Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

Well done, Jonny, you did all right, Jonny. That’s what the thumbs up meant. They called him Jonny as if he was still their boy. And he smiled a boy’s open smile. He was happy just then. She could see that. He was in his place and he was proud. Maybe this was his place after all, he should be here always. But this was only a moment of sunlight. It was the middle of the day when the sun was up in the sky, everything bright, no shadows to be seen. When the moment passed that boy would have secrets, like boys do. Things he hid in pockets, at the back of his drawers. In his memory. That separated him from his brother. That separated each of them from the other.

He had been going nine hours. It was hard to stop after so many hours. It had been getting dark for some time. He had seen the sun setting behind the village. He had seen the last of the colour fade from the sky, put on the headlamps, but their light would not be strong enough to keep him going very long. He would like to have driven on until it grew quite dark, on and on in an industrial process, his mind narrowed in a tunnel of light. He kept his eyes concentrated now on the strip he was cutting, the sight of the wheat falling before him, which was no longer so smooth now but thrashing and lumping. His hearing was all for the sound of the machine, the constant of the engine, the dull roar of the drum. He heard as the dew began to fall. The stalks were becoming moist, beginning to slip against the blades. The rhythm was beginning to slip, bundles forming and breaking, the straw lumping and beginning to jam. It was tempting to keep going, to try to finish the field, or this stretch of it at least. He drove more slowly, attending to the machine, to the sound deepening and becoming erratic. If only he might keep at it, finish the strip, finish the field, work on through the night as if the rest of the world had fallen away. There would be only what loomed up before the combine, and the following tractor, its lights also on now, that moved away and then back alongside – and in other fields in the distance, the pattern repeated by other men. Tom Jackson was still going. Old Jackson would be out there with his son, watching, listening, with all his half-century of experience, stepping down to put his hand to the stalks; holding the decision to himself. He would not go in before the Jacksons. When Tom Jackson went in, then he would too. He would go in tired, his eyes stinging and his muscles aching, the throb still in his body, the reverberation in his head. He would eat and bathe, and sleep black sleep, and as he fell into that sleep the heads of wheat would still be falling and churning before his eyes.

He would sleep long and wake late. It would be later than he was used to waking, the day bright outside, a fully formed summer’s day, the others up before him, breakfast cooked, bacon waiting in the oven. Jonathan would already have been in the yard, and the girl out there with him, and the men; the concrete swept and the grain in the store piled high. Time to service the combine for the next day’s work. Wait again for the dew to lift.

For a week the harvest went well, then the weather turned against him. A single day of heavy showers meant that it was too wet to work for some days afterwards. Morning and evening, Richard went out to walk the fields that hadn’t yet been cut. On the third day he went out alone and got the combine started, in the field where he had left off, just to see how it was, but he had not gone far before he felt the weight of the machine begin to sink into the wet ground. Once more he stopped, and left it out there. He hoped that it would not sink deeper before he could get it going again.

All it took was another day of showers for the pattern of waiting to be repeated.

The swallows flew ever lower over the lawn as if the air pressed them down in the arc of their flight. There must have been swarms of insects there in the humid band of air close to the ground where the birds swooped to feast. Claire heard them close overhead as she moved about her plants. The soil was almost too wet to work now. And besides, the growing season was almost over. There was really no need to weed any more in August, except for tidiness. The look of things.

When she was done with weeding she stood and stretched her back. The sky was grey but she thought it had infinitesimally lifted. The insects must have risen. The birds were flying higher.

Jonathan and Kumiko had walked to the village and were making their way back. They too watched the swallows, skimming low above the standing crop. Some of the birds seemed to fly no more than a wing’s breadth above the heads of grain. But others were gathering on the telegraph wires ready for the summer to end. Jonathan had thought they would themselves be finished and gone long before the swallows. Now he wondered if the swallows would be gone first. This was something he could not bear about farming, being the captive of the weather and the place. He was not steady like his brother. He could not have had his pragmatism.

Another two days of waiting and then Richard thought they might try again. The combine was stuck and they