Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [80]
But the practical output of this orgy was eleven hundred pumpkins. The next morning our awakening was bracing.
We tried filling the front porch first, and when that was done, moved to the bedroom, and from there to the backyard under a big tree. We were reluctant to store them outside, however, because unless they can be kept dry, pumpkins will rot quickly at the stem.
We put up a sign marked “Pumpkins” over our mailbox. After selling only a handful over two weeks, we put up another sign where our road met a state highway six miles away.
Pumpkins were one of two cash crops we had planted; the other was sorghum. Now that Sylvan had provided ground for our sorghum, we were responsible for helping him with the cooking at harvest. (Whenever I came by to work on my crops, Sylvan still arched his dark brows in his usual expression of mock alarm at the brashness of an unskilled beginner.) The day was approaching for the appointed collaboration, and I dearly hoped I could be of some use. We stripped the tall sorghum stalks of their leaves, then cut them off near the ground using machetes and piled them on wagons.
“Ouch!”
Not again!
I didn’t know which the collision hurt more—my toe or the pumpkin. Either way, it hurt me in the long run. I tried not to think about it. The trouble was, it was difficult to walk to the bathroom in the dark with so many pumpkins on the floor. Several had already gone soft around the stem and begun to blacken after only a couple of weeks. And now I was hastening the deterioration by chipping their skins with my big toe. They rotted through such openings. Muttering to myself, I leaned over and picked out bits of orange rind from under the nail, and then went back to my journal.
Before sorghum juice could be cooked down, it had to be squeezed from the stalk. And since it soured in a few hours, squeezing took place the night before it was to be cooked.
When I arrived at Sylvan’s for the long-awaited occasion, the house was empty. I sat on the porch and waited until the moon had risen. Blank objects loomed, pale and ashen, here and there in the lunar glow—a barn, a fence, a tree—and behind, a darker row of woods. The scene was downright spooky. Eventually I got skittish. Could he have forgotten? We had set the date over a week ago.
Clomp-cht-cht, clomp-cht-cht, clomp-cht-cht…
A horse was approaching. The scrape of buggy wheels rounding a corner rustled on my eardrum. A fuzzy shape grew in the distance. A lantern light appeared. A jolly baritone voice crooned out of the blackness, “Well, if it isn’t our visitor.” Then I saw them: Sylvan, Ida, and their baby, suddenly lit up by moonbeams and gazing out at me from the bench of a spring wagon. Sylvan panned me with his usual mischievous grin.
“Boy, I can see you so clearly.”
“Harvest moon,” he announced. “Good for staying out and working at night.”
Sylvan had pulled up to the side of the porch, and his wife, nodding politely, carried the baby into the house.
Then we went to work. The sorghum press looked like the wooden frame of an unfinished teepee. It was a simple device made of a tall, central rotary drive shaft with a diagonal member supporting a single crossbeam, to which the horse (which Sylvan was now leading towards it) was hooked. Under the shaft was a narrow set of metal rollers that turned when the horse went round. The whole contraption sat in an open area near the barn.
Sylvan began to insert the sorghum stalks between the rollers, and as they flattened, juice trickled into a pan that emptied into a tube that, in turn, drained into a large holding tank down the hill. On into the night we worked at it, with me leading the horse and Sylvan inserting the sorghum over and over and over. I made it through without a hitch.
At morning’s light, Mary and Ida joined us. Sylvan tripped the cock that released the juice from the big stainless steel vat. The sorghum trickled into the first compartment of the long,