us?” he asked.
Bob was a veteran pea man, having cut his teeth at the old pea viner. The viners were in use in the era before the pea combines had come into common usage. Pea vining was a labour-intensive process. The pea vines were cut in the field using swathers. They were then loaded onto trucks by men using pitchforks.
“Never let the fork touch the ground,” they were told. “Keep it moving.”
The men loaded the pea vines onto trucks, using their long-handled pitch forks, which were then hauled to the pea-vining plant on trucks, where they were again pitch-forked off. Bob had enormous forearms and shoulders, the product of loading trucks in the field, or pitch-forking them off the truck and onto the conveyor belt that led from the back of the dump trucks that hauled peas there. The conveyor belt carried the pea vines into the factory, where the peas were separated from the vines inside the building. There, giant threshing units were doing what the pea combines now did in the field, separating the peas from the vines and pods. Bob worked at the Elmstead pea-viner, then later at the Essex plant.
“Boy! You’re sure lucky you’re driving a pea combine,” he said to Anthony. “Imagine forking vines all day. We were paid fifty-cents per truckload. I used to throw a whole truckload off in a half-hour, then climb over and help the other guys finish theirs. The secret is: never let the pitchfork stop moving.”
Anthony agreed it was nice the pea combines had now replaced the pea-viners, but he didn’t really know. He liked Bob. Bob made him feel like he belonged there. He didn’t treat him like a rookie. He was not down-grading him. Bob accepted him and made him feel accepted.
“Thanks, Bob,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll have a lot of questions for you before the day is over.”
“No problem,” Bob replied, “No problem.”
Anthony walked further. He noticed the field furrows that ran in both directions, perpendicular to each other across the field. The east-west furrows were deeper than the north-south furrows, evidence they had run a lot of water. Anthony noticed that no peas were growing in the furrows there.
“I’ll bet they put the furrows in after planting in order to drain excess surface water from the field after heavy rainfall events,” Anthony thought as he kept walking through the field.
He noticed that the windrows thickened on the silty, black land he encountered from place to place in the field. His feet sank in it, among the tangle of pea vines. He noticed how the pea pods were extra long, extra plump there. He stopped to pick one and again noticed how sweet the peas were in this part of the field.
“You got any land like that at home?” Kurt called over.
Anthony chuckled. “Not like that,” he said, as he bent over again to pick a few pea pods.
“Is that what you have in the lunch bag you’re carrying?” Kurt asked, “pea pods.”
“No,” replied Anthony as he fumbled with the large brown paper bag. “Want some?” he called over as he unwrapped what Kurt thought was a sandwich.
“Sure,” he said, as he had been at the field a while already.
Anthony had gotten up early. He went out to the barn to do the morning chores. He gave the cattle a little extra ensilage that morning, thinking he might get home late, then went into the house, boiled an enormous pot of oatmeal and laid it out on several flat pans. He then cut it into strips, six inches long and two inches wide. They reminded him of Rice Krispe squares.
“Just like a hotdog,” he said to Kurt.
“Glad to know that,” Kurt replied. “It’s nice to have a change once in a while. I get tired of eating peas.”
“Why is that?” Anthony asked and they both laughed, as they ate their oatmeal rectangles.
“Are you here just for the day?” Kurt asked.
“Yeah--just for the day,” Anthony replied.
“Just for the day, every day maybe, like the rest of us,” Kurt added, “You know this place can grow on you.”
“Oh,” said Anthony, not thinking at the time that he would ever come back, because he was too busy working at the cattle farm. The two men, now colleagues, then walked over to a combine.
Kurt showed him how to work the combine. “This button revs up the engine. This lever throws it into gear,” he said without taking a breath. “But, be careful! Pare, pare la maquina, saque las laves de la maquina antes de trabajar en esta lugar,” he read from the Spanish sign on the front of the machine.
“I have no idea what is says,” he added, “but it is there in big letters for you to see. So, be careful. It must say, ‘watch out’ and ‘be careful’ or something like that, because the words are written in dark, black print with yellow paint around them,” Kurt said. They both laughed as he said it.
“Now, when you get a full hopper of peas, called a ‘dump’, by the men, put on the yellow light. That signals the truck to come over. If you don’t put on the yellow light, the truck won’t come over. You’ll just sit here on your tractor seat until a white hat sees you sitting there. He’ll really give you the gears for sitting there, if you’re there long, so pull on the light.”
Kurt continued, “Now this lever pushes the tank that holds the peas out of the main frame of the combine and out over the truck. This one tips it up into the air to dump the peas, but don’t pull this lever until you have opened the trap door. If you don’t open the trap door to let the peas fall out, the weight of them will spring the track and break the machine. Both men laughed as they imagined the golden, green peas rushing out of the combine tank into the truck.
“That’ll be something to see, I’ll bet--when they run out of the tank,” he added.
“You bet,” Kurt replied, “you never get tired of that.” Kurt then said, his voice rising in alarm, “Better get over to your machine. Act like you’re cleaning it up. Take my hockey stick. It’s a Sunoco special.”
“Thanks,” said Anthony, as he tramped over several windrows of peas toward his machine. “I’m a combine cowboy now,” he said to himself, not sure what to make of it.
Anthony climbed onto the step of the tractor, his hockey stick in hand. This was the first sign he was new at the job. The other drivers stored their sticks in a metal shaft at the front of the combine. They rarely carried the stick onto their tractors, unless they had some kind of play in mind, such as shooting peas from the fender of their tractors at a passing driver. The hockey sticks were usually needed to unclog pea vines at the combine pick up, so they left them there.
Anthony took another step onto the platform of the tractor, slid his inner leg through the space between the seat and steering wheel, and sat down, stretching his arms over his head, each hand gripping the hockey stick tightly. He then shifted the tractor into gear, let out the clutch, and stalled it.
“I hope I can get it started,” he said as he pushed in the tractor clutch with his left leg, turned the key, and pressed the starter. The diesel engine started immediately, belching black smoke into the air, as a relieved Anthony eased up on the throttle and shifted the tractor again into low gear. This time, however, he let the clutch out slowly to avoid stalling it again as the tractor started forward. He then turned the tractor and combine into a windrow, accelerated the combine engine,
