Always October. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ before, that she should have been left behind to do the baking so Momma could open the store. This was ridiculous because no farmers purchased machinery—or much of anything else in town—in July. All their energies were directed toward cutting and curing the hay before it rained.

      My dad was a talkative man back then, back in the good years—talkative by nature. I suspect that was why he chose to live in town. If he’d followed in his father’s footsteps and stayed on the farm, he’d likely have talked to the horses. The answer he gave my sister, then, was the same he’d already given two or three times.

      “Think for a minute about life without farmers, Annie. You’re old enough now.”

      And I wasn’t, obviously. I kept my mouth shut, and Dad went on without so much as glancing in my direction.

      “That roof over your head? The one that keeps you warm in the winter and dry in the rain? That roof wouldn’t be there if farmers didn’t buy the machinery I sell. And the food your momma sets on the table, the food that keeps your stomach full? Farmers provide that, too, and not only when they patronize the store. Somebody has to grow the food you eat, and farmers are the ones who do it.”

      “I don’t see what that has to do with the baking.”

      “The baking will get done without you.”

      “The haying will get done without me, too.” Annie had her arms folded across her chest by then, a sure sign she’d stopped listening.

      “It’s not all about us, Annie. We’re small pieces of a community that comes together when the need is greatest, like in haying season and threshing season. By coming together in the name of the community, we admit we depend on each other. Depending on each other is just the way humans are made.”

      I’m pretty sure Annie had a comeback. She had an answer for everything. But as we rounded a grove of trees, I spotted Thomas Beckmeyer and his sons in their field, whereupon my sister’s protests fled my little brain like field mice scurrying from a side mower. I was that scared.

      Annie was big on picture books and, every so often, when she was in a generous mood, she’d read me a story. One story was titled “The Grim Reaper” and right there, on the first page, old man death was pictured in all his dark glory. I suppose we’re all familiar with that image—a skeleton dressed in robes, carrying a scythe. Only I didn’t know the instrument used by the grim reaper even had a name. I only remembered his skull face and that long, curved blade. The Beckmeyers had their backs to us when we first sighted them. They might have had skulls for faces—imagination has a tendency to run wild at five years old—but there was no mistaking the blades on the scythes they wielded.

      My first instinct was to jump out of the wagon and make for home as fast as my little legs could take me. As it was, I grabbed my dad’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

      “What’s wrong, Lucas?”

      “He’s takin’ souls,” I responded, which was what the grim reaper did in Annie’s book.

      “Taking souls?”

      “The grim reaper. He’s takin’ souls.”

      I seem to recall my dad stifling a laugh at that moment. “No, he’s not, son. That’s Thomas Beckmeyer and he’s only cutting his hay.”

      My father’s quiet tone reassured me just enough to take another look, and sure enough, every time Thomas and his boys swept their scythes, swaths of clover fell to the earth. Then the smell reached me, strong enough to forever mark itself in the center of my being.

      Suddenly I became aware of the rhythm of the work. Scything a field is slow business. A step, a swing, another step, another swing. The reapers work behind each other and their bodies rotate with each step, turning until their heads face backwards. The sweep follows—not too fast or the grass will bend, as it does before the wind, only to recover a second later. But not too slow, either. Too slow will produce the same effect—the grass springing back to life. Every stroke has to be the same, a stately progression as formal as any waltz, each man working at exactly the same rate. If not, the back man is liable to cut off the foot of the man working in front of him. The blades are that sharp.

      Beckmeyer and his sons stopped when they heard the wagon—not to greet us, though they did, but to sharpen their scythes. The cut grass lay behind them in three neat rows, called windrows, where it would be left to dry for a day or so. I recall my dad pausing to admire the perfectly straight windrows before approaching Mr. Beckmeyer to shake hands. Then he formally introduced me and Annie.

      “How do?” Thomas Beckmeyer said to each of us. His boys just nodded as they ran their whetstones across the edges of their blades. Flies buzzed around their heads and their bodies were soaked with sweat. Most likely their thoughts were only of the water jug resting in the shade of a tree. They would take long drinks before they resumed cutting, the only real pleasure they would know until their momma brought their lunch.

      Other families had made appearances before us. They were in a field cut two days earlier, raking the windrows into what folks called haycocks, which looked to me like the igloos I’d seen in one of my own picture books. My father and Annie joined them, and pretty soon they were as sweaty as everyone else.

      I was too young to wield a rake and so was left to myself. I didn’t mind. I climbed up on the wagon and watched the Beckmeyers, father and sons, return to their labor. Mr. Beckmeyer was the master there, his back arrow straight, his body swiveling, the blade of his scythe cutting through the grass exactly parallel to the ground. Low enough to leave only stubble behind, yet high enough to avoid the occasional rock or clump of earth.

      Step, turn, whoosh. Step, turn, whoosh. Again and again and again. There was something about their labor that captured my attention, something large, and something else, too—something that stayed with me for many years but I couldn’t name. Everything was locked up with everything else: the tools, the men, the waving grass, even the occasional partridge that shot up out of the grass in a flurry of wings that sounded like an explosion. I didn’t know what to make of what I saw, but at my young age I didn’t feel a need to provide everything with a name, and so I kept my feelings to myself and just watched.

      CHAPTER 3

      I’ve been thinking on this, trying to understand why people remember some things as if they were happening right this minute, while so much else is lost in the haze of a long life.

      I have an impression of me and my sister Annie and how we got along. That’s only natural, as Annie was often charged with my care and we spent a lot of time together. I can still conjure up a few images of Annie skipping rope with her girlfriends, of a fight she had with Roger Olson, who tugged at her braids, of Annie hunched over her dinner with Momma urging her to sit up straight. But these are like faded snapshots. My recollection of the Beckmeyers working their scythes is as vivid as daylight. I don’t know why, and I’d rather not know. I’d rather move on to the next incident, which just might qualify as one of my happiest moment in those early years, the good years.

      As a young boy, I was crazy for baseball. Back then, it wasn’t like today. Nowadays people are so concerned with their e-mail and their text messages and whatnot. Well, I think the first thing you need to do is put all that technology stuff out of your head. And I’m not just talkin’ about the Internet and cell phones that can do more tricks than Lassie. Forget television, forget even radio. The farms in Bear County didn’t have electricity back then. Electrification would come later, during the New Deal, when President Franklin Roosevelt wired the backcountry. We did have electricity СКАЧАТЬ