Wessex Tales: "For Viviana's Wedding" (Story 16)

  Chapter 4

  Away at the barn, Long Tom was mustering such men as he could find to thresh out a bushel of oats for their bread, and a peck and a bushel of wheat for the flat cakes and fine white loaves. Gentry were coming. For Viviana’s wedding.

  “Take up thik flail, Gregory.”

  “Too warm for threshing, Tom.” But if words dissented, Gregory’s action spoke swift compliance, for Long Tom had been bailiff to the de Eskellings, and his father before—an office earned, mind!—as long as either family could recall. And fair with his men. If’n they worked with a will, Long Tom was no master to measure their corn by his bushel. Lean like a willow, with powder-grey hair to his shoulders and bald on the top, Long Tom with his worried expression looked like a sport of nature twixt a grain-dusty miller and an ascetic monk.

  He responded simply, “Never too warm to eat, though, Gregory.”

  “Bain’t that God’s truth!” Gregory was a barrel of a man, short and stooped, with calloused shoulders like the gall-wood on an oak. The strongest man at manor, he was front man on the cowl’s staff when a ‘pipe’ or barrel must be toted, or a tub of water carried from the river twixt two men, suspended from a pole.

  Sometimes it was two behind, and mighty Gregory up front, like Atlas, for when a lesser man cried “Rest!” and set his end upon a thumb-stick while he changed to the other shoulder, Gregory would stand like an ox, steady as Hambledon, while t’other man fought for breath. He seemed to never mind the weight or feel the pain or fear the distance still to go.

  Now he spread a bushel-basket of dark oats upon the floor and took his flail.

  “William!” Long Tom called to the cattle byre through one of the open doors athwart the threshing floor. “There’s threshing to be done.”

  “I’ve kine to look to, Tom, and the boy be at the hall.”

  “’Tis early a-day yet, Will. Come flail for yr bread!” Long Tom called back. “Us’ll be no more’n half an hour. Threshers get best mead, Sarah promised. Best, like for gentry, and not yr harvest swish-wash.”

  The cowman joined them on the threshing floor, and with good will. Soft hands he had, and pale, but strong withal. With or without the inducement of mead, he recognized authority.

  So they set to the grain, Long Tom and William Cowman vying for position, neither man willing to stand across from Gregory’s flail.

  “Go gentle, Gregory. Corn bain’t good an’ if ’tis dust.”

  The other smiled. “Do you but start the riming, Tom.”

  “Ready?”

  “Ah.”

  The bailiff began: “Now ’tis ONE for my maker,”

  Long Tom’s flail came thunk onto oats,

  “And TWO for my ruler,”

  then William Cowman’s, standing to his right.

  “A THREE for my server,”

  The impact of Gregory’s sweple shook the threshing floor.

  “A FOUR for the force”

  called Long Tom,

  “that doth BRING me to bed.”

  Always to the right around the circle, no matter the number of men,

  “with a RAT-tle, a thump,”

  for heads might crack more everlastingly than oats.

  “and a FIVE on the floor.”

  With most men right-handed, the clearest view was to one’s left.

  “Now hear SIX for my sweple,”

  You timed your stroke to the one, from your left, that came before.

  “And SEVEN’s the leaven,”

  There was not a man among them had any call to count to ten…

  “and EIGHT is an air atwixt…”

  …except on his fingers.

  “DOORS as’ll aid we”

  Nor needed to. A shepherd’s count sufficed for everyday.

  “to WINnow the chaff.”

  But a thrasher’s chant was a thrasher’s chant, and not arithmetic.

  “For now NINE is the toiling

  and TEN is the corn

  that the WOMen shall bake into BREAD.” (Endnote ref_2)

  For Viviana’s wedding.