Grand Change Read Online Free Page A

spiked-together racks flanging at the sides, the cross-boarded uprights awry, the wagon rigs in their lazy rock moved in and the forkers heaved on their forks, arm working against arm, sweeping the stook sections high and onto the load, where the builders built, placing the sheaves around the racks’ square perimeter, sometimes flipping them to get the butts out.
    Some days, a bright, golden stillness filled the fields, disturbed only by the hums of hummingbirds, the rustles of sheaves, the tinkles of trace links, the rattles of harnesses as horses shook their noses at nose flies. But the cold winds came, too, growing increasingly bitter, and the forkers fought gusts of wind that could sweep fork loads away. Sometimes, after an overly heavy rain, they had to tear down the stooks and spread them to dry. But they rolled steadily on until the horse hooves clopped on the barn floors for the last trip and the last sheaves were forked in relay up walls of sheaf butts in the lofts.
    Then, as in the changing acts of a play, the scenes along Hook Road changed. Whirligig potato diggers, their rear ends fanning like tails of peacocks, sweeping clay and potatoes against their canvas booms, crept along potato drills while the digger men hunched on stemming seats like sleepy crows, guiding the sets of pole-divided horses in a relentless plod.
    Spaced the lengths of the fields, bobbing like multicoloured clothespins on lines, hoisting their baskets in underbelly swing, clawing like digging dogs to clear away the tops and flip the potatoes into the baskets, the pickers hunched and trudged. At their sides, filling bags stood in their ragged rows like dummies, their loose mouths flopping in the breeze like unruly mops of hair. Here and there along the lines, pickers rose and stepped out to squat, thigh-set their basket, bag-mouth its rim and dump. Along the ragged rows, the low-slung sloven rigs with their high back wheels moved, while the loaders, with a knee boost, hoisted the filled bags by their mouth corners.
    When daylight began to fade, the diggings were harrowed over and the pickers gleaned, moving and picking like pecking robins. Finally they came home from the fields, their clay-caked boot heels clopping on wheel paths, their strides stiff but gratefully free from the back-bent trudge, the lingering clay choke still in their nostrils, its grit still in their eyes and fingernails.
    From the sides of houses, at the foundations, came the cobbles of the day’s last potatoes being rolled down cellar holes, and the drivers with their sloven rigs moved faint in gloom as they faded away for the day. From kitchen windows, kerosene lamps shed their mellow comfort, their extending basks spreading like hope across footpaths shadowed by duckweed. In kitchens came the rattles of dishes and murmurs of voices at the plots of suppers. In gloomy porches, somewhat subdued now, the workers filed, taking their hand-washing turns at sink pumps with a flub of yellow lye soap and a hand wipe on an endless towel on rollers; their mind-stomach coordinations fixed on the heavy farm fare of meat, potatoes, thick gravy and bread puddings steaming on parlour tables.

Autumn on Hook Road
CHAPTER 2
    There is always a point when seeds of change begin to take root. That point, which was to bring irreversible change to Hook Road, came on a clear autumn morning. The sun had risen singular in a cloudless sky to beam down hotly, glistening the melted frost on the browning weeds and grass on the banks of the headland. There was no wind. The caw of a crow rang clear and trumpet-like from the maple woods shadowing the south edge of our potato field.
    I was working east on the last dug potato row, feeling lank, thinking about dinner, when I heard The Old Man mutter, “Must be thinking about another election.” I paused in my hunch, rested my hands on the basket handle and looked up.
    The Old Man stood looking across the potato field, barren except for the odd