Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

afternoon he could manage the bales with the rest of them, but his very bones seemed to ache, and at lunchtime he wished desperately for a place to catch fifteen minutes’ sleep. The other boys played baseball, and, finishing his sandwich, he got up and joined them.

The air was so thick with hazy moisture that afternoon that it was like sticking your head into a hot, sticky pond and trying to breathe. The direct sun was almost unbearable and the backsof his arms ached from exposure. Some of the boys worked with their shirts off and were as brown as nuts with hard, lean stomach muscles.

When the others came back from the barn with another empty wagon, they asked for someone else to come up in the mow. July could see that it must be a disagreeable job because no one volunteered, but he thought at least it would be out of the sun and went along with them.

It turned out to be worse than anything he could ever have imagined. If it was a hundred degrees in the sun, it was an extra twenty or thirty in the barn, where there was no circulation of air whatsoever and the dark roof had had all morning to fry it. As for the humidity, there was simply no comparison. Out in the field was like a cool desert. Two other boys stood with him and waited, talking gloomily; one explained to the other the bad luck he’d been having with girls for the last three years. When July saw what was going to happen, his heart nearly folded up. Lifted by a pulley system pulled by a tractor, suspended from four large hooks, a bundle of eight bales came up, filling the upper door; it caught on the runners and moved into the loft, coming toward them, maybe twelve feet overhead. It came closer until it was almost directly above, then one of the boys beside him called, “Now,” and someone outside pulled the trip rope, releasing the hooks and letting the bales fall. A tremendous cloud of hay dust filled the entire barn, sticking to the sweat on their arms and faces and, except for the hairs in their noses, would have layered their lungs. The two boys rushed forward into the densest part of this cloud, dragging the bales away from where they’d fallen and stacking them along the sides of the barn. July followed suit and managed to get two of them at the expense of nearly twisting his ankle in a hole between two loosely stacked bales, as they were of course walking on layers of already stacked hay. No sooner had he pulled the two bales over to where the other boys had stacked theirs than one of them yelled, “Now,” and almost from nowhere there appeared eight more, which fell into the same places, andthey rushed forward again to clear them away before the next bundle.

“It gets better,” said one of them to July, his face almost completely black with gobs of the tiny pieces of leaf hanging from his nostrils, “when we get the level up so the bales don’t have to fall so far.” July looked. The mow was maybe fifty feet wide, and a third again that long. To go up only three and a half feet would take two layers of bales, 24,500 cubic feet of hay. They had just enough time, working as fast and hard as they could, nearly choking on the dust, to clear away the eight bales before another load fell down. July had made up his mind that each time he would carry three bales back, but there were many times when Jack and Bonesy would get the extra ones and he was thankful for that when it happened.

After an unimaginably long time there came a shout from outside, telling them that the wagon was empty. It meant a ten-minute break while waiting for the next, and they scrambled down the ladder and outside. In the pump house they washed with the hose and drank long, deep mouthfuls, running the water through their hair and over the backs of their necks. Then they sat in the shade of the pump-house wall and July felt as though he’d never known real relief before. He also felt a great sense of comradeship with his two fellow workers and imagined they felt the same—which wasn’t actually true, he noticed later; when they talked together, it was different from when they talked with him. Furthermore, it was just another day for them.

July found that reflection upon any subject was impossible with such fatigue; that in itself was a novelty, and he indulged in having no thoughts and seeing the world through the eyes of an ox. That night he was almost too tired to eat and fell asleep in the rocking chair at eight o’clock. Getting up in the morning was unbearable, even at nine, but he managed it. The hay was still too wet from the dew to bale in the early morning.

Three days later the work was as easy as that kind of work could ever be, and even working up in the barn with black dusthanging from his nose, he could think convoluted thoughts and daydream as regularly as when he was sitting on the back porch. He fitted into the schedule of staying up late and getting up just before rushing out of the house.

They finished at the one farm and moved on to another. The crew felt more comfortable with him, and included him in the crudely intimate discussions of women, money, gadgetry, ambition and sports. Mal once asked him, “What do you talk about while you work? Give me an example of one of your conversations.”

“What time of day? It depends a lot on what time it is.”

“Why?”

“Well, first thing in the morning nobody says much of anything, and even despite Jack and Bonesy, who’re especially noisy then, there’s a general sluggishness and irritability—usually