“I’m just about to be there,” I maintained, waltzing wide around the sickle as Herman shakily balanced it while climbing onto the grindstone seat. “I need to tell Gramps one last thing about how we do it in this country.”
“Hurry up about it,” Jones warned. “Standing around gabbing doesn’t put up any hay.”
As he departed, I pulled the medicine pouch out from under my shirt and over my head. “Here, I’ll leave this with you a while to go by,” I told Herman, unsheathing the arrowhead and placing it on the frame of the grindstone in front of him. “This is what he means about sharp and not rounded off, see? Grind them until they have an edge like this and no more, savvy?”
“Like maybe so?” He tentatively pedaled and sent sparks flying from the bevel of steel meeting the grindstone. Then, though, he halted the encouraging screech of the grinding to pick up the arrowhead and feel its whetted edge with his thumb.
“Lucky one more time, you and it, Donny,” he said so softly I didn’t correct him to Scotty. Holding the charmed piece, he gazed around at the prosperous-looking buildings of the ranch and the shielding mountains beyond and past even that horizon, I believe, to the ups and downs the dog bus had carried us through all the way from Manitowoc. Then at me, the hunted look gone from him at last. “Knocked, we have still got it, ja?”
“Close call,” I expelled in relief, relaxing back into the haze of well-being that came with a Diamond Buckle hatband. “But yeah, we still do.”
? ? ?
IN THAT SUMMER of flying calendar pages, Big Hole haying was a streak of time, when I take account of myself then, that I can scarcely believe packed so much into my life in so short a period. I suppose it would be like a kid of today thumbing through the holdings of some smartphone that shows him himself and realizing that a couple of years and robust inches have been slipped onto his pouty eleven-year-old self without notice. Electrifying, to use a word that still holds true of such a shot of overnight growing up.
Exactly as I had seen myself when I ventured into Wendell Williamson’s lair to offer myself as stacker team driver in Double W haying before the sparrowhead turned me down in favor of a dumb truck, I proudly was in charge of my own pair of workhorses and a steel cable that the team pulled to hoist the stacker fork laden with hay, and—here truly was the weight of responsibility to rest on eleven-year-old shoulders—of halting the horses every time at just the right instant to drop the thick cloud of hay atop the stack wherever Harv indicated with his pitchfork.
In doing so, I had to manipulate a ton and a half of actual horses at the end of leather reins, back and forth the fifty-foot-length of the cable each time Shakespeare or Highpockets delivered an overflowing buckrake load onto the broad fork for sending up. Horses are not thrilled with walking backward—me either—yet that was half our job, backing to the stacker after the hay was dumped at Harv’s altitude, and I needed to steadily cluck and coax and tug the reins just so to return us to our waiting spot for the next load. My salvation was Queen, as magnificent to me as the Trojan horse must have been in that age-old tale and as smart as she was grand, dutifully tugging Brandy—dumb as they come except when oats and the barn stall were involved—along with her in the pulling power that ran the stacker.
Love is a strong word to use anytime, but I loved that big gray mare, already taking a giant step or two before I could say “Giddyup” or “Whoa back,” her big hooves largely responsible for the steady path we wore into the stubble beside each stack, like the front walk to the mansion of hay Harv was building with his pitchfork. Without Queen’s steady horse sense, in the true meaning of that, I would have been sunk those first few days of trudging that same line of march over and over with the sun beating down and no rest for the weary, in Jones’s unrelenting way of putting up hay.
All in but my toenails by quitting time, I was anxiously asked by Herman when I dragged myself into the bunkhouse to wash up for supper, “Tell the Jones it is too much for you, can I? He can put Fingy on stacker team and you on dumping rake, you can sit at your work like me.”
“Don’t you dare.” I found the strength to sound offended. “I’ll toughen in.” Which I did, day by day, that path worn into the earth beside the haystacks leading me into the gritty line of Camerons and Blegens who had hunched up and taken it since time immemorial.
And see, by the end of the first week of Big Hole haying I held a triumphant mental conversation with Gram, I’m not too young to live in a bunkhouse like a regular ranch hand.