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His plough-point hits the stones, and his plough-handles knock him in the ribs and lay him out.
"I'm afraid," said the man, "that it wouldn't do. You see that great scoop?" He pointed to a big iron scoop that was in the cart. The little boy looked and nodded. "Is that a scoop? What is it for?" "The horses drag it, and a man takes hold of those two handles like plough-handles, and it scoops the dirt right up." The little boy nodded again. "You can watch us if you want to," the man said then.
The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth, shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline. "Pap, this is the way you do me all the time come an' plough in my co'n when I don't know nothin' about hit when I don't want hit done, tryin' to make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count.
But no word, no breath of intimation, had ruffled the serenity of the crossroads. The calm, still, yellow sunshine day by day suffused the land like the benignities of a dream almost too good to be true. Every man with the heart of a farmer within him was at the plough-handles, and making the most of the fair weather.
I don't believe God intended a man to be bent to plough-handles like that, but that isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is, these people live lives approaching automata. They become machines to serve others more lucky or more unscrupulous than themselves. What is the world of art, of music, of literature, to these poor devils, to Sim Burns and his wife there, for example?
She was out in the fields from sunup until sundown. If I rode over to see her where she was ploughing, she stopped at the end of a row to chat for a moment, then gripped her plough-handles, clucked to her team, and waded on down the furrow, making me feel that she was now grown up and had no time for me. On Sundays she helped her mother make garden or sewed all day.
These were my first and last days at the plough, and they made that field memorable to me. I never cross it now but I see myself there a callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my head in a cloud of alluring day-dreams. This, I think, was in the fall of 1853.
In this matter he was by no means mistaken, for it soon became plain to all observers of whom an immense concourse was assembled that the usually self-possessed Guarder of the Imperial Silkworms was conducting himself in a most undignified manner; for though he still clung to the plough-handles with an inspired tenacity, his body assumed every variety of base and uninviting attitude.
"I can feel my fingers burn to this day where the frozen fodder sawed and rasped 'em in winter and the hot plough-handles bit and blistered 'em in summer. And then, afterwards, those old St. Louis days meant hard pulling, too, of another kind. From grocery clerk, to dry-goods clerk, to old Peele's real estate office, it was pull, pull, if not over one thing, over another.
Tall, lanky, awkward, fellows, came in squads, and companies, and regiments, swaggering along, dressed in their brown homespun clothes and blue yarn stockings. They stooped, as if they still had hold of the plough-handles, and marched without any time or tune.
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