Dave Wood

“I’LL THRASH YOU, IF YOU’LL THRASH ME BACK!”
Whenever I hear the rumble of a giant John Deere combine about to blow me off the highway, my thought goes back to 1943 when my father and his neighbors met at Sunnyside School between Blair and Hixton to wrangle over the neighborhood’s threshing run, about whose farm would begin or end it. Dad was sitting next to Luther Chappell, the only rich guy on Highway 95, who had recently bought a beautiful farm and often depended on dad for advice. He was also the only farmer in the neighborhood who didn’t speak Norwegian, a language which was echoing through the tiny classroom as if it had been a session of parliament in Oslo.
“What in hell are they jabbering about?” whispered Lute. Dad who loved to rile Lute (usually by merely mentioning FDR’s name,) simply replied “They’re discussing in a language you can’t understand if they can muster enough votes to put your place last on the rotation.” 

This is a family publication so It would be untoward for me to quote Lute verbatim.
Of course dad’s answer was only made up in the spirit of riling. What they were really talking about was the consarned practice of WWII fuel rationing. Most of the farmers farmed with horses and so were limited to the least generous stamp to put in their jalopies. And the pre-war practice of using tractor-powered threshing machine, would quickly evaporate their modest fuel allowances. 

“Ya, uffda! I hope vee don’t haf tew go back tew da flailing system, like my grandpa,” laughed Olaus Tappen. “Yah Yah, dat’s for shooer,” agreed Cervensel Toftrud.
And then the meeting got serious when Tosten Tostenson quietly suggested an option: “How about Oscar Peterson’s steam engine and his old Advance threshing rig? Water is cheap and FDR hasn't raised the price for the stuff in the Trempealeau River.” (“Don’t be so sure, whispered Lute.”)
“Pretty risky; those sparks get outside the firebox and you lose a straw stack and maybe even a barn nearby,” opined the careful Sylvester Sylfest. After a multilingual debate it was decided to phone Oscar.
Dad came home and told Mom that we were second in line and she said, GREAT! Now she knew that all she had to do is cook a meal bigger than Rundvig Tappen’s, who was responsible to kick off the opening day.

Me? I could hardly wait for Oscar’s arrival with his giant behemoths from the past. The day dawned and Mom had the Beaver Dam cookstove baking 10 loaves of bread, two more than Rundvig’s eight loaves Dad had espied the day before. 

The previous week Dad and I busied ourselves collecting old fence posts and wooden detritus that multiplied on farmyards like rabbits in heat, needed by the old steamer. When it arrived, it scared the just milked and very sensitive Guernseys out to pasture as Oscar tooted the steam whistle, then expertly lined up his rickety machines, slid a long leather on pulleys of each end IN ONE TRY, a master of his craft, a Barney Oldfield of cereal grain racetrack. His son “T-Bone” Peterson arrived in a Model A tank truck and headed through a field of shocked oats to the not so mighty Trempealeau River to fill the rusty old tanker.
Oscar got off his high throne, clad in a never-washed Oshkosh B’Gosh bib overall looking as if it had been dipped in cup grease. He spit a stream of Old Summertime tobacco juice at a snarling cat and began squirting an oil can at various joints and valves as the steamer idled beside him, its governor balls whirling idly waiting for Oscar to turn on the steam which would transform the oily governor into a couple madly dancing faster and faster a Virginia Reel with legs and skirts akimbo.
I stole that metaphor from my grandpa who retired from farming years ago, but came out to witness the event and repeated that trope three times along with good old days memories when he had a neighbor who powered his thresher using a dog on a treadmill! Dad listened patiently to his dad but kept a watchful eye on Oscar’s firebox and the blower, a giraffe-like appendage ready to emit clouds of straw and chaff and possibly sparks onto his newly remodeled barn. And warned my 8-year-old ears more than three times to “Stay away from that long belt when it starts to move.”
Next week I’ll conclude my life on that fatal day on the farm. Will I stay away from the belt? Will the straw stack burn down? Or the barn? And T-Bone Peterson. If mom doesn’t serve steak for dinner will he cut off our water supply? Will that long and dangerous belt snap me in two?