Free Dry Divide by Ralph Moody Page B

table when we went in—exactly the same things we’d had for supper and breakfast—and Judy was clearing away Hudson’s dirty dishes. She looked up and smiled, started to say something, then stopped with her lips pinched tightly together as if she were having to hold it back. After she’d put on a clean plate and cup she sat down and helped herself to a potato, a biscuit, and some gravy, but she just shook her head when I passed her the platter of boar pork. The other fellows ate it for the same reason I did, but there was hardly a word said during the meal.
    We stuffed in as much of the nauseating grub as we could stomach, left the table, and went out to sit in the narrow strip of shade on the north side of the house, glad of the half hour’s rest before it would be time to go back to the field. Hudson was at the header, hammering rivets into the spliced old conveyor belt, and barely let us sit down before he yelled, “Get them horses hitched up! What you loafin’ there fore? I’ve lost time enough a’ready!”
    When Hudson yelled the other fellows all looked toward me, so I said, “Let’s do it. If we’d quit now we wouldn’t come out any better than the boys did, and maybe I can get things straightened out by morning. If not, we’ll quit then. Is that fair enough?” No one answered, but they all got to their feet.
    No matter how tough a decent farmer may be with his hired help, he’ll give his horses a full hour’s rest at noon. And even though he may be stingy in the table he sets, he’ll see that his horses are well fed and watered. The amount of feed Hudson had sent in from the field wasn’t more than half enough for thirteen horses, and they were fighting each other away from the last few straws when we went to the corral for them.
    The afternoon went a little better for the fellows on the barges, but worse than ever for the horses—and it wasn’t too easy for me. I don’t know how hot it might have been that afternoon, but well above 110°, and there wasn’t a breath of air stirring. Fortunately, the drivers carried water jugs, wrapped in a wet sack and hung under the barge. Each time a load came in I must have drunk a pint. I sweated it out almost as fast as I drank it, and the more I sweat the more stinging beards stuck to my skin.
    Hudson didn’t waste any time yelling at the barge crews, and they didn’t give him anything he could yell about. Their job, like mine, grew harder as the stack grew taller, but Hudson never had to wait one minute for an empty barge. And except for a few breakdowns, he didn’t wait for anything else. Even if he’d had well-seasoned horses, heavy enough for the oversized header, the pace he was setting would have been nearly enough to kill them. For the ones he was driving it was nothing short of torture, and as they began to slow down he poured the blacksnake onto their backs. By mid-afternoon every horse in the header teams had zebra stripes, but they’d reached the point where they didn’t even jump when the whip hit them, and with each round I noticed that they’d slowed their pace a bit more.
    As the sun sunk lower all the spirit drained out of Hudson’s horses. They plodded along like benumbed, half-frozen cattle in a blizzard, too exhausted to pay the least attention to the whip. That was probably all that saved the pitchers and me from keeling over in the heat, for as the horses slowed it gave us time to catch a couple of minute’s rest between each load.
    I don’t believe there were a dozen words spoken between the crew that afternoon, except, “Pass the jug, will you?” We’d all made up our minds to see the day through, and we were doing it just about as the header horses were. The sun was just setting, so it must have been about half-past-seven, when Hudson finished the last swath of the quarter-mile-square field, then without