Grand Change Page 3

  I straightened and followed the direction of his gaze to the intersection of Jar and Hook. A red half-ton truck with black lettering was parked there, and on Jar’s bank a man was knee-deep in bushes sighting down Hook through a theodolite. Along the spaced posts of the fenceline a couple of hundred yards down, another man stood with a pole.

  The Old Man dropped his gaze to the plug of tobacco in his left hand and the open jackknife in his right. Absently, he carved off a chew, slid it off the blade into his mouth and, in double motion, clasped the knife, stowed it with the tobacco into his pants pocket and began slowly working his cud, his eyes sweeping back across the field.

  Nanny finished filling her basket with a handful of potatoes, rose, thigh-set her basket, limp-footed her way to the bran bag and dumped, the cobbling sound of the potatoes breaking the near-total silence. She hedge-stepped then to beside The Boss, her eyes watching with his.

  Standing in their ragged coats and overalls, caked with clay at the knee patches, they made an odd pair. The Old Man was bean-pole thin, his shoulder stoop augmenting his overly long nose, deep-set eyes and flat cheeks falling to a square jaw. Nanny was short and stout, her grey-brown hair sweeping back from a moon face into her rooster-tail bandana, her old grey winter coat flaring in straight fall from the one button at the neck to the red band of her rubber boots.

  The Old Man spat out tobacco and reached for his gloves. “We’ll finish without trouble this afternoon,” he said, working his gloves over his large hands. “I guess we’ll load up for dinner when we finish this row.”

  He swiped up his basket and moved to fall on his knees at the wide scatter of potatoes, some nubbing half-hidden in the clay beside hooped-down tops. Nanny followed suit and the two with their knee waddle, hoisting their baskets forward, picking like pecking crows, began closing in on me.

  The day had begun as a usual potato harvest day, with a sleepy, foot-chilling grope down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the cold made the smells of kerosene and setting bread dough almost morbid. The scratch, snap and sulphur whiff of the match at the table lamp, the flair of flame in the wick slot, the sudden bask of light with the fitted globe revealing Nanny’s sleep-drawn face and dishevelled hair seemed to crack off the day.

  Nanny stuffed yesterday’s paper into the stove with kindling and lit the fire while The Boss and I worked on our clay-stiffened coarse boots at the couch and got our coats and caps from their wall hooks, our shadows bobbing and weaving on the wall like pointing spooks. The Old Man lit the lantern hanging on a nail in the porch and clunked down the wired-in globe. I swiped milk buckets from their nails and we went out of the porch and across the yard. A bask of light, pushed by foot shadows, waggled around The Boss’s feet, its reflection revealing at times the light-blanked eyes of the seven milk cows waiting in the yard.

  The Boss paused by the cow stable door, allowing me to identify it, then moved a few yards farther up to the little door leading into the barn floor, where the morning hump of hay lay. I threw back the stable door and the cattle filed in and found their stalls. I hung the buckets on the wall by feel and groped beside the cows, linking their tie chains. A thin shaft of light cutting along a lap gap gave a quick direction and I got a stool and a bucket and got squatted beside the first cow, clasping the bucket between my knees.

  A stream of urine hissed in the darkness, its smell mingling with the tangy stink of manure. I could hear the cow’s belly sounds with my head against her flank, and it was all warm and comforting. As I fumbled for her teats, I found it hard to stay awake. The ping-squish of the milk hitting the pail brought bleats from the chorus of cats badgering for milk. From the next stable came the thump of horse hooves and the odd soft nutter. Neck chains rattled as The Old Man flopped open the laps in the barn floor wall. Rectangles of light showed at the heads of the cows and there was the swish of hay-supplement for a waning pasture and munches in the mangers.

  Milking didn’t take long; the cows had next year’s calves growing in their bellies and except for the farr cow, we were weaning them dry. The crooked-backed cream separator in the porch, with its large bowl, bucket seats, spouts and crank gave its angry whirr only briefly; only a small blurp of cream for the can cooling in the cellar hole, barely a token of skim milk for the calf tub in the small pasture by the house.

  It was warm by then, in the kitchen. The cold, morbid smells had been driven out by the hot stove, its lights dancing out cheer through its several cracks. Instead, there were the toasty smells of burning maple, cooked oatmeal and tea. The snap and burr of the fire wove their way through the whoot of the kettle boiling out steam and the strains of an old-time fiddle and guitar twang from the radio. There was pause after breakfast, for The Old Man to lean back in his chair and smoke his pregnant cigarette and catch the news and weather. After Nanny washed the dishes, in a large pan on the stove, she kneaded dough on the table, stuffed knife-cut globs into pans, slid them into the oven, filled the stove with wood and set the draft.

  First light was beginning to creep in by the time we got the horses hitched to the sloven and picked up Nanny at the pathway to the house. The rattle of the sloven wheels, the foot clumps of the horses and the tinkles of trace chains resounded eerily as we rode to the field. I moved to the pile of empty bags at the back of the sloven before we turned in at the headland. The cold, choky dust from the bags puffed into my face as I threw them at intervals while we drove the length of the field by the potato drills. When we hitched the horses to the digger, you could begin to see the tops on the rows. When The Boss swung the horses into the outside row, their feet muddling in cross-step, you could see small steam puffs coming from their nostrils. After, The Boss halted the horses at the row’s end, waited for me to lever down the digger’s shear, then drove on. You could see the side whirl of the clawing digger’s wheel and the spew of clay and potatoes hitting the side-slung canvas boom with a carrumph.

  It was close to midday when we finished the row. The red truck had not moved, but the two men had set up down the road a ways. Nanny lumbered to the house to start dinner. The Old Man and I turned to the horses, which stood hitched to the digger, lazily swishing their tails, and changed them to the sloven. We ran along the row of filled bags then, the horses stopping on command, The Old Man knee-boosting the bags onto the sloven, me taking and dragging them to some kind of pile against the axle box.

  At the headland by the road, loaded now, we drove to the corner of the field by the end of the lane and stopped. I jumped off and went for the mail. As I was returning, the red truck passed; the sun glinted on the driver’s glasses and deepened his partner in shade. The driver gave a formal wave. The Old Man waved back and we were engulfed in the dust trail of the truck. The Old Man winced his shoulder at the dust and turned the horses toward home.

  There was a pensive look on his face I had rarely seen before as we rode down the lane, the wheel jolts flapping the mouths of the bags we sat among, sending minute puffs of choky dust into our faces. When he pulled up beside the house, he overshot the cellar hole and had trouble getting backed around and wound up taking a turn around the house to get lined up. When he began letting the filled bags down the cellar hole to me, his hands worked in a ponder. More than once, he absently let down a bag open-end first, sending a barrage of loose potatoes and dust at me, augmenting my agony of having to crawl, haul dumping on my belly, to the corner where the potatoes were piled to within a few feet of the floor joists. Different times, as we unhitched the horses and watered them, lead them to their stalls and their dinner, his head shot toward the road.

  After a dinner of potatoes, thick slabs of pork, jimmies and thick gravy, topped off with bread pudding with raisins, we sat in the drowsy warmth of the kitchen, with the sun slanting through the window and cutting through the wave of tobacco smoke hovering above The Old Man. He was sitting sprawled sideways across the couch, hidden from the waist up by the newspaper he was reading. The farm noon
radio was running the deaths, stock prices and news. Nanny, with the dishes done, had somehow found the incentive to knit. I sat flopped in the armchair by the radio, one foot resting on the steel end of the couch, in some kind of drowse, the whine of the dying kettle, the clicks of Nanny’s knitting needles and the drone of the radio drifting at me as in a dream.

  Different times during the news The Old Man, listening while he read, called to Nanny for a prompt, something he only did when his mind was distracted by something.

  The tiredness grabbed me then, boxing me in, and it was hard to break out when The Old Man’s feet thumped the floor. We had the horses out of their stalls and half hitched before I fully snapped to life.

  We finished in mid-afternoon. As we worked, The Old Man looked intermittently toward the road, and when we rode from the field, desert-like now with the skeletal digger standing singular and lonely, he glanced once more.

  John Cobly came that evening at about the time when the weariness of the day had given way to relaxation and it was good to read the funny papers with my feet on the stove’s oven door. Nanny was clicking her needles close to the lamp side of the table. The Old Man sat hunched at the end, musing at solitaire, working his dog-eared cards in shadowy flops. The clicks, flops, burr of the fire and hum of the kettle were spacing into a comedy show on the radio with its patented laughs.

  John was a stubby little man with a pinkish face and freckles. Most called him “bran face” when he wasn’t around. His farm was just west of the swamp bog on the west side of the road. There was just him and his wife, Agnes, working their farm with seasonal help. Their daughter was married to a banker in the city. Their two sons were in the Air Force.

  He came twirling in around the door without waiting for an answer to his knock and flopped into the armchair. Nanny and I returned his greeting. The Old Man just grunted without a pause in his solitaire.

  John paused for a few moments in the armchair, then rose and stood over The Boss, peering down his nose, his eyes shifting with the card flops. “King of diamonds on the queen, Harv… You missed the ten,” he said, his words bursting almost in sync with the punchlines of the radio comedy. “You missed the six of clubs; you’re never going to win that way, Harv. But maybe that’s your strategy?” The Old Man just kept flopping the cards in his muse.

  John Cobly settled back down in the armchair. “What are you knitting, Ella?” he said. Nanny held up a half mitt with the needles angling from a decapitated-like thumb. John shook his head.

  “Don’t know how you do that. With my ten thumbs there would be needles sticking out of me all angles. I’d look like a pincushion.”

  “How’s Agnes these days?” Nanny said.

  “Cranky as ever… Ah, she’s all right. Burnt up a cake this afternoon, covered it up with an inch of frosting—all the better. But she can’t be too bad off. Puts up with me and the Cape Britoners we got hired for the digging.”

  John Cobly took an open pack of tobacco from the bib of his overalls, slid out the paper pack stuck in the cellophane wrapping, leafed out a paper, pinched tobacco from the pack, spread it on the paper trough and began twisting a cigarette. He peered up at me, his fingers and thumbs working, his eyes glinting from the shadow of his cap peak.

  “Into some heavy reading are you, Jake?”

  “Heavy enough for me,” I said. Another burst of laughter came from the radio. John Cobly smirked at a punchline, then ran his tongue across the paper edge and twisted up the roll.

  The Old Man finally lost his game. He packed up the cards and put them in his corner shelf at the head of the couch by the flue box. Then he swiped his makings from the window ledge, slumped down sideways across the couch and began rolling a cigarette.

  “Turn the radio off, John,” The Old Man said.

  “Sure you don’t want to finish it, Harv?” John said. “Sometimes you can get a laugh out of them.”

  “Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t; hear them too much and it all starts to sound the same.”

  John Cobly turned off the radio and sat with his cigarette dangling unlit in his mouth, a match in his fist, his thumb on the head, waiting for The Old Man to finish. Then the snap of the match flaring into light broke into the quiet from the absence of radio sounds. John reached to light The Old Man’s cigarette, lit his own, moved to the stove, poked the spent match through a draft hole and went back to the armchair.

  “I suppose you mind when the radios first came, Harv?” John Cobly said.

  “Yeah, Uncle Joe had one in town, earphones and a battery big enough to fill a wheelbarrow.”

  “Television will be the next thing, Harv.”

  The Boss settled back, blowing out a belch of smoke. “Think there’s much to them?”

  “Kind of like watching a picture show in a box. Fred James got one. Seen it one evening when I was settling up. Lot of snow. I wasn’t too crazy about it. They say they’re catching on, though.”

  “More tomfoolery than anything else, probably,” The Old Man said. There was a pause. A sudden gust of wind creaked the old house.

  “Got your crop in, Harv?”

  “Yeah, got it in; been a pretty good fall. All I got don’t amount to much anyhow.”

  “Sometimes I think we’d all be better off keeping it small like you, Harv. Potatoes are such a gamble.”

  “How are you getting along?”

  “Not bad. The Cape Britoners I got had a bit of a set-to the other night—got into the hooch, hammered each other around the yard for a while. Had to send a couple home. But that’s the way she goes. We’re getting there. Sometimes you wonder if you should be at something else, but it’s a living I guess.” John Cobly leaned back in the armchair, shot his legs straight out and folded his arms across his belly. His cigarette dangled askew from his lips. “Thought I’d like to be a doctor when I was a gaffer. But by the time I learned to even read and write, with all the time off for cropping and whatnot, I had trouble fitting into the seats. I mind watching the others going to school and me just getting in with a load of mud.”

  “You would have made a good doctor, John,” Nanny said. “Not many people can doctor a sick animal any better than you.”

  “Yeah, kind of in me I guess. Never know what a fellow might have turned out to be given half a chance.”

  The Old Man flicked ash from his cigarette into his pant cuff.

  “Well, every day will be Sunday when they get the road fixed up.” The glint in John’s eyes brightened and a sardonic grin flitted across his face. “You must have seen the boys out with their telescope, or whatever they call it, and there’s still a stake or two by the swamp bog from before the last election.”

  “How many elections does that make that they staked it off and still nothing done?”

  John Cobly’s grin went into a smile. He shook his head. “Can’t remember that far back. We’re just not voting the right way, I guess, Harv.”

  The Old Man’s face shot full toward John. “They talking election again?”

  “Never heard anything about it yet, but they could call one near as next fall. New government might do something, but the Liberals will probably go in again. Not that we don’t need something decent. The whole bloody road is nothing but a swamp, you might as well say, spring and fall. Kills the heck out of a horse. Lose a horse, rig and all by the swamp bog.

  “No doubt about that,” The Old Man said. “But, oh well, we’re getting by. Could be a lot worse, I guess.”

  “Things are going to have to change, though,” John Cobly said. “More people going tractor these days and that road ain’t no good for a tractor.”

  “I suppose that’ll be the next thing. Think they’re any good?”

  “Oh yeah, they make a difference, work wise. You know yourself, Harv. A man can walk forty miles a day behind a plow, or a light harrows, keeping three ornery horses in line, whe
n he could be riding along, sitting pretty. And them engines, Harv. You know yourself, they’re up and down, choke a sheaf into a mill too fast, jam a log into a saw blade and they just about quit, and you have to wait on them to get up speed. Them little tractors just purr along like a kitten, steady as she goes.”

  “Yeah, I seen one in a mud hole on the way to town one day. Albert Champs, I think. It was purring pretty good, all right. Looked like it was trying to learn the foxtrot.”

  John Cobly sat bolt upright. “I’m talking about working the land. Just think of how much time you use up, harnessing and hitching. With a tractor, you just hook on when you want, no muss, no fuss, no manure, no feeding and resting. Keep the gas to her, change the oil now and then, a little grease, and she’ll work all night if you want.”

  John Cobly took a last heavy drag from his cigarette butt and then went to the stove and poked it through a draft hole. He went back to the armchair, took a match from his pocket, flopped back down, and began digging wax out of his right ear with the match head.

  “Still going to need a horse,” The Old Man said. “How are you going to haul potatoes in the wintertime? They can’t even keep the front road open with them truck affairs. The first couple of good storms, and roads like ours are choked up so bad in the cuttings they’d have to use a bulldozer in places.”

  “There’s a new one coming out,” John Cobly said. “Breaks in the middle. Fred James said he seen one up in Toronto at one of them shows for machinery, more engine than anything else. They’ll be here before long.”

  “What’s a tractor like with horse machinery?” The Old Man said.

  “They’re good, geared for them. Just cut off the poles and bolt on some kind of attachment for the draw bar—don’t have to be fancy. Pretty much need a trip plow so you don’t have to get off at the headland and put the shears in and out. Might as well throw in a blower attachment for your thresher. Thresh in the fall. Good idea to get a trailer, too.”