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46 THE RURAL VOICE
NOTEBOOK
shortened by its connection to Dad's
belt, now drags him off the wagon
without noticeable effect on the con-
trol lever position. Swiftly it hoists
him over a barn cross beam before the
bemused horses and their even more
bemused handler, in answer to an
incredible display of aerobatics and a
crescendo of strangled profanity, come
to a smoking hall
Despite the suspended weight of
my father, now slowly windmilling
head -down, 20 feet above the barn
floor, the contrary trip mechanism not
only remains stubbornly locked, but
the carriage and its payload, with the
trip rope otherwise engaged, seems
frozen forever in one position on the
roof track. None of this, it need
hardly be said, does anything for re-
turning Pop to a more dignified pos-
ture or a less exhilarating altitude.
Standing directly below him, the
better to catch whatever expert
counsel and advice could be delivered
upside-down, I am engulfed at shorter
range in the pyrotechnics of Dad's
seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary.
This rises in both pitch and intensity
with our mutual recollection that the
only possible rescue tool, our one
extension ladder, had just moments
before been bombed out of existence
by a mound of runaway hay.
Noting that Dad's trip -rope is
slowly moving his pants down, which
is to say "up," around his ankles, I
stop laughing long enough to push
armloads of loose hay under his
corpus invertus to reduce the drop be-
tween it and the barn floor. This kind-
ness is completed with only seconds to
spare. The satanic trip rope peels my
father to his sweat -stained shorts. He
swan -dives into his fourth pool of hay
and claws his way to the surface in a
cloud of dust and innovative adjec-
tives to survey our latest triumph.
The long, hot day comes merci-
fully to an end at last. And the score-
board reads as follows: in six sweat-
ing, fly -infested, dust -covered, back-
breaking hours of superhuman effort,
we have managed to bring into the
barn a single wagonload of new hay.
A conservative estimate places the
crop still in the fields at about 427
wagonloads, in which case, at this
dazzling pace, we can look forward to
completing our 1940 hay harvest in
1944.
In this incredible demonstration of
material -handling technology, we also
managed to distribute, in four separate
attempts, about two tons of entangled
loose hay in all the wrong places,
leave the assigned storage area virgin-
ally devoid of product, magically
attach a pair of torn Levis to a rope
clearly beyond human reach, destroy a
perfectly good extension ladder, and
severely strain the voice box and men-
tal stability of the senior participant.
Other than that, Pop, how did you
enjoy the show?
And that's the way it was in 1940
at haying time. Day after frustrating
day. All that wonderful summer long.
The summer I realized how much I
loved, respected, and enjoyed my
father.
You wanna buy a hay fork?
Cheap?0 (R. A. Fowler is a Durham,
Ontario writer.)
THE OLD BARN
The place where the old barn used to stand
is empty now;
a gaping hole in the landscape, pathetically
disappeared, into the mists of time
Gone, the lofty beams breaching the height
filled to the rafters with sweet-smelling hay
silvery -gray walls weathered by a lifetime
of storms
a soft rain falls, weeping over the gash
where the old barn used to stand
by Nellie Gritchen Scott