Grand Change Read Online Free Page B

scraggly top sprigging here and there and two full rows with their tops lying like matted hair at the field’s south fringe. His empty, woven basket sat squat and awry by the half-filled bran bag he had dumped it into. His canvas gloves, clay-caked at the palms, lay draped over the basket’s carved wooden handle.
    I straightened and followed the direction of his gaze to the intersection of Jar and Hook. A red half-ton truck with black lettering was parked there, and on Jar’s bank a man was knee-deep in bushes sighting down Hook through a theodolite. Along the spaced posts of the fenceline a couple of hundred yards down, another man stood with a pole.
    The Old Man dropped his gaze to the plug of tobacco in his left hand and the open jackknife in his right. Absently, he carved off a chew, slid it off the blade into his mouth and, in double motion, clasped the knife, stowed it with the tobacco into his pants pocket and began slowly working his cud, his eyes sweeping back across the field.
    Nanny finished filling her basket with a handful of potatoes, rose, thigh-set her basket, limp-footed her way to the bran bag and dumped, the cobbling sound of the potatoes breaking the near-total silence. She hedge-stepped then to beside The Boss, her eyes watching with his.
    Standing in their ragged coats and overalls, caked with clay at the knee patches, they made an odd pair. The Old Man was bean-pole thin, his shoulder stoop augmenting his overly long nose, deep-set eyes and flat cheeks falling to a square jaw. Nanny was short and stout, her grey-brown hair sweeping back from a moon face into her rooster-tail bandana, her old grey winter coat flaring in straight fall from the one button at the neck to the red band of her rubber boots.
    The Old Man spat out tobacco and reached for his gloves. “We’ll finish without trouble this afternoon,” he said, working his gloves over his large hands. “I guess we’ll load up for dinner when we finish this row.”
    He swiped up his basket and moved to fall on his knees at the wide scatter of potatoes, some nubbing half-hidden in the clay beside hooped-down tops. Nanny followed suit and the two with their knee waddle, hoisting their baskets forward, picking like pecking crows, began closing in on me.
    The day had begun as a usual potato harvest day, with a sleepy, foot-chilling grope down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the cold made the smells of kerosene and setting bread dough almost morbid. The scratch, snap and sulphur whiff of the match at the table lamp, the flair of flame in the wick slot, the sudden bask of light with the fitted globe revealing Nanny’s sleep-drawn face and dishevelled hair seemed to crack off the day.
    Nanny stuffed yesterday’s paper into the stove with kindling and lit the fire while The Boss and I worked on our clay-stiffened coarse boots at the couch and got our coats and caps from their wall hooks, our shadows bobbing and weaving on the wall like pointing spooks. The Old Man lit the lantern hanging on a nail in the porch and clunked down the wired-in globe. I swiped milk buckets from their nails and we went out of the porch and across the yard. A bask of light, pushed by foot shadows, waggled around The Boss’s feet, its reflection revealing at times the light-blanked eyes of the seven milk cows waiting in the yard.
    The Boss paused by the cow stable door, allowing me to identify it, then moved a few yards farther up to the little door leading into the barn floor, where the morning hump of hay lay. I threw back the stable door and the cattle filed in and found their stalls. I hung the buckets on the wall by feel and groped beside the cows, linking their tie chains. A thin shaft of light cutting along a lap gap gave a quick direction and I got a stool and a bucket and got squatted beside the first cow, clasping the bucket between my knees.
    A stream of urine hissed in the darkness, its smell mingling with the tangy