Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America
It jammed again, solid this time. He looked back and saw the rotating power takeoff and the jaws churning and heard the chatter of the knives working somewhere low near the roots of all of the rank growth of legume and grass. Then he saw behind the gap where the cut grass stopped and swore softly under his breath. You could swear here; you were a long ways from church. He thought of some of the ladies downstairs having coffee after church after one of his sermons and how they would frown if they heard him now, the skin wrinkling around the corners of their mouths. But not even this thought could lift his spirits as he climbed down from the Oliver 550. All he knew was that another perfect afternoon for making hay was about to be slowed and perhaps ruined by mechanical adversity.
Funny how everything wants to quit on the hottest day, a day to make snakes and lizards sweat. His arms were already coated with sweat and chaff that had raised little pock marks along the underside of the forearm from where, earlier today, he had taken the old, almost-rotten bales from the last attempt and broke them open and scattered all of the wet warm hay out on the ground. “A day away from mildew, and only a day,” he had thought to himself when he rolled the bales heavy with rain and ran his gloved hands along the baling twine and slashed it open. Not that it mattered. It was too late for tedding. All that could be done was to give it back to the soil, disc it, work it to where the rotting would do some good. Work it in and then go on past this last attempt to beat the weather and get that first crop into the barn. .
There had been, what, two three hundred bales out there in the bright sun of the morning and the growing humidity, and if he had not been able to chop them down to size with the seven-foot cut-ditioner, then there really would be no way in hell to fix the mess. He could see himself wrestling all of those bales onto the flat rack, straining under the wet mass of the soaked hay, hauling them down to that low ground near the creek where they would have been piled, rotting in sun and rain, into a make-shift compost A lot of work. Desperate and stinking work too, in this heat.
So he was grateful that the morning was past and that now he could turn again to the remainder of this large field, clothed in tall, resilient, rippling grass. He had turned to it, willingly, even in the heat, and was ready for the long hours of the burning afternoon sun when the wire showed up like a snake in the midst of delayed Eden.
Mowing is always a mystery; you always wonder what is there, hidden away in that sea of waving grass. And when you mow, you find out, especially the first cutting. But how the few feet of smooth wire found its way out to the middle of the field was beyond him. He had led the nine-foot haybine right to the spot, right to the intersection, the crossroads where the wire jutted up out of the hard ground like it was stuck in a crevice of rock. It had been waiting, hidden away, for weeks if not months.
The haybine had dutifully taken it in; had started to chew and to cut. Then it gagged as the wire, finding the sprockets on the side and grinding and wrapping itself like a metal glazed snake in and out of all of the gears, brought it to the point of indigestion.
The sun was up overhead him, now, and slightly ahead of him to the south and to the west. It was unobstructed. He could feel it pushing through the back of his shirt like a warm, heavy hand and he knew that this was just the start. An initial shove. Alone on the downslope of the forty acres behind the dry lot and closest to the creek, he felt suddenly more isolated and alone than he was. Singled out, squeezed, in his solitary battle—with no one to come along to spell him— a man in the sun, finding his energy absorbed by the close, dense fabric of the heat while he thought about what he now suddenly was facing. Part time preacher man, part time farmer.
He went back to the tractor for snippers, popped the tool box and fished around awhile. Funny about the conjunction of some things. Just yesterday, Mr. Marsh, one of the deacons at church, had read the Old Testament lesson from Numbers Chapter Twenty-one. A few parishioners were scattered here and there in the pews, and the wind pushed the curtains through the open windows as he read, his thin voice trailing away in the air of the silent church:
And the people spake against God, and against Moses, ‘Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.
Perhaps it was the suggestion of the text itself, or the palpable heat, but Drew remembered it was here that the old deacon stopped for water, the blue-veined hand quaking a bit as he raised the glass to his lips, even narrow lips, before his light but piercing voice picked up the cadence once more:
And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much of the people died.
So much for complaining.
Drew returned to the silent red beast, a dull red in the blazing sun, and he knelt in a prayer of sorts. Monday prayer. The grass laid back down into a soft mat as he compressed it with his weight, feeling around for some entrance point while prone on the ground. Then he began the journey—a little pilgrimage of his own, a dense winding journey in the grass.
He worked himself in under the haybine until he found a space where he could get close to the gears jammed with the wire. Then he worked the snippers in and worked at the wire, back and forth, starting the long process of pulling it free.
It was a superb snake. Not the brass that Moses made in response to the serpents of the desert, but a good metal snake nevertheless. It had coiled and writhed from the gears up into the rollers and slithered over to the edge of the roller where it was bolted on. He snipped and pulled, thinking of a real snakeskin lying perfect and whole when it was abandoned, and of this contrast as he took one little piece after another. Beads of sweat on his forehead rolled easily down along the bridge of his nose as he worked.
Snakes. Murmuring in the desert. And, earlier, snakes in the garden. You mention snakes in church and that’s where everyone would go: to the Garden. But there were others snakes. Snakes that Deacon Marsh did not know of: great sea snakes slithering their evil, swimming in the texts of Mesopotamia. Astarte, Baals consort in Canaanite religion, always with her serpent. And serpents in the Gilgamesh Epic of Babylonia. Snakes that the Leviathan of Jonah might just dimly reflect. And now this little satan, mocking him, reduced to one stubborn wire woven into the gears, grinning as he dismembered it piece by piece.
Take what it’ll give you! He almost said it out loud as he worked in the compressed tin space, a temple of sorts, suddenly improvised and necessary and full of the close smell of grass, dank air and oil. But he thought it more than said it. And then, in the midst of all this work, suddenly a door was opened and he was back with his uncle, in another time, back before texts and seminary reading lists; back before half-filled church pews, before any of it, standing on the hay rick.
A hot day like this one, it had been. And the horses moved slowly with the weight of the building load, pulling the wagon and the hay loader along as his cousin drove the team and his uncle, walking along beside in the oppressive July heat, gave advice.
The hay did not come out smoothly—like on a conveyer. Instead it came in clumps, some big, some small. An average-size clump was no problem for him with his young, unsteady legs and his fork. He could get behind these clumps and roll them along and stomp it down.
But the big stuff was a puzzle. It was always too much. He didn’t have the strength yet to slam into it with the fork, though he tried. And so it would sit there inert, a rock of grass immovable in the hot air, with the clatter of the loader telling him it was time, more hay was coming. Sometimes he could break a piece of it loose and scatter that farther along on the load and work it in, but mostly not. And then along with everything else, there were the bits and pieces, fleeces of hay coming off the loader; wisps, some falling, some finding the air.
“Take what it’ll give you.” He looked down at the two silver-rimmed glasses reflecting the sun. His arms felt tired. The fork, growing heavy, felt increasingl
y foreign and awkward and the man behind those blazing orbs could see that. He looked down again and said it as much to the air as to his uncle, “I don’t think I can.”
He remembers the veins on the forearms still. The strong calloused hands and the veins and tendons bulging as his uncle took hold of the frame and pulled himself up. One, two pulls and he was there, standing beside the boy. He took the fork in his hand and it became a toy. He almost twirled it, this way and that, moving the little stuff, striding, punching the hay home with his feet, tying it in. Even the big stuff was moving. Nothing disobeyed or balked, until the whole top of the load was smooth, the bunches locked into one another, the last of the hay smoothed over the top, and they were ready for the barn.
“There is a dance to be done up here, son.” His uncle smiled, the sweat glistening his face and running off his jaw and down his neck, “a hay dance.” The loader was unhitched while the horses stood. Then they were moving again, coming off the field and into the lane. The load and wagon lurched and his uncle quickly jabbed the fork into the load and balanced there. The boy lunged into him and found the metal button of his coveralls with one hand and the deep back pocket with his other and hung on.
“You’ll get the idea. It takes time…and practice.”
He nodded at the steel blue eyes behind the wire framed glass, and then, almost in tears, he looked down. “If you dance right and move each piece quickly out of the way to where it should be, well, then there’s far, far less chance of getting the next clump down your neck.”
The arms around his shoulder were flecked with chaff.
They were on the level now. The horses’ heads were bobbing. His uncle picked him up in those same strong arms and turned him around and put him down again and he saw the growing closeness of the barn. They would unhitch the team then, with this load of hay directly under the open mow. His cousin would disappear up the ladder just inside the barn door and his aunt take the team over to be watered before the next step, the pulling of the hay into the barn.
Timothy and clover it was. He could see it now and feel it on his neck as he worked in the sticky shade offered by the haybine. The last piece of wire almost was out. One more pull and then it was free. He slithered back out, rolled to his knees, and gathered up the snipped pieces of the wire in his leather-gloved hands. Then he wrapped them around his palm and put the bent pieces back into the box with the snips and the pliers.
He stood and looked around, and looked again while mounting the tractor: no desert. No crosses of brass reptiles. No horses or giant mounds of hay going up into the open maw of the barn. No bulging arms. No blue-veined hands. Just this: grass.
The grass still to be cut showed a silky sheen as it waved in the wind, the first breeze of the day strong enough to lift for even a moment the hard hand of the heat. He looked at the grass and into the dense cover it provided over the rough texture of the land itself. He stared. It was as if he was trying to look through it, as though grass itself covered and capped the present with this field, this heat and work; and he wanted it to yield, to show him to himself again after these years.
And the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in Oboth, and they journeyed from Oboth, and pitched at Ijeabarim, in the wilderness which is before Moab, toward the sunrising.
Back somewhere past these words, these years, was the place where he was young again. Whenever Marsh read, it was always time. Time in the guise of white slender fingers and blue-veined hands, closing and holding the book as he stepped away and down from the pulpit after reading.
Time.
He wanted the belt loops, the slow swaying motion of the wagon and the horses heads. He was looking for horses, you see. But there were no horses, now. No horses, no hay rick, no man riding the load or striding beside it with his red bandana round his neck, looking up.
Take what it’ll give you! The phrase danced on the air and drifted, until it too was woven into the texture of the waving grass, and disappeared. Suddenly it came to him why he had remembered it. It had come back to him through all those years, because it was true. Truth is moments when you have to step aside. And time is grass, always in the present, coming up the ladder.
Drew pulled the ignition and flipped the key. The tractor sprang to life. He worked the power take-off and turned and watched the spinning jaws of the machinery chewing insatiably and synchronously once more. He pulled the clutch and the machine behind him began to eat. Then he turned, set his course just under the lip of the rise that ran across the middle of the field and carved a swath into the waving grass.
For Drew, this was the long trail of what must be done; a long winding entrance into the afternoon, the unrelenting sun, and all that was waiting. As he mowed, Drew’s path made a trail in the sea of the grass, a temporary path which marked his place in time.
A PRAYER FOR WINTER