Let’s see, what else. The smell of a wood fire, in the kitchen stove and the pot-bellied stove in the living room. The smell of the oil my father used to lubricate the machinery he sold. The smell of a fresh blackberry pie left to cool on a windowsill. The smell of the lilac toilet water my mother used every day, and the smell of the tiny, red roses that grew on a trellis alongside the house. The smell of sweat-soaked farmers in town for the day. There were no water heaters back then, no washing machines. Washing clothes was a day-long chore. You had to heat water on the kitchen stove, scrub the clothes on an old-fashioned wooden washboard, rinse out the soap—which was lye-based and caustic—in clean water, then hang the clothes out to dry. Gracious, there wasn’t even electricity outside of the town itself. Most farmers bathed once a week and they smelled like it, too.
What I’m gettin’ to, in my old-man way, is a memory that’s still sharp even though I couldn’t have been much more than five years old when it happened.
Cut hay smells good, plain and simple, whether the hay is timothy grass or alfalfa. Neither one, though, can stand alongside the smell of newly cut clover. There’s a poet named Robert Frost who described cutting clover as “the sweetest dream that labor knows,” and I can’t claim to disagree. I can remember times when the family gathered on the front porch after supper, sipping lemonade. This was on hot nights, before the house cooled enough to allow for sleep. The smell of cut clover would come drifting on the night breeze from the farms across the creek, and Momma would shake her head and laugh.
“Somebody needs to put that in a bottle,” she’d say. “It puts lilacs to shame and makes the daffodils blush.”
CHAPTER 2
Haying season in farm country is all about speed and cooperation. You have to cut and stack the hay before it rains, which is not a job for one man or even one family. In my day, farm families took turns helping each other. Town folks turned out as well—including my dad, who hoped to sell machinery to the farmers. Talk about hard work, especially for townies who weren’t used to such grueling manual labor.
Minnesota’s not a state blessed with a friendly climate. I’ve already said how the winters were bitter cold, which you’d think would mean the summers were mild. That wasn’t the case. No, sir. Haying took place in July, when temperatures reached ninety degrees in the shade. Sweat? You don’t know the meaning of the word till you’ve spent a day raking newly cut hay into haycocks or loading hay bales onto a wagon bed.
My point here is not to complain about the hard work. In fact, the memory I’m workin’ at happened when I was too young to help out much. I was brought along because this was Momma’s baking day and she didn’t want me underfoot. What I saw on that day has stuck with me for a lifetime.
By the time I had made my appearance on this planet, most farmers had switched from hand tools to machinery, horse-drawn side mowers, and side rakes that let a single farmer, perched up on a seat, do the work of ten men. Not Thomas Beckmeyer and his boys, though. They sweated for every stalk, wielding their scythes—Bear County Minnesotans called ’em sighs—hour after hour. As if they were born to it.
We started out right after breakfast. My father hitched our horse, named Cinnamon, to the small wagon we used for deliveries. Off we went—my father, Annie, and I—leaving Momma behind. The day was already warm, the sun bright in a cloudless sky. Main Street was still quiet, and it would remain that way until haying season was over. Only the town barber, Carl Golson, was about. He was perched at the top of an extension ladder that reached the roof of his little shop, paintbrush in hand.
“Howdy, Samuel,” he said as we passed by. “Thought I’d catch up on the chores while the catchin’ was good.”
“That’s fine, Carl,” my dad replied. “Maybe after you finish, you could do my place next.”
“With that strong, young man sittin’ next you? No, sir, you don’t need my help.”
We were past the barber shop and almost out of town before I realized Mr. Golson was referring to me.
Now, I know I said Louristan was the county seat. The courthouse was located on Main Street, and we had two doctors, a dentist, and two lawyers. But Louristan was still a small town by American standards. Main Street, which ran all of three hundred yards, featured two clothing stores, a meat market, two grocery stores, a small restaurant, a bank, a feed store, my dad’s shop, and churches for the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, and Seventh Day Adventists. A pair of taverns, the blacksmith’s forge, the livery stable, and the Bear County Clarion were located on our two side streets, First and Second. The grain elevator and the creamery were down by the railroad station at the southern edge of town. They were cooperatives even back then, the farmers organizing to counter the power of the mills and the railroad to dictate prices.
Beyond the edge of town, all was cultivated fields and woodlots. It didn’t take long to cross the little, stone bridge spanning the creek and be out in what Dad called the country.
“Tell me again, Annie, what we’re gonna do?” I remember asking.
“We’re going to rake the windrows.”
“Windows?”
“No, windrows.”
“What’re windrows again?”
“I’ve already explained it five times.”
“Tell me one more time and I won’t ask again.”
“Lucas, you are an exceptionally tedious child.”
Annie was five years older than I, a world-weary girl saddled with looking after her little brother when our parents released us for play. Myself, I figured all sisters were bossy by nature, and I didn’t argue with her.
Haying season had only just begun and the fields we passed were lush with hay—timothy grass the most common, but also clover and alfalfa. Timothy grass produces a long flower stalk lined with pink-purple blossoms. With the breeze moving through acres and acres of the grass, the fields I stared at were a magic carpet—at least they were to me at that moment. I’d played in timothy grass, even chewed on the stalks, a habit Annie pronounced common but I’d never seen it exactly that way. The grass swayed and recovered with the ebb and fall of the breeze, giving way, coming back, as if the grass and the wind had cut some kind of deal. I remember the stalks were bright green, like they were proud to be alive, and the flowers rose at the ends of the stalks like the tail feathers on a peacock.
I was impressed enough to stay pretty quiet on the short ride to the Beckmeyer farm. Not so Annie, who argued, as she’d done the night before, that she should have been left behind to do the baking so Momma could open the store. This was ridiculous because no farmers purchased machinery—or much of anything else in town—in July. All their energies were directed toward cutting and curing the hay before it rained.
My dad was a talkative man back then, back in the good years—talkative by nature. I suspect that was why he chose to live in town. If he’d followed in his father’s footsteps and stayed on the farm, he’d likely have talked to the horses. The answer he gave my sister, then, was the same he’d already given two or three times.
“Think for a minute about life without farmers, Annie. You’re old enough now.”
And I wasn’t, obviously. I kept my mouth shut, and Dad went on without so much as glancing in my direction.
“That roof over your head? The one that keeps you warm in the winter and dry in the rain? That roof wouldn’t be there if farmers didn’t buy the machinery I sell. And the food your momma sets on the table, the food that keeps your stomach full? Farmers provide that, too,