XXXIII

IT WAS the hilltop field with the mowed hay lying in windrows in the heat. To the north and down the hill, beyond a pasture and a narrow wood, lay the pond and its blue distances; to the south stood a stone wall, and over it, in a summer blaze of light, the immense and fiery sun. I was just in time for the beginning of the afternoon’s work. From close beside the barn, a very modern tractor painted green and yellow had set out on its journey to the fields, dragging behind it an ancestral hayrack once painted carriage blue.

Every year when the mowing machines begin their clatter in the fields, and the tall grass falls flat beside them in long and even rows, I look forward to working with my neighbor Hudson Vannah at his farm across the pond. We are old friends, and during the war years I pitched hay with him on many a long, hot summer afternoon with the war planes now and then passing overhead. Help was scarce then; it is none too plentiful now.

It took me but a moment to reach for my hay fork in the back of the car, and step across the stone wall into the field. So dry has been our early summer that the stubble underfoot had burnt to gold, and round and about the stubble roots the earth itself lay dry. On came the tractor and the rack, the old wagon rolling about as in a seaway over the unevenness of the hot and golden earth, with the haymakers clinging to its side.

*   *   *

A twelve-year-old boy in shoes and overall pants and nothing more was driving the tractor and managing it and its course with sureness and skill. All the authority of manhood was in his face, I thought, as I saw his boy’s hand reach for the great lever at his side. This was Ronnie Winslow, a neighbor’s son.

Earle Baldwin was there from the farm just across from us, a fine lad who was honor man at our academy, and came back from the Army with a sergeant’s stripes. And Dale was with us, a veteran of World War I who is here in summer, and Hudson himself, who followed behind with the great hand hayrake.

Still in his thirties, spare, well-knit, muscular, and tireless, perhaps a trifle under middle height, Hudson never seems to rest, and many is the time I have gone past his farm in the twilight and seen him working busily and all alone in his thriving and never-neglected fields. He has a herd of milking shorthorns, and there is a tin sign saying so swinging at his gate.

There is no work on a farm I like better than work in the hayfields on a blazing day. Puff, puff, puff—and the green and yellow tractor hauled the rack beside a windrow, and plunge went each fork into the sun-hot, the almost crisp-dry hay. On this part of the field a stand of timothy had grown strong and high, and lifting up a forkful of hay, one had to tear it from its intricate entanglement with other stalks—drag at it till it gave and could be lifted up to the rack. In other places where there was a touch of water in the ground, I found myself tossing up a different type of grass like so much fluff.

*   *   *

Oh, work that is done in freedom out of doors, work that is done with the body’s and soul’s goodwill, work that is an integral part of life and is done with friends—is there anything so good? The youngster had jumped down from the tractor and climbed onto the rack to tread down the rising hill of hay. Our forks clicked as they met together and he speared down my load; sweat ran into my eyes and chaff glued itself to my skin; higher and higher, fork by fork, up-tumbled and rose the load with the urchin surefooted and busy in the fragrant sea.

As we were bringing the last load, something very lovely came to pass. A great eagle rose from somewhere on the top of the hill, planed above us, began the vast circles of his climbing, and disappeared into the evening and the blue.

FARM DIARY

Towards the twentieth of July we begin to say goodby to the bobolinks. First they stop singing, and then they go, melting out of the landscape all at once like a “dissolving view” in an old-fashioned stereopticon lecture in the town hall. / More and more the town next door takes on the summer look, and becomes a bewilderment of out-of-state cars, crowded stores, trailers parked on side streets, and visitors in gaudy and carefree summer clothes; with every “ye olde” something or other on Route 1 doing a rushing business. Gave road directions the other day to a big car with a British license and a British righthand drive. / Striped “cucumber beetles” a real nuisance this year; have to keep spraying and dusting all the time. There are times when I think some pests regard arsenate of lead as an exhilarating marmalade. / Even the trees are showing the effect of the dry weather, the birches yellowing and the sumacs turning an autumn red. / Elizabeth has bought from a neighbor a pair of blankets made from the wool of his sheep. Some small mill in the boundary mountains makes them up for him. Color a good blue, and the texture well-woven, light and warm. I thought them a bit expensive, but he sells every pair, and they are certainly good, honest workmanship and good material.

*   *   *

Has it occurred to any one that as civilization has become more urbanized and city populations greater than those who live by agriculture, there has been a parallel increase in war and violence? Apparently some relation exists which is not entirely economic. The farmer would reply that agriculture is an art of peace which requires a peaceful time, and that agricultural populations, as seen in history, are not by nature aggressively military. A population of planters and farmers, moreover, can not leave its crops to shift for themselves and gather themselves together into barns. The machine, on the contrary, can be left to shift for itself. It does not improve it, but it can be deserted on its concrete floor. Above all, the machine world is barren of that sense of responsibility which is the distinguishing spiritual mark and heritage of the long ownership of land. I think history would agree that though spears may be beaten into pruning hooks, pruning hooks are less frequently beaten into spears.