Dave Wood

“Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,/And nothing to look backward with pride,/And nothing to look forward to with hope, So now and never any different.” – Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man.”   

“Poor Silas” for sure. Anyone who has ever lived on or near to a farm knows all about the hired man, an icon in the Pantheon of agricultural folklore. Adolph, my brother’s hired man, could plant the straightest line fence, plow the perfect furrow…  But unfortunately, Adolph “was his own worst enemy” whenever he came to town to celebrate his monthly paycheck, afterwards unfailingly returning to the farmstead looking much the worse for wear.

He wasn’t a rarity. One of my academic pals loved to remember his father’s hired man, Knut. “Years back, I was shocking oats on a very hot day with Knut, who was grumbling and sweating. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I told Knut, ‘Today’s payday….’”

“Ya,” replied Knut. “That means I’ll have to go into town and get drunk. Do I ever DREAD that!” Such stories are legion, and so a while back I wrote a piece about poor Adolph, which appeared on the op-ed page of the Star Tribune. Another farm boy, Rick Nolan, then US Congressman from Minnesota, read the piece and used his clout to have it read into the Congressional Record! Nolan sent me a copy of the weighty publication. Though I was proud of that, I meant to keep it away from Adolph. But one day in a fit of amiable conversation, I showed Adolph his new-found notoriety. Adolph just smiled and hung the publication on a peg in the milkhouse. Weeks later, I asked my brother if Adolph was angry about it. “ANGRY?” he replied. “No! Geez, whoever comes into the barn, a milk hauler, a veterinarian, a feed salesman, Adolph is right behind them, showing off the Congressional Record!”

Sadly, Adolph’s saga came to what might be called a grim Robert Frostian conclusion. A few years later after spending a month building straight fence lines and perfect furrows, Adolph took his paycheck and walked to town where he practiced being his own worst enemy. He was found on Sunday morning drowned in the town millpond.

As a former hired man who upon occasion was also his own worst enemy, I speak from experience. When I was 15, my father informed me that I was too old to work on a paper route, that I had to begin thinking about becoming a man. So he signed me on for a summer working on a big farm, which was no picnic for this city slicker who had never picked up anything heavier than a Thursday copy of the Winona Republican-Herald. But I survived and have come to appreciate stories about hired men, including Silas in Frost’s poem cited above.

One that comes to mind is great-grandad’s helper, a newcomer named Ole Hegg, who needed a team of oxen and promised his boss who didn’t need his, to earn the team by spending several weeks harvesting and delivering 50 loads of marsh hay to great grandad’s farm. Ole did it, got his team and the following day his old boss reported in his diary “I heard that on his way back to his own farm, Ole lost one of the oxen.” Ole managed to survive with neither insurance or a team, and when he learned to read English became the county’s Register of Deeds.

And during the Great Depression when, my father suffered a ruptured appendix and my mother suffered with me, a lad of three months, Dad had been running his mother-in-law’s farms and so he hired a newlywed couple, Sophy and Ole, to tend his cows and feed his toddler. At the first dinnertime, my mom was stunned into silence as she watched her maid grab a slice of bread and smear butter on one side and also on the other side. Soon after, Mom heard from a hired girl down the road that Sophy was bragging at church that “The Woods are so rich they butter their bread on BOTH sides.”

Having won fame with her lie, Sophy continued to butter lavishly, my mother continued to say nothing —help wasn’t easy to come by!

Oh, one more: My friend the Rev. Richard Mork told me years ago about his experience as a first-time pastor at a rural church near Northfield. “Seems my first service was to be a funeral. It was for a long-time hired man named Ansel, who was very eccentric and had ended his life after making trouble in the neighborhood. What could I say? Would any one attend?” As Mork ascended to the pulpit, he noticed lots of people, then looked down at the front row of pews. 

“It was Gov. Al Quie and his wife Gretchen! Later I drank coffee with the governor, who explained “We read about it in the Pioneer Press. He was our hired man when I was a boy. We’re here to pay our respects to Ansel.” Maybe there was some pride there after all.