Grand Change by William Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

the overturned furrow, sometimes taking their hands from the plow handles to saw on the reins looping their necks to check the horses or brush a run from their noses. While overhead, the grey-black clouds hovered in their slow, moody moil, adding their chill to the fall wind cuffing and furling the manes and tails of the horses and buffeting the circus of seagulls sweeping and banking and lighting to pick worms with quick pecks in the plows’ wake.
    A farmer was judged by his plowing. Indeed, if you could keep three horses in line enough to run a straight furrow, stones and rough ground considered, you were usually competent at everything else. The trick was to get the first run straight. The farmers would put something easily viewable, maybe a flour sack or an old shirt, on a post as a marker and proceed without taking their eyes off it.
    Box carts appeared, too, their shafts riding high on the backs of the horses, and the farmers hoed out the cabbage, turnips, carrots and mangels, loaded them and carted them to their cellars. Then they forked and carted sod until the sod banks ringed the houses against the coming winter frost.
    As late fall progressed toward early winter and what was left of pasture turned grey-brown and died, the calves and young cattle, half wild from pasture freedom, were driven, rope-hauled and tail-twisted into berths in the barns—except those selected to take a one-way trip on the truck of a cattle buyer. The stay of the one whose carcass would hang in any given woodshed for winter beef was somewhat shortened as well.
    Then half molasses puncheons were filled with water heated in double boilers, kettles and pots on kitchen stoves, butchered pigs were block and tackle-hoisted by the pointed sticks in their hocks and dunked, and there was the steamy-acrid smell of pig, blood and hair during the scalding, the knife shaving and the junking for the barrels of brine.
    Dan Coulter’s battered saw gear, a two-by-four spiked angle-wise across its spindly front legs for support, made the rounds, and the stationary engines, poised like ducks to fly with their high pulley and balance wheels and nubbing water tanks, in their turn, were skidded from the barn floor, crowbarred into position a belt length from the saw and pegged down. The starting procedure was simple: adjust for spark, flip up the jigger on the oil glass by the water tank, then heave on the balance wheel until the machine’s barks and sucks took hold and increased with the crank of the cylinder poking into its belly and the broad belt, soaped for traction, whirred and the machine resembled a rabid dog jigging and straining on a leash. Meanwhile, back at the saw gear, the thump of the first log on the worn, gouged table broke into the whispering hum of the saw’s talon-toothed circular blade and the shuttle of its frame.
    A swipe at the safety lever protruding above the table’s back, by the blade slot, a straight-armed, brace-legged push on the log toward the whispering hum, and the saw gear symphony began: the quickening of the engine barks, which become laboured with the run-down mourn of the blade cutting through, the cling of the blade dinging the severed block with the table’s return, the clop of the block—heaved by the blocker—hitting the frozen ground, the engine barks spacing in runaway momentum, the thumps of the log bounced up for the next cut. And there were the baked smells of hot sawdust, and dirty water boiling in the engine’s belly.
    When the twenty or so cords of rock maple and beech peaked in their piles, a snugness settled over the people of Hook Road, a slowdown came and they moved as those who had conquered another hard season as they waited for the first big snow storm. It came in mid-December, blocking the road with heavy drifts.
    Then, in keeping with time-worn tradition, they took to their wood sleighs with sets of wire-cutter/pliers and brush for markers, and, taking the path of