“THEY’RE THE THINGERS you cut hay with!” I had trouble keeping my voice down when I really wanted to screech, “Fuck and phooey, Herman, you have to know what sickles are or we’re fired and kicked off the ranch to walk to town and right back to where we started in the hobo jungle, only worse off because Highpockets and the others aren’t there to stick up for us and that deputy sheriff could come back and recognize you from a poster and then we’re sunk.”
Instead, I sort of hissed desperately, “Didn’t you have sickles of some kind to cut hay with in Ger—the old country?”
His face lit up. “Scythes, you mean, I betcha.” He gestured as if swinging that oldfangled curved implement Father Time is always carrying in cartoons.
“No, no!” I bleated. “Nobody has used those since the Pilgrims or somebody. Sickles, see, go in mowing machines,” I tried frantically to assemble an explanation of modern haying, “and cut back and forth like crazy when the horses pull the mowers, and there’s all these teeth that need sharpening a couple of times a day, and that’s what you’re supposed to do, what they call riding the stone.”
“Sorry as all git out”—Herman wrinkled up, trying to imagine—“but riding some kind of rock, I do not savvy.”
“It’s a grindstone, get it?” I practically chewed the words up for him. “There’s a seat on it and you sit there and pedal it like you would a bicycle and it makes the stone go around fast and—”
I was growing a little hysterical, trying to conduct a lesson in sickle sharpening, with Herman not comprehending that his chore was the absolutely essential first task in haying. As sure as Murphy’s Law, the heavy green hay would clog the mowing machines if the teeth were dull when Peerless and Midnight Frankie pulled in to the first field to start cutting, and we’d be hoofing it back to town on that long road, right back to being on the run. And wouldn’t you know, with the rest of the crew busy on their machinery with grease guns and oil cans and general fixing up, now here came Jones to deal with us.
“One Eye”—the foreman was in his usual hurry—“let’s get you squared away at the blacksmith shop so you can start right in on the sickles.” As for me, he jerked his head toward the towering wooden framework of the beaverslide stacker parked behind the shed. “I guess you know where you’re headed. Give all those pulleys a helluva good oiling.”
“Uhm, I’ll get right at it,” I claimed, not moving an inch. “Maybe it’d be a good thing for me to stick with Gramps a little bit while you get him started, though? To, ah, translate, sort of.”
“Come on, the both of you,” Jones said, as if it were his own idea, “I don’t have time to parley voo in some other lingo.” He set off in his bustling stride toward a low old log building near the barn. Trailing him just out of his hearing, I managed to whisper to Herman to simply watch me when we reached there.
The way things were done in haying season, the grindstone had been moved out of the inside of the shop into the big open doorway for space to handle the sickles, which were nearly as long as a man is tall. Herman caught on to this part of it quick enough as I hopped into the seat and with false enthusiasm—“Oh man, I wish we could trade jobs, Gramps!”—pedaled madly to set the wheel-like grindstone spinning at top speed. I could also see it dawning on him that the wicked-looking limber spans of metal propped against the wall in the cluttered blacksmith shop, each with treacherous teeth from end to end presenting countless chances to cut a finger off, must be the sickles, and he had no idea in this world how to handle the dangerous objects.
Jones noticed his hesitation, too. “This is the sort of thing you did in the old country, right? Up there in the yodeleer meadows?”
“Ja. Sure. Might be rusty some, like the siskles—”
“Sickles, Gramps, rhymes with tickles.” I hopped off the grindstone seat and behind Jones’s back pantomimed to the best of my ability, grabbing a sickle from the back by the bar that the teeth jutted from and carrying it the do-or-die way a tightrope walker uses a pole to keep his balance.
With something like numb determination written all over him, Herman gingerly approached the sickles and picked up one the excruciatingly careful way I’d shown, while I silently cheered him on.
“Sharpen the bejesus out of the first couple of those,” Jones ordered, “so I can send the mower guys out to the field. And don’t round off the goddamn points, like Smiley tends to do. It wears them down too fast.” The foreman whirled to go, impatiently glancing over his shoulder at me. “That stacker is still waiting.”