--"soak me in the guts with three bundles to onct an' knock me off'n the
top of the load?"
"Ever since morning you've been kidding me and telling me I went too
slow for you.... I thought I'd speed up a bit."
After surveying me scornfully for a minute, he mutely reascended the
load, and we finished the job in silence together....
We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.
* * * * *
Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on
the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and
daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to
heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of
pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like
giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.
I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough
for the use of my blanket.
I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a
giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me
and was breaking them into my breast....
The cramps....
I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and
stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and
drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through,
till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood
naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my
body....
The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at
my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me
as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They
backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water
and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe
distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.
The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring
and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they
crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in
at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it
continually rustled in my ear.
I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water
waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the
whippoorwill.
Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I
thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen
pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay
like a lump of rock in me....
No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frightful
labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who
had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung
over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I
never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of
complaint.
But after the first load I began to be better....
And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.
"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with
sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.
"I never wear a hat."
"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.
* * * * *
"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to
do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.
"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."
The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to
my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked
and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt
cool in the highest welter of heat.
In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.
"What's the matter?"
--"too hot!"
"Where's your whiskey now?"
--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm
old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.
* * * * *
These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we
held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and
suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...
which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting
that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and
blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of
the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....
* * * * *
On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of
the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles
down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it
... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and
the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the
separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....
* * * * *
It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily
threshing built up.
Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out
into the straw....
One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and
gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were
foundered....
* * * * *
The cramps bothered me no more.
The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.
"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've
got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles
... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."
* * * * *
After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....
"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"
"--pay me off to-day?"
"Yes."
"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"
"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than
most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace
at the separator....
"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about
things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what
with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the
notch, next day.
"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he
counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me,
disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon,
I'll drive you back to town."
"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."
I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure,
longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."
"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.
I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....
"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?...
Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their
mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join
against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be
assailed by all hands....
"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no
one cared ... but now you've started something."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."
"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines
your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."
* * * * *
I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before
I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....
That fall the _National Magazine_ printed _The Threshers_ and _The
Harvest_ and _The Cook-Shack_, three poems, the fruit of that work. All
three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three
didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.
* * * * *
Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main
street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It
had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in
order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and
sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.
Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I
set them up in several neat rows.
I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I
had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for
myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own
washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of
doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.
The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew
down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks
I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive
study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness,
such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.
I opened the _Buch der Lieder_ at the poem in his preface--the song of
the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the
poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his
soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....
"O, shöne Sphinx, O löse mir
Das Rätsel, das wunderbare!
Ich hab' darüber nachgedacht
Schon manche tausand Yahre."
* * * * *
Monday morning ... by six or seven o'clock a rustling below, in the
shop, by eight, the day's work in full blast ... a terrific pounding and
hammering on sheets of tin and pieces of pipe. The uproar threw my mind
off my poetry.