The Unplowed Sky Read online

  “That’s a stupid waste of time! Look how-long it takes you to get from one farm to another. That outfit can’t make more than two miles an hour.”

  “Two and six-tenths.”

  “You’re as out-of-date as your steam engine! And you’ve refused to sell me your farm for a lot more than it’s worth.” Raford’s eyes narrowed in sudden decision. “I’m going to buy a gas engine, hire a crew, and run you right out of business in this part of the country.”

  MacLeod’s eyes didn’t flicker. “You can try.” A threshing outfit was a big investment needed only for a short time each year. That was why most farmers preferred to pay a traveling thresher. But Raford wouldn’t care about money. MacLeod nodded toward the bridge.

  “It doesn’t look like the county fixed this bridge the way you promised it would, Mr. Road Commissioner.”

  “Other projects were more important. If you obey the planking law, there won’t be a problem.”

  “Planking law!” The young man on the engine gave a scornful laugh. His voice, too, had that soft music. Glancing from him to the man on the separator, Hallie thought they must be brothers, the engineer some years the younger. “As if stretching planks across a bridge like yon would keep it from caving in!”

  “You’d better hope it does.” Raford turned from the threshers as if dismissing them from his mind. His gaze enveloped Hallie; she felt it with shock, like a physical grasping. “Do you want a ride to town, Miss Meredith?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Well, when you get there, come to the hotel if you change your mind about that position.”

  The motor of the Pierce-Arrow roared as the long sleek vehicle crossed the bridge with a groaning of planks. Dust billowed back. “Why, that—” the engineer began, glanced at Hallie, and chuckled. “God bless him, I was going to say, miss. Is it a ride to town you’re needing, you and the laddie?”

  “What I really need is a job. Is that a cookshack behind the separator?”

  “We’ve got a cook.” MacLeod jumped down from the separator and began to unfasten some long planks about three inches thick and a foot wide from the machine. “Lend a hand, Rory. If a bridge ever needed planking, this is it.”

  The men in the Fords piled out and helped lay the planks across the bridge. Most wore overalls and blue chambray shirts but a few, including the engineer, had on khakis. Scratching the mite of a kitten behind its ears, the bearded man on the water wagon kept his seat as if the task were beneath his dignity. The boy, too, stayed in his place.

  The bearded man watched Hallie with deep-set dark eyes that seemed benevolent. His mouth was too surrounded by mustache and beard for her to judge its appearance but the way he held the kitten made her think he was kind. “Are you a good hand with pies, lady?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  The hope his question had roused in Hallie fused with determination. She threw back her head and looked him in the eye. “I make delicious pies. No one ever leaves a bit of the crust.”

  “Bread?”

  “I’ve been baking since I was nine.”

  He grinned. “From the look of you, that wasn’t all so long ago.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  The man raised an eyebrow as he looked at Jackie. Hallie felt blood heating her face. Was everyone going to think what Raford did? “Jackie’s my brother,” she said curtly and left off the “half.” With their father dead and his mother gone, Jackie didn’t need a half-sister. He needed a whole one.

  The men had laid the planks. As MacLeod started to climb back on the separator, the bearded man shouted at him, “Garth, this young lady says she can bake pies.”

  The eight men paused beside the Model Ts. “Pies!” they cried in unison, every face lighting up.

  “Besides,” called the engineer, “she’s a whole lot prettier than Shaft!”

  MacLeod scowled at the older man. “I want my men to keep their mind on their work. That’s why I hired you.”

  “And you said you’d hire me another helper after the last one quit to get married.”

  “I will. But—” Garth MacLeod looked above, below, and on both sides of Hallie, but not at her. His gaze lit on Jackie. “Listen, Shaft, how will you cook with the laddie underfoot?”

  “That’s not your worry. But you’ll have war in camp if you don’t get me a helper who can bake pies.”

  All the men nodded agreement. The stocky one with a patched and peeling sunburn and kinky hair bleached almost white glanced apologetically at Shaft. “Shaft makes the best sourdough this side of heaven, his biscuits are great, and his gravy’s smooth. But a starved mule wouldn’t eat his pies—and you know, Garth, we got to have pie!”

  Garth MacLeod looked at Hallie then. She almost flinched at the pain and anger in his gray eyes. What in the world was the matter with him? “Are you sure you want the job?” he said, almost daring her.

  “I want it.”

  “There’s lots of ways for anyone, much less a child, to get hurt around a threshing outfit. The men must be tending their work, not the lad. You’ll have to keep him out of the way.”

  Why was Garth MacLeod so hateful? Had she been alone, she would have told him to stick his job in one of his big ears. But she had Jackie, she believed she had an ally in Shaft, and she wasn’t going to let Garth MacLeod threaten her out of a job that would let her take care of her brother.

  Brother. She listened to the word inside her head. It sounded nice; balm on the ache of losing her father and the even crueler, earlier ache of being pushed out of her home by Felicity less than a year after her own mother’s death. Felicity got rid of Mother’s things and insisted on new furnishings as if Ellen Meredith’s memory were an infection. Felicity and thirteen-year-old Hallie clashed often in private, but around Father, his new wife was all tearful innocence. Mrs. MacReynolds had been mother’s friend. When she saw how things were, she had persuaded Mr. Meredith to let Hallie live with her and her husband and work as a daughter might to earn her keep. Hallie had seen her father often, but she had felt he wasn’t really her father anymore. He was Felicity’s husband and soon Jackie’s father.

  Now Jackie had only Hallie. She vowed to make that enough. Taking Jackie’s hand, she looked straight at Garth MacLeod. “I’ll be responsible for my brother.”

  The boy beside Shaft jumped up and confronted Garth, arousing an immense dog who rose from the wagon bed, stretched, and peered over the side at the strangers. He looked something like a Great Dane and something like a greyhound and was in between in size. His short hair was smooth and brindled gray except for a white breast, white paws, and white-tipped tail.

  “Doggie!” Jackie cried. “Look, a doggie!”

  “His name is Laird,” said the bearded man.

  The dog wagged his long tail and thrust his long, slender muzzle toward the child. His friendliness was a marked contrast to the expression of some of his humans, especially the boy. As overalls tightened over a long-sleeved blue shirt, Hallie saw the rounding of young breasts and looked more closely. In spite of cropped light brown hair this was definitely a girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, with dark-lashed blue-gray eyes that veered away from Hallie with passionate dislike. “Do we have to have a woman around, Dad? I’ll bet I can make pies.”

  “You’ve never tried, Meg.” Garth almost smiled, and his eyes softened. “You’ve got all you can do to hustle water for the engine. You ready to quit that and go to cooking?”

  “No! But I—” The girl scowled at Hallie, who had no trouble putting herself in young Meg’s shoes. “I won’t have somebody bossing me around—trying to make me act like a lady.”

  “Don’t worry.” Hallie realized immediately that she shouldn’t have laughed. “I’ve got all I can do trying to be a lady myself.”

  Grudging approval showed in Garth’s eyes. “Let’s give each other a trial, then. Pay’s a dollar a day and your food, of course.”

  A cheer went up from the men who
piled into the Model Ts. “You can meet everyone later,” Garth said. “I’m Garth MacLeod, that’s my brother Rory on the engine, and you can climb aboard the water wagon with Meg and Shaft.”

  “I’m Hallie Meredith, and this is Jackie.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He sounded as if he weren’t, but he did toss her suitcase and Jackie’s carpetbag into the wagon. “All right, lad,” he called to his brother. “Let’s see if that bridge will hold us up.”

  The whistle shrilled. Hallie settled on the plank next to Shaft, Jackie on her lap, and hoped she had done the right thing. The tractor labored onto the groaning boards. Hallie shut her eyes. If they were going to plunge through the bridge, she would rather not know it. She held her breath till they were safely across and the men hurried to load up the planks.

  “It’ll be all right, Miss Hallie.” Shaft smiled at Jackie, who ventured to pet the kitten shyly. “Garth’s bark is a whole lot worse than his bite.”

  Hallie hoped that was true and grinned wryly. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about his making offers along the lines that Raford had. Whatever else, it was a vast relief to be out of that man’s reach.

  II

  It was almost noon when, with a spirited whistle, they turned up a lane that led past a small, unpainted house with raddled screen doors and a big well-maintained barn. Several dogs ran alongside barking. Laird opened an eye and yawned but otherwise ignored them.

  Evidently the MacLeods knew the farm. Rory skirted a rickety chicken house, malodorous pigpen, and a corral built around a creaking windmill and stock tank before the engine steamed into a seemingly endless field. Grain waited in giant rows about fifty feet long, twenty feet wide, and perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet high. The stacks were only about eight feet apart.

  “How does the engine pass between the rows?” Hallie shouted in Shaft’s ear. “It looks a foot or so wider than the space.”

  “It is. From wheel to wheel, the engine’s nine and a half feet wide.”

  Hallie stared at the belching steam and thought of the fire and boiling water that caused it. “Can’t the stacks catch fire?”

  “Sometimes. ’Course the engineman closes all the ash-pan dampers before he hauls the separator between the stacks.”

  Hallie’s spine pricked at the thought. She had grown up in Hollister but she really didn’t know much about how grain got from the fields into the bread she ate every day. The town depended on wheat and she was accustomed to see the surrounding fields change from fresh green shoots in early spring to tall stalks crowned with heads of grain. Many high-school boys earned good money working the harvest. During harvest and threshing seasons, the town swarmed with “hands” looking for work and farmers who needed them.

  Like migrating flocks of birds, the workers followed the harvest north and some returned for threshing. Hallie often had seen men with their belongings tied in a bundle or stuffed into tin or cardboard suitcases spill out of each arriving train. A big change began about ten years ago when Henry Ford began turning out Model Ts on an assembly line—ten thousand a day, it was said—and the price was cut in half. Many traveling field workers now had their Tin Lizzies, Studebakers, or other cars.

  Farmers hauled threshed grain to the huge iron-clad elevators rearing along the north side of the railroad tracks, where it was to be stored till it was sold and shipped away. The gleaming elevators towered much higher than any of the buildings in the little town on the south side of the tracks, higher than the two-story bank and hotel and even the spires of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches.

  “Ed Brockett, the farmer, is showing Rory where he wants the straw stack so we can make our ‘set,’” Shaft bellowed. “That locates the engine and separator in the right place. This is headed grain—it’s been cut off without much stalk by a machine called a header. We’ll thresh from the stack so our crew can handle the job.” He squinted at the sun and then at a single large cottonwood tree that had been spared when the ground was cleared. “The minute the cookshack’s unhooked under that tree, we’ll have to rustle to feed the boys before they start work. Won’t have to be a lot. They ain’t done nothing but ride this morning, and they’ll get afternoon lunch.”

  “Afternoon lunch?”

  “Sure. Kind of work they’re doing twelve hard hours in the heat, threshers need breakfast, morning lunch, dinner, afternoon lunch, and supper.”

  “That’s a lot of cooking!”

  “Sure.” Shaft winked. “That’s why I need a helper.”

  The engine puffed to a halt. The men were instantly on the ground, unhitching the separator from engine and cookshack, using spades to level the ground beneath it while Garth called out instructions. A bald man unhooked the coal wagon from the water wagon while Shaft and Garth released the water wagon from the shack.

  Rory chugged around with the engine. “We’ll get you into the shade, Miss Hallie!” he shouted. It was clear from the admiring laughter in his eyes that he didn’t share his older brother’s view of her as a nuisance.

  Shaft placed his kitten and the Merediths’ baggage in the shack, hitched his portable kitchen to the engine, and called to Hallie to jump inside. She clambered down from the water wagon with Jackie. He had drowsed off, cuddled against Laird as he sat in the bottom of the wagon on his carpetbag. Now he looked around with sleepy eyes, realized that he was being carried, and gave an imperious wriggle.

  “Let me down, Hallie! I’m not a baby!”

  “Of course you’re not, but—”

  Shaft hoisted him into the shack and gave Hallie a hand up. “You’ll be able to play with Laird in a little while, son,” the cook admonished. “But you’ve got to be real careful and keep away from the machines and wagons.” At the disappointed droop of Jackie’s lower lip, Shaft added, “Smoky’s never been threshing before. It would sure help me if you’d keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t try to play with the separator cylinder. I saw a man get caught in it once.”

  Jackie’s eyes had gone completely round. “What happened?”

  “He leaned in to oil the cylinder, got his coat caught on the shaft, and spun around and around before they could stop the engine. Poor guy’s head and shoulders—” Shaft gave a mournful sigh.

  Jackie hurried to grab the charcoal kitten and sat down with her on the linoleum floor while the cookshack was trundled into the heavenly shade. Even there it was hot, probably close to a hundred degrees. The men must need the rest they got during their morning and afternoon lunches at least as much as they needed the food. Some of them drove steel stakes near the four corners of the shack. To these they tied the stout ropes attached to each corner.

  “On wheels and high off the ground as the shack sets, it needs to be tied down, ’specially when the wind blows,” said Shaft. He put on a calico apron, produced a cord from his pocket, tied it around his beard, and fastened it to the apron band behind his shoulder.

  “Praise be for kerosene stoves!” He lit burners and the oven, poured water into a gallon coffeepot, and set on a big enameled kettle. “Cooked beans last night so they’d just need betting up and fixed a big roast. How’s about you making biscuits—about three dozen big ones?”

  Hallie blinked. She was used to baking for three. Counting herself and Jackie as one mouth, there were thirteen to feed. So if she just multiplied ingredients by a little over four—No, these men were going to eat considerably more than frail Mrs. MacReynolds and Mr. MacReynolds who spent his days behind a dry-goods counter. Six times was more like it. She desperately wished she’d had time to look the kitchen over and find out where things were.

  “I need to wash my hands.”

  Shaft glanced at his own and looked a bit embarrassed. “Why, sure. So will the boys. Washbasins, soap, and towels are in that box under the water keg stand. You can just fill up the basins and set ’em on the shelf that folds down by the door outside.”

  Hallie tied on an apron from the suitcase and hung three clean towels on nails above the
shelf. Filling the water basins, she washed with a bar of Ivory and left Grandpa’s Tar Soap and Lava to the tougher-skinned. Shaft had set a dishpan for her on the long table that clamped to the middle of the floor.

  “Flour’s in the biggest barrel. Lard’s in the can beside it. Baking powder’s on the top shelf.” Slicing boiled potatoes into a big cast-iron skillet, Shaft chuckled. “Hey, I bet I know a boy who could set the table!”

  “Who?” Jackie looked around.

  “You!” Shaft said. “And then you can go play with Laird so long as you don’t get near the machines and see that Smoky don’t. Dishes are in the top cupboard drawer. We keep ’em there so they won’t fall out when the rig’s moving.”

  The man grinned at the boy, who seemed awed and overwhelmed at so many new things all at once. Hallie could sympathize. As she made a well of flour to hold the biscuit ingredients, she felt the same way. “Can you count to eleven, Jackie?” asked the cook.

  He held up his hands. “I can count ten fingers!”

  “Good. So just put on that many plates and add one more. Your sis and you and me will eat after the gang clears out. Knives and forks and spoons are in a box inside the drawer. Cups in the next drawer. Set them all at this end of the table. Easier to pour coffee that way.”

  As Jackie importantly counted out blue enamel dishes, Hallie cut lard into the mixed flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Praying that she had the proportions right, she added enough water for a stiff dough and kneaded it vigorously till it passed through the blistery stage and was smooth. She rolled the dough on a floured board and cut rounds a half-inch thick, hurried these into big pans and put them in the hot oven.

  By then Shaft had carved a great platter of cold roast beef. Beans bubbled, potatoes crisped, and the aroma of Arbuckle’s coffee filled the shack. If this was a light meal—

  “You might open up a gallon can of peaches,” Shaft suggested. “They’re stored with other canned stuff in the bin under the shack, the one nearest the back axles. Bin at the front holds taters and onions. We’ve got to lift a trapdoor to get to the middle bin. That’s where I keep cured hams, condensed milk, and anything the bugs can’t hurt. Peaches’ll have to do for dessert, but we’ll have my special burnt-sugar cake and two kinds of pie for supper.”