The Unplowed Sky (6 page)

That was another puzzle. Hallie knew that the owner of the machinery was the boss. Often he was also the engine man, though he might just keep a watchful eye over the whole operation. When there was no other boss, the engineer was in charge of overseeing the threshing. In this case, though Rory ran the engine, Garth had the indisputable authority that marked him as the true chief.

Such musings were pushed out of her head by the need to pay attention to Shaft as she washed, rinsed, and dried the dishes. The kitchen was organized for handiness and to keep things in place for traveling. “The tops of the benches lift up. Bedding and clothes are stored inside. You can put your things in one end, and we can stash your suitcase under them boxes of canned stuff in the corner.”

“I don't have any bedding.” Hallie wondered for the first time where she and Jackie would sleep.

“Plenty in the benches,” the cook assured her. “The clean sheets are in the right-hand one, couple of pillows, too. Lessee, now. I can set my cot up outside and leave the shack to you. There's another cot you can have. Think Jack can sleep on the table if it's padded good with quilts?”

“The table should be fine,” she said. “But I don't like driving you outside, Mr. Shaft.”

“It's cooler. I usually sleep out anyway. We don't have misters! Anyhow, my real name's Milov Hurok. Bohemian. Shaft's a nickname, short for Deep Shaft.”

“Please call me Hallie, then. You've got an unusual nickname.”

“Earned it fair and square. I used to make the best Deep Shaft in the Balkans.”

“The Balkans?” Hallie searched what she retained of her geography lessons. “You mean Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro—countries like that?”

It was his turn to look baffled. “Lord love you, no! I'm talkin' about right over in southeast Kansas, though I reckon them hills got their name because they was settled by so many folks from them places. Lots of Italians, too. Mostly work in the mines. But when Prohibition come along, a good many started bootleggin'. Includin' me.”

“Oh.”

Hallie had heard of bootleggers, of course, but had pictured them as machine-gun-toting Chicago racketeers. At her scandalized gasp, Shaft said defensively, “Well, most of us was raised Catholic and didn't see anything wrong in drinkin' wine or spirits at our tables or at parties. When the law came nosin' around, we hid our stuff in old mine shafts. Let me tell you, Hallie, girl, Deep Shaft's got a reputation that brings the highest prices all the way from Ontario to Mexico City. It sells for five dollars a pint in Detroit, though close to home a half-pint sells for two bits. Most of us made it just like we would for our ownselves.”

Brought up in teetotal households, Hallie was fascinated. “How did you make it?”

“Well, you dump a hundred-pound sack of sugar in a fifty-gallon barrel, add rye or corn and two or three pound slabs of yeast—none of that fast-actin' stuff! Ruins it! Then you pour in water till the barrel's about three-quarters full and keep it warm so it'll ferment. Long about a week or more later, when it's ready to distill, you dip out the solid leavings of the mash. Good animal food, but I've seen critters get drunk on it. Even some geese.”

“Is the whiskey ready, then?”

“Not by a long shot. It's got to be cooked in the still and then run through a copper coil in a barrel of cool water—have to keep changing the water to keep it cool. To make sure there wasn't no poison fusel oils in my batch, I'd filter it through an old felt hat half-full of ground-up charcoal. Pure and clear as spring water my Deep Shaft was. I never aged it in a Coca-Cola syrup barrel like some did to give it darker color, much less dumped in red rock candy. Al Capone hisself used to come buy five gallons at a time, which was all I'd get from distillin' fifty gallons of real fine mash.”

“Don't people get poisoned on bootleg whisky?”

“Sure. The distillin' ain't done right, it can blind a person or cripple—even kill 'em. Hallie, I hope you won't ever drink, but if you take a snort, be sure it's not cheap likker that even a drunk has to lace with cherry syrup to swallow or that rotgut Jamaica Ginger that'll paralyze you.”

Even Hallie had heard of jake and jakeleg. She forbore to ask Shaft why he advised her against drinking the brew he had described so pridefully. “If you were doing so well, Shaft, how come you're cooking for a threshing crew?”

Shaft sighed and fitted three big pans of gingerbread into the oven. “Well, my cousin's a deputy sheriff. Came on a raid with some federal Prohibition officers. They caught me sellin' a jug to some Tulsa fellers. My cousin had to haul my still and the rest of that run of whiskey into the county seat, but when he told me to get whatever I needed to come along with him, he gave me a long, slow wink. I grabbed what cash I had in the mattress, scooted out the back window into my old jalopy, and I ain't been back. Nothin' in the pen that interests me that much!”

“Does Mr. MacLeod know?”

“Figgered it was only fair to tell him. He allowed as how he didn't want me making any likker, but said his great-great-great grandmother distilled bootleg whisky on the Isle of Lewis—that's off the west coast of Scotland, he says. That's how she made her living while she was a widow. And that's how quite a few widows in the Balkans keep food in their kiddos' mouths, though more of 'em sell it than make it.”

These fascinating disclosures were cut short by a motor wheezing to a stop outside the window. “Mr. Hurok!” shrilled a woman's voice. “You interested in some butter, milk, eggs, and chickens? We got more green beans and watermelons than we know what to do with. I'd be obliged if you'd use all you could. Hate to see food go to waste—”

She paused long enough for Shaft to say, “Howdy, Miz Brockett. If one of your kids could bring over a gallon of fresh milk after you're through milking tonight, it'll keep till morning. I can use four dozen eggs today, if you've got them, and three dozen tomorrow. Can you spare five pounds of butter? The men would sure appreciate the beans and watermelons. I can take about four chickens, providin' they're cleaned and plucked—”

The hefty broad-faced woman in the sunbonnet cackled, showing her wide-spaced teeth. “Don't like to wring their necks, do you? I recollect you got mighty pale when they were floppin' around without their heads!” She eyed Hallie and gave a disapproving grunt. “You don't look like you know how to gut a chicken, neither, much less singe off the pinfeathers. You want some real help, Mr. Hurok, my Sophie can wring a rooster's neck on the second twist, and her apple dumplings plumb melt away in your mouth—”

“Much obliged,” Shaft said hastily, “but Miss Hallie's workin' out just fine. Got any beef for sale?”

“We knew you'd be along soon, so my man butchered a steer yesterday. Can you use a quarter?”

“Be about right. Can't keep it too long in this hot weather but what with lunches, the boys go through beef pretty fast.”

Mrs. Brockett gave a nod so vigorous that it made her sunbonnet swish. “Fine. I'll send Sophie over with it and the other stuff soon as she cleans the chickens. We got electricity in this year, and I got a nice new washing machine, so if you want, Sophie and me'll wash up the men's clothes.”

“Reckon that'll suit Garth 'cause the only washing I do is dish and hand towels.”

“We can do them, too, lots easier than you can on the washboard. When Ernie brings the milk this evening, he can pick up the laundry, and we'll have it back to you tomorrow night. You've never seen towels as white as Sophie can get.” The woman paused, then gave Hallie another look which was at once speculative and wary. “Mr. MacLeod got married yet?”

“Not as I know of.”

“Time he did. Man without a wife gets all frayed and frazzled around the edges.”

“Ma'am, I sure agree. Rory needs a good woman to settle him down. I'd bet your Sophie's the one who could do it.”

“Rory! That feckless, reckless, rollicking, frolicking young hellion? He better not come hanging Sophie, or I'll send him off with a flea in his ear and a bee in his bonnet! The very idea!”

“Beg pardon, Miz Brockett.” Shaft spoke contritely, but his beard didn't quite conceal his grin. “Now, ma'am, I kind of need them chickens if I'm going to fry 'em up for supper.”

“If you ever tasted Sophie's cream gravy—oh, all right, Mr. Hurok, I'll get the things right over.”

The Model T had a self-starter. After some whines and screeches, Mrs. Brockett wrestled it around and chugged toward the farm buildings. Though a mother's boasting could be discounted a bit, Hallie felt hopelessly inadequate beside what she had heard of Sophie.

“Shaft, if you'd like to hire Mrs. Brockett's daughter—”

He gave her a stricken look. “That woman would try her best to get Garth hitched up in double harness, and I don't want to see him smashed up the way he was when I first met him.”

“He's been married?”

“His wife, back on Lewis, ran off with someone else while he was in the army. Guess that's one of the reasons he came to Canada to work in the harvest and wound up down here. Good grannies! It's already time to start to start fixin' afternoon lunch!”

So Garth had been married, but wasn't now. Did he distrust all women because of that? Hallie seethed with questions but sensed that Shaft was reluctant to discuss that private part of his friend and employer's life. Tossing the dishwater out the door, Hallie looked for Jackie, didn't see him at first, and got a little scared. She wasn't used to watching out for a child, but she had to learn fast. If he wandered over to watch the threshing and got in the way before anyone noticed—What if he got caught in that long belt stretched from engine to thresher or got in the way of the pitchforks wielded from both stacks to feed grain into the separator?

Her scalp prickling, Hallie started to call, then gratefully stifled the cry as she saw him. There he was, cuddled up against Laird in the shade between tree trunk and shack. Smoky, in turn, was curled up in Jackie's arms. Lambie, the little boy's threadbare companion, might lose some of his magic to the charm of these real animals. But if Jackie came to love them, wouldn't the parting be cruel when the season was over and Hallie had to find another job?

She'd worry about that later, much later. Right now she was relieved that Smoky, Laird—and Shaft—would fill some of the emptiness left by Felicity's desertion, that dreadful sense of abandonment that Hallie herself had felt when Daddy brought home a new wife to take Hallie's mother's place—and her own place, too, as it turned out.

No woolgathering! She had to prove to Shaft that he hadn't made a mistake in hiring her, especially when the formidable Sophie, who could wring chickens' necks without a qualm, would arrive at any minute. Hallie hurried inside and began to make piecrusts.

III

As she carried a basket of sandwiches out to the crew, two apiece with mustard spread on inch-thick slabs of beef, Hallie wished for a sunbonnet. Her only hat, the straw boater she had been wearing that morning, didn't have a broad enough brim to shelter her face. Jackie trotted proudly along with a pan of gingerbread, overshadowed by Laird, who stood inches taller. In the fingers that weren't gripping the basket, Hallie carried a burlap-wrapped crockery jug of water to replace the one stowed under the separator.

At Shaft's direction, she had stirred a spoonful of oatmeal into the water. “Cuts the alkali,” the cook said. “Keeps the men from gettin' the trots, which can be pretty inconvenient when you're threshing.” He carried the other pan of gingerbread, a sack of cups, and the gallon coffeepot.

The steam engine gave them a rippling salute, followed by one long blast. “That's the quittin' signal,” Shaft said.

“Will the engine shut down?”

“No. Rory's injecting cool water into the boiler and shutting all the dampers. That'll hold the fire and it won't take long to get up to full steam again.” Shaft squinted at the stacks on either side of the separator. They were still higher than a tall man's head. “The boys ought to finish this ‘set' tonight and move on to the next stacks in the morning.”

Pitchers, three on each stack and one working from the ground behind the separator, forked their last loads of headed grain onto the long extension feeder. This carried wheat spikes into the turning cylinder that separated grain from chaff and straw. On the other end, grain poured into a waiting horse-drawn wagon driven by Mr. Brockett, thin and wiry as his wife was buxom. The straw huffed from the long tubular blower into a growing pile.

“It must be hard to pitch over the belt like that.” Hallie marveled at the distance the men could toss the spikes.

“It is, and you can see the wind's blowing chaff into their faces. That's why they wear bandannas over their faces and change sides pretty often and take turns pitching from the ground—the hole, they call it. Jack, plunk that gingerbread down on the corner of this oilcloth, will you? And get out the cups.”

While Mr. Brockett drove off with his grain, the pitchers stuck their pitchforks in the stacks, scrambled down, wiped their faces with bandannas, and hunkered around the oilcloth. Rory and Garth examined their respective machines; but after Rory joined the pitchers with a pleased grin at Hallie, Garth was still tapping away with a hammer at the cylinder.

“Makin' sure the teeth are tight,” Shaft explained to Hallie. “See, he's tightenin' one with a wrench.”

“Garth'll always find something to fuss over,” Rory said, pushing his hat up from the sweat-drenched golden hair plastered to his forehead. “The way he watches me on that engine you'd think no one but him ever ran one.”

“Can't blame him for lookin' after a big investment,” Shaft said peaceably. “He mortgaged his land to buy the tractor and separator four years ago, when wheat sold for twice what it does now, and he got fifteen to twenty-five cents a bushel for threshing headed grain, more for bundled. Prices busted in twenty-one. They ain't picked up. So this is the fourth year Garth's tryin' to pay on a two-bits-a-bushel mortgage with ten-cents-a-bushel fees.”