Dry Divide (9 page)

Except for two sets, the harness was nothing but a collection of neglected junk, but Paco had the two worst sets put into fairly good condition. In all his life he'd probably never known anything but patched-up harness, and had learned to do more tricks with wire, a pair of pliers, and a couple of rocks than any man I'd ever known. He was as excited as a little youngster with the sack of new snaps, buckles, and rivets I'd brought from town. I stayed with him, telling him about the deal I'd made, until Doc called, “Come and get it 'fore I throw it to the coyotes!”

I hadn't heard that old chuckwagon call since I'd been a kid in Colorado. At any other time I'd have been glad to hear it, but it seemed out of place on a day when a man had been killed. My feeling must have been evident in my voice when I called back, “We'll be along in a few minutes.” Usually men will start on the run when the chuckwagon call is given, but no one left his work until I led the way to the wash basin at the windmill.

As always, we waited to go in together. When we reached the kitchen we found Doc and Judy as proud as peacocks, and they had reason to be. The table was spread with flour sacks for a cloth, and enough food for two dozen hungry men. There was a big platter of fresh ham steaks, another of hashed-brown potatoes, two heaping plates of biscuits, and they'd opened at least two cans of every sort of vegetable and fruit we'd bought. There weren't bowls enough to hold all the stuff, so they'd just opened the cans of fruit and set them on as they were. The only single can they'd opened was salmon. It was standing beside a steaming hot bowl of sauerkraut, at the end of the table where Hudson had always sat.

For some reason I didn't want to sit at that place, but there was nothing else to do, so I went around and stopped behind the chair. The table was set with three plates on each side and one on each end. Doc drew back the chair at the end opposite me, and bowed low toward Judy. Her face turned scarlet, and for a few seconds she looked confused, then she stepped forward and let Doc seat her.

No one helped himself until the platter, bowl, or coffee pot had been passed to Judy and came back to him around the table, and no one could seem to think of anything to say. To break the tension, I told Doc I'd like him to take a walk through both sections with me, so we could find which quarters were most apt to shatter and should be harvested first. I didn't know enough about wheat to trust my own judgment, but from what Doc had told me about stacking I was sure that he knew, and that we could save Mrs. Hudson a lot of wheat by harvesting the ripest and driest first. From there on, everyone seemed at ease, and the conversation was all about the job we had ahead of us.

It was one o'clock before we left the table, then it took Doc and me about three hours to put the new parts on the header, and to rig a heavy enough counterweight on the boom that I could raise and lower the cutting head easily. After we'd finished, Judy drove us around both sections of uncut wheat. At every quarter mile we drove a tall stake, and tied a white rag to it, so we'd have markers for dividing the sections into forty-acre fields. As we went along we walked deep enough into each field to find out exactly the condition of the crop, and I drew a map to show which quarters should be harvested first. Where the land was level the kernels were already hardened, but there was still enough sap in the straw to avoid any danger of shattering for two or three weeks. On the highest rises the grain was so dry it would begin shattering within a few days, but where there were dips it could safely be left standing for nearly a month.

In the deepest draw the grain stood waist-high, the kernels were still in the milk stage, and the leaves were green. “This would make pretty good horse feed,” Doc told me. “Cut now, it would give 'em both hay and grain, but these heads are too heavy for the limber stalks. Leave it till it's ripe, with these hot winds blowing, and most of it would go down too flat to be harvested.”

“Then let's come and get a load of it,” I told him. “It will give me a chance to try the header out—and the horses too. I'm afraid they may have gone wilder than chicken hawks again after a day in the pasture.”

It was probably five o'clock before we got back from checking the fields, so I started the men right off to the pasture, telling them where to take positions, and to make no move that might frighten the horses. As soon as they'd gone I went to the corral for Kitten. Her sides were still streaked with dried blood from the spurring she'd had, but she seemed to be well over her fright and nervousness. There was no hurry, for it would take the crew ten or fifteen minutes to get into position, so I worked slowly with Kitten—talking to her from outside the corral before I went in. I wasn't yet ready to try her with a saddle; first because I thought she might associate it with Hudson, and secondly because his stirrups would be three or four inches too long for me. I expected that she'd do as she had always done; make a run for the far end of the corral, but she didn't. She stood without even laying back her ears, and let me walk straight to her. I slipped the bridle on, stroked her neck a minute or two, led her out through the gate, propped it wide open, and flipped onto her back.

After I'd watered Kitten I closed the gate at the end of the lane, and flipped onto her back again. That time she acted nervous, raised her head high, and pointed her ears sharply up the lane. I let her take her time, moving forward a few steps, stopping to sniff the air, then moving on again. When we reached the place where I'd come to relieve her of her burden that morning, she approached it dancing and trembling, shied away from the spot where the body had lain, then raced past as though a ghost had risen behind her. I'd managed to quiet her a little, but she was still trembling when I rode her into the pasture. A hundred yards or so farther on she shied again, and circled wide around a spot where the ground was trampled.

The horse herd was at the same place Hudson and I had found it, and again raced away into the gulch as I rode into the pasture. I let Kitten lope to the north, then took her down into the bottleneck of the gulch, just as we had gone before, and again I found the herd trotting toward me on the wide grassy floor. At sight of it Kitten wanted to charge, but I held her to a jogging trot. For maybe a minute, the herd stopped and stood watching us, heads high, and ready to spook at our first quick move. When we didn't make one, the horses trotted back the way they had come, and, with the men strung out to head them off, we had no trouble in turning them into the lane.

We waited at the end of the lane until the horses had time to reach the gate at the far end and quiet down, then cut the colts back to the pasture, let the others stop to drink at the tank, and drove them on quietly to the corral. By working slowly with them, they didn't give us much trouble harnessing.

There was no need of using more than one barge for hauling feed, so we harnessed only eight horses, taking the three teams that had worked on the barges the previous day, along with the two heaviest colts from the header teams. I had Old Bill hitch the colts to the barge, and we put the better-broken six on the header, for I knew I'd have trouble enough in handling it for the first time, even though I had horses that wouldn't require too much driving. Then, before we started out, I made a few turns in the yard, so as to give the horses, as well as myself, a little practice at turning corners.

With the machine out of gear, and there in the yard where the ground was smooth and hard, I didn't have to fight the rudder, and the horses soon got the idea of swinging off to the side in making the turns. By the time we'd made six or eight of them I could come fairly close to putting the old header right on the lines I had Doc mark for me. “That's enough,” I told him. “Suppose you give Judy a hand with supper while we're gone. We'll be back in less than an hour.”

The draw we were going to take the feed from was nearly a mile from the house, so I got in some more good practice on the way, and it was lucky that I did. It took us till sundown to harvest that one load of horse feed. I'd learned a good deal about handling a header before the barge was loaded, but that little draw looked about the way my brother's head did the first time I practiced haircutting on him. Even so, I'd been fortunate enough that, with all my blunders and mishaps, no part of the machine had been broken.

Doc and I had picked a forty-acre field farther from the house for our first day's harvesting, so there was no sense in taking the header back to the yard. We unhitched the horses, slipped the bits out of their mouths, and tied them to the back of the barge, so they could help themselves on the way home. Then, while Paco and I unharnessed, Bill and Jaikus pitched the load tight against the corral fence, so the horses could eat as much as they wanted during the night.

That afternoon Gus and Lars had not only repaired the remaining wheels for two barges, but had built Judy a cooler box outside the kitchen window. When covered with wet straw, the evaporation would cool it enough to keep meat, butter, and eggs fresh for a week or so.

Supper had been ready for an hour before we'd finished our chores, but Judy had kept it hot on the back of the stove, and it was as good a meal as dinner had been. During the afternoon she'd scrubbed the kitchen until the floor boards gleamed, and she seemed to like sitting at the end of the table opposite me. The more the crew ate the happier she seemed, and they gave her plenty to be happy about. At that one meal they must have stowed away ten pounds of pork chops, and I cleaned up a whole can of salmon.

Paco had done the milking and separating before we got back with the horse feed, and after supper we all pitched in on the dishwashing. I was drying the last cup when Judy asked, “What time do you aim to get into the field in the morning, Bud? I'll come in plenty of time to cook breakfast while you're harnessing.”

“It's up to you fellows,” I told the crew, “but this is what's been going through my head: The more acreage we can put into the stacks in a day the more money we'll make, but if we go at it too hard we'll play the horses out, and the hotter it is the faster they'll give out. If we get into the field at sunup, lay off two hours for rest at noon, then work till sundown, it would give us a thirteen-hour day. That's enough to kill most horses, but if we do it the right way, I think these tough little mustangs might stand up to it. If they don't, we'll just have to cut down to whatever time they can stand.

“It won't be rough on the barge horses, since they get a good rest during unloading. It's the header horses I'm worried about, and I think we can split the work up so that won't be too tough. With twelve horses and only two barges, we can lay each pair off every sixth day. Then if we trade around so the six that are on the header in the forenoon either lay off in the afternoon or are used on the barges, no horse will have a full day of killing work. In that way, and with a two-hour rest at noon, I think they might stand up to a thirteen-hour day. Do you think you fellows can?”

When I asked the question I looked at Doc, because, as stacker, he'd be the one who would have to be on the go the whole thirteen hours, and in one day's stacking I'd learned how tough it was.

“Let's give it a try,” he told me, “but there's no sense in Judy getting out here before sunrise; I'll wrastle up some ham and eggs while the rest of you harness and do the milking. She can clean up the mess whenever she gets here. Fair enough, kiddo?”

He looked at Judy when he asked the question, but she shook her head. “No, it ain't fair at all, and I won't do it,” she told him. “If I'm going to get a full share of the pay, I'm going to put in a full share of the hours, but I'd best to get started for home before Paw comes out to see where I'm at. Did you know it's ha'-past-eight a'ready?”

8

Wheat Harvest

I
can usually set my head so it works like an alarm clock, and before I turned in on the night of the accident I set it for four o'clock, but that wasn't a minute too early. The stars were still bright, and the sky had barely begun to turn gray in the east, when I heard the old Maxwell backfire as Judy drove into the yard. “Come help me, Bud,” she called as I hauled on my jeans. “These ornery hens will scatter all over if we don't catch 'em.”

Judy was herding three hens in the beam of the headlights, and three others craned their necks through holes in a sack that lay on the ground. “Come easy, and don't scare 'em till I turn the lights towards the barn door,” she told me, “then we'll shoo 'em in there. The sack come untied when I took it out, and if they ever get into the wheat we'll never find 'em.”

She backed the car around till the lights shone into the barn doorway, the hens went in by themselves, and with the other fellows helping me we had no trouble in catching them. When Doc passed one of them toward Judy, she said, “Dress it for me, will you? The boss, he can't eat no pork, so I want to put one on to stew for him while I'm cooking breakfast.”

Even though Judy had called me the boss, I didn't have to do any bossing. Everyone seemed to know where he could be of the most help, and from there on we always did our chores exactly the same way every morning. Doc helped in the house, Gus and Lars did the milking, and Jaikus greased barge wheels and carried in corn cobs for the fire, while Paco, Bill, and I did the harnessing. The younger horses weren't too easy to handle, but didn't give us nearly as much trouble as on the first day, and we had all the teams ready for the field when Judy called, “Breakfast.”

The edge of the sun was just peeping over the horizon when Paco and I hitched the horses to the header. I'd decided to use the same ones Hudson had used on Saturday, partly because they'd learned the trick of turning square corners, partly to wear the colts down a bit before putting them on the barges, and partly to give the old mares the first half-day's rest. To avoid any chance of the colts trying to run away with the header while it was out of gear and easy to pull, I had Bill drive his barge in front of us on the way to the new field, but there was no need of it. By my keeping a reasonably tight hand on the reins, the colts handled better than I expected, and we made a good square corner when we turned into the field.

Since we were to be paid by the acre, it seemed best to lay our work out in forty-acre tracts, each a quarter-mile square. Old Bill could drive a perfectly straight line, so I had him do all the driving on the first round of the forty we'd chosen for that day, using the markers Doc and I had put up as his guides. Then we cut our stackyard right at the center of the forty. I had a terrible time to control both the colts and machine, and to keep the wheat flowing into the barge on that first round, but any new job is a little rough until a fellow gets the knack of it.

With the laying out and cutting the stackyard, it was about an hour and a half after sunrise before we'd made our first round of the field. Then things went in pretty good shape. The colts had been fractious enough to keep my hands full during that first round, but as soon as they'd worked up a little sweat they steadied, though holding a little faster pace than I'd have liked. The first time around, I didn't have much chance to raise or lower the cutter, but once the horses settled down I kept watching ahead, and moving the boom often enough that we took only three or four inches of straw with the heads. By keeping the straw at a minimum, one barge could take the cut from a half-round of the field. And by starting in the middle, where we'd cut a roadway to the stackyard, we didn't waste a minute in chasing the header around the field.

Each time I reached the roadway, on either side of the field, there was an empty barge waiting for me, but each time I stopped to give my horses a few minutes' rest. At first, a half-round of the field loaded the barges almost to overflowing, no matter how careful I was in moving the boom so as to take only the minimum of straw. But as the morning went on and the field became smaller, the rounds went faster and the loads weren't so large.

The practice I'd had in cutting the horse feed had been tough enough to make my job out there in a fairly level field seem easy. But my muscles were still so soft that the continual pushing against the rudder with my legs, the constant raising and lowering of the boom, the handling of the reins, and their weight around my shoulders made me feel as though my whole body were one gigantic toothache. During the last hour before noon I might have rested the horses a few minutes longer than they needed, for they were still stepping right along, but I was so tired that my legs trembled. Of course, I realized that the field was becoming smaller with each round, but I was too busy to notice how much. It wasn't until we quit for noon that I took time to look it over, and I was surprised to find that we'd put nearly twenty-five acres into the stacks—and with only eight in the crew, instead of the eleven we'd had Saturday forenoon.

At about eleven o'clock I'd sent Judy in to get dinner ready. By the time we had the horses unharnessed, watered, and in the corral, she had everything on the table, and she'd laid herself out to give us as good a dinner as we'd had on Sunday. She had a whole stewed chicken in front of my plate, and I was so hungry that I ate nearly all of it. That dinner set a pattern for us without any planning. With our taking two hours off at noon, there was no reason to hurry, so we sat and talked for nearly half an hour after we'd finished eating—not about anything in particular, just talking and resting. Then, while Judy washed the dishes, we sat in the shade of the house and listened to Jaikus tell stories about the “ould sod” till it was time to harness.

In the afternoon we laid off the two youngest colts from the header teams, put the old mares in their places, then switched the other four to the barges, giving them an easier job for the rest of the day. I split the old mares, putting one on the outside of each header team, so as to balance the pull as much as I could. It balanced the pull all right, but they were slower walkers than the smaller, quicker-stepping mustangs. Still, it made my job easier, because I had to do no holding back on the reins, and the rudder required a lot less fighting. I made up for the lost time by shortening the rests when we changed barges, and well before the middle of the afternoon we'd finished our first forty acres.

With the lines of the first field to go by, it was no trick to lay out the second, though we lost a little time in cutting our center roadway and a stackyard. Even at that, I could see that we'd cut a good ten acres of the new forty when the sun was at least an hour high. I sent Judy in to get supper ready, and within a half hour the rest of us unhitched and called it a day. Both Doc and I had nearly reached the end of our ropes, but we had more than fifty acres of wheat in the stacks, and it made us both happy enough to forget how tired we were.

Supper went about as dinner had, we had a half-hour's visit at the table afterwards, then Gus and Lars went to do the milking while the rest of us helped Judy clear the table and wash the dishes. It had been about seven-thirty when the sun went down. By eight-thirty Judy was on her way back to town, and the rest of us were turning in between our blankets.

That first day set the pattern for our work. From then till the end of harvest there was no bossing, and little planning, for me to do. Each one in the crew not only did his—or her—job well, but knew that if we were to finish by the end of July we'd have to put fifty acres of wheat a day into the stacks, and they wouldn't quit until another round or two had been added for good measure. When we were in light, bone-dry grain it was easy enough, then I'd call quits an hour before sundown. After we'd skimmed off those first dry forties the going became tougher, but we became tougher too. Within a few days Doc's muscles and mine had hardened enough that the ache was pretty well gone, and we'd picked up the knack of our jobs enough that we didn't have to put so much strain on them. Then too, the horses were working into as good shape as we were. With plenty of feed and a lay-off of one day in six, they came into lean, hard, excellent condition. And as soon as they learned that there were no blacksnakes to fear, they gave no trouble in either harnessing or handling.

The first break in our routine came on the Friday after we started the job. In the middle of the forenoon a car turned into the roadway toward the house. A few minutes later it went back, and when Judy brought her empty barge to the header she told me, “That was Paw's car; he's brought Sis and the children home. There won't be no need for me to go in and cook dinner; I've told her what we'll have, and Sis can cook better'n me . . . when she's got anything to cook with. Paw said he'd fetch out half a dozen more hens, so I put the last one of the others on to stew this morning.”

Judy went right to the house when we got in that noon, and by the time we'd unharnessed and washed a cracking good dinner was on the table. There was only one thing the matter with it; the table was set with only eight places, and Mrs. Hudson and the children were nowhere in sight.

When our family first moved to Colorado, back in 1906, there had been five of us youngsters, about the ages of the Hudson children. We were too poor to hire help, so Father worked for the neighbors during haying, then they all came and helped us for the two or three days it took to get in our harvest. The rest of the year we lived pretty much on oatmeal, pork and beans, and johnnycake, but when the harvesters were coming Father went to town for a load of special groceries. Then Mother baked pies, and cakes, and raised white bread, while Father brought in a door from the bunkhouse, and built legs under it to make an extension for the table.

No matter how many neighbors came to help us, we all sat down at the table together—Mother at one end, with the baby in his high chair beside her, we youngsters next, then the neighbor men, and Father at the end opposite Mother. To us youngsters, those harvest meals seemed like extra Thanksgivings, and we looked forward to them as much as we did to Christmas.

A picture of the long table on the old ranch flashed into my head when I stepped into the kitchen that first Friday in harvest, stirring up a warm sort of memory. Maybe it was the door to the front room standing ajar, and my remembering that Father had used a door to extend the table, or maybe it was just knowing that Mrs. Hudson and the children were beyond that door. Before anyone had taken his seat, I called quietly, “Mrs. Hudson, may I speak to you a minute?”

When she came to the door there was a puzzled, half-frightened look on her face, as though she expected me to scold her about the dinner she'd cooked. I started out by telling her about our moving to Colorado because my father had tuberculosis, of how poor we were, and all the rest of the story, right down to how much we children looked forward to those harvest-time meals. Then I said, “I'd like to go back and do it all over again. Of course, I can't, but it would seem almost like the old days if you'd let us take that door off the hinges for extending this table, then you and the children would come and eat with us.”

While I'd been telling the story she'd lost her half-frightened look, but it came back to her face when I mentioned their eating with us. “Oh, I couldn't do that,” she said nervously. “Joe, he's charged all the stuff to you . . . and besides . . . the younguns ain't used to strangers . . . they'd be scairt.”

“We're not strangers any longer,” I told her, “and we'll be around here until at least the end of the month, so they might just as well get acquainted now. As for the grub, we can't eat it till it's cooked, and it's pretty tough to spare Judy from the field to do the cooking. If you'll do it for us, your help will be worth a lot more than what you and the children can eat.”

Really, we didn't miss Judy from the field very much when she went in to cook our meals. Either Gus or Lars could easily load a barge while the other drove the team, but there was no sense in letting Judy or her sister know it. Besides, I didn't want to give Mrs. Hudson time to think up any more excuses, so I said, “Gus, could you and Lars take that door down and set it up at the end of the table? You might bring in those boxes the canned stuff came in, Jaikus. They'll do for extra chairs till we have time to make another bench.”

It took every odd dish, knife, fork, and spoon in the house to set the extended table, but with everyone helping it didn't take long to do it. When Mrs. Hudson brought the children from the front room they were clean, and still dressed in their town clothes, but they were all as timid as fawns. They clung tight to their mother and Judy, crowded away from us, and didn't look up as they passed. Judy was the one who eased things a bit. She took the two older girls by the hand, led them to the far end of the table, and told them, “We'll do it just like they done when Bud was a little boy. Your maw will sit on this end, with you girls next her on that side over there. Then will come Paco, but he don't talk no English, so you just help yourselves when he passes things. Billy can sit on this box, and then Susie, and then me, so's't I can cut her meat for her.”

When we first sat down I thought I might have made a mistake. Everyone, except Judy, seemed uncomfortable, and the children were just plain scared. They didn't dare help themselves, but watched nervously as Judy and their mother served them, then they seemed afraid to touch the food, peeking up first toward their mother, and then toward Judy. The fellows, even Doc, seemed nearly as uncomfortable as Mrs. Hudson. They filled their plates in silence, and ate as if they weren't hungry. I had to do something to break the spell, so I asked Doc, “What do you think that forty we're working on will run; twenty bushels to the acre?”