Many years ago, my wife picked up a cast-iron, hand-cranked corn sheller at an auction, just about the same time Bob Pargeter passed over his cornfield next door with his new combine. I noticed there were all sorts of intact corncobs lying on the ground at the corners of the fields where the machine turned sharply, so I went out with an empty grain bag one Saturday morning and, in the space of 20 minutes, gathered as many cobs as the bag would hold. As chance would have it, Bob drove by in his truck and gave me a puzzled look. It occurred to me I might have irritated him, because he failed to raise one index finger off the steering wheel. This can be a sign that you have irritated a Pargeter, something no sane person in this township would want to do, so I made a point of visiting the Kingbird Café the same day to explain myself.
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“No problem,” said Bob. “It’s good not to see it go to waste… but you just looked so desperate!”
Gleaning after the harvest never really caught on in this part of the world and by the time I had run that bag of corncobs through the hand-cranked corn sheller I began to see why. Forty-five minutes of cranking converted one bag of cobs into a two-gallon pail of grain corn, which satisfied the hens for about two days. A minute with the calculator indicated that I would have to spend three 40-hour weeks gleaning and shelling to feed the hens all year. The savings to me at the market price at the time of $3 a bushel would amount to roughly $75, or $1.60 an hour for my time. Even a freelance writer, putting in two naps a day and a long lunch at the Kingbird Café, can outperform those numbers.
Owly Drysdale, who is nearly 90 now and still keeps cows, remembers using one of those shellers for his mother’s hens. But he shook his head when he saw me grinding cobs into a pail.
“Either get the boys to do it or shut the door on the barn so the neighbours can’t see you. They’ll be putting a tag day together for you before you know it.”
Last fall, Bob and his brother Bert were combining the cornfield next door and running a grain buggy back and forth to a transport truck out on the road. In the morning, I noticed there was a small pile of corn sitting in the middle of the road with five crows standing on it, so I went out with a broom and a shovel and filled three bags. Ten minutes later Bob drove up, stared at the spot and I waved at him.
“Oh,” he said. “It was you. I didn’t think those crows ate it all.”
“Did you want it back?” I asked.
“No,” he said waving a bear paw at me. “I was worried some motorbike might slip on it and sue me. But if you want some more, we had an oops! moment out there last night in the dark. It was the end of an 80-hour week and the combine jogged right but Bert kept going straight with the buggy. It was maybe 10 seconds before we saw it but that was enough to leave a trail of corn 50 feet long and a foot deep.”
That afternoon, I went out with the boys and gathered 20 bags off the field with a broom and a shovel.
Bob saw the load in the back of the pickup and nodded approvingly. “When that combine sneezes, it feeds a writer’s chickens through the winter.”
The five books of Moses, which guide Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, offer explicit rules on the subject of gleaning. Leviticus 9:19 advises farmers not to harvest the corners of their grain fields or gather the gleanings in their vineyards. This food is to be left for “the poor and the stranger.” Buddhists use the term “mottainai” to indicate regret at the waste or misuse of something sacred or highly respected, such as religious objects or food. Nearly every culture has some “waste not want not” pronouncement on the need to share the harvest with those less fortunate.
On the Petunia Valley Sideroad, the farmers look after poor, strange artists like myself and keep us on speed dial during the harvest.
