Essential Novelists - Hamlin Garland. Garland Hamlin
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the oats came last of all. No sooner was the final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and "stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began.
This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were paid off, only the more responsible ones were retained. The rush, the strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles, four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing green with swiftly-springing weeds.
A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bundles, two drivers for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the sheaves from the shock with a three-tined fork and threw them to the man on the load.
At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bundles" on the stack, but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of me—not only in my own estimation, but in the eyes of my boy companions to whom I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the stack over the rick.
No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neighbor thrash—("changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling which I afterward put into verse—
A lonely task it is to plow!All day the black and shining soilRolls like a ribbon from the mold-board'sGlistening curve. All day the horses toil,Battling with savage flies, and strainTheir creaking single-trees. All dayThe crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain.
Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he was promoted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or play cards in the kitchen.
Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket. There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate stakes, and huge sudden rewards. All that I had heard or read of Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of pasteboard marvellous.
My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think he would forbid them to me, I took a fearsome joy in assuming his bitter opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill, our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in.
We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very comfortable."
Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play," they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter.
Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in my mind. Prue and I and The Blithedale Romance were on an equal footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted beings found only in the East—in splendid cities. They were not folks, they were demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down benignantly on toiling common creatures like us.
It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance meet an author, or even hear one lecture—although it was said that they did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they sometimes reached our county town.
I am told—I do not know that it is true—that I am one of the names on a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular pack!
The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season. Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework herself—cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain, and I have many recollections of neighbors riding up in the night and calling for her with agitated voices.
Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize, the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of course, and Frank and I churned and carried wood and brought water; but even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part of the day, she was required to furnish forth three meals, and to help Frank and Jessie dress for church.—She sang less and less, and the songs we loved were seldom referred to.—If I could only go back for one little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for those grinding days!
Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us only at long intervals. He still owned his long-barrelled rifle but it hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west seemed complete.
Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by David who came over from Orchard with his machine—the last time as it turned out—and stayed to the end. As I cut bands beside him in the dust and thunder of the cylinder I regained something of my boyish worship of his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he smiled and tore the sheaf apart—thus deepening my love for him. I looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of the machine made of him a chieftain.—The touch of melancholy which even then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm.
One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vegetation but always on lands after they had been safeguarded by strips of plowing. On this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irritation and self-confidence I decided to clear away