ARCHIE SATTERFIELD

Chapter ONE

It is the morning wind I remember when I think of the wheat country, not the enormous open spaces nor the extremes in temperature nor the slight rattling sound of ripe wheat stalks hitting each other. Nor in my memory do I first see those low, steep, treeless hills with farmhouses and barns riding the crests of great waves of earth that undulate off into the horizon. It is always the wind, the ageless force that has come up every morning out of the southwest and probably always will.
Each morning when we arrived in the field we could see a trace of dew glinting on the wheat stalks, and they would bend rather than snap beneath our feet. The sun would quickly suck up the dew so that when we climbed onto the tractor or combine and began the day's work the stalks would be dry and brittle and would break when we stepped on them. At first the wind was hardly more than a subtle movement in the atmosphere, like a sleeping horse shifting his weight. We first felt it as we greased the machinery and filled the fuel tanks with gasoline and diesel, and when we finished these chores, the wind, steady and predictable as the tides, was blowing at its usual brisk speed.
The wind maintained its relentless pace all through the day, gusting sometimes but usually just flowing off to the northeast, interrupted occasionally in the heat of the day by the small whirlwinds called dust-devils. Repeatedly I have seen a dozen or more of the spiral columns of heated air and dust spinning back and forth across the landscape like demented dervishes out in the heat of midday, dipping and twirling, standing in one place, then darting off in one direction, then another until at last fading and their load of dust and leaves and weeds settling back to earth. They were something for me to watch from the tractor, one of the few things moving in those blazing afternoons. They caused no harm unless they whipped through a park and demolished a picnic or deposited a coating of dirt on laundry hanging on the line.
The wind continued on past the evening meal, and nearly every night it was the last thing I heard, still blowing around the corners of the house when I fell asleep. It died late in the night and when dawn came our universe would again be standing still, expectant beneath the red morning sun.
I was most aware of the wind while driving the tractor in the spring and early summer when I spent up to fourteen hours a day on the clattering, snorting monster. The wind represented change amid the monotony of going around and around a field the size of a European city-state. The wind threw dust at me from every conceivable angle; into my face, down my neck, and from both sides, depending on which direction I was driving. The tractor I drove during those rich, repetitious days was an aging International with broad steel tracks like a World War II tank. It made an incredible amount of noise as it rattled across the fields, the big diesel engine roaring through the exhaust pipe that stood straight up in front of me, the transmission howling and scorching my feet, pieces of metal plating vibrating against each other, and always the wind blowing that fine volcanic-ash soil into my face.
Sometimes when I fell asleep at night I still felt the vibrations of the tractor, the grit in my eyes, and the quick whip of the tractor when I pulled on the steering lever and stamped on the brake to make a quick, clean turn. Often my dreams were of the movement of the tractor and the dust, always the dust swirling gracefully and relentlessly, changing colors in the sunlight. The swirling effect imitated my mother's description of a near-death experience when she said she felt warm and peaceful and the only thing she could see were green leaves swirling and swirling before her eyes. A similar story was told to me by a man who nearly drowned in an irrigation ditch when he was a child, and he too saw green leaves swirling and swirling. Since this happened in my youth and I still have those dreams from time to time, I assume that the last thing I will see while dying will be brown swirling dust with the strong sunlight giving it golden tints.
Because of the steady wind I always looked forward to the southbound lap around the field; most of the dust from the equipment I was towing behind the tractor would fly behind me, except for the occasional handfuls that would be thrown upward from the tractor tracks. The rest of the time I was enveloped in a constant cloud of dust so thick I often could not see through it, and I had to stop and let the dust cloud blow away so I could see the track made by the marker wheel. The marker wheel was a simple metal wheel protruding from the rod-weeder and its job was to lay down a track that told me where to run the tractor treads the next time around so I wouldn't miss any of the soil. I learned that first year that if I missed even a small strip of soil with the rod weeder a line of green weeds would soon appear there, and if I missed with the seed drills, a bare patch of ground would accuse me of carelessness.
I wore coveralls zipped all the way up and buttoned tightly at the throat over my jeans and shirts to keep the dust away from my body and clothing so that when I came in for lunch (dinner, as it was usually called; the evening meal was supper), I could slip out of the coveralls, dust myself off, stamp the high-heeled boots on the steps or just take them off, wash my hands and face, and be reasonably clean when I went into the house to eat. I wore a cap but no goggles because they collected sweat, and when summer was over and I returned to college, it was almost comical to see the line around my forehead and the nape of my neck. As the summer wore on, that line became darker and darker as I tanned, while the top of my forehead was startlingly pale.
Afternoons were the most difficult. It is traditional for farmers to eat large noon meals, which goes back a generation to the horse-drawn period when all farmers worked very hard and needed large meals to fuel their bodies; sometimes, in fact, they ate four meals a day. This tradition forced most farm wives to continue serving large meals, and I could never refuse the beautiful spreads that always included a piece of pie or cake. By two o'clock I would be very sleepy: The heat, the steady drone of the engine, the rhythmic clatter of the tractor treads, the hypnotic effect of the ground moving slowly by, the dust clouds spinning and swooping and turning to their own music, the dry heat, the. . . I had no other choice but stop and throttle back to a slow idle and take a brief nap, seldom more than five minutes, then resume the work.
That southwest wind was one of the many constants of the wheat country that made the place so inviting to me. After all these years I still think of those low, steep hills as a home base; yet I was there only three months at a time over four years, and as I write this forty years have passed since my first summer there. More than my native Missouri Ozarks, the dryland wheat-farming area of eastern Washington is home. I don't go there as often as I would like, but that big landscape is always comforting when I drive through it and the people I know there seem to always be ready to resume our last conversation. Once I stopped at Tom Hays' service station in Washtucna on my way home from delivering a daughter to school at Washington State University in Pullman. It had been several years since I had seen Tom. He didn't change expression when he saw me. He spoke and went out to service a car. When he came back in our conversation had none of the long-time-no-see preamble; we said the insulting things men say to their friends, and they caught me up on some of the events over the last few years. It was as though I had been away no more than a week. Such friends don't need constant attention.