CHAPTER I THRESHING

It really was my fault. There’s no getting away from that.

It started during the threshing.

I remember I was angry till I saw the red caps. Then I was frightened. As always.

Regular people, my brother Fred had explained to me recently, laughing, do not see red Norwegian caps (luer) with long tails and tassels dancing in the grass whenever they lose their tempers. All around me the caps rushed and gamboled in my sight, like flaming fox tails among the fields. I never saw the folk who wore those caps, nor wished to. They danced, it seemed, just underground, moving through the earth like fish in water.

So I’d learned to stop and take a few deep breaths whenever I got angry. The red caps usually went away then.

“Chris! Auggie! Fred! You think those shovels were made for leaning on?”

That was my Bestefar (Grandfather), yelling in Norwegian, which was what we all spoke at home in those days. He’d looked up from pitching bundles into the self-feeder long enough to catch us shirking. Fred had shoveled some oats down my neck, and I’d stopped leveling the wagon load while I shook them out. He and Auggie were watching me now, grinning. We hopped back to work, our hands and backs sore, our mouths dry and our shirts wet. We had black coal dust in our noses and eyes, and oats in our boots. It was late July, threshing time, that year at the tail end of the 19th Century, and the Minnesota sun had bleached the world as blond as the three of us boys.

You probably don’t know about threshing. Everybody switched to combining machines after World War II, and almost nobody’s used a steam engine since the ʹ20s.

My father and grandfather owned the majority share in a fine threshing outfit—a Reeves 16 h.p. engine and a 22-inch Avery “Yellow Fellow” separator, plus a water wagon. Our share gave us the right to start the season on our own fields. Then Otto Iversen, Auggie’s father, who owned the second share, got his turn, and each of the other partners after. If it wasn’t too snowy yet when they’d finished the ring, they’d hire out.

We’d run a horse-drawn ground-driven binder over the oats, making bundles for stacking in shocks (something you don’t see much nowadays except on Halloween cards, and good riddance to them). Now, with all the partners here, the crew in the fields was loading the shocks into wagons, bound for the separator and us.

Power came from the engine, a black monster like a locomotive engine on steel tractor wheels. It was almost worth the labor to a boy to watch that leviathan at work, loud as God’s wrath, governor twirling, petcocks steaming, and great clouds of smoke pouring from the stack, so that a gray haze hung over the land the whole season. The engine was Otto’s baby, shares or no shares, and he knew its voice, heard its complainings, coaxed it with sweet words, and fed it half a ton of coal a day.

But the separator was where the business got done. It was a long box, with lots of belts and pulleys, on steel wheels. Papa ran it, wearing the operator’s uniform of denim jacket and overalls, straw hat, and red bandana. I saw my father in many roles in my life, but none that suited him better than separator man. The shocks went into the self-feeder (a short conveyer) at the front end, automatic knives cut the twine bindings, the grain got shaken loose in two passes through the innards, and the straw and chaff were blown up the tubular “wind stacker” at the rear. When the weigh scale tripped, the grain came out a chute to three weary boys in a wagon.

I believe in eternity, for I have been a leveler, under the summer sun, in a series of wagons, coughing when the wind blew dust in my face, one arm aching, longing for lunchtime. I wasn’t a very good leveler, but nobody said I was in the way. I’m not sure if I was grateful for that or not.

We secretly looked forward to jams (“slugs”) in the separator, blessed short minutes when we could rest while Otto and Papa wrestled with the guts of the machine. To our great disappointment, no jamming occurred that morning.

We’d risen to milk the cows at 4:00 a.m., and we’d been at work ever since, except for breakfast and coffee. I’m not bragging about my industry—I’d have stayed in bed given the choice. After milking we’d locked the cows out of the barnyard. Papa had “set” the separator by the spot he’d chosen for his straw pile. It wasn’t long before we heard Otto’s engine chuffing up the road, slow but inexorable. He brought her in like an ocean liner, and we spent nearly a half an hour getting her positioned just right so we could run the long belt, with one twist in it, from the flywheel to the separator. By then the neighbors were coming in, and after coffee we were ready to start.

A moment came at last when Bestefar straightened, squinted at the sun, ran his handkerchief over his forehead, and pulled his turnip watch out of his overalls. Auggie and Fred and I watched him from the corners of our eyes, but we didn’t dare slow our leveling. After a long wrestle with his conscience (a formidable adversary), Bestefar blew a puff of air through his mustache and nodded to Otto, who began to damp the engine down. The separator poured out another bushel or two, which we attacked half-heartedly, and then stopped. The relative silence was like cotton in our ears. We were free to go eat—after we’d watered the horses.

Threshing was hard on men and boys, but to be fair it was nearly as bad on the women. Mother and the hired girl were up the same time we were, their faces flinty with resolve. A woman’s honor depended not only on feeding the threshers, and feeding them all they wanted, but feeding them better than any other wife in the ring. Little in the way of praise could be expected from Norwegian farmers, but their appreciative silence at least was worth something.

All we asked of the ladies was perfection, in enormous quantities.

So it was remarkable that day that, while we boys rushed to unharness the horses (Fred’s particular friends) and get through their refreshment to our own, two or three of the threshers hung back to look at the separator and talk to Papa.

“That’s a new self-feeder you got there, Pete,” somebody said. “You build that yourself?”

And Papa said, “Well, it’s the frame from the Avery, but I tinkered with it over the winter. I figured I could make her run a little smoother.”

Otto was stepping up on a wheel for a closer look as I passed out of earshot. “Peter, you gone an’ rebuilt the whole blasted thing! And it runs like butter off pancakes! Nobody slugged the cylinder all morning! What did you do here—?”

(To be continued)