When the threshing crew arrived
she’d add in some leaves,
then cover the table
with a stiff white cloth,
dust off the plated silver
and the serving bowls,
which she’d heap full
of mashed potatoes,
boats full of gravy.
They’d spoon sugar
into tiny coffee cups
held by rough hands,
scrubbed red but stained
with grease from tinkering
with the power train belt
that broke in the field.
She cut the cake while
they ate in silence –
this gathering of men
bound by blood and common need
and by the desire for
just one more slice
of that lemon cake before I go,
if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.
– Steve Peterson
Notes
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month.
The photo above is one of several I will use from a fantastic collection of historic photos in the New York Public Library digital collections. This is from the Farm Security Administration and was taken by Ben Shahn in 1938 in central Ohio. I discovered a lot of photos taken by Shahn, a favorite artist of mine, in the collection.
This photo struck me because I grew up with many stories about the threshing crew’s visits to my dad’s farm in north central Minnesota during the late ’30 and 40’s. If I remember right, the relatives and neighbors had various pieces of equipment that they would cobble together for the harvest season. Then they’d go around from place to place helping each other “bring in the sheaves.” At dinner time, they’d sit around the table, usually decked out all fancy and filled with food, then eat in silence: men in rough clothes straight from the field, grandmother’s labors greatly appreciated. (She cooked all that stuff in a wood burning oven. No electricity at the home place until the early 1950s!)
One year, my father gave me the dining room table from the home place as a present. It’s a distinctly un-fancy red oak oval pedestal table. There are nicks and scratches on the legs and table top. Some of the leaves are made of poorer quality wood that contains worm holes, for instance, but it extends out very far and holds a lot of history, in a Swedish wabi-sabi sort of way. The table was a wedding present for my grandparents in 1920; it was already used by the time they were given it by some long-forgotten relatives. For a time it disappeared and no one really remembered it until Dad found it languishing in the basement of a relative several years ago. He stripped the ubiquitous green paint off it and repaired and refinished it. When I sit down to eat, I often think of the threshing crew that once gathered around that table.
I think there was some neighbor-helping-neighbor in the threshing crews of Eastern Colorado, but there were also crews that started in Canada and followed the ripening grain south. Harvesting contractors. Uncle Bob (really my dad’s cousin) used the same crew year after year, so they became like family.
I can so picture their hands in the second stanza, and I love how you let them break their silence at the end. For that remark-able lemon cake!
Yes, there were harvesting contractors that came through my grandparents farm, too, in north central Minnesota. In fact, for awhile my grandfather also worked on one of those crews. Very dusty, dirty, hot, dangerous work. The old threshing machines had these long leather belts that connected the thresher to the power train in the tractor. It was easy to get caught in that spinning belt, or it might snap and wreck all kinds of havoc on the scene.
My grandfather died from “emphysema” in his early 60s. I often wonder if this would now be diagnosed as pulmonary fibrosis caused by particulates he breathed in over his life: “farmers’ lung.”
… rough hands,
scrubbed red ….
powerful imagery, Steve. I’m thankful that you and Mary Lee and others are tapping into images and I intend to do that, too, this month.
Kevin
Thanks, Kevin! In a larger version of the photo I noticed that the man in the middle held a silver fork, but his hands were very dirty. I knew they would have washed their hands in hot water to get the dirt off because, well, that’s what would have been expected. My father talks about the way they treated guests on their farm, including the threshing crew guys. They didn’t have much, but the best silver and the best dishes (even if they were impossibly “dainty”) would be brought out for the guests. And the guests would be on their best behavior, too. I think it’s fun to imagine these sweaty farmers straight from the field, basically sitting down to a tea party in the house before heading outside again to work in the hot sun.
It was a lot of fun to look through a digital collection and think about what poetic possibilities there might be.
Steve-
I love this, both the story in the poem and the back story of the table. Like Kevin, I love the details- the stiff cloth, the gravy boats, the tiny cups (I picture china, like ladies would use at a tea party) held in those rough hands, and then that lemon cake. This is just about perfect!!
Carol
Thanks, Carol! Looking at those little coffee cups in the photo reminds me so much of the kind of dishes my grandmother had and would have used to serve those men. They probably also had bigger, rougher mugs for coffee, but those would not have been good enough for the guests, so the “fancy” stuff would have been supplied. One detail I noticed in the photo was that the cup the woman is offering is different than the one already sitting on the table near the man on the right. His is hexagonal, she is offering a circular one, which, to me, means that they probably didn’t have a complete set of anything. It was the smallness, the refinement that she was offering to these rough men as much as she was offering a cup. And the lemon cake. I can see that hiding under glass on the hutch in the back. She probably made it last night in anticipation and covered it after it cooled so it would be moist and delicious at noon. 🙂