The Thresher

by Herbert Krause

“He’s got a brother that runs a thrasher over Loon Lake way,” Kurt said, as if that put a better stripe on Lomas’ breeding. “Bory Tetzell’s his name. He’s always talking about getting a steam engine for thrashing.”

Johnny skipped over a rock. “I bet Alb Hukelpoke’s teams and power would thrash twice as much as Bory Tetzell’s old steam engine.”

“Horses – they’re too slow.” Kurt spoke in a positive way.

Johnny wondered from what paper he’d filched that notion, the Prairie Farmer or the Lincoln Freie Presse. He answered doubtfully, “A stinker, all right. A buggy stinker.” They descended the slant and entered the valley.

By the time he was at chores and the bread and barley coffee of lunch had pushed hunger out of his belly, he let this day’s disturbance plague him no more than the switching tail of the heifer he was milking. There was a measured sway to his body as his hands fisted on the downward stroke, relaxed on the upward; right hand, left hand, muscles tightening, then slacking. He breathed as deeply as in sleep, eyes almost closed, his thought far away from the plunge of his hands, as if his mind stood on a hill and his fingers were lost in a valley. If rain hopped on the barn doorsill and Uncle Herm were home, grunting audibly over the lifting of a harness to a peg, Johnny was as brimful of content as later his cup was of milk. He swayed into forgetfulness, the milk on the metal of the bucket warming languorously the flesh of his thighs through his pants legs. So it was in those days and long thereafter: the furrows of distraction were harrowed into smoothness by the cadences of rhythmic motion, whether of flesh or of iron.

Even Aunt Phrena and her hints and the slow curl of doubt untwisting in him were then only echoes, like brawls at a neighbor’s, too far away for the moment to have personal meaning. Then if ever he began to feel that he was a part of the farm; that he was crowding out a place for himself as a partridge hen does a nest in the leaves, not easily but with hardiness. Even at church the congregation no longer creaked in its benches to auger him with stares, as it used to. He added his shoulder muscle (knot-sized though it was, but growing) to the man-woman-and-animal strength on the place – strength that brought milk from barn to house and grain from the field to the bin and so kept the round of labor going even as the teams on the sweep kept the power running and the separator threshing.

Sometimes, however, this sense of belonging smashed as dropped skim-ice does. He’d toss aside a feed can and rush through the pasture to the cleared space on the ridge, loneliness like a hand gripping his throat, unconcerned that Aunt Phrena scolded or Uncle Herm cared. He’d stand where he and Uncle Herm had stood and see a hawk dip crazily in his tears. He longed for wings to carry him – where? Where? He didn’t know.

Or evenings, when Kurt was nose-deep in the Fourth Reader and Johnny was supposed to be, he’d come upstairs, candle in hand, and hold the doll with the china head in a hot fist, the red ribbon dangling between moist fingers. Though he didn’t know it, the memory of his mother was shrinking and fading beside a shadow that was beginning to form – the shadow of a father he’d never seen, a dark figure that troubled the brightness of his play whenever Aunt Phrena spoke his name; a man made up of the hints and the unsaid meanings in her words. And as he sat there, his breath came jerkily, as if he were sobbing, though he wasn’t.

But squarely in the middle of his loneliness would come a thought, soothing as a cool stone laid on a bumped forehead: “Uncle Herm – he’ll take care of me. And Snoose and Sophie Marchen; she’ll be handy, too” (never Aunt Phrena or Kurt); and he’d leave the cleared space on the ridge or hide the doll where he hoped Aunt Phrena wouldn’t look, and come to sit near Uncle Herm’s craggy shoulders or sneak over to wrestle with Snoose and eat the cookies Sophie dragged from the oven.

And so, under the pull of the farm and its rooted life, of neighbors’ ways spinning out the threads which wove and interwove darkly or brightly through his life, some of the loneliness ebbed slowly. But this new disturbance – that began to grow and spread like wild oats in a field.

It came to him, years later, not as something he had learned but as something that was a part of him, that the pang of grief or the bite of trouble is best blunted with the opiate of action, strength in motion, whether of a span of oxen or an engine, steam-wet with the surge of power.

That year the threshers came near mid-afternoon in late October. As long as they remained, Johnny and Kurt stayed home and the school lunch pails stood empty in the pantry. Always in this season one seat or another at school was vacant and Mrs. Sperry would observe with patience, “Well, the Nussbaum children are absent today. They’re threshing, I suppose”; or, “The threshers finally arrived at the Peisers’. Nobody here from their house.”

Johnny crawled with eagerness when Alb Hukelpoke drove the power near the barn, the team spanking under the harness. Uncle Herm followed with the separator, one foot on the feeder head, shouting, “I’m back. Chase the hens off the stacks, Johnny. We want to keep a little wheat for flour.” Johnny ran to meet him, trotting beside the machine and trying to find a place to catch on and ride. He was glad that Uncle Herm would eat supper from his own plates again for two or three days in a row; as glad as he was over the threshing and the piling of wheat in the granary.

Mr. Schadel rumbled up with the grain wagon, sacks flung over the box edge and flapping. His two boys balanced their pitchforks against the sway of the wagon. After that Mr. Dunkel came, slow with his oxen; with him Mr. Marchen with Snoose and the two older brothers, Jack and Bill, in a wide-tired wagon. Behind them drove Mr. Nussbaum and his boys, proud of their sorrels, and sometimes a hired hand – a small circle of neighbors then who gathered to set the machine and stake down the power. Uncle Herm giddapped the team and pulled the separator between the stacks.

Meanwhile in a grassless place, Alb ‘unlimbered the engine,’ he said. The power, a bull wheel with a nest of gears in it, held together by a cage of iron, was mounted on a rectangular wooden frame on four wheels. From a rack Alb flung braces and brace rods. They hit the ground with a thud and a jangle. “Stake ‘er down, boys!” he shouted. Johnny ran for the maul, yelling at Kurt to come and help. Under Alb’s shaggy gaze, the Nussbaum boys steadied the frame into position and kept it propped there with braces inclined to the ground. These braces they anchored firmly with a dozen links of chain and two stakes driven into earth.

“That maul handle of yours is slicker’n a calf’s pizzle, Alb,” said Rob Nussbaum, hefting the iron.

Alb laughed. He was the kingpin of the crew, Johnny could see. Uncle Herm was a good separator man, as was Mr. Schadel; but the way Alb drove the horses determined how well the cylinder hulled the grain and separated wheat from chaff. The feeder-man had his share in threshing the stacks cleanly. But he, too, waited on the power. The neighbors agreed with Old Geppert: “The man who stands on the power – he puts a farmer’s crop in the granary, or in the straw pile. And Alb keeps one eye on the straw pile.” No one but Mr. Nussbaum fussed over Alb’s handling of the four teams on the sweeps.

He was a tall man, Alb was; lean and scraggly whiskered, with a voice high in his throat. He grunted with a catch in his back when he stooped over his work. “Cracked kidneys,” he said wryly. On the bull wheel he fastened the sweeps, four twelve-foot lengths of pole, and the stay rods which opposed the strain of the horses pulling on the sweeps. “Yep, s’moother’n a cat’s knuckle, that maul, all right. Nothing like sweat to polish ‘er up.” He attached the equalizer rods. “There; guess that will even up the pull of the tugs, eh, Johnny? That gray mare of Schadel’s – I’m gonna poke her behind with a pitchfork, if she doesn’t limber her legs a little.”

“Sweat,” grumbled Mr. Nussbaum. “’Bout what a farmer can expect for a year’s work.” He slipped a coupler on the end of a tumbling rod which Johnny held for him. Grease smeared over his fingers. “Ach, corruption,” he growled and wiped them on his pants. Johnny felt a laugh starting but squeezed it back, Mr. Nussbaum’s face was so dour.

“My old man used to plant wheat when we lived down in Nicollet County.” Mr. Dunkel’s round face creased with recollection. “I wasn’t no bigger than you kids.” He nodded at Kurt and Johnny. “Each fall, ‘bout every dollar Pa could depend on was piled in those stacks of wheat.”

“Some of them counties down there is all wore out for wheat,” said Mr. Marchen, pushing his suspenders up his shoulder. “Prices is down, too. Like Old Geppert says, it’s them fellers from Egypt and them Rooshyans. They dumped such a muck of wheat on the market, they kicked the prices down to hell and gone.”

“Geppert!” snorted Mr. Dunkel. “That blowhard! Only thing he knows is oxen and wheat cradling. There he’s got a loud mouth.”

Johnny listened, arms heavy with a tumbling buck, but Kurt wondered about the “fellers from Egypt.” (“It ain’t ‘feller.’ It’s ‘fellah,’” he told Johnny next day, after he had poked in Aunt Phrena’s dictionary. “And he’s a farmer; an Egyptian farmer.” To which Johnny answered grandly, “To hell ya say,” in Hukelpoke’s high-pitched voice, liking the sound of Alb’s words. Then he jerked around quickly; Aunt Phrena might be near.)

And in the house Aunt Phrena “how-dee-do-ed” Mrs. Marchen and Sophie and helped unpack the baskets they brought. Sophie was pettish over a rip in her dress. “Men got everything handy; no long skirts to catch in a stump and tear.” She pushed the curtains aside and wished that Clymy Humber were among the men in the yard.

Johnny poked at a wasp, bumping uncertainly along a board, drunken with autumn, lively in old age.

Alb hooked a doubletree to a chain before he said, “’Tain’t them foreigners alone that raise the devil with prices. It’s them crooked elevator men and the spec-alators right here in this state. They got more grades of wheat to go by than tits on a sow. No. 1 hard and No. 2 Northern and No. 3 spring. Sheetin’ Judas! It’s all the same wheat, only the price is different, seems to me. And dockage?” He straightened a singletree. “That bastard of a Meyer at the elevator in Mary’s Hill – he docked me six pounds on the bushel, couple of falls ago. Ain’t forgot it, nuther. No wonder folks don’t plant wheat.”

“Well, Alb; that patch of your’n was pretty weedy.” Mr. Dunkel spoke judicially. He laid the tumbling rods end-to-end between the power and the separator.

“Sure thing,” Alb agreed. “But not six, seven pounds to the bushel; nope. Some people got beat worse than that.” He stepped back, squinting over the top of the bull wheel. “Wonder whether the old bitch is in line with the cylinder gear now? She was a little outa whack at Schadels’ and the knuckles howled.” He grinned at Johnny. “Think she’s in line, young shaver?”

They connected the power with the separator by means of couplers or ‘elbows’ joining the ends of the tumbling rods. Alb covered the rod nearest the power with a box, saying, “We never would get Nussbaum’s sorrel horse to step over that turning shaft. We have to hide it from him or the hames’ll fly, he’s that snickety.” He laughed, none too neighborly with Nussbaum, and took a chew of Indian Twist; offered it to Johnny with a wink and then to Snoose.

“Old Geppert is right. It was crazy, planting wheat, spring in, spring out.” Mr. Nussbaum tamped his pipe severely. “S’posing you get a bad year or the damned grasshoppers take it? It’s root-hog-or-die for the farmer then, by jippers. Or fire gets into your stacks and you get burnt out.” He helped Alb with the tumbling rods. There were four of them: a short one inclining from the gears; one under the sheltering box over which the horses passed; a third slanting up, supported in a notch on a tumbling block, a three-legged frame with one of the legs at a gentler pitch than the other two and notched to vary the angle of the rods; a fourth continuing the slant at a sharper angle and attached to the cylinder gear on the separator.

“It don’t pay, to depend on wheat alone.” Mr. Dunkel smiled speculatively. “You get yourself a bunch of cattle and some pigs and plant you some oats and barley, and whoop-Jinny-and-fall-down, you can feed the stuff to the critters and tell them elevator crooks to go suck a thumb.” Under a puff of breeze, chaff lifted from a corner on the separator and scattered, and the manure pile came strongly to their noses.

“Tell ya.” Uncle Herm spoke from the feeder. “A good stand of wheat – she’s a purty sight. And the clink of dollars – it warms your insides the whole winter. But it’s a poor crop this year.”

“With prices good now, they’re going in for it again, up here,” said Mr. Marchen. “Old Man Rose – he put wheat on every last acre he’s got. ‘Course, a cripple like that – it’s the easiest crop for him.”

“He got it hard, farming alone like that; him on crutches and his boy doing most of the work,” sympathized Mr. Dunkel. “His family’s living in town till he gets the place fixed up.”

“They’re moving out this winter, I hear,” said Mr. Marchen. “Wonder how his missus will like a log house. She’s a schoolteacher, or was. They got a little girl too.”

“No church members, them Roses,” pronounced Mr. Nussbaum grimly, as if that had dire significance. “Not one of the family is baptized.”

Mr. Marchen swung his long arms with the stubby fingers. “Hand me that wrench there, Schwartzie.”

Johnny hesitated, teeth all at once on edge; then obeyed, wanting to howl, “My name ain’t Schwartzie,” but shutting his mouth, remembering the bruise on Snoose’s cheek.

“A farmer surely is a dumb fool.” Mr. Nussbaum lit his pipe gloomily. “He risks the pockets in his pants on the seeds he scratches in the ground. And, by jippers, only God knows what’s between seed time and harvest – frost and stones and dry weather and chinch-bugs and grasshoppers – ach, corruption. If the grain don’t fill out in the head, where is he then? Where’s the money for shoes and flour and clothes –”

“Well, she’s tied down. We’re ready to hook up,” Alb yelled. “Get my team, Johnny.”

Johnny brought up Alb’s horses, guiding them smartly to the singletrees with a “Step over there now, Jerusalem.” Excitedly he ran for Mr. Nussbaum’s team. But Mr. Nussbaum shouted, “You leave them horses be; ain’t gonna have my team spoiled by a little hind-end like you.” Johnny dropped the lines as if they were red-hot pennies. His throat wobbled, a bubbling inside him that made him walk stiff-leggedly past Mr. Nussbaum’s glare.

Kurt sniggered, “Always getting your nose in trouble, ain’t ya?”

But Snoose, putting a hand on Johnny’s shoulder, said, “You got a good driving fist.”

Alb, overhearing, leaned near and added, “Sure thing, Johnny; best for your age I ever seen. Never mind Old Nussbaum. He was born with a crab in his teeth. Some day me and him are going to have trouble.” The bubbling died down.

Before a gear moved, Uncle Herm squinted at the weather and pointed. A ridge of cloud piled darkly under the sun. “There won’t be many bundles pitched before it wets down. But let ‘er fly, boys,” he ordered. “We’ll thrash what we got, poor as it is.”

Johnny felt the blood under his skin run faster. There was much shouting in the yard. Uncle Herm trotted, oil dribbling from a can. Alb roared, “Jeru-s’lem, you sawed off, runt-legged son of a blister, you, lag into the leather.” Mr. Dunkel bellowed at his team, backing the wagon near the grain tally. With a great clatter, the machine got into motion. (Years later, with the throttle of the steam engine rattling under his hand, Johnny would remember with yearning the clitter-clatter-clitter of the couplers – ‘knuckles,’ Alb called them: elbows of iron on the ends of the tumbling rods which slanted up to the separator. The strength of horses transformed by gears traveled along this dark shaft to the bevel wheel on the cylinder pinion.)

With excitement stirring his toes, Johnny ran restlessly nowhere and everywhere, sometimes alone, sometimes with Snoose and Kurt. They goggled at the figure-eights of belts, the spurt of dust from the fan, the gray blur of a wheel yellowed by straws whirling with the spokes. Johnny leaned to hear the click of the grain register as Mr. Dunkel slid another half-bushel basket through the measuring box.

A greasy, horny hand shoved him aside. “You get away from that tally box, now,” Mr. Schadel yelled at his ear. He ran to climb a grain wagon where Kurt and Snoose perched on the box edges like hawks and watched the bandcutters thrust their knives into the bundles and the feeder catch at the loosened straw; watched Alb Hukelpoke stand on the platform of the power and shoot a curl along the length of his snaky bull whip – a curl that exploded into a ‘crack’ over the horses’ rumps.

Sometimes he and Kurt carried water from the spring, cool and beading on the jug. Johnny was proud when Alb or a feeder called to him. Once he ran to ask Aunt Phrena for a tumbler of vinegar. Mr. Schadel and Mr. Dunkel liked their drink pungent with acid. They sloshed the brown liquid into the clear. He scampered to the granary where the wheat piled warmly in the bins.

But always (so it seemed to him) just before a cylinder choked with straw or a carrier stopped with a broken chain or a minor catastrophe brought quiet to the rig, Aunt Phrena shrieked, “Johnny! Johnn-ee! The woodbox is empty,” or “Kurt and Johnny! The cows broke out of the pasture. Run quick, or they’ll be in the corn.” He’d leave, eyes bobbling over his shoulder, reluctant, and miss the quickening flurry that ruffled over the crew, the calls flung from stack to stack: “What did he say got broke?” – “The shaker arm.” – “It was the shaker arm.” – “No, not the shaker arm; the straw rakes. They only got stuffed up.” – “Oh, hell! I thought we’d get a minute, anyway. My tail end aches.”

Dusk ended the threshing in the middle of a stack. The pitchers heaped the bundles against the prophecy of rain. Johnny milked in the dark, his eyes on the black hulk of the separator in the yard. A moon sailed before storm. From the haymow where some of the threshers bunked a moment of laughter lifted wildly in the night. Old Sport whoofed softly. Johnny carried the milk to the house. Afterward he left the chips he was gathering for kindling and came slowly to the power. And in the ring where the earth was ground to powder by the circling hoofs, he dragged his bare feet, the dust puffing coolly up between his warm toes. As he scrogged along under a moon riding suddenly into a clear space, he had a cloud of silver on his heels.

This story is an excerpt from Herbert Krause’s novel The Thresher. Krause was born on a farm among the hills of Friberg, near Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Until he was nineteen he ran his father’s farm with his brother’s help. The year he was twenty he teamed for a construction company, drove a span of horses and a scraper and watched a dam grow into a towering structure.

Meanwhile he worked summers, vacations and after hours in newspaper offices, for an advertising firm, as a hired man on a farm, shocking and threshing grain – doing anything that put an extra nickel in his pocket. The life of a threshing crew captured his imagination. He read everything he could lay hands on about threshing.

His first novel, Wind Without Rain, won the award of the Friends of American Writers, as the best book by a Midwestern author in 1939.

In June 1944 he was granted the University of Minnesota Regional Writing Fellowship in order to encourage his work on The Thresher.