Grand Change (5 page)

“Maybe if you hadn't set your cap, you wouldn't have been chased,” The Old Man said.

“I didn't have to set my cap to get chased.”

“That's because you were chasing me.”

“Keep talking like that, you old horse, and you'll get no lunch.”

“The road of love is a rocky road,” John Cobly said giddily.

“Now, you know you couldn't get along without me,” The Old Man said.

“Can't get along without horses, either.” Nanny's eyebrows had shot full height and the needles were clicking in high gear.

“She loves me, John, can't you tell?”

“Haven't the shadow of a doubt.”

“Speaking of lunch,” The Old Man said.

Nanny put down her knitting, moved to the stove and reached for the tea caddy in the warm closet.

“Don't be getting me any lunch, Ella,” John Cobly said.

“Ah, you'll stay for lunch,” The Boss said.

“You'll have to stay for lunch,” Nanny said, pouring water into the teapot.

“Well…Agnes will be wondering, but, ah, I guess she won't mind. She put up with me this long, I guess she won't leave me if I don't get home right away.”

There was a pause. I could hear Nanny bustling in the cupboard.

“Thinking of doing something with the school, Harv?”

“They're talking about it. But they've been talking about it since I got on the trustee's board. If they don't do something soon, the first thing you know the place will be in the cellar.”

“Still talking about a furnace?”

“Once in a while. Talk about a lot of things. Bill spoke up the other night and said, ‘It's about time we were thinking about getting running water and a flush toilet. It's a shame, them little ones freezing their backsides off all the time.' Clayton jumped in then: ‘I never froze my backside off when I went to school,' he said. ‘That's because you probably only went once a week,' Bill said.”

“Haw, haw, haw,” John Cobly belched out. “They'd be into it then.”

“For at least half an hour. Would've been longer if old Harley hadn't jumped in: ‘You bucks stop jawing and wasting time. Youse got more jaw than a government mule. We need to get a decent cellar under the place first, then a furnace so they won't be freezing their backsides off sitting in their seats.'”

“Sounds like when I was on the board; like pulling teeth, getting anything done,” John Cobly said.

Nanny handed out our lunch plates and cups of tea and we took them on our laps and the conversation went on hold for a spell. A blow of wind buffeted the house. The burr of the fire stirred up briefly to fall with the wind.

John Cobly finally coordinated his tongue around heavy chews on a thick beef sandwich and tea slurps.

“I suppose you'll be out tricking pretty soon, Jake?”

“I don't play tricks,” I said.

“Course not,” The Old Man said.

“The young beggars turned my outhouse over last year,” John Cobly said.

“I wouldn't know anything about that,” I said.

“Course you wouldn't,” The Old Man said. “Best way to beat them at that is to move the outhouse off the hole. Joe Chase…”

“Never mind, Harvey, were eating our lunch,” Nanny said.

“I mind the time we took to work and hauled Wes Johnston's light wagon up onto his shed,” John Cobly said. “Must have taken a couple of hours, us whispering and grunting and sweating. Just got it nicely sitting when he shined a flashlight on us. Wasn't the old beggar watching from the porch all the time! ‘All right, boys; I know youse all, now take her down,' he said.”

“Kind of turned the tables,” The Old Man said.

“Told my old man, too. Kind of hard getting out of cleaning out the pigs after that, among other things.”

“I guess we all had our day,” The Boss said. There was a pause again with finishing lunch and replenishment of tea.

“By the way, how's your digger working, Harv?” John Cobly said.

“Better than a plow,” The Old Man said.

“Did most of the digging yourself with them, all the clawing and scratching,” John Cobly said.

“Yes, and the whirligigs send the potatoes halfway across the field,” The Old Man said. “Instead of clawing and scratching, you're reaching after them.”

“Yeah,” John Cobly said. “I would have gotten an elevator if they were any good in wet and sod ground. Anyway, the reason I asked is because a claw on that old digger of mine got broke on a heavy stone. She still digs, but she smashes up the odd potato. I was wondering if I could get the lend of yours.”

“Sure,” The Old Man said. “Might need to throw a little grease at her.”

“That'll be great. I'll just hook her onto me wagon on the way home.”

The Old Man and John Cobly rolled a making apiece, lit up and settled back while Nanny collected the lunch dishes.

“Are they holding the tyme in the hall?” Nanny said from the pantry.

“No. George is going to straighten up the main floor in the old mill, him and Charlie.”

“I thought Alf wasn't letting anybody near the old mill anymore,” The Old Man said.

John Cobly chuckled with a belch of smoke.

“And him blacksmithing in the west side room with the roof half buckled in and the windows about to pop out. They were out in the yard a while back jawing over it. Alf just finished shoeing a horse for me. ‘That place ain't fit for man nor beast,' George said. ‘You just stick to your farming,' Alf said. ‘Them fences ain't nothing to write home about, big mouth.'”

“Now George is going to hold a tyme in the main floor and Alf thinks it's too dangerous,” The Old Man said. “Sounds like them.”

“Charlie and Joanie going to move in?” Nanny said.

“Just 'til they get a piece built on.”

“Poor Hilda,” Nanny said. She was back at her knitting. “It would be something if Alf got a woman.”

“Alf is too busy with his blacksmithing and inventing,” John Cobly said.

“He takes after Willard,” The Old Man said. “You'd go for grist and it would take half an hour to find him, then another half hour to get him away from something he was dreaming up. Remember the time he put the sail on the wood sleigh?”

“Yeah,” John Cobly said. “Must have got her going fifty or more on a good crust of snow, with no way to steer it.”

“No way to stop it either, but the woods did a pretty good job. Wonder he wasn't killed.”

“Then he put the windmill on the pump in the barnyard.”

“Yeah, gust of wind took it while he was gearing it up and the thing started chasing him across the barnyard. Just missed him, too. Hit the barn and tore off a big patch of shingles.”

There was a pause.

“Don't seem long since Alf took over the mill,” The Old Man said.

“Didn't run it long. Once the feed mill in town got underway and people started buying flour… Gorsh!” John Cobly stared at the clock. “Is that clock right? Is it really ten to nine? Agnes will skin me alive if I ain't home soon.”

“Jake, take the flashlight and give John a hand with the digger,” The Boss said.

“No need, Harv. I can hook her on. Not much of a trick.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, no trouble.” John Cobly rose stiffly and stretched his stubby frame. “You and Ella will have to come over for a game of auction when things quiet down.”

“I don't know. Might not be enough competition.”

“Just youse come on over. I don't recall any Jackson ever giving me any trouble.”

“We'll be over. We'll try not to trounce youse too bad.”

“We'll be seeing you,” John Cobly said. He paused with his hand on the doorknob and peered back at The Old Man. “Now remember to get ready to vote right, next election, so they'll fix up the road.” He flashed another sardonic grin and left.

Prelude to
Late Fall and Early Winter on Hook Road

When the potatoes were stowed and the binders and
dig
gers
were back in storage, the three-horse gang plows appeared along Hook Road, with the plowers limp-footing their way along, one foot on sod, the other in the groove of the overturned furrow, sometimes taking their hands from the plow handles to saw on the reins looping their necks to check the horses or brush a run from their noses. While overhead, the grey-black clouds hovered in their slow, moody moil, adding their chill to the fall wind cuffing and furling the manes and tails of the horses and buffeting the circus of seagulls sweeping and banking and lighting to pick worms with quick pecks in the plows' wake.

A farmer was judged by his plowing. Indeed, if you could keep three horses in line enough to run a straight furrow, stones and rough ground considered, you were usually competent at everything else. The trick was to get the first run straight. The farmers would put something easily viewable, maybe a flour sack or an old shirt, on a post as a marker and proceed without taking their eyes off it.

Box carts appeared, too, their shafts riding high on the backs of the horses, and the farmers hoed out the cabbage, turnips, carrots and mangels, loaded them and carted them to their cellars. Then they forked and carted sod until the sod banks ringed the houses against the coming winter frost.

As late fall progressed toward early winter and what was left of pasture turned grey-brown and died, the calves and young cattle, half wild from pasture freedom, were driven, rope-hauled and tail-twisted into berths in the barns—except those selected to take a one-way trip on the truck of a cattle buyer. The stay of the one whose carcass would hang in any given woodshed for winter beef was somewhat shortened as well.

Then half molasses puncheons were filled with water heated in double boilers, kettles and pots on kitchen stoves, butchered pigs were block and tackle-hoisted by the pointed sticks in their hocks and dunked, and there was the steamy-acrid smell of pig, blood and hair during the scalding, the knife shaving and the junking for the barrels of brine.

Dan Coulter's battered saw gear, a two-by-four spiked angle-wise across its spindly front legs for support, made the rounds, and the stationary engines, poised like ducks to fly with their high pulley and balance wheels and nubbing water tanks, in their turn, were skidded from the barn floor, crowbarred into position a belt length from the saw and pegged down. The starting procedure was simple: adjust for spark, flip up the jigger on the oil glass by the water tank, then heave on the balance wheel until the machine's barks and sucks took hold and increased with the crank of the cylinder poking into its belly and the broad belt, soaped for traction, whirred and the machine resembled a rabid dog jigging and straining on a leash. Meanwhile, back at the saw gear, the thump of the first log on the worn, gouged table broke into the whispering hum of the saw's talon-toothed circular blade and the shuttle of its frame.

A swipe at the safety lever protruding above the table's back, by the blade slot, a straight-armed, brace-legged push on the log toward the whispering hum, and the saw gear symphony began: the quickening of the engine barks, which become laboured with the run-down mourn of the blade cutting through, the cling of the blade dinging the severed block with the table's return, the clop of the block—heaved by the blocker—hitting the frozen ground, the engine barks spacing in runaway momentum, the thumps of the log bounced up for the next cut. And there were the baked smells of hot sawdust, and dirty water boiling in the engine's belly.

When the twenty or so cords of rock maple and beech peaked in their piles, a snugness settled over the people of Hook Road, a slowdown came and they moved as those who had conquered another hard season as they waited for the first big snow storm. It came in mid-December, blocking the road with heavy drifts.

Then, in keeping with time-worn tradition, they took to their wood sleighs with sets of wire-cutter/pliers and brush for markers, and, taking the path of least snow resistance, each farmer in his own allotment, they broke the winter road. And it wound, resembling twin snakes following a shallow ditch pitted by horse hooves and peppered by horse buns. Across open fields, twisting and turning to avoid the heavier drifts, through fences with cut wire furling back, through yards and ditches and sometimes on the road, it wound, its ragged brush markers stating its course. In its run, where it crossed the lesser banks, which in themselves could be formidable, jolting pitches formed from the rock and ram of sleigh runners, making for a precarious ride.

There was also a bit of the precarious in the fact that there was only one trail for two-way traffic. There were road rules, of course. Empty and full sleighs meeting got a track apiece; an empty sleigh gave right of way to a full sleigh; a sleigh passing from the rear, empty or full, got a wave. Misdemeanours were punished by name-calling and expenditure of smashed sleigh sides and broken runners.