“Lye soap this time,” Edith said.
“Oh, dirty bastard,” Lyman said. “Oh, horse piss too.”
Then John Roscoe and Edith laughed and Lyman grinned like a cocker spaniel. They went on working that way throughout the morning, while the July sun rose higher and hotter in the sky and the dust behind the machinery hung in the air like clouds of gnats. Roy sat up there hard on the seat at the back of the header with the horses on either side of him. The horses lunged against the harness to get the header moving again, to push the heavy machine forward to cut another swath of wheat after it had been stopped at the end of a square turn or after stopping to wait for Edith and Lyman to come back with the emptied barge. Then with the header in motion, the six horses walked steadily up the field, pushing the weight and noise of the machine ahead of them. The horses were dark with sweat along their necks and shoulders, where the collars rode, and along their flanks. White foam, like soap lather, worked up between the big muscles on the insides of their back legs. Flies bothered their eyes and underbellies, so that as they walked, straining against the harness, they tossed their heads and switched their long harsh tails.
Roy sat grimly between them, watching straight ahead, the tiller-wheel lever stuck up between his legs. In the header barge Lyman was covered all over with sweat-stuck chaff and wheat hulls; his cheeks and neck and arms were covered with it, and he had almost stopped cussing. He was too tired, too hot. Only Edith, in her thin work dress and flat-brimmed straw hat, clucking to her horses from her seat at the front of the barge, seemed at all comfortable in the morning heat and dust. Occasionally, she looked up at John Roscoe across the field on the wheat stack. She could see that his bare back shone wet in the sun, then she would turn back again to be sure that she had the barge in position to catch the falling wheat. She shredded several heads of wheat and chewed the hard kernels to make wheat gum while she sat rocking on the wood seat, watching the rise and fall of the horses’ rumps ahead of her.
At noon they finished a swath at the end of the field nearest the stack and stopped. They unhitched the horses, then at Roy’s command Lyman mounted one of the horses and led the others along the fence line and then across the road to the tank at the Roscoe place, since they were working in the west field that day, which was closer to the Roscoes’ than it was to their own place. At the tank beside the corral, the eight horses pushed in beside one another, snorted into the water and drank. Lyman climbed down then and held his head under the pipe that ran water from the windmill, the same pipe and windmill you see there now, the one his mother had walked a half mile to with her yoked pails three years before he was born. I don’t suppose Lyman thought about that, though, or remembered it if he knew it at all. He held his head under the running water, which was so cold it numbed his face, and wished he could take his overalls off and climb into the horse tank like a little kid, his father be damned.
When the horses had stopped drinking and had begun to sniff at the water or to raise their heads to look around them with dark eyes, sighing and shuddering a little like horses do when they’ve been worked hard and seem to look off away towards something you yourself do not see, cannot see, then Lyman mounted again, dripping water from his head and shoulders down into his pants, and led the big horses back across the road to the stack. On the north side of the stack Roy and Edith and John Roscoe sat in the shade, eating.
“Feed ’em,” Roy said.
Lyman tied the horses to the header and along the side of the barge. John Roscoe came over and helped him fit the nose bags onto the horses’ heads and slip the straps behind their ears to hold the bags with barley in place, while the horses swung their heads suddenly and stamped their feet to ward off flies.