Tom pitched another sheaf. This was the first time he’d ever gotten a producer’s-eye look at a California farming landscape, in contrast to the view from a car, or backpacking through the wilderness.
Of course, this isn’t much like anything in my world’s California, he thought dutifully. Except in the basic geography. And this wasn’t the view from the cab of an eight-wheel modern tractor either, high off the ground and enclosed.
On his own feet, it looked… larger, he thought. Quite a bit larger.
He would have expected the valley to feel narrow, but instead it simply seemed directed, oriented by the mountains looming to his right as he looked south and the more distant ones to his left. The flat fifty-acre field of wheat was big when you were attacking it this way, a rustling mystery as the tractors chewed their four staggered swaths through it. The redwood fences and rows of cypress windbreaks alternated, closing in the view either way; he knew consciously that this trough in the earth was only an hour or so drive from top to bottom even on the local gravel roads, but emotionally it seemed to stretch for days both ways, as if his mind were putting it on a foot-travel scale.
A rabbit came out of the wheat and looked at the humans. Adrienne’s dog pointed an alert muzzle its way, and the rabbit obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valor, by the way it turned and dashed back into the standing grain.
The stubble was also taller than a combine would have left, which made the boots and gaiters a good idea—cut wheat stems had sharp ends. He looked down and kicked the stubble tentatively; there were thick green shoots wound into the straw, some just tall enough to be lopped off by the reaper’s cutter bar. Far too uniform for weeds, probably some sort of fodder crop undersown into the grain in the spring.
“Grass ley?” he asked her, half grunting as he lifted another sheaf.
“Legume-grass mixture,” she replied. “Two years in grain, four in grass, then back.”
The tractor came back, pulling the empty flatbed. Adrienne whistled cheerfully, and twirled her fork around her body for a moment like a martial-arts staff.
“Do many of your, ah, landholders pitch in like this?” he asked as they resumed work. “I would have thought horsebacking around and directing the peasants with a riding crop would be more appropriate.”
“I don’t have any tenants here, which means there’s a lot more to do than most landholders have with just their home ranches, and I always did like to lend a hand—Dad thought it was an affectation, ‘playing at peasants,’ as he called it.”
“Which was why you kept doing it?”
Adrienne shrugged ruefully. “Well, at that time, if Dad had said sleeping with grizzly bears was a bad idea, I’d probably have decided that they were really sort of cute…. Anyway, different domains, different Family traditions. The von Traupitzes like to do the blood-and-soil Germanic chieftain thing; I doubt any of the Collettas or their collaterals get closer to harvest than eating the results, or watching. The Contessa approved of that, though she despised old Salvo—and it was mutual, believe me. Not that it makes much difference; allod farms work this way too, just on a much smaller scale, the tenant’s family and a couple of extras.”
The sheaves got a little heavier as the day wore on, the sun went higher in the cloudless blue sky and the temperature went up to the low eighties, although it was a dry heat that sucked the sweat off his skin. There was less chattering, as most of the workers fell into a steady rhythm that didn’t call for thought. He did himself; it had been a while since he’d worked on a farm, and never like this, but it wasn’t as bad as humping the boonies in body armor and full pack with an M240 machine gun in his arms.
Much better, in fact; more like backpacking. He wasn’t fighting to keep alert all the time so some shaheed—or just plain “shithead,” as the army slang put it—the sensors missed couldn’t shoot him, or wondering if he was about to step on a mine.
The sound of a long spoon beating on an iron triangle jarred him out of his trancelike state. His back twinged just slightly as he stood erect and peered from under the brim of his hat; that happened when you repeated the same sequence of motions over and over, and especially if they weren’t motions you were used to. A tractor and flatbed loaded with wicker boxes were parked under one of the oak trees.
“Lunchtime!” someone shouted, which raised a ragged cheer; he looked upward, and then confirmed it by a glance at his wrist—one o’clock in the afternoon.
Everyone stacked their forks and headed toward the valley oak near the edge of the harvested zone; he’d asked someone why any of the big trees were left in the fields, and the reply had been, “For nice.” The dappled shade felt very nice indeed; the native turf had been left out to the drip line of the tree, in a smooth oval eighty feet long. The long grass was getting dry and prickly with the season, and the asterlike blue flowers that looked pretty from a distance had fanged stems, but the flatbed’s cargo included blankets. Those gave evidence that horses could sweat, but he was fairly pungent himself by now. Adrienne settled down not far away, stretching like a cat.
“Stiff?” she asked.
“Well… a little,” he said. “Maybe I should have listened more carefully.”
The flatbed also held two large oak casks, used ones that had once held wine for aging; from what he’d heard, you could do that only once or twice before switching to new. Now one held ice-cold water, and the other fresh-squeezed lemonade, equally icy. He sluiced the dust out of his throat with a mug of the lemonade, downed three of the water to replace what had left rimes of salt on his T-shirt, then took another of the lemonade, savoring the cool tart-sweet taste. Eager hands helped to unpack the wicker baskets. They held wrapped piles of sandwiches made by splitting long loaves of crusty bread in half—bread so fresh-baked that the butter had half melted into the inner surfaces. The filling was shaved honey-cured ham, slathered with homemade mayonnaise, onions, pungent cheese and garlicky mustard. There were also crocks of potato salad speckled with bits of pickled red pepper and laced with boiled shrimp, and…
“Roast quail?” he said dubiously. “Bit fancy for lunch in the field, isn’t it?”
Someone laughed, picked up a rock from the dusty soil and shied it at a section of bound sheaves not far away. A dozen quail who’d been pecking at grain on the ground—and still in the ear—ran or flapped away.
“Watch out for the birdshot,” the wag said, and got a round of laughter.
“Point taken,” he said, loading his plate; saliva was flooding into his mouth at the smell. “No objections.”
He began stoking himself, then stopped for a moment to spit out a piece of the predicted birdshot and chuckled. At Adrienne’s lifted brow he went on: “I was remembering times I was so hungry even MREs tasted good,” he said. “I’m not quite that hungry now… but this is a lot better than MREs.”
“Mmmphf,” she said, taking the meat off a quail’s drumstick, then waving the bone around. “Not quite the gulag-style horror you were expecting, hey?” she added with an ironic tilt of an eyebrow.
“Well, not so far,” he said grudgingly. “Pass the salt, please.”
She did so with a shrug, still smiling slightly. The whole party had been working since dawn, and working hard. When the chatter began after the first wolfish assault on the food he listened and then joined in cautiously; he was here to gather information, after all. Most of it was nostalgically familiar from his own boyhood in the upper Midwest: crops, weather and gossip. A few of the older teenagers were going steady and sat together; the rest tended to clump by boys and girls, with a lot of mutual teasing; the older residents of Seven Oaks made a clump of their own, and the nahua sat off to one side. A few of the youngest of the contract workers were picking dubiously at food strange to them, but the rest were tucking in enthusiastically. Nearly everyone was ready enough to chat to the newcomer; they assumed he was a friend of Adrienne’s, which gave him massive status.