The Unplowed Sky Page 5

  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.”

&nbs
p; Maybe that Was why Garth acted like a bear with a sore tooth, Hallie thought. Something she labeled sympathy tugged at her heart as he stuck the wrench in a clanking pocket and turned from the separator. He moved with easy, long-legged grace, broad shoulders narrowing to waist and flanks. As if on signal, Laird dashed to him and stood up on his hind legs, front paws planted on Garth’s shoulders, white-tipped tail swinging back and forth like an ecstatic pendulum.

  “Down, boy!” Garth commanded, but he gave the dog a lingering pat and soft word before he wiped face and hands on a bandanna and reached down for a sandwich. He muttered thanks as Hallie poured his coffee, but didn’t look at her.

  After a moment, he did. Their glances tangled. They both blushed before glancing away. Something like an electric shock radiated through Hallie, sang through her blood. Then Meg came driving the water wagon up to the engine. Still chewing on the sandwich, Garth went to help her drain the water into the engine reservoir. Hallie’s eyes followed him. She felt her face redden when she saw that Rory had noticed.

  “Like to see Cecil B. deMille’s Ten Commandments, Miss Hallie?” he asked. “It’s on at the theater in Hollister.”

  “Plannin’ to get there on the tractor?” drawled Jim Wyatt.

  “Why, no, Jim.” Rory gave the former engineer a careless smile. “I figgered you’d lend me your Model T if I filled it up with gas.”

  Wyatt looked at Hallie, as if his answer was up to her. She had heard of the famous movie, of course, and had planned to attend a matinee. Then Felicity left Jackie with her and everything had changed—and kept changing.

  “No, thank you, Mr. MacLeod,” Hallie said quickly. Blushing again! She had to stop that. “I can’t go off and leave Jackie our first night here. Besides, I think I’m going to be too tired to keep my eyes open.”

  “So would you be, Rory, if you didn’t mainly stand around on the platform all day, lord of all you survey, while we break our backs.” Rusty Wells, the Oklahoma farmer, delivered the barb in a good-natured tone.

  “The engineer’s job is the engine and keeping an eye on the whole picture,” Rory retorted loftily. “If you toss your pitchfork in the feeder along with the spikes, as some have been known to do—”

  Everyone looked at Rich Mondell and chortled. The handsome black-haired professor blushed beneath his sunburn but he laughed, too. “Well, boys, I only did it once.”

  “And you paid with nary a whine for fixing the cylinder,” put in Garth, returning with his sulky-faced daughter. “It’ll chew up a pitchfork, but can’t digest one real well.”

  “Shucks, the perfessor’s rich.” Cotton Harris’s nose was almost bloody from constantly peeling sunburn. “He just works for the healthy fresh air and exercise.”

  “If you saw my college paycheck, you wouldn’t say that,” Mondell retorted.

  “You’ve gone and eaten all the crusty sides of the gingerbread,” Meg accused, poking with a none-too-clean finger at the remaining center pieces.

  “If they’d eaten the centers, that’s what you’d have all of a sudden wanted.” Shaft frowned at his boss’s daughter. “Take that piece you’ve got your paws on, and see if it won’t sweeten you up a little.”

  Meg scowled, but did as she was told. Rory eyed her warily. “You fall in the stock tank again?”

  “The dratted board I had laid across the tank so I could dip water scooted out from under me.” Meg shook the clinging legs of her overalls that were drying plastered to her skin.

  “A bath might improve you,” Rory teased, “but you’d better not have muddied up the water. You know what they say: “‘If you won’t drink it, don’t put it in your engine.’”

  “Sure, worry about the engine!” Meg bit savagely into the roast beef. “You and Dad both care a lot more about your old machinery than you do about me!”

  “You’re cheaper to fix.” Rory scrunched his nose at his niece. “And when you blow up, you don’t send engines and cylinders and threshers flying everywhere.”

  “Not yet.” Meg made a face at him and almost giggled. She took another chunk of the maligned gingerbread.

  Now Hallie understood why a young girl was with a threshing crew, but she couldn’t understand, any more than she had with Felicity, how a mother could leave a child—just go off and act as if the youngster had never existed.

  Hallie had felt abandoned when her mother died though she knew, in her mind, that Ellen Meredith fought hard to live, that she hadn’t wanted to die at thirty-two with so much life to live, so much love to love, with her daughter so young and her husband so distraught. Hallie felt abandoned by her father, too, though he had never intended that Felicity crowd her out. Hallie bitterly regretted now that she had probably caused him as much pain as he had caused her—though he’d had Felicity and Jackie for consolation.

  Why did people who loved each other still hurt each other so much? And how much more terrible when there seemed to be no love—when a mother left a child who had come into the world completely helpless and depending on her. After that, how could either Jackie or Meg really trust anyone?

  When the last sandwich and crumb of gingerbread were gone and the coffeepot was empty, the threshers rose and stretched, slouched their hats lower, tied bandannas over mouths and noses, and those who wore them pulled on their leather gloves. Baldy Tennant spread coal in the firebox of the engine, and Rory soon had the engine billowing steam.

  “Can I go see the engine, Hallie?” begged her little brother. Awed by the rough-and-tumble jokes of the crew, he had sat very quietly beside Laird, who had lain down by Garth with his long muzzle resting his daintily crossed paws.

  “Not now.” The puffing engine, the long belt stretched to the separator, and the separator itself looked exceedingly dangerous to Hallie. She placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Jackie, don’t you ever, ever come around the machines unless I’m with you!”

  Jackie looked so crestfallen that Garth, to Hallie’s amazement, smiled at him. “Reckon I can show you how the separator works some morning while Rory’s getting up steam.”

  He frowned at Hallie’s boater. She had saved for weeks to buy it and thought it quite becoming. “That’s a useless hat if I ever saw one.”

  “Thanks for your kind opinion!” Why was he so rude, and why should she care? Hallie turned her back on him and began collecting cups.

  They were scarcely back at the shack when the Brocketts’ flivver churned up. Sophie was plump but slim-waisted. Her ruffled pink sunbonnet, tied in a flirty bow under her chin, shielded a rosily fair complexion.

  She examined Hallie with Delft blue eyes as Shaft introduced them. Sophie gave her uptilted nose a further lift. “If you needed a helper, Mr. Hurok, I wish you’d have hired me. You know I can stand up to the work.”

  “Hallie’s doing fine.”

  Sophie gave a scornful laugh. “Ma says you just hired her this morning! How do you know she’ll last?”

  Hallie came to Shaft’s rescue. “Mr. Hurok felt sorry for me and my little brother, Miss Brockett. We don’t have a home, and I was out of a job.” She looked the other woman in the eyes. Those eyes had a curious hardness that made Hallie well believe she’d have no qualms at wringing a chicken’s neck. Disturbed by that opaque expressionless stare, Hallie finished more emphatically than she had intended. “I’ll do my best to make Mr. Hurok glad he hired me.”

  “Mmmph!” Sophie flounced around and began lifting food out of the backseat. Shaft put four big green watermelons in a tub of water beneath the shack and carved what looked like a twelve-pound roast off the beef which had come in a hundred-pound flour sack insulated inside two damp gunnysacks. He put the roast in the oven and hung the rest of the bagged beef from a limb of the tree. Hallie draped a wet towel over the crock of butter and set it in a kettle of water, trying to ignore the dishpan of plucked, headless chickens. She transferred the wet newspaper-wrapped eggs from Sophie’s basket to a large crock that she placed in the coolest corner and put a wet towel over that, too. T
he MacReynoldses had an icebox and the Raford kitchen was equipped with a sparkling Frigidaire, but Shaft had explained that, except when the threshers were close enough to town to buy ice, they had to keep perishables cool as best they might.

  “Here’s the beans.” Sophie almost threw the sack at Hallie. “Told ma she ought to charge for them and the melons, too, but she just said she couldn’t stand to see food go to waste—and, after all, it was me that crimped my back picking the stupid things.”

  “Tell your ma we’re much obliged.” Shaft ignored Sophie’s complaint. “If she’ll keep track, Garth’ll pay her when we move on, or subtract what we owe from the threshin’ fee.”

  “You bet he will!” Sophie gazed out toward the threshers with mingled anger and what Hallie thought was frustrated longing. “Thresherman gets his fee even if that doesn’t leave us enough money to plant this fall.”

  “Don’t see how that can happen, Miss Sophie.” Shaft’s tone was patient. “Garth reckoned your pa’s grain is threshin’ out to around forty-fifty bushels an acre. That’ll put some money in the bank.”

  Sophie’s lip curled. “That’ll pay on the loan we had to take out two years ago when wet weather made the wheat rust. What that and bugs didn’t ruin, hail did. We got only about nine bushels an acre.”

  “Well, Garth didn’t make anything either, since he takes every twelfth bushel as pay. Nineteen-twenty-two was a rotten year,” Shaft commiserated. “But you folks ain’t the onliest ones with a mortgage.”

  “I still don’t think that thresherman’s lien law is fair!”

  “Well, Miss Sophie, the reason the wheat states and Canadian provinces passed some kind of lien laws is that quite a few farmers wouldn’t pay up when the threshin’ was over.”

  “Pa always paid!”

  “Sure he did. So the law makes no never-mind to him.”

  Sophie climbed into the flivver, displaying plenty of shapely leg, and drove off as fast as she could. “Sure hope Garth stays clear of her,” Shaft declared. “That’s one mean female in spite of her soft look. Well, we better get to it, Hallie.”