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The Lucknow Sentinel, 2015-12-30, Page 7Wednesday, December 30, 2015 • Lucknow Sentinel 7 The Christmas Sheaf — A Christmas story by Mike O'Neill There was nothing remark- able about 011ie. He was about average height, average weight, average looking...the kind of man you see every day and never really remember. What I do remem- ber was that day in August that he walked up our lane with a duffle bag on his shoulder and asked if there was anywork for him to do. I was about ten, I guess, and big brother Stan was eighteen and headed for trouble. You see, we'd lost Dad when he fell asleep coming home from working midnights in a factory an hour away. He'd run the binder behind the horses all day and then went to the job. Mom asked him not to go, but he needed that job to make ends meet. The police said he just drove into the ditch and the truck rolled. That was about three years before. The neighbours had come to finish the harvest for that year and the next, but they thought Stan might've started to pitch in more this year. Stan WAS remarkable. Big, strong, handsome and handy, he had taken to hanging out at a garage, fixing cars for cash and he got a motorcycle for getting it running again. After that we hardly ever saw him. He got to be bossy when he was home and I think Mom was scared of him. That's what I hated the most. If he didn't like the farm he should leave. Not show up when he felt like it and make Mom unhappy. Then 011ie came along. He said he could do a bit of farming and carpentry and manual labour and was more interested in food and shelter than money. He was soft spo- ken and looked like a gentle- man, so Mom said okay. There might be a way of fixing up a room in the barn if that was acceptable. 011ie said "Sure." The first order of business was dinner. We were a "break- fast, breakfast, dinner, supper" farm fam- ily and 011ie was polite and quiet. His duffle bag was set gently on the floor behind the door. It bore the tell-tale OD green of the military and the Korean Conflict had just ended. He had a look about him, as I look back on it, sort of haunted. I'd seen a few of that type, wanderers with a past. Mom said it was a lot more common after World War II; lost men seeking proof that what they had done was worthwhile. It was hard. But that afternoon was unbelievable. Mom had sent me to set an old door on some blocks of wood in the granary and 011ie could maybe make himself as comfortable as pos- sible there. He said that'd be fine. He then took a fork and headed to the field behind the barn. Our neighbour, Tim Boland, had brought in his binder and cut the crop for us, but that was a week ago. The sheaves had lain in the stubble all this time, Mom and I stook- ing as much as we could. We'd gotten about two acres done, but there was a lot more to do. Maybe twenty acres more. I was a good-sized ten year old, but a door was unwieldy and had to be hauled from the house all the way up the gang- way and into the granary. I could see 011ie out there stick- ing a sheaf and forming a stook with a fluid, easy motion. He'd done that sort of thing before. I took him out some water in a mason jar in mid afternoon and he took it down in one continuous swallow. He just smiled and nodded and went back to work At suppertime, we expected to see him come in from the fields, and call it a day. He didn't come in until dark, streaked with sweat and dust and he washed up at the basin Mom kept on the back porch. He just seemed to do every- thing right and I could see Mom begin to relax and trust him. He bade us goodnight and made his way into the darkness while Mom and I cleaned up. The next morning I was up at dawn and went to gather some eggs. I walked past the bam and nearly dropped the basket. The whole field was stooked! Row after row marched in military precision across the acres all the wayto the bush. How? I went on into the henhouse and grabbed as many eggs as I could without getting pecked too much. I raced to the house and told Mom that the grain was all stooked and 011ie had done it and how was that pos- sible? She was surprised and pleased, but offered no answers. And things went on from there. Work got done that had been put off for years. 011ie seemed able to do just about everything around the farm. He never intruded, just quietly ate with us and left to go back to work He went with the trav- elling threshing machine and worked with the neighbours and got the crop off. Ours went very well and we had lots of feed for the animals that win- ter. He'd fixed a room in the comer of the stable and it was pretty sharp. The granary was full, so he scoured out a box stall and actually built a bed and table and had a wash basin and he tacked cardboard all around ...it was pretty neat, I found myself talking with 011ie more and more. He seemed to know everything, but he never pushed it on you. He could get so much done in a day; you'd think there was more of him. But Stan hated him. You see, Stan started hang- ing out with a bunch of tough - looking characters. Once in a while they'd ride in on loud motorcycles and swipe some meat and apples or something and take off, scaring the chick- ens hickens and Mom and me. I don't think they scared 011ie, but I don't knowwhy. As summer moved deeper into the fall, Mom came up with an idea. She had read in the Family Herald about how farm machinery was changing the face of agriculture. She wanted to be able to do more on her own, so she asked me what I thought of selling the horses and buying a tractor. I asked 011ie what he thought. He simply said "You don't have to rest a tractor at the end of each round:' So that was how we met Michael. His was a manner I'd never seen before. He was tall, strong, blonde, and dressed in white. That was weird because he was a tractor salesman. 011ie said he knew him and got him to come to the farm. They seemed to talk on a different level than us, communicating in more than words. I didn't see it then, but I sure can when I think back on it. What I didn't know then was that when a tractor was ordered, it often took months to get delivery. A week later we had a brand new Massey -Harris 101 Jr. with "Twin Power" Whatever that was. And back then I didn't think it remarkable that a few horses and a red heifer would be worth a new tractor, but the deal was made. Another thing I never thought of was that horse- drawn machinery just didn't hook on to tractors. They needed to be modified. But 011ie seemed to knowwhat to do. Stan would come home once in a while and look at the tractor. You could tell he liked it, but he wouldn't say so. Then that day in mid December happened and things changed totally. Stan's friends showed up in a big new car about the time Michael arrived with a two fur- row plough on a low trailer. There were six or seven of the toughs, all loud and menacing and rude. I didn't know what was going on, but Mom grabbed me and took me to the house in a hurry. There seemed to be a confrontation of some sort and then the car left, with Stan sticking his head out the window and hollering something that sounded bad at 011ie and Michael. I'll never forget the next morning. Stan was sitting on the porch when I went out to get eggs. He was trembling. He looked like he'd seen a ghost, or something that had scared him right to the core. He stayed there, staring at the bam where 011ie started his day with call- ing in the cows. Stan never said anything about the night before, but he went in and spoke to Mom while I went and got the eggs. For the next two weeks, Stan was home. I'd come from school and Stan would be hard at work sawing wood or some- thing else that needed doing. I couldn't get over the change in him. He seemed to spend some time with 011ie, actually learning stuff. On Christmas Eve, 011ie ik!.7 came to supper with some- thing I'd never seen before. It was a sheaf of barley, perfectly drawn, all the straws exactly the same length. Each individ- ual head was positioned and the fronds trimmed perfectly. It formed an orb so round, so even, so...perfect that I couldn't imagine it being done by human hands. Stan was in awe. He had changed so much it might be considered miracu- lous. When 011ie gave the sheaf to Mom, she smiled and set it on the shelf in the comer. Then she turned and I'll never forget the look on her face as she embraced 011ie and said "Thank you for giving me my son back' 011ie left then. He just van- ished the next day and we never saw him again. Stan kept on farming and being the changed man he was. Sixty years later, I sat by his deathbed and asked him what happened that December night so long ago. "Do you believe in mira- cles?" he asked. "Sure" I said. "You changed into a good guy, didn't you?" "Yeah, well, I've done a lot of thinking on what happened that night. Who Michael really was. Who 011ie reallywas, or IS" "What are you talking about?" I asked, a bit nervously. Stan looked me full in the eye. "Whether or not you believe, doesn't change what is true. I've come to this con- clusion: Michael was a war- rior, or maybe THE warrior, the Archangel. The forces brought to bear on that biker haunt were beyond human capabilities. I saw it ripped apart. I saw the whole thing and I'll never understand it. I just didn't want to face that again. Then there was 011ie. He never spoke of it, but I knew he knew all of it" 'Wow," I said. "Yeah, wow. I did some research and found that there was a guy in the tenth or elev- enth century Spain that was a hired man on a farm and did stuff you wouldn't believe. Miraculous stuff. He was can- onized in 1622. St. Isadore. The patron saint of farmers. 011ie" "You don't believe that, do you?" I asked. "It don't matter to the truth whether or notyou believe," he said. His lastwords.