Lambsquarters (22 page)

I was once told by a classmate about a poem by Keats on ploughing, though I can’t find it in any concordance. It could be a rural myth, but rural myths don’t tend to run to Keats. I first heard of the poem in my student days, when I wrote about pigs in James Joyce. “The Boarding House,” a story in
Dubliners
, is full of swine imagery, and I called on my farming lore to note it. Gilt just means gold-plated to most readers. But every farmer knows that a gilt is a young female pig.
A gilt to a sow is what a heifer is to a cow, that saucy teenage stage before the first lying in. So I realized the metaphor of the golden clock on the mantel, the nubile daughter suddenly pregnant, the boar hiding in the ding house. And my rural colleague recalled the Keats poem.

It hinges, he claimed, on the trajectory of the plough, round and round the field to the centre. But that’s not how the plough—or the harrow or the double disc or the haybine or the corn planter or even the combine—travels. It’s never that simple. Perhaps Keats, if he wrote such a poem at all, dreamed his ploughing picture, watching the nightingale rather than the lark.

The method of striking into a field, whether to open it up or clear it off, has always been a mystery to me. Fields are ploughed and planted in rows. You can see the furrows between the crowns, thick gullies between clods of rich earth, almost black in November greys. The furrows glisten in frost, are snow-rowed in winter, hard-packed and regular with the turn of the plough. Each share on the plough cuts into the earth and angles down. The mouldboard lifts and turns, flicks over soil the way a spatula folds cake batter, tunnels ahead leaving earthen gullies, running crowns. Still, fully formed, the field is armed from the ground for wintertime, when nothing new grows or feeds. The grasses, stover, weeds or stubble are sent to the underground. They descend into darkness and wither,
deracinated, disjointed and dead.

There is pleasure in making the furrows—practised far from the road by the novice, in fields landlocked and safe from neighbours’ eyes. The patterns are visible only from above, where hawks search the fencerows for mice, or seagulls focus behind the plough, diving for unearthed and bisected worms. Only when the skill is perfected will the plougher move to the roadside field, daring to put the results on display. There is pride in a straight furrow. Pride in all the work of farming. And every fall there are contests. Not just big ones, where implements are drummed and business is done and the whole of agriculture seems to turn into a marqueed mall with muddy floors, but also small matches on individual farms. Heavy horses and single-furrow ploughs. Reins and harness and rubber boots. Rain and toques and jostled arms as the shares dig and slide, the mouldboards turn the terrain, and the jolts of the horses, the stones, the inclines and declines move up through the hands to the tendons and muscles of well-veined arms, still tanned from summer chores and roughly calloused from constant use. And almost every roadside field is a contest. Every furrow is on view to every pickup truck driving by. For farmers notice, they observe, and they take note.

I DETERMINED
to learn the pattern of fields. The flying Dutchman duly arrived while I was at my desk at the
window, overlooking the field so close to my own. The leaves gone, the sky bleak, my work innocuous, I took up my pen and paper and plotted a graph of his route. I took up two pens, a blue and a red, and began to draw the pattern of the field on the page with arrows for direction.

A pitchfork in hand, he paced an eighth of the way into the field at the top end, stopped, and dug in the fork. Back to the tractor, he paced again from the lower edge of the field with a stake (a broken hockey stick, its telltale tape intact) marking a straight line from start to finish, from stake to fork, fork to stake. Between the road and the first cut into the land he left a space of grassy stubble, wide enough for turning the full length of tractor and plough. “Headlands,” they are called, and they are two-headed beasts, guarding the field at both ends. The plough does not travel round and round to the centre, but manoeuvres the headlands to return to parallel lines, up one side and down the other of the field.

The first cut appears where the ploughman decides to strike out. Discs ahead of the plough, or iron blades in times past, cut into the earth for the share to enter and the mouldboard to turn. They are called coulters, and they precede every blade of the plough, act as gatekeepers to the earth, keys to its locked thatch of summer vegetation.

My grandfather’s name was Coulter. Coulter M
^c
Lean. He was born two generations away from the
plough: two after, for his grandfather was a farmer, and two before, as I came back to the land only a county away from the homesteading M
^c
Leans. And I wonder if he knew that his name meant more than the relative he was called after.

My neighbour’s is a five-furrow plough. Five coulters, five mouldboards with five ploughshares: one a piece. The mouldboard is not a board at all anymore, though once it would have been made of oak or elm, the iron share bolted on. The Egyptians developed the plough from a crude hand-held stick into an implement pulled by animals, and the Greeks added wheels. In times of war Hellenic ploughshares were co-opted, their iron shaped into weapons. Ares led the fight while Demeter mourned for her lost daughter. The land was idle, the grain neither sewn nor reaped. The plough just a distant constellation in the peaceful night sky.

With his Dutch heritage, my neighbour can take pride in his shiny plough; its prototype was conceived in Holland in the Renaissance. With a slimmer shape and lighter coulters and mouldboard plates, the plough was easy to use and inexpensive, making it popular and available. My neighbour, when he came to Canada, brought his history with him, having ploughed with his horse as a boy, the reins tucked under his arm or over his shoulder, the shares skimming through the low nether land devoid of rocks.

When he arrived in the township he was told the
field beside my farm could not be ploughed. Impossible. That first year he marked every rock, every boulder that broke a shear pin on his plough, and the field was dotted with stakes like an apple orchard newly planted with saplings. It took a backhoe to dig the rocks out, one at a time, and they filled a swale in the pond-field beyond. One by one he dug them out and dropped them into the bog, where they sank down through vegetation to disappear forever. Or until the next glacier.

He pulled the rocks and he ploughed the field. And he’s ploughed it every year since; after seasons of grain, then corn, now grain again, oats and barley mixed, budded or bearded and swaying in June winds, feed for his cattle, bedding for his sheep, golden sheen for my eye on summer mornings when dawn’s rosy fingers reach it first on my eastern horizon.

HE EXPLAINS
it all to me now, how the plough works, where shares meet mouldboards, how the coulters cut through the tangle of twitch and milkweed and stubble of the field floor, and guide the share through the newly sprouted grain, turning it in the furrow. He tells me about the dead furrow, that double gully where divergent directions of the plough meet. One side of the field moulds the furrows to the right, the other side to the left. When they finally meet, the furrow deepens, widens, forms a split in the field with no crown. Crownless, the furrow is dead.

His plough leaves a sixteen-inch track, more than twice the width horses could manage, their strength limited, finite. Their feet an average seven inches wide, they pulled ploughs with furrow widths of six to nine inches, and when the seed was scattered it fell to the notch and sprouted in rows just far apart enough for the horse to walk through. When the cultivator weeded or the binder harvested, the horse could lead without stepping on the crop.

Horses are now packed by the hundreds into powerful diesels, their four-foot walk turned into four-wheel drive. Twenty inch rows, on twenty-furrowed ploughs— wider than equine imagination. Monsters you can’t buy new for twenty thousand dollars, and can’t sell used for ten thousand. With new innovations the plough might go the way of the horse, only brought out a few times a year, testament to a past when the land was new, unbroken, resistant, but made to yield to that cutting edge.

While my Dutch-born neighbour takes pride in the cut of the share, the turn of the mouldboard, the straight furrow laid even from south to north, in easing his plough over the
geeren
, that triangular section inherent in an uneven field that no English word names, the sixth generation Harris boy wants only to make the earth black. There are no prizes given for fancy ploughmanship in the daily chore, and he is disdainful of what he calls “recreational ploughing.” Like his grandfather before him (an excellent farmer, an infelicitous ploughman), he takes off the coulters,
drags cornstalks in a braided rope of bedraggled dross, their gold spent and gone, paid to the combine in dues. The way of the future is to conserve the earth with no-till planting and save fuel with fewer passes of machinery. Yields increase as the years pass. The plough sits rusting in the yard, its shares ironically craving dirt to make them shine.

A third neighbour, whose ancestors first opened crown land, who farms still on the fields claimed from the forest by his grandfathers, prefers to plough in a tractor with an open cab, needing to hear the sound of the plough, its music. He uses a three-furrow plough, and drops the
d
in the mould of his boards, visualizing them as moles running through his fields. And he bemoans the destruction of earthworms, regrets their dissection by the shares as he cuts through the field, and indicates his intense connection with the land. Involved. Implicated.

HARVESTS STRETCH
through the season. Winter wheat is planted to root before the dark days underground, spurt in spring and be reaped just after hay, the very first crop to come off the fields. Spring seeding happens early in well-drained land. Tractors ply the furrows or drill the stubble; the weeds are turned under or chemically euthanized, their enzymes inhibited, photosynthesis blocked. The browning of Canada. Haying starts with the first growth spurt, when the grass jumps overnight, the legumes unfold their
fronds and the earth allows the forage harvesters to traverse its surface, which is still unstable from deep frosts and spring runoffs, sports stone patterns where none lay in fall. The haylage flies from the spout, augured from below, and sails into covered wagons, small boxcars that trundle up and down the roads, now empty, now full, back to the home farms to bunkers or silos. The herbal tea ferments and condenses, fodder for livestock who lick their chops and salivate at the scent.

When the fields are dryer, hay is baled, either square or round, thrown or stuck, tossed or piled, tied or sheathed. The sound of the baler each sunny afternoon,
chunk-a-chunk-a-clunk-thwap
, sings late into light-filled evenings.

But the grain harvest is somehow best when you can watch the old ways as we did when we first arrived in the area. The binder and stooker across the road, the sheaves tied and plied, small idols to Demeter, fair bouquets pointing skyward. The grain in a spray on strong straw stalks, waiting to be threshed on the barn floor and winnowed in a wondrous display of grain from chaff.

LAMBSQUARTERS ISN’T
big enough to grow grain. The sheep need our fields for pasture and hay. We can improve our pasture by fertilizing with manure and by rotating the animals from field to field to keep the weeds down and the grasses healthy, but our hay periodically needs to be replenished. Legumes don’t live forever.
When we first had the Hayfield ploughed, we seeded it down with alfalfa and timothy, but underseeded with oats and barley, a thin mixture, which would jump ahead of the hay, shelter it from hot sun, nurture it along and crowd out the weeds. It is called a nurse crop. Before the legumes had time to blossom, the grain was grown, tall golden strands, their heads swaying in a progressing wave with each heavy gust of summer wind.

One of the Harrises came in a combine to harvest our crop. The header cut into the swath, winnowed out the grain, augured it up into the bin and left the straw behind in windrows to be gathered later and baled. And when the gold was gone from the field, the green began. Small plants unfolded, the grass grew straight, and before long the mix of clover and alfalfa blossoms purpled the green like crown jewels. It lay in the field, finding its feet, not to be harvested until the following year.

The grain filled one side of our granary. But the storehouse’s tin lining was thin and worn, and the rats found their way in, brought their friends, their relatives, and moved beyond the barn and into the house that autumn. I was shocked by the sight of a large brown rodent on the basement wall, and Thomas was horrified at the thought that his home was invaded. He felt lax in his duties. The exterminators were sent for, the rats done in.

CORN, THE NAME
for all cereal grains elsewhere, is native in Ontario, distinctive. Here the maize gets tall enough for mazes to be cut through it. The academic agriculturalists once said it wouldn’t grow in our area because of the elevation, and the heat units it needs. But it just grew taller and closer to the sun in the township fields, defying the experts and delighting the raccoons who raid the fields for cobs. A late crop, corn takes longer to get past the green stage than wheat or mixed grains. We watch it grow in our neighbours’ acres after their other fields have been harvested, ploughed, put to bed for winter. And it has various uses in the vicinity—cob corn stored in cribs, or silage hunkering down in a bank bunker—but much of it is grown for its kernels, pure gold nuggets of cash crop.

I had never been in a combine. I had driven the old Ford 8N, ridden the wooden seed drill, spent more time than I’d have liked on the hay wagon. I wanted to experience the harvest for myself, so I arranged to ride as a passenger in the Harrises’ huge John Deere, which was as green and gold as the crop itself and a couple of storeys high. Just around the corner from home I found the young farmer harvesting the perimeter of his great-grandad’s field, for the combine starts on the edge. He’s a tame titan of a man, who loves his work but is always ready to chat. A sixth-generation Harris, whose two baby sons make the seventh. His aunt, whose corn it was, climbed down from the rig, grinning. “I
always like to ride that first round,” she said. “It’s the only one I get all day, what with bringing the wagons back and forth.” And the combine drove up to her tractor, poured out its first silken crop, ribbons of peach melba as the corn flew unfocused from the bin and out the chute of the monster machine into the grain wagon. She hauled the wagon away when it was full, to unload at her home place.