Tramping on Life Part 76

"I never wear a hat."

"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.

"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.

"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."

The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt cool in the highest welter of heat.

In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.

"What's the matter?"

--"too hot!"

"Where's your whiskey now?"

--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.

These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...

which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly a.s.serting that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....

On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it ... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....

It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily thres.h.i.+ng built up.

Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out into the straw....

One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were foundered....

The cramps bothered me no more.

The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.

"--thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles ... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out."

After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me....

"Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!"

"--pay me off to-day?"

"Yes."

"What's the matter? ain't I working hard enough?"

"I've no fault to find with your work ... you're a better worker than most of the men ... in fact they complain that you set too hard a pace at the separator....

"But you argue too much ... keep the men up o' nights debating about things they never even considered before. And it upsets them so, what with the arguing and the sleep they lose, that they ain't up to the notch, next day.

"No, that's the only fault I have to find in you," he continued, as he counted out sixty dollars into my hand ... "but," and he walked with me, disquieted to the road, "but if you'll wait around till this afternoon, I'll drive you back to town."

"No. It's not over ten miles. I'll walk."

I was glad to be paid off. I was missing my books and my leisure, longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university "stack."

"You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.

I've found it doesn't do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....

"I hope you don't think all this debating will end after you're gone?...

Oh, no,--for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be a.s.sailed by all hands....

"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you've started something."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton."

"It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on thres.h.i.+ng and the harvest will appear."

I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....

That fall the _National Magazine_ printed _The Threshers_ and _The Harvest_ and _The Cook-Shack_, three poems, the fruit of that work. All three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.

Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.

Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I set them up in several neat rows.

I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own was.h.i.+ng ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.

The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.

I opened the _Buch der Lieder_ at the poem in his preface--the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....

"O, shone Sphinx, O lose mir Das Ratsel, das wunderbare!