green pea conveyor belt above the holding tank. No peas were coming out. He proceeded about fifty feet down the field, uncertain whether to continue or not, because he didn’t want to plug the machine. Then it happened. Peas came out--masses of them. Shiny, green peas, fresh out of their pods, rolled off of the conveyor belt, into the holding tank. The peas made a very soft sound as they hit the tin bottom of the tank and sent up a sweet aroma as they settled into the bottom of the tank.
Anthony was really enjoying his first sight of freshly threshed peas, when he felt a tug at the arm of his jean jacket. It startled him.
“Hey!” he gasped. It was Lyle.
“Hey, Anthony, you better lift up that pea pickup on the front of the combine. Do you see the way it is raking the ground as it picks up the pea vines? You’re going to break prongs that way and you’re going to pick up stones and worse, it’s going to wrap pea vines around the pickup, so you’ll start and stop all day to unplug them. The trick is to get the pea vines flowing in and then lift it so the prongs clear the ground as it turns. The pea vines will pull themselves in that way.”
“Okay,” Anthony said, not listening to the whole speech.
He had gone about one quarter of the way down the row, when he noticed that some pea vines had collected at the corner of the mouth of the pickup.
“I better clear them out,” he said to himself, as he reached for his hockey stick.
He had noticed the other drivers jump from their tractors, leaving them in gear, moving ahead slowly, as they hurried to the combine to clear out the vines. Anthony decided to try it; only, he didn’t jump. Instead, he lowered the hockey stick and stepped carefully from the platform to the top step with one arm braced on the fender of the tractor, the other holding the hockey stick loosely. Just as he was about to take a careful jump, his stick caught on a tractor tire lug and drove the butt-end of it squarely into his stomach. Anthony gasped, as the stick planted itself squarely in the pit of his stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Anthony dropped to the ground, unable to breathe. The tractor wheel grabbed at the side of his shoe, but pushed it away rather than dragging it under. Anthony summoned his strength, got up, hurried to the combine, unplugged the vines, but this time, he left the stick there, as the other men did.
Still unable to breathe, Anthony stumbled to one knee, hobbled forward, caught the fender of the tractor, pulled himself onto the seat, and shut the tractor off.
“Wow! That was close!” he said to himself, as he tried to regain his composure.
Lyle, who had seen the stumble and fall, hurried over.
“Are you alright?” he started to say, fully intending to remind Anthony to read the warning sign on the front of the combine and to heed the warning. He wanted to say that, but didn’t, because another combine nearby, just then, had put on the mechanic light.
So instead, he said, “I’ve gotta go fix that combine. We don’t want to lose any production.”
It didn’t matter that he forgot to say “read the warning sign.” It was in Spanish anyway.
The rest of the day went pretty smoothly for Anthony. He succeeded in unloading his bin full of peas a few times. He got shot by peas from the fender of a passing tractor. He felt welcomed by the horse play. Lyle never came back to warn him of anything else. The day was a good one. The crew went home early that day, at eight p.m.
As they were leaving the field, Keith, the tractor owner, came over and said, “Hey, you did alright today. If you want to drive the tractor full-time for the rest of the season, you can.”
“I do,” Anthony replied, surprising himself with his answer.
“Okay then, I’ll count on you.” It was that easy. Anthony was now a full-time pea combine operator.
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