundles, shoving them in by huge forkfuls. He leaned far over the chomping ravening insides of the separator. She knew that Clarence Egger had only one arm because the other one had got caught in a threshing-machine belt. And last year she heard about the thing she knew was bound to happen. She heard one thresher tell another one about a big dumb Finn who fell into a threshing machine.

“Yes sir,” the thresherman said, “that Finn wanted that job so bad and he was so scared he’d get the boss mad at him. He just kept on pitching harder and harder until he went right on in with a big forkful. That was
his
last forkful. Unless the Devil give him a pitchfork when he got down to Hell. Nowadays these rigs couldn’t of handled him, but that thing was one of them big steam jobs—kept two-three men busy just stoking her with wood to keep the steam up. That separator could of thrashed
ten
Finns, all at once! We hollered at the boss, ‘The Finn’s in the bundle chute! Stop the engine!’ The boss yells back, ‘He’s a goner!’ He was right, too. By the time we got it stopped, that Finn wasn’t in the bundle chute any more. He just wasn’t anywhere at all—that is, his top half wasn’t anywhere at all. We hauled out his legs and laid ’em in a blanket and started up the machine again.

“When his buddy from the Old Country come back in from the field with a load of bundles, we says, ‘There’s your pal down there,’ but he couldn’t understand the language. Somebody took him over and showed him what was wrapped up in the blanket. When he seen it was his buddy’s boots you never saw such a surprised man in your life.

“Finally he pointed to himself up above his waist, and patted his hands up and down over his stomach, and felt of his head. All the time he kept yelling in his own language. We kept pointing at the thrashing machine, and when he finally come to believe it, he just up and run. You never seen a man run like that. Just took off right over the stubble and never did stop, as far as I know. Anyhow, we never seen him again. You know, there in Europe they don’t have any of this machinery. Those foreigners that come over here, they just don’t know what to make of it all. They’re scared to death of a rig like this
here
one even, and they can’t understand nothing you yell at them. It’s no wonder they get theirselves killed off all the time.”

He was nearly finished with his sandwich, but he wanted to spread out his rest break a little longer. Lucy had to stay and wait for his coffee cup. She remembered how he kept switching his legs as he sat on the ground, bending up the knee of the one that had been straight and laying the other one out flat.

“You know, it’s hard to know just how to bury the legs of a man. Do you just build a box long enough for half of him or do you build him a full-size coffin and just pretend all of him is in it? What do you do about a man that’s thrashed so you could never find a whole hair from his head? Where do you say he is, anyhow, on the grave-marker?” He gave a short laugh. “Besides, we never even knew the bastard’s name! Never knew even what to call his
legs!

“You’re giving me a look like you don’t believe me! Why
you
aren’t even dry behind the ears yet!

“You should of been around in the days when they had them special trains full of machinery. I’ll never forget the time the J. I. Case Special come into Teed’s Grove, back in Iowa, when I was just a little kid—around nineteen-aught-eight—somewheres along in there. I’d never saw anything like it in my life. Right then I made up my mind to be a thrasherman. It was a whole train full of J. I. Case machinery—steam engines with ten-foot iron wheels. And thrashing machines. And on one car a crazy old son-of-a-gun, he played all day on a steam calliope.

“And then, by God, they revved up one of them new agitator thrashers—they was new at that time—and a fella got up there to show off what it could do, and you know what he did? He started feeding
two-by-six planks
into ’er! You should of seen the sawdust fly. You still think it couldn’t of thrashed
one
flesh-and-blood Finn?”

Lucy herself had been totally convinced. She remembered the conversation perfectly, and even the looks of both the men—the old one and the young one.

She had always wondered what it would be like to fall into a threshing machine. Even from several yards away, the noise was almost more than she could stand. What would it be like inside?

Finally she had told the story to her mother, who had instantly said it couldn’t be true. “That’s just the kind of story these thrashers love to tell,” she said. “Don’t you ever believe a
word
they say!”

“But what if it
was
true!”

“Well … if it really did happen … he couldn’t have suffered long, poor fellow. Don’t you think about him. Once a person is dead he can’t feel anything hurting his body, you know. It’s worse for the people who are left behind. He probably never knew what happened at all. There are really worse ways to die.”

Lucy could not think of anything worse than suddenly having life taken away without even knowing anything about it. She couldn’t imagine everything just going on and not being there to watch it herself. She could not imagine being the legs wrapped in a blanket on the stubble while the threshing crew started up the machine again and went on with the harvest.

And yet farmers were broken in pieces every year by their own machinery. She heard people talk about it. Somehow they slipped under the cleated iron wheels of the tractors they were driving, or the tractors moved as they tinkered with the hitch of a disc or a harrow and they fell beneath the knives or the teeth and were sliced into the dirt they had cultivated all their lives. They got caught in the tines of hayloaders; they looped an ankle in the rope of a haylift and were yanked into the air and flopped back on the ground; they fell into wells and off barn roofs and windmills.

And there was the vanished arm of Mr. Egger. Her grandfather had been there when that happened. He had told her about it so she would be sure never to get too close to the threshing machine. It hadn’t been so terrible, even, because it had happened so fast that nobody heard the arm come loose or noticed the blood spurt. And Mr. Egger had not even yelled. He jumped back and looked at his torn, empty shirtsleeve and said, “Why, I never even felt it. I never even felt it.”

But the more dangerous the separator was, the more exciting it was, too, and Lucy couldn’t have stopped watching her father up there even if she had wanted to. Even if it frightened her to see how fast her father worked and how he leaned. Not even the strongest man could keep the bundle chute full for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. It wasn’t at all hard to see how a man who had never threshed before would pitch too fast and too long until he grew dizzy there on top of the bundles and lost his balance.

The chaff blew high in the air and formed a great light cloud, and the straw blasted out and settled into the beginnings of the wide lopsided stack, and the little stream of grain poured down to make a golden cone on the rough gray boards of the truck floor. The sides of the cone slipped and trickled and the base of it inched from one row of rusty nailheads to the next. She would pick a smutted kernel to concentrate on and watch it, never blinking from the time it came out of the spout till it was buried. Then when she looked back out at the field again, she would seem to be seeing it through a solid rain of wheat.

When the cycle got going, they really missed the fellow who had gone back to Gackle on a bender. George told the boss he expected the crew to finish in two days, even if they were shorthanded. “Well, if he don’t show up by noon, I’ll go over town at dinnertime and get somebody else,” the boss promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll make ‘er.”

They had better make it. If they began to see that they wouldn’t finish in two days, George knew they’d slow down to make it another whole morning. Just paying for that extra half day could decimate the profits he was counting on.

He took a bead on the sun and went to Lucy. “You better go along in and help Mother bring out the sandwiches,” he said.

Douglas tagged her into the house. He stood around in the way while Lucy helped to butter the bread. It was not quite ten o’clock and Rachel had been working as fast as she could work for more than five hours, but she was getting behind.

“If Douglas helps you,” she said to Lucy, “do you think you two could take all this food out by yourselves, so I won’t have to leave the baby?”

“
I
can do it by myself,” Lucy said.

“I want to help,” Douglas argued.

“I think it’s very nice that Douglas wants to help,” Rachel said. “Why don’t we let him pull your wagon, and we’ll load it with the food and coffee. You can pretend you’re like the men with the popcorn and sandwich wagons at the fair.”

“
I
want to pull it,” Lucy said.

They filled the rusty red wagon with the sandwiches, a cut pie wrapped in a flour-sack dish towel, a kettle full of coffee, two gallon pails of water, and the cups. The wagon was so heavy that it took both of them to pull it, and neither of them argued as they went up the hill, walking backwards to keep an eye on the kettle of coffee.

“Let’s just have one piece of pie before we take it all out to them,” Douglas said.