Chartreuse Sails

David Hamilton

Charlie asked whether I got morning sickness. He was one of several black men with whom I worked on a fence construction crew one summer in Virginia. He was the oldest, the most experienced, and our foreman. On a clear day, the Blue Ridge defined our western horizon. "Of course not," I said, and must have looked startled, for Charlie assured me that he "always did." He had just completed measurements and was pointing out where I should back up the small tractor, with the power auger on its rear end, and commence digging a hole. Charlie was as undefensive about his admission as the blue sky overhead. He stood smiling, open, and armed with a manual post-hole digger with which he would clean up the rough plunge of the auger about as quickly as I could lift it out of the ground and maneuver the tractor into position for the next hole. I spent a fair portion of that summer trying to perfect the efficiency with which Charlie used his digger, the sure vertical plunge making a smooth cut shaving down one side of the hole, the quick, horizontal tug on its arms, closing the jaws below, then the clean and jerk of clay and loam up out of the opening, leaving the hole smooth and ready. Place two holes together, line them with a blanket, and you could bed down a child.

That night I dreamed of lying not in a post hole but in a furrow, just beyond the shade of a pair of basswoods I had passed and passed, and of giving birth. I lay on my side and bare bottomed, loam cushioning my cheek, while I sought protection in fresh black earth unlike any in Virginia. But a furrow's not that deep and I lay exposed, the sun warming my bare backside while new wheat gleamed at eye level. Morning sun streamed across it, washing it chartreuse while I pushed a baby out onto the land. "Sails," I thought, "chartreuse sails," as tiny leaves of new wheat billowed on my low horizon.

I was young and my young wife was pregnant for the first time. But the ground in which I was lying was not in Virginia, and the tractor that had prepared it wasn't the little Ford with the post hole auger.

The tractor was a John Deere G--a Popping Johnny--that I had once worked back and forth across a hundred acre field, a treeline defining the east end and a dirt road the west. Three fields lay to the north, two more and our strip of timber to the south. I plowed the Middle Field on a March day of the sort that, on a college campus, causes t-shirts and frisbees to break out. Again I stood at the wheel. The east end of the field gleamed in winter wheat, new, tender, and brilliant as a June lawn. I plowed corn stubble that abutted it. My tractor pulled a simple, two-bottom plow. Two coulters cut into the ground, then two shares followed, knifing deeply, peeling back, and rolling the earth over, earth as black as a moonless night. The tractor moved slowly, and I spent most of the day turned half around, watching the staggered peelings of earth roll over. I saw the plowshares as hands sliding under the earth and lifting the dirt as it turned, broke up, and resettled so that another furrow lay stretched out naked and revealed.

I worked mesmerized by the widening strip of black earth that rolled over against the lime-lime green of new wheat in spring. We could have named our daughter "Chartreuse," but we didn't think of that. I think instead of how visible work, with land, machines and tools, has nudged me toward mysteries, often feminine, and of how the boyishness of trying to master such work knocks at their doors.

When we cultivated, small green corn glimmered down rows where in other years wheat had grown and in others water had crested for miles in all directions, higher than the stacks on my tractor. Then clumps of trees broke through like whispers of islands. Cultivating, I worked four rows at a time, with "shoes," small spear-shaped blades, breaking up the dirt between each pair of rows. My small front wheels jerked and pitched over the clods that remained after plowing, disking, planting, and the earth settling to a seedbed still rough enough to suggest waves lapping against a bow. If the tractor followed a sudden twist of my wheels, if I didn't correct quickly for its jerks and pitches, I could suddenly take out rather than clean up four rows of corn.

The tractor moved at the pace of a brisk walk, four rows east then west four, and at the end of each round I could skip four rows to make the turn easier. Turning required tripping a lever behind me to pull out the shoes, breaking the wheel on which the turn was made by pressing down on a pedal, spinning the steering wheel and lining the front wheels up between the second and third of a new set of rows, and dropping the shoes back in. Skipping four rows and moving to the next set down the field made those several maneuvers easier. I could work back across the field later and pick up all the skipped rows with the same smooth motions.

As I become more agile with the tractor, I found it beneath me not to make the tightest turn possible. I'd cut the throttle with my right hand, pulling the cultivator lever behind me simultaneously with my left, then disengage the clutch by jerking back a second lever on my right, break the large left wheel with my left foot pressing hard on the left foot break, spin the steering wheel left with my left hand while riding the clutch with my right, line up the very next four rows by swinging the front wheels smoothly around and between the second and third of them while the huge left wheel stood almost still, turning on some small, unnoticed chartreuse sail, reset the cultivator by pulling on the lever behind me again, watch the shoes slide into the earth at the very starts of new rows, throw the throttle forward triumphantly and fully engage the clutch. Then with a smile that I'm glad no one was around to record, I could loaf and invite my soul.

Years later, my brother George, the father of three daughters, said he had just about the same dream every time.

Reprinted from Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm by David Hamilton, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 2001 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.