Read Online The Unplowed Sky by Jeanne Williams - Free Book Online Page B

stand to see food go to waste—and, after all, it was me that crimped my back picking the stupid things.”
    â€œTell your ma we’re much obliged.” Shaft ignored Sophie’s complaint. “If she’ll keep track, Garth’ll pay her when we move on, or subtract what we owe from the threshin’ fee.”
    â€œYou bet he will!” Sophie gazed out toward the threshers with mingled anger and what Hallie thought was frustrated longing. “Thresherman gets his fee even if that doesn’t leave us enough money to plant this fall.”
    â€œDon’t see how that can happen, Miss Sophie.” Shaft’s tone was patient. “Garth reckoned your pa’s grain is threshin’ out to around forty-fifty bushels an acre. That’ll put some money in the bank.”
    Sophie’s lip curled. “That’ll pay on the loan we had to take out two years ago when wet weather made the wheat rust. What that and bugs didn’t ruin, hail did. We got only about nine bushels an acre.”
    â€œWell, Garth didn’t make anything either, since he takes every twelfth bushel as pay. Nineteen-twenty-two was a rotten year,” Shaft commiserated. “But you folks ain’t the onliest ones with a mortgage.”
    â€œI still don’t think that thresherman’s lien law is fair!”
    â€œWell, Miss Sophie, the reason the wheat states and Canadian provinces passed some kind of lien laws is that quite a few farmers wouldn’t pay up when the threshin’ was over.”
    â€œPa always paid!”
    â€œSure he did. So the law makes no never-mind to him.”
    Sophie climbed into the flivver, displaying plenty of shapely leg, and drove off as fast as she could. “Sure hope Garth stays clear of her,” Shaft declared. “That’s one mean female in spite of her soft look. Well, we better get to it, Hallie.”
    She peeled a dishpan of potatoes, strung and snapped a big kettle of green beans and baked three pineapple pies with juice oozing through the latticed crusts to turn golden brown. After Shaft took his luscious-smelling burnt-sugar cake out of the oven, she produced a heap of oatmeal cookies for morning lunch and mopped the floor.
    Shaft tended two big skillets of frying chicken while Hallie chopped two cabbages into slaw and made biscuits and mashed potatoes. As if the success of the meal depended on him, Jackie held up fingers as he counted out plates, cups, and utensils and set the table. Hallie had scarcely filled the washbasins and put out clean towels when the whistle sounded.
    It was 6:30, only about three hours since the men had demolished a big lunch, but they devoured chicken, biscuits, and mounds of vegetables as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Conversation was limited to a terse “Please pass the smashed ’taters,” or “Shoot the biscuits this way, will you?” It was only with chunks of pie, hunks of cake, and second or third or fourth cups of coffee that the men relaxed.
    â€œGarth,” said Cotton Harris, “reckon Quent Raford meant what he said about gettin’ his own threshin’ outfit?”
    Garth nodded.
    Cotton meditated while he forked up cake and pie in the same bite and announced the result with a blissful sigh before his brow puckered. “He’s taken over a bunch of quarter-section farms along with his big one. That’ll be a sight of bushels we won’t thresh.”
    â€œYep. As I recall we threshed out about thirty thousand bushels for Raford last year and it was a bad year, too.”
    â€œIt’ll hurt to lose that three thousand dollars.”
    Garth put down his fork and looked at Cotton. “Are you saying that because you men get a share of the profits that I should have asked you to vote on whether we knuckled under to Raford and threshed him first?”
    â€œI vote to hell with Raford!” Buford Redding growled, his light brown eyes come to