PART NINE Unpublished Reports, Short
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PART NINE Unpublished Reports, Short Stories, and Poems by Richard Scheuerman I. "Finding Otis", by Richard Scheuerman (2003) for Mary Katherine, who makes us so proud, on her birthday and forPhyllis, Dorothy, and Edwin, who reminded us of Otis Inset from the “lautenschlager and Poffenroth” harvest crew, 1911 on the present Pat Kleweno farm north of Endicott. Grandpa Karl Scheuerman is under the derrick table holding the pitchfork. No sign of Otis. Ninety-four degrees outside today—"thrashing weather." Even at the distance of four decades, that expression conjures up sensations of stifling July heat and a neck rubbed raw from combat against wheat and barley chaff. Our grandfather, Karl Scheuerman, spoke the words every July with a combination of both enthusiasm and reverence. The gleam in his eye was all but incomprehensible to an adolescent grandson who looked upon another searing day in 1960s Palouse Country grain harvest as indentured servitude without hope of escape. Our family had been farming as far back as the memory of our experience and Grandpa was the repository of this knowledge. He cut a stately profile, a tall man with Kaiser Wilhelm eyebrows, and his perpetual smile lifted the spirits of anyone whose presence he countenanced. Grandpa‟s stories stretched back beyond the transatlantic voyage of his parents from the steppes of Russia nearly a century earlier to our ancestral Vogelsberg homeland in Germany. The tales he seemed to favor most, however, were about folks he had encountered during a lifetime in 226 the hills from which he had never greatly strayed. Yet his outlook on life was anything but parochial. Pioneer immigrant church life had instilled in him a reading knowledge of High German, though his native tongue was the sibilant 18th century Hessian dialect of the Volga Germans, and a few years of formal schooling had introduced him to the literature of Longfellow and Tennyson. My aunts later told me he had once considered studying for the ministry until family circumstances confined him to our rural home. Even far into retirement, Grandpa couldn't let summer pass without at least one trek to harvest field where he would hitch a ride from the elevator in Endicott for the ride out to the "home place," five miles north of town. The late morning breeze flooding the cab of our '49 black Ford truck heading back to the field brought welcome relief from the stifling temperatures inside after the twenty-minute crawl into town fully loaded with 250 bushels of wheat. Temptations to push the rig to at last thirty miles and hour were difficult to resist on the way to town, but anything near that speed would send a cascade of kernels over the warped bulk ranks that contained the load. Should Dad ever see a trail of grain on the road leading from our field, there would be hell to pay. Driving in the presence of Grandpa, however, always brought easy conversation and laughter. While not given to idle talk about the sylvan joys of yesteryear, he would patiently and thoroughly respond to youthful questions about our past and and myriad topics on the mind of a kid like me at that age--the prospects for a good basketball team this fall, destination of the fire truck crew yesterday afternoon, and which city cousins would be visiting the ranch this week. "The Brewster bunch is coming over this weekend," Grandpa announced with obvious pleasure. "Millie and the kids are going to stay the week." His only grandchildren living beyond the community resided half a state away so the prospect of their coming was something to celebrate. To Grandpa, family was bound together like shocks of grain. The presence of our cousins brought some hope of novelty to the humdrum schedule my older brother and I felt condemned to endure on the Scheuerman acres during harvest season. Two years older than me, Don whittled away the hours between trips to town in his truck, a newer red Chevy with blue racks, by reading from his mobile library of paperback Ian Fleming novels. I wanted to drive his truck because the hoist was much more cooperative when unloading the grain in town. But farm life teaches lessons about age and rank early on. Still, cruising through town in the Ford had its advantages as the lusty grunt of its engine turned the appropriate heads. Some of my more mechanically-inclined classmates spent hours in the shop trying to get their cars to howl the same tune. I spent most of my time in the field dreaming or trying to catch up on rest deprived us from the new regime of thirteen hour work days and wasn't sure I'd ever be cut out for the farming life. Dad's ability to keep the oldest machinery in the countryside not only functioning but raise some of the area's finest crops was something of a marvel to me. Keeping our operation going on "Jap tape and bailing wire" was not hyperbole. I contributed to the effort in minor ways--keeping the speed down on the road, shoveling up any grain that errantly fell to the ground while the combine unloaded its plenty, and dutifully cutting the heads off any offending heads of wild rye that dared infest our father's fields. We carefully placed into sacks for his careful incineration at the end of the season. I liked hearing 227 Grandpa's stories about the old days and on such days when he spent that morning with me in the field, I would ask for more details on how we had come to live on our half-section wheat ranch, small even by 1960s standards. I drove down the lane past our house and around the old orchard of stripped apples and pears that he and my grandmother had planted around the turn of the century. I took a run at the steep hill leading back along a slope above our house, a box trimmed in wavy white shakes, and gunned the engine to a trail in the stubble that led to resting place shaded by the branches of a crab apple tree oddly positioned up in the field. The remnants of a dilapidated McCormick reaper had fused with the lower branches of the tree as if mother clutching child. Grandpa pointed to the field across the road where we would be cutting in a few days. The entire field was a cresting sheen of full ripeness. "Your great-grandfather turned that piece from virgin sod with a footburner plow soon after settling here in 1891," he said with a wave of his sunburned arm. "Took him two months to do just that hundred acres with a two-horse team. Of course that meant a day starting at 4:30 in the morning to feed the horses." We still had that plow down in the farmyard, a proud rusted tribute to Sisyphean struggle, stored away behind the old smokehouse a long stone's-throw from our home where Grandpa had also lived in his youth. I had seen in an old photograph that in his day the house had been ringed on two sides by a fancy veranda of beams and spindles. Just across a grass lined ditch that drained acreage behind our house stood one of the most remarkable chicken houses in the region. Spacious enough to accommodate a couple dozen pupils in its former one-room country schoolhouse days, this imposing shingle structure of yellow ochre and cream exterior now held class for a large flock of white leghorns and a dozen sheep. A congregation of rock doves kept house in a cupola of concave sides that seemed from a palace of the great khan. Grandpa had served as director for the Litzenberger School, named for our cousin neighbors, in the 1920s and welcomed each year's schoolteacher into the Scheuerman home as if a member of the family. He would not accept payment for board and room as the commitment of young educators like Vera Longwell, who arrived from Kansas in the fall of 1920, to the wellbeing of Grandpa and Grandma's six children was sufficient reward. The only evidence of its former use in my time was a string of six tin cups suspended from a post in what Dad told me had been the kitchen. Miss Longwell's subsequent sixty-year correspondence with our family recalled many instances of pioneer pedagogy now considered innovative--cross-age grouping, classical and interdisciplinary curriculum, and relevance. I asked Grandpa about the Midwest schoolmarm. "Once after school your Aunt Evelyn told me she had a math lesson about Babe Ruth. I said, 'What does baseball have to do with arithmetic?' 'Well, Dad,' she said, "He's playing with the Yankees for $125,000 a year. Miss Longwell wanted to know how long it would take for him to become a millionaire." I knew from our weekly Sunday afternoon feasts of boiled roast beef with boiled potatoes, carrots, and parsnips--the menu rarely varied at his home, that he also had intimate knowledge of the Bible. His offerings of blessing at mealtime, sometimes rendered in German, included passages appropriate for every occasion: "All eyes wait upon thee, O Lord, Thou givest them meat in due season. Thou openest thy liberal hand, and satisfieth the need of every living 228 thing." The archaic King James humbly offered in slight German accent defined reverence. The multivolume leather-bound Bible commentaries I had seen in his bedroom (Doeschel's Biblewerk) showed evidence of substantial use.