The Seven Dollar Haystack

Gordon Baer The Seven Dollar Haystack by Thomas d. Lane My grandfather's haystacks were monuments to uselessness. He had no livestock, even in my earliest memories. And besides, his hillside acreage was surrounded by sub-divisions—even though they didn't call them that in our town, not yet. A low class slum on one side of his property stared unshiilingly up his grassy slopes toward the back walls and thick hedges of some of the oldest money in town. Only my eccentric grandfather would want to own that no-man's land, between bona fide industrialists and chronically unemployed. I remember thinking that he liked the rich folks better, although he had nothing in common with them except ownership of land, because their walls and hedges at least saved him the expense and labor of a fence on their side. He was, however, angered by the seven-foot cyclone fence installed by one of his rich neighbors. He did not seem to consider that it was aimed much more at the slum-dwelling urchins than at him. "Hmmmph!" he would mutter. "At least the damn thing's up at the fur end." He found solace in not being able to set the offending barrier from his windows. But more than once as he raised his head from hoeing or scything to wipe the sweat from his grizzly brow, he looked 16 at the. fence, shook his head, and articulated what I remember as his favorite and most frequent expression: "Shee-yut! Good God!" He was indeed a man of strong habits. He never used this epithet by halves, as if it might lose its effect. Perhaps he thought of it as another might quake at saying only half the Lord's Prayer: it simply wouldn't get the job done. Luther Blevins and I agreed with my grandfather's opinion of this particular fence—probably the only time in our lives that we shared a common view with the old man. For us, the fence blocked off some fine woodland, wild enough to have Tarzan-like vines which allowed us to act out our versions of Saturday morning movies. We found the fence a forbidding obstacle, and climbing it punctured my middle class values as well as our jeans and shirts. We knew that the woods were a rich man's backyard (even though such a man would never use the word "backyard"); but somehow crossing such a high fence made the trespassing too obvious to me. Luther never really said whether it bothered him. Of course, we never climbed the fence when my grandfather was around. My friends were.not allowed on his property, unless they happened to be with me, and unless my grandfather was not at home. And only the latter condition carried any weight. If my grandfather was at home, I usually was busy anyway, working in the garden or mowing one part or another of the huge expanse of grass with an old iron-wheeled push mower. This chore began as soon as I was old enough—or big enough—to cause the machine to move. Just as some nightmares involve being chased and unable to run fast, my earliest-remembered bad dreams are of being forced to push an ever-larger cast iron mower, Sisyphus-like, over wet, tractionless grass. While my brothers and I struggled with the devilish mower or weeded the garden, my grandfather swung a razorsharp two-handed scythe until it was too dark to see, mowing his steep hillsides as closely with that ancient tool as any cast iron mower could ever have done. He arranged the cut grass in perfectly straight windrows; and when it had dried just right, he gathered it, using a glinting, sharp pitchfork, and made haystacks at least ten feet high—or so they seemed. The sharpened pole that formed the rigid center of each stack was always a mystery : how did anyone get such a point on a piece of wood (I must have been denied even the knowledge of such sharp tools as drawing knives then.) Did the pole extend into the ground under the haystack? If not, what made it...