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“Now you take watermelons,” he warbled on. “I like ’em with the skin this thick.” He pinched his fingers together. “But they won’t take ’em. You try to ship it and”—he squawked as the food shipper would—“ ‘it cracks!’ They want something with skin an inch thick that they can throw around. We pick fruit that day and have it for supper. They pick one day, pack it the next. They pick it green”—Gideon’s voice cracked as the other men broke out in laughter—“ship it the next, and sell it who knows when. Well, we really live like kings.”

Silent until now, I at last offered my own observation: “It never occurs to people in the city that, if they lived in the country, how well they’d eat.”

“But they wouldn’t want to do what they’d need to in exchange.”

Added the invisible voice: “They don’t want to have to work.” An audible grunt followed, and a sheaf rolled into place on top of the stack from behind the mound, nearly completing it.

Work…That’s right, we were working now. I had almost forgotten. Nice that I seemed to be keeping up the pace, barely feeling it. The temperature today, admittedly, was a degree or two lower than it had been that other time.

Maybe I’d go another round.

As I began pitching sheaves once more, that voice from behind the wagon inquired: “Gettin’ too tired yet?”

I realized he was talking to me. “No, not at all,” I answered. “Not making the mistake of taking three jabs each time instead of one.” I demonstrated by scooping up a couple of sheaves in a single sweeping motion, which I’d copied from the other men. I did feel a slight, pleasant ache in my thighs, back, and shoulders. Since my last stint, it was almost as if my body had developed a craving for work. Odd, that pain could feel almost…good.

“Yeah, we remember,” guffawed Gideon. “Your face was so red, we didn’t know what to think about it.”

Before I knew it we were back at the barn again, fetching an empty wagon. There Gideon’s father, Levi, the bishop, came upon me. “With your light complexion,” he inquired solicitously, “is the sun beating too hard on you?”

“No, I’m all covered up by this hat. The only thing sunburned is maybe the back of my neck.”

When we got back to the fields (round three), Gideon probed a little further. “Do you think you’ll sleep well so tired, or maybe all the aches and pains will keep you awake?”

“If I feel tired, it will be tomorrow morning when I try to get out of bed.”

Gideon laughed. “No, I don’t have a problem with that. But I do feel tired at the end of the day. But one time, well, we were building a roof shaped like this.” I turned around to see his hands folded into an ‘A.’ “And I had to hang from a rope like this”—he bent at the waist until his body formed a right angle—“all day long in one position. Boy, was I sore the next morning. Then I finally got to know what it must be like to be an old man.”

Gideon provided good material to demonstrate the self-automation of manual labor because his very commentary on it proved he wasn’t thinking about it. The more absorbed he became in his stories, the more apt he was to forget where he was or even who he was. It was as if he inhabited his subject psychically. He was a real raconteur. Whenever he looked your way, you felt a sense of unmerited privilege as if the attention that might have been lavished on a large audience was focused on you alone. You were the reason for it all; you were his public.

He began recalling exploits of the logging industry near the place where he had grown up (he and his brothers had also relocated here to escape development), and somewhere in his account he began to identify so closely with the trees, it was as if had taken their point of view. Next he stepped into the mind of the lumberjack, the busy worker clear-cutting the forest from the mountains. He kept repeating the term “clear cut” as if he were a rapt believer in the practice. His allegiances kept shifting, but as a storyteller, it was his gift to see things from all sides. Now with pain he began to recall backwoods people throwing stones at him