Hayfields
by Tom Wade
Mornings, my uncle would begin stirring downstairs in the kitchen before 7:00. Sometimes he hollered up the stairs, telling my cousin Mike and me to come for breakfast. Sometimes I didn’t need the wakeup call. I ambled into the kitchen, with worn linoleum flooring, and sat in a chair with a shiny chrome frame and a plastic-covered seat and back. My uncle asked, “How do you want your eggs?” Hard or soft were the choices. Hard eggs were what I ate most mornings, even when I asked for soft eggs. They went with thick country gravy poured over a biscuit. I chewed the rubbery egg and savored the oatmeal-gray gravy soaking the spongy, brown-crusted pastry.
Though my uncle’s given name was Garland, his kith and kin called him Jiggs. He stood about five-eight or five-nine, with a large belly ballooning under his bib overalls and a tanned oval face similar in shade to the crust of the biscuits he made. He had sky-blue eyes, edged with an arc of wrinkles, and kept his gray-flecked, medium-brown hair in a buzzcut. Like most farmers, he wore a billed cap, though by midsummer, it was limp and ragged-looking, often turned cockeyed. I worked for him when he was in his late forties to early fifties.
A hardscrabble farmer, he examined interlocutors with a non-threatening and affable gaze. He searched for amusement in people and didn’t shy from making mordant observations of those he took a fancy to. When a small-town lawyer pulled out a cigar at his brother’s welding shop, Jiggs piped up to several idlers, “It’s going to rain.” Staring at the smoker, he went on, “You know why? When a hog carries a stick like that, something big is going to happen.” Tickled, mouth raised at the corners, he emitted a loud snicker.
After breakfast, we fed and watered the hundreds of chickens Jiggs and his wife, Louetta, raised. If needed, we went to a shed to ready or repair equipment, such as replacing sections on a mowing machine sickle. Then, except for rainy days, we headed to a field.
In my early teens, before I had the strength and stamina to handle hundreds of bales in a day, hauling hay captivated me. When they came to our place, I watched the lean, bronze, sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old hay-truck guys swagger and cuss without the restraints of overbearing adults. They carried themselves with abandon and confidence, like first-team athletes. They enthralled a shy fourteen-year-old.
Though ever so often, I mowed pasture or raked hay, I spent most of my time toiling on Jiggs’s two-ton flatbed the summer after I reached sixteen. While set in motion by the brash aura I associated with it, my cousin’s presence hooked me into hauling hay. I relished the companionship that Mike provided, countering the solitary chores and hours on a tractor at the dairy farm my dad ran. Two or three inches taller than Jiggs, Mike got his height from his mother. While strong and agile, he carried a paunch even as an adolescent. By his late teens, his once-blond hair darkened to a cinnamon shade, lying flat on his head with thin strands falling on his forehead. As his dad, he had a tanned complexion, but his blue eyes scanned his surroundings in puzzlement rather than the curiosity his dad’s manifested. His symmetrical features formed a handsome yet artless visage.
Mike enjoyed the fellowship of other people, and his pleasant manner generated many friends. But he seldom formulated an independent viewpoint. I recall we heard a nerdy guy, spectacled with dated glasses despite his family’s money, deride the pop song “Sweet Pea,” opining, “What does it say? It doesn’t say anything.” A month or so later, when a relative of Mike’s mentioned she favored the tune, he reacted with, “It doesn’t say anything. I can’t stand that song.” This scene stayed with me: Besides his speaking louder than warranted, it was a rare instance of Mike asserting himself.
As we drove into a hayfield, I surrendered to the imminent undertaking. I climbed onto the truck bed, aware that the dirt and heat would soon enshroud me. The weight of the first bale informed me what to expect the rest of the day. For each of the eighty to hundred bales making up a load, I bent my back forty-five degrees to grip the two strands of twine and straightened up. Lifting a forty-pound bundle elicited a grunt under my breath. The ends of the shorn stems on the edge of each bale scratched my wrists above my thin leather gloves as I carried it one to three steps to place it, and if I had to lift it, I would add extra power to the hoist by pressing my right knee against the hay. With temperatures in the eighties and nineties, sweat dropped off the tip of my nose as I cycled through this routine. My inner voice grumbled: How much longer before we get this truck loaded? How many more loads to the end of the day?
Alfalfa greeted me with a distinctive smell, dry but fresh. Tiny green flecks from crushed leaves sprinkled my clammy arms. Clover, with its brown, crumbling leaves and stems, had a musty, pungent aroma, contrary to the sweetness of alfalfa and the faint perfume of timothy. Even freshly cut clover appeared to be rotting.
During the initial week or ten days, I became tired by late morning. My back and arms strained to keep going. Mold spores and dust reddened my eyes and caused my nose to run and occasionally bleed. But the tiredness and dust effects grew less noticeable as I acclimated. The skin on the inside of my wrists toughened, resisting new scratches. The pressure on my arms and shoulders decreased. My mind drifted to settings filled with chatter and laughter, such as the air-conditioned rec rooms in the homes of my Topeka cousins’ friends. I fantasized about going swimming, playing football, and flirting with pretty girls.
Although uncomplicated, the job carried hazards. On a summer afternoon, a boy of thirteen or fourteen was working for one of his father’s hay-hauling crews. Too young for much lifting, he usually drove a truck in the fields, but this day, he was on the truck’s bed with a hay loader attached to the side. He lost his balance, fell off, and rolled under the wheels. He was dead when the ambulance arrived. I subsequently learned that the driver, a boy of sixteen or seventeen, became distraught and ran away over a hill. An hour or so later, emergency responders found him crying, in a state of shock.
I heard about the accident from my uncle while I sat on a tractor, not more than a few hours afterward. Jolted and confused (how could it have happened?), I recollected spotting the victim at the Dairy Y—a slightly chubby kid with brown hair. I rummaged in my consciousness, grasping for an image to distract me from picturing this boy mangled under the wheels of a truck. As I battled emerging faintheartedness, I wanted to escape, to be somewhere else. Staring at my uncle’s eyes for a second and then dropping my gaze, I mumbled, “Oh, no.” Trying to control my queasiness and hide my distress, I retreated to the task at hand.
For two summers before Mike married at eighteen, I went to a drive-in movie theater with him on Friday nights. Eschewing the car, we relaxed on the patio by the concession stand with four or five guys he knew, sipping on Cherry Cokes spiked with sloe gin. A mixture of farm and small-town boys, they chatted about ’57 Chevys and who’s a good pool player (Mike had his own cue, a sign of better-than-average expertise), and gossiped about acquaintances, friends, and antagonists. Except for one account, I recall nothing more than snippets from these conversations.
In the waning sunlight, I began every movie evening with the hope someone from the group might draw me in. Yet an overture seldom materialized, and if one did, I was unable to muster more than a hesitant, self-conscious response, undermining potential connections. Sidelined, I became lost in a sinking sensation, like the kid no one remembered to pick up at the bus station. Absorbed in self-pity, I was incapable of eliciting interest in the movie or the palaver. I drifted into recurrent reveries involving my friends and ersatz accomplishments, mainly dates and football prowess. I wished I were elsewhere, but not at home on the isolated farmstead. Though godawful, the patio sustained the possibility of communion.
Laconic and gangly, I settled in a plastic chair on the periphery of the group. In contemplative moments, I glimpsed my shy, silent dad in myself. While they recounted stories and rambled about whatever came to mind, nobody made eye contact with me.
Mike’s buddies and I diverged in several respects. They went to high school in Smithville, and I attended the one in Platte City. I determined from their anecdotes that most of them enrolled in vocational classes, like carpentry or auto repair, while I was in the college prep track. At my school, I had no more than an intermittent opportunity to mingle with the vocational students. Even in the courses required of everyone, such as English, history, and math, the hands-on kids sat in separate classes, studying different content or reviewing it at a slower pace than the academically inclined. Based on what I observed, I construed our futures—theirs and mine—short-term. After high school, I expected the guys in the loose circle, including my cousin, would go to work in a plant, a garage, or on a farm, followed by marriage to a local girl. I anticipated entering a higher ed institution, delaying marriage until after I attained a degree. They sought employment, maybe a trade; I sought out a career.
The coterie favored mundane tales with a pinch of awe: the guy overhauling a car engine in his backyard who spent every evening and weekend on it; the reckless show-off going ninety on the highway traversing the west side of Smithville, eluding the town’s deputy dawg. However, some stories produced a shiver. On an early summer day, one of their friends and his dad were tilling cropland with six-bottom breaking plows. Beginning a new furrow, the boy lowered his plow without slowing down. The blades dug deep into the clay-thickened soil, so deep that they stopped the tractor, causing the front end to rise like a horse rearing on its hind legs. The tractor pivoted and landed on the plow, crushing the boy as his father watched.
The speaker narrated in a slow, somber delivery. I envisioned plowing ground, the soil lying in shiny, straight ridges. My sentiments centered on the dad, the helpless witness. How did he react? Did he run to the offspring he couldn’t aid? Did his mind become ordered or delirious? I pictured another farmer whom Jiggs and I encountered a short while after his son died in Vietnam. His aspect reddened as Jiggs expressed his regrets. His eyes welled, and his visage crumpled as he tried to talk. I looked away, discomforted by his heartache.
After the movies ended at around midnight, Mike would drive me home, five miles from the drive-in. He became cautious when tipsy, slowing down to forty miles an hour or less, instead of his usual seventy-plus, on a paved highway and twenty or thirty on a gravel road. Once, after he dropped me off, I stood on the unlit porch, watching him drive away. I stared at two red dots moving up a hill about five hundred yards distant, the only visible objects in the darkened landscape. Following his unhurried crawl, I thought, “He’s dead drunk.” He had another twenty miles to go.
The cocky and free-wheeling world I associated with hauling hay, in my pubescence, proved illusory by the end of my first week of doing it. And during the third summer, Mike had finished high school (he didn’t graduate—flunked world history), married, and eventually went to work elsewhere.
In June of that year, I found temporary work for three weeks in a warehouse. At the end of the job, I bounced back to the farm. Around a month later, the warehouse owners offered me another job. I would earn more money and work inside, sheltered from the sweltering weather. My mother, who took the call about the offer, urged me to go back to my former employer. But I refused their tender. In the warehouse, I followed orders from two full-timers, ten years older than me, whose primary interests were porn movies and flirting with the faded lady in the upstairs office who maintained the books. When they and other employees engaged me in small talk, I replied in kind with terse blather. In the presence of these not unfriendly people, a void consumed me. Insignificant and out of step, I had no desire to fit in.
I wasn’t lonely at my uncle’s. We talked about the particulars of our labor—when to bale the mowed alfalfa, making sure to bring a grease gun for the rake and baler, and clearing space in a loft for another hundred bales. I listened to and aahed over his gossip about the people in the community—an older German with a large holding who spent a year in prison for resisting a World War I draft order; the loose woman who lived with her mother in a modern house on the blacktop; the boys who came home in caskets, some closed. Despite our differences, he spoke with me in the same tone he used with adults.
I grew to enjoy the suppertime gatherings in Louetta and Jiggs’s kitchen with their relatives and friends. One evening, while seated in a straight-back chair, bantering with folks after dinner, the sudden realization that my usual reticence was missing startled me. Baffled but pleased, after a few moments, my attention shifted back to the chitchat.
In our rambling exchanges, Jiggs tolerated my infrequent political opinions, such as the wrongness of poverty or the rightness of dissent. On the Vietnam War, our stances overlapped. Although he chuckled at the beatings anti-war protestors received during the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, he adamantly opposed the conflict in which we sent our sons to die in a distant and foreign land. He lobbied a neighbor on the draft board for an exemption for Mike, without success. Still, fate was in their corner when the Army Reserve accepted Mike into its ranks.
As for the nation’s racial turmoil, Jiggs regarded Martin Luther King as a communist and was bewildered when he heard on the radio that a distant city had named a street for the civil rights leader. He viewed Black people as dishonest and unintelligent, labeling them with degrading epithets.
Although I avoided disputing his stances or expounding on mine, my uncle recognized where I stood. During my final summer, I tutored two Black adults one evening a week. While I disclosed that I was helping a couple of individuals with their reading and math, I didn’t bring up their race. But when I mentioned the sessions were in Kansas City, Jiggs and the others knew they were Black. I left early each Wednesday afternoon, self-conscious about my project and the denigrating comments I imagined family and drop-bys made about me around the kitchen table. However, as the summer advanced, these shamefaced thoughts diminished; the Wednesday lessons became routine, and no one directly disparaged me.
And, one day, Jiggs surprised me. He paused a moment, in the midst of a vitriolic utterance, before saying, “Now they went too far in the South,” likely thinking about television scenes of police dogs attacking Black children. I clung to this remark. I inferred his contempt was less entrenched than in some of our family members, who I conjectured fit the mold of those who attended lynchings sixty years in the past. Still, my uncle’s slur-filled assertions persisted, and George Wallace’s presidential campaign bolstered his hope for change.
Evenings, around six or later, we would return to my uncle’s house covered in grime and dried sweat, my forehead and cheeks reddened by the sun, the bill of Jiggs’s hat hanging over his right ear. We, including assorted others, would sit down to a supper of fried chicken and green beans prepared by Louetta, who had been home for about an hour after sorting packages all day for a catalog business. One afternoon, we got in at four-thirty. Seeing the sink full of dirty dishes elicited thoughts of my mom’s admonition, “Help out when you’re there. Wash the dishes or do something else.” I spent about twenty minutes cleaning the plates, bowls, and pans, brushing off Jiggs’s insistent “You don’t need to worry about that.” When she got home, my aunt reiterated, “You didn’t have to do that,” in a chiding but pleased tone. A few weeks later, when we got in early again, Jiggs tackled the dirty dishes. He acted as if this was the norm, not saying a word.
BIO: Tom Wade is a retired state government employee. He lives in the Atlanta area and volunteers with the American Civil Liberties Union. His essays have appeared in Canyon Voices, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Lunch Ticket, Inlandia, Harmony Magazine, Rivanna Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, 805 Lit+Art, William and Mary Review, Black Fork Review, Bookends Review, Ilford Review, ellipsis, table/FEAST Literary Magazine (Fifty & Up Writer Award) and other publications.