And now the year of the seagoing farm lifts to its crest with mushrooming July thunderheads leaning over it. It comes in haying-time. The tinker mackerel are running by nations in the sea. continents of herring are trailing against the farm so hard that its ribs are cracking, vows Uncle Cephus. But for all that, for once all farming of the sea has to wait, and all hands—and arms and legs and hearts—are in the hay. Everything comes at once in this corner of the world, and July proves it. But the hay cannot wait, and the thunder grumbles, and nun strain and sweat. Windrows run up over all the hills of sleep, strong men are still pitching hay in their dreams, and Peter, fast asleep in his bed, still treads the hayrack.
Even the deepest of sea-uncles is mustered in With a pitchfork. Cephus is here with the rest, lifting hay to the high rack. His white hair is all tangled in with the white hair of the rising thunderclouds in the west. Uncle Timothy is stripped to his waist, sweating like a Trojan, swearing like a Hessian trooper, and his big mustache leans bushily away from the wind. Father is in his shirt sleeves and cool as a cucumber. Peter is working like a man on the load, stowing away, trying to keep up with three men carrying whole worlds of hay on their upright forks and all lost from sight but their legs. He catches the worlds and rolls them to the middle of the rack.
Thunder outside. Thunder in. The big barn shakes with eight-footed thunder as the straining horses come pounding up the runway and across the planks of the Hour. and behind them comes the rack, with Peter prone on the top to keep from being brushed off by the lintel of the high door. The load fits exactly between the mows and makes one sweet world of hay. Father takes his place on the middle of the rack. He doesn't roll up his sleeves even now. But he shoves home his fork and comes up with his load and swings it to the mow. where Uncle Timothy is a wet red Indian to the belt. Calm as the incoming waves of the sea, the vast forkfuls rise, and the rack that Father is standing on goes down, and the mow rises. Fourteen forkfuls is what a load means to Father, and he knows where each forkful is. He can feel each with the tines of his pitchfork.
All the boys tread and stow away under the shouts of the slave driver Uncle Timothy. He keeps the hay rolling at them. They have to look alive not to be lost till the middle of next January under the rising tide of daisies and clover. The boys' overalls are dark blue with the heat in their bodies. They are as often upside down as up. They take what fun they can with tumbling and somersaulting on the hay, but they are likely to get a rap on their overalls from Uncle Timothy if they fool too much and don't tend to the business of packing down the forkfuls of grass. And their world is hot and dusty and dark and full of the prickles of thistles, and more work than play.
And the cool artist among the rankling lobsters out at sea is the same artist here, he uses his pitchfork as he uses an oar or a cod line. And the loud goes down to the bottom of the hayrack, and Father picks up his reins and drives out of the west door of the barn as cool as he came.
Only Uncle Cephus gets any rest. While the rack is unloading, the old captain sits in the shade of the high barn door and sees the snowy peaks of Java instead of the mountains of lightning standing up along the west. And he is at peace with the world.
And the thunderhead touches the sun, the sun goes out. and lightning rips the world apart. It rains all at once like falling pitchforks. All the rest of the hay, so beautifully made and windrowed and bunched, must be shaken out tomorrow to dry all over in the sun. Then it must be raked and windrowed and bunched once more. But that is the luck of hayingtime, And the boys of the farm forget the backaches of tomorrow and run and cool their hot dusty feet in the sudden rivers that are running over white clover blooms where no rivers should flow. Their breeches are still in summer, but their feet are in hailstones and water that feels like January. And the rain gone eastward turns fire now, and a world-wide rainbow spans the dark sea.
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