The Unplowed Sky (7 page)

Maybe that Was why Garth acted like a bear with a sore tooth, Hallie thought. Something she labeled sympathy tugged at her heart as he stuck the wrench in a clanking pocket and turned from the separator. He moved with easy, long-legged grace, broad shoulders narrowing to waist and flanks. As if on signal, Laird dashed to him and stood up on his hind legs, front paws planted on Garth's shoulders, white-tipped tail swinging back and forth like an ecstatic pendulum.

“Down, boy!” Garth commanded, but he gave the dog a lingering pat and soft word before he wiped face and hands on a bandanna and reached down for a sandwich. He muttered thanks as Hallie poured his coffee, but didn't look at her.

After a moment, he did. Their glances tangled. They both blushed before glancing away. Something like an electric shock radiated through Hallie, sang through her blood. Then Meg came driving the water wagon up to the engine. Still chewing on the sandwich, Garth went to help her drain the water into the engine reservoir. Hallie's eyes followed him. She felt her face redden when she saw that Rory had noticed.

“Like to see Cecil B. deMille's
Ten Commandments
, Miss Hallie?” he asked. “It's on at the theater in Hollister.”

“Plannin' to get there on the tractor?” drawled Jim Wyatt.

“Why, no, Jim.” Rory gave the former engineer a careless smile. “I figgered you'd lend me your Model T if I filled it up with gas.”

Wyatt looked at Hallie, as if his answer was up to her. She had heard of the famous movie, of course, and had planned to attend a matinee. Then Felicity left Jackie with her and everything had changed—and kept changing.

“No, thank you, Mr. MacLeod,” Hallie said quickly. Blushing again! She had to stop that. “I can't go off and leave Jackie our first night here. Besides, I think I'm going to be too tired to keep my eyes open.”

“So would you be, Rory, if you didn't mainly stand around on the platform all day, lord of all you survey, while we break our backs.” Rusty Wells, the Oklahoma farmer, delivered the barb in a good-natured tone.

“The engineer's job is the engine and keeping an eye on the whole picture,” Rory retorted loftily. “If you toss your pitchfork in the feeder along with the spikes, as some have been known to do—”

Everyone looked at Rich Mondell and chortled. The handsome black-haired professor blushed beneath his sunburn but he laughed, too. “Well, boys, I only did it once.”

“And you paid with nary a whine for fixing the cylinder,” put in Garth, returning with his sulky-faced daughter. “It'll chew up a pitchfork, but can't digest one real well.”

“Shucks, the perfessor's rich.” Cotton Harris's nose was almost bloody from constantly peeling sunburn. “He just works for the healthy fresh air and exercise.”

“If you saw my college paycheck, you wouldn't say that,” Mondell retorted.

“You've gone and eaten all the crusty sides of the gingerbread,” Meg accused, poking with a none-too-clean finger at the remaining center pieces.

“If they'd eaten the centers, that's what you'd have all of a sudden wanted.” Shaft frowned at his boss's daughter. “Take that piece you've got your paws on, and see if it won't sweeten you up a little.”

Meg scowled, but did as she was told. Rory eyed her warily. “You fall in the stock tank again?”

“The dratted board I had laid across the tank so I could dip water scooted out from under me.” Meg shook the clinging legs of her overalls that were drying plastered to her skin.

“A bath might improve you,” Rory teased, “but you'd better not have muddied up the water. You know what they say: “‘If you won't drink it, don't put it in your engine.'”

“Sure, worry about the engine!” Meg bit savagely into the roast beef. “You and Dad both care a lot more about your old machinery than you do about me!”

“You're cheaper to fix.” Rory scrunched his nose at his niece. “And when you blow up, you don't send engines and cylinders and threshers flying everywhere.”

“Not yet.” Meg made a face at him and almost giggled. She took another chunk of the maligned gingerbread.

Now Hallie understood why a young girl was with a threshing crew, but she couldn't understand, any more than she had with Felicity, how a mother could leave a child—just go off and act as if the youngster had never existed.

Hallie had felt abandoned when her mother died though she knew, in her mind, that Ellen Meredith fought hard to live, that she hadn't wanted to die at thirty-two with so much life to live, so much love to love, with her daughter so young and her husband so distraught. Hallie felt abandoned by her father, too, though he had never intended that Felicity crowd her out. Hallie bitterly regretted now that she had probably caused him as much pain as he had caused her—though he'd had Felicity and Jackie for consolation.

Why did people who loved each other still hurt each other so much? And how much more terrible when there seemed to be no love—when a mother left a child who had come into the world completely helpless and depending on her. After that, how could either Jackie or Meg really trust anyone?

When the last sandwich and crumb of gingerbread were gone and the coffeepot was empty, the threshers rose and stretched, slouched their hats lower, tied bandannas over mouths and noses, and those who wore them pulled on their leather gloves. Baldy Tennant spread coal in the firebox of the engine, and Rory soon had the engine billowing steam.

“Can I go see the engine, Hallie?” begged her little brother. Awed by the rough-and-tumble jokes of the crew, he had sat very quietly beside Laird, who had lain down by Garth with his long muzzle resting his daintily crossed paws.

“Not now.” The puffing engine, the long belt stretched to the separator, and the separator itself looked exceedingly dangerous to Hallie. She placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Jackie, don't you ever, ever come around the machines unless I'm with you!”

Jackie looked so crestfallen that Garth, to Hallie's amazement, smiled at him. “Reckon I can show you how the separator works some morning while Rory's getting up steam.”

He frowned at Hallie's boater. She had saved for weeks to buy it and thought it quite becoming. “That's a useless hat if I ever saw one.”

“Thanks for your kind opinion!” Why was he so rude, and why should she care? Hallie turned her back on him and began collecting cups.

They were scarcely back at the shack when the Brocketts' flivver churned up. Sophie was plump but slim-waisted. Her ruffled pink sunbonnet, tied in a flirty bow under her chin, shielded a rosily fair complexion.

She examined Hallie with Delft blue eyes as Shaft introduced them. Sophie gave her uptilted nose a further lift. “If you needed a helper, Mr. Hurok, I wish you'd have hired me. You know I can stand up to the work.”

“Hallie's doing fine.”

Sophie gave a scornful laugh. “Ma says you just hired her this morning! How do you know she'll last?”

Hallie came to Shaft's rescue. “Mr. Hurok felt sorry for me and my little brother, Miss Brockett. We don't have a home, and I was out of a job.” She looked the other woman in the eyes. Those eyes had a curious hardness that made Hallie well believe she'd have no qualms at wringing a chicken's neck. Disturbed by that opaque expressionless stare, Hallie finished more emphatically than she had intended. “I'll do my best to make Mr. Hurok glad he hired me.”

“Mmmph!” Sophie flounced around and began lifting food out of the backseat. Shaft put four big green watermelons in a tub of water beneath the shack and carved what looked like a twelve-pound roast off the beef which had come in a hundred-pound flour sack insulated inside two damp gunnysacks. He put the roast in the oven and hung the rest of the bagged beef from a limb of the tree. Hallie draped a wet towel over the crock of butter and set it in a kettle of water, trying to ignore the dishpan of plucked, headless chickens. She transferred the wet newspaper-wrapped eggs from Sophie's basket to a large crock that she placed in the coolest corner and put a wet towel over that, too. The MacReynoldses had an icebox and the Raford kitchen was equipped with a sparkling Frigidaire, but Shaft had explained that, except when the threshers were close enough to town to buy ice, they had to keep perishables cool as best they might.

“Here's the beans.” Sophie almost threw the sack at Hallie. “Told ma she ought to charge for them and the melons, too, but she just said she couldn't stand to see food go to waste—and, after all, it was me that crimped my back picking the stupid things.”

“Tell your ma we're much obliged.” Shaft ignored Sophie's complaint. “If she'll keep track, Garth'll pay her when we move on, or subtract what we owe from the threshin' fee.”

“You bet he will!” Sophie gazed out toward the threshers with mingled anger and what Hallie thought was frustrated longing. “Thresherman gets his fee even if that doesn't leave us enough money to plant this fall.”

“Don't see how that can happen, Miss Sophie.” Shaft's tone was patient. “Garth reckoned your pa's grain is threshin' out to around forty-fifty bushels an acre. That'll put some money in the bank.”

Sophie's lip curled. “That'll pay on the loan we had to take out two years ago when wet weather made the wheat rust. What that and bugs didn't ruin, hail did. We got only about nine bushels an acre.”

“Well, Garth didn't make anything either, since he takes every twelfth bushel as pay. Nineteen-twenty-two was a rotten year,” Shaft commiserated. “But you folks ain't the onliest ones with a mortgage.”

“I still don't think that thresherman's lien law is fair!”

“Well, Miss Sophie, the reason the wheat states and Canadian provinces passed some kind of lien laws is that quite a few farmers wouldn't pay up when the threshin' was over.”

“Pa always paid!”

“Sure he did. So the law makes no never-mind to him.”

Sophie climbed into the flivver, displaying plenty of shapely leg, and drove off as fast as she could. “Sure hope Garth stays clear of her,” Shaft declared. “That's one mean female in spite of her soft look. Well, we better get to it, Hallie.”

She peeled a dishpan of potatoes, strung and snapped a big kettle of green beans and baked three pineapple pies with juice oozing through the latticed crusts to turn golden brown. After Shaft took his luscious-smelling burnt-sugar cake out of the oven, she produced a heap of oatmeal cookies for morning lunch and mopped the floor.

Shaft tended two big skillets of frying chicken while Hallie chopped two cabbages into slaw and made biscuits and mashed potatoes. As if the success of the meal depended on him, Jackie held up fingers as he counted out plates, cups, and utensils and set the table. Hallie had scarcely filled the washbasins and put out clean towels when the whistle sounded.

It was 6:30, only about three hours since the men had demolished a big lunch, but they devoured chicken, biscuits, and mounds of vegetables as if they hadn't eaten in weeks. Conversation was limited to a terse “Please pass the smashed 'taters,” or “Shoot the biscuits this way, will you?” It was only with chunks of pie, hunks of cake, and second or third or fourth cups of coffee that the men relaxed.

“Garth,” said Cotton Harris, “reckon Quent Raford meant what he said about gettin' his own threshin' outfit?”

Garth nodded.

Cotton meditated while he forked up cake and pie in the same bite and announced the result with a blissful sigh before his brow puckered. “He's taken over a bunch of quarter-section farms along with his big one. That'll be a sight of bushels we won't thresh.”

“Yep. As I recall we threshed out about thirty thousand bushels for Raford last year and it was a bad year, too.”

“It'll hurt to lose that three thousand dollars.”

Garth put down his fork and looked at Cotton. “Are you saying that because you men get a share of the profits that I should have asked you to vote on whether we knuckled under to Raford and threshed him first?”

“I vote to hell with Raford!” Buford Redding growled, his light brown eyes come to sparkling life in the monotone of his tanned skin and brown hair.

“I ain't a Wobbly,” Rusty said in his deliberate manner. “But I don't hold with a man havin' it all his own way because he's rich.”

“Fair is fair,” Henry Lowen agreed. He spoke with a German accent. “Always it is the best way. The one threshed first one year in a neighborhood comes last the next year.”

Jim Wyatt and Baldy Tennant nodded. Pat O'Malley frowned. “I'm saving up for a jalopy. I won't get it this year if we pass up crops like Raford's.” He turned to Rich Mondell. “You teach eek—economics, professor. Is it good business to fall out with your biggest customer?”

“I think Garth's right,” Rich said gently. “And evidently the rest of the crew does, too, except for maybe Cotton.”

Cotton shrugged. “I guess we have voted. I'll go along with the crowd.”

“Not that it matters,” said Rory, “but for the record, I call it damn foolishness to lose that much money over an agreement that's not in writing and not enforceable.” He flashed a defiant stare at his brother.

Garth didn't wince visibly, yet Hallie got the distinct impression that he had. After a long, baffled look at Rory, he said slowly, “Anyone who's not satisfied with how I do business is welcome to draw their share soon as we're finished here. The day my word's not as good as some contract a lawyer draws up and a court enforces is the day I quit making agreements.”

Pat's thin young face was sullen. “I never made no promises.”

“You didn't,” Garth agreed. “I sure don't need a hand who thinks he can find a better job.”

“I may just try.” Pat turned to Rory, but the young engineer avoided his eyes.

Garth looked wearier than even a day's threshing should have made him. “If that's what you decide, lad, I'll give you your money and wish you luck as soon as we're through here.”