 |
 |
|
||
- [Excerpt]
|
|
|
||
All rules were suspended in thrashing time. The morning when the McConkeys began thrashing, the house was aroused and alive at three o'clock, electrified by the arrival of the machine, which had run late the evening before at a neighbor's, and was pulled in before dawn. Fremont tore himself from the arms of his bride as the hail of the boss thrasher echoed from the direction of the first setting of wheat, and he rose and donned his plow-boy's clothes. The women were busy getting breakfast. His brother Frank was off on a horse rousing from their dreams the men in the neighborhood who were to help. When he returned, he could hear as he went to breakfast, the blows of the mauls on the stakes which held the great machine in place against the strain of the ten horses which tugged at the sweeps an hour later. The thrashing gang had had its breakfast, and out in the air clear as crystal, among the stubbles bearded with hoar frost, were waiting for day and the quota of workers.
The thrashing machine, the steel plow, the reaper, the seeder, the whole system of horse-drawn machines, supplemented by the easily-built railway, applied to this great expanse of treeless black soil by the tireless energy of the American pioneers, were the agencies which had already revolutionized the world in a manner which it had not experienced since the invention of the steam engine and the utilization of coal. It was an agricultural revolution, felt all over the world. Cheap food blighted the farmer of the Atlantic slope, and drove him to the factories, which thrived like weeds. The forest returned to the New England farms and the woodbine covered the old stone walls of fields which the ancestors of these Iowa pioneers had cleared with prayers on their lips, and with guns leaning on near-by stumps -- for use against the skulking savage. The European landlord found his rent unpaid, and the peasants of the Old World, from the Bay of Biscay to the terraced hillsides of Siam, wondered why times were so hard. The Mississippi Valley was pouring into the markets of the world such a wealth of grains and meats that the strangest of all phenomena was taking place -- people were starving because of the plenteousness of food. And this abounding energy of the new regions which were turning things topsy-turvy, had its concentration in thrashing time on Alvin McConkey's farm that autumn morning in 1878.
The great red machine stood between the high, hive-shaped stacks. The ten horses were standing hitched to the five long wooden sweeps of the horse-power. The driver stood on the board platform in the center with his long whip in his hand. The pitchers had climbed the stacks with their forks, the handles polished by long contact with hard hands, their three tines inserted into the top sheaves of the stack. Frank McConkey, the neighborhood band cutter, who had never cut a feeder's finger, motioned for enough bundles to cover the feeding table, the bands of which he cut carefully so as to have them ready when the machine should start. The separator tender, with oil can in hand, went carefully over the machine, oiling up. The measurer cleaned out the box of his mechanical tally-box, put one half-bushel measure under the grain-spout, and set another where he could sweep it into place as he removed the full measure, which moved the trigger of the tallying mechanism as he took it out. The man who hauled off the grain had his wagon backed up ready for the flood of wheat.
And then, the captain of all this organization, the feeder, stepped up to his place in front of the mouth of the great separator. He might have been taken for a sailor or a plainsman, or the engineer of a steam boat -- there was something about his so bluff, so hearty, so full of decision. As I write this, every one is buying himself or herself a bicycle, and we are divided in our fidelity to our favorite types of "bikes." The machine as to which our partisanship divided us into factions then, was the thrashing machine. The feeder of this machine, who was always in debt to the manufacturer, as all thrasherman habitually were, was a partisan of the "Buffalo Pitts" machine. He loved it as the captain loves his vessel. He argued with much profanity with partisans of the "Rumely," and the "Chicago Pitts," the "J. I. Case," or the "Vibrator." And now there was pride in his port as he stood before the gaping mouth with his hand on the nearest sheaf, looked down on both sides to see whether every man was in his place, glanced up at the top of the stack at the pitchers, turned to the driver and nodded.
Looking to the east to see the sun just peeping over the level horizon, the driver spoke to those dependable teams which could be relied upon to start the great machine; he touched a slow horse lightly with the tip of his lash -- and with some irregularities, soon smoothed out by the driver's skill, the ten horses put their weights and then the power of their muscles into their big leather collars, and the "Buffalo Pitts" started. The feeder saw the ponderous cylinder before him begin to revolve, trying to gnash its polished steel teeth against those of the concaves, but failing because they always passed each other by a hair's breadth. A deep growl like that of a bulldog magnified fifty diameters, filled the air, and as the cylinder gathered speed it rose from a bass to a baritone, and then to a tenor of a volume which sang over four square miles of haze-obscured prairie. The feeder looked up at the pitchers, saw the man who pitched to the machine, with his next bundle ready to fall on the table, saw Frank with his band-cutter's knife ready to slice softly through the band of it, and then, he moved the first two sheaves gently over between the open lips, deftly twitched their butts upward, and the great operation was on. The tenor took a little lower note; the horses felt the sweeps holding them back; the driver's shouts rose to a higher and more peremptory tone; and if everything went well, they were off upon a half-day's run, during which the feeder's pride would be that he would feed those four great stacks through the thrasher so steadily that not once would the thrashed straw in the straw-cutter fail to pass in an unbroken stream, hiding the slats of the carrier; not once would an inexpert handling of a bundle choke the thrasher down, even to a baritone; to say nothing of a bass note; not once would the cloud of chaff cease to rise from behind the sieves; not once would the stream of wheat fail to flow into the half-bushel measures which would keep the measurer and the man who hauled off in a perspiring hurry. And when, with the last bundle but one of the fourth stack fed through, the driver with much ado brought the horses to a halt, aided by the feeder with a big headless sheaf jammed with uncut band into the cylinder, the men, with their ears still ringing with the roar of the machinery, wiped their brows and with jokes and shouts, swarmed to the house for their dinners, only to find that by some magic -- while they were eating -- the thrasher's crew had moved the machine over, staked it down, eaten their own hearty meal and were ready for another setting in the afternoon, to be finished in the darkness, perhaps, so that the great engine might be again moved, to begin on a third setting at sunrise to-morrow.
It was a wonderful thing. It was this frenzy for accomplishment on the part of the mid-west farmers, which broke the back of agriculture of our own East and of the earth -- the world has never been the same since. It proves many things; but perhaps the most interesting of them is that there may be such a thing as too much of a good thing. Also, that any good thing has a damaging recoil, when it is not equitably distributed. These Iowa farmers were, in their own persons, and those of their families, suffering from the fact that this recoil of their production was economically shocking to themselves.
Fremont felt that sense of harmony with the universe which one feels who, accustomed to labor, resumes it after a period of leisure. Dimly he saw the poetry of the day's work, the lessons of its neighborly cooperation, the triumph of its mechanism. As he did his task of keeping away the straw which poured in a fluffy stream from the straw-carrier, and would have swamped the whole machine if he had remitted his toil for a few minutes even, he thought of the flail with which his father remembered his grandfather to have thrashed his grain back in Massachusetts, of the cattle driven about over the reaped grain in the Holy Land; and of the thrashing floor where Boaz winnowed the barley, and where he had become weary and slept by the pile of corn, Ruth had gone and laid down at his feet -- and then he though of Winifred and wondered how she was passing the long, long forenoon, during which she would not have seen him from dawn to noontime!
He did not make that frenzied rush for the dinner-table which hunger-impelled thrashing hands are expected to execute, though heaven knew he was hungry enough. He wanted to ask where Winifred was, of Sarah and Mrs. Frost who, when he arrived at the kitchen were eagerly serving their first arrivals with that superabundance of food which an Iowa housewife delights to lay before her guests -- and thrashers are always in the best sense of the word, guests -- but he knew such gangs were fertile in jokes, which, like other forms of fertility, were not sure to be over-immaculate in character. How they loved to see blushes! So he looked from room to room for the dear girl and finally found her, prostrate on her bed weeping...
... For thrashing and things really have to be done, since "men must work and women must weep."
In these days none of the farmers know, save through memory, what was the task Fremont discharged that thrashing time -- the work of "bucking off straw." We thought then that the fertility of our soil was inexhaustible, and that manure tended to spoil the rich land of the prairies; we had little live stock, and wheat straw was not regarded as of much value, save by some queer men like Jacob Vandemark, who made himself well-to-do out of the neighbor's thrown-away straw. So the usual manner of handling it was to get it away from the tail of the thrashing machine in the cheapest way, and when the thrashing was done, to set fire to it.
