Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [52]
“I can’t believe that,” I cut in. “It would have taken longer.”
“No, it really happened. I read it in the newspaper.”
“It couldn’t cook you that fast.”
“She had it turned on full force.”
“But if I stick a hot dog in for just one second, it’s just as cold when I take it out as when I put it in.”
“Maybe it was a minute.”
By now we had put our hoes down and paused, and in the lull of activity Edward’s voice boomed from a few rows away: “But that was a hot dog. We’re talking about a cold dog.”
Edward had made a pun? I turned to look. I saw him between the stalks, covering his mouth in embarrassment as if he had just burped. “There’s a difference,” he added half-defensively.
“What a headline that must have made,” Bill clucked. “Hot Dog for Dinner.”
After the conversation, Edward approached me and apologized. He explained that there was a scripture against jokes; it sorely grieved him that he had weakened in my presence, and he hoped he hadn’t set a bad example. For goodness sake…
As if to make up for his lapse, the mood on the farm the next time I visited was much more somber. I found Bill alone in a vast field, shocking oats. This consisted of collecting bundles of oat stalks (already cut with a horse-drawn device called a binder) and setting them in piles scattered throughout the field. Each pile, or shock, comprised a number of bundles set vertically, capped by two laid sideways to shed rainwater. The work gradually became rhythmic and comfortably automatic, but for once I couldn’t relish the conversation.
“I’m not like the others here,” Bill grumbled. “The other fellahs, when they start out, they get a lot of help. Eli Fisher, when his sons turn twenty-one, or when they are about to get married—well, they can get it sooner if they need it—he gives them each six hundred dollars. Our parents are too poor to give us anything. Everyone else here is way ahead of me. When I got here, I was starting from scratch.”
To make matters worse, he explained, Edward gave him terms less favorable than those of other hired hands. Another young man he knew, also a novice, worked in a family that provided room and board in return for one full day of work, leaving him the remaining five workdays to earn money on his own projects. Bill had to work three full days for Edward to earn his keep. And these were not, in Edward’s case, neatly bounded eight-hour workdays. They could easily last ten or twelve hours. (In addition to the land Edward owned, he rented several adjacent fields besides.)
As if to prove Bill’s point, the shocking we were doing now (on a rented field) had to be finished today however long it took. It had already been near suppertime when I joined him. “How much more?” I asked.
Bill’s eyes narrowed. “There’s two more fields, and one is bigger than all the others combined. It’s depressing just to think about it. I’d almost rather be in Siberia.”
There was a long pause.
“But then,” Bill said, continuing his thought, “there’s a prison there.”
“That’s just what I was going to ask. Is even prison better, or is it the cold you want?”
“After doing this awhile, a cool dark cell might seem like a vacation.”
As daylight ebbed, Bill began dreaming of ways to get even. He had been reading a history of the American Indians and mentioned two methods they used of enforcing criminal justice. One was the squaws’ gauntlet, and the other was the braves’ gauntlet. The squaws only clubbed their victims. The braves—. Bill caught himself and said, “Well, never mind.”
Remembering something I’d learned in graduate school, I told him why historians thought native America had become so warlike. The accidental introduction of horses by Coronado had drastically expanded the hunting range of every tribe and intensified the competition for land. When guns were brought in later, the effect was like a spark in a powder