And there’s no more band. There’s not a single pane of glass left in the windows. The buffet’s been turned upside down. The decorations hanging from the ceiling are all in tatters. Your jacket’s in rags. There’d be times you could wring the blood out of your shirt — your own blood and other people’s. Then after the whole thing was over you’d sing all the way home.
One night, after one of those dances some farmers took us back home in their wagons. We were drunk as lords. That time I spent three weeks or so hiding out in the loft over the cattle shed, because there’d been a dead body and the police were poking about the villages looking for the guilty party. But you might as well go looking for the wind in the fields. When you’re having fun like that there is no guilty and innocent. Everyone lashes out left, right, and center, you could stab someone to death and you wouldn’t even know who. Or he’d get stabbed and he wouldn’t know who’d done it. Only the Lord God alone could know who was guilty, not the police.
I had three cuts, one in my side and two on my back. I could only lie on my stomach. Mother made compresses with different herbs. But it wasn’t healing up properly. The knife must have been rusty, because the wounds kept bleeding and bleeding, and mother was all teary:
“Szymuś, son. Think of your mother. One of these days they’ll kill you. I couldn’t take that.”
“They’re not going to kill me, mother. No way. Stop crying. I’m not that easy to kill. Look — I’ve got three holes in me, and did they kill me? You see yourself. And I’ll get even with them. Even if they do kill me, better it be sooner than later. There’s no point clinging to life, mother. Just living from one harvest to the next — what kind of life is that?”
As it happened the harvest was beginning, so at least those cuts got me out of mowing the rye and the barley. And more than half our land was barley and rye. On top of everything, that year there were rains, it rained and rained without stopping. Everything was flattened and mowing it was the hardest thing. One acre of flattened crop took as much work as three regular ones. You couldn’t feel your arms afterwards, your back was agony, your head felt like it was made of stone, and your legs would barely carry you home. What were those three holes in me in comparison.
I often tried to convince father to buy a harvester, because I was sick to death of all that mowing. Was it some punishment from God that the harvest had to be taken in year after year? Couldn’t it have grown some different way, so it didn’t have to be mowed and tied up and transported, then after that threshed and winnowed and driven to the mill, and only then you could have bread? Bread could grow right from the start, you’d go out and collect the loaves straight from the field. They could even be small ones the size of heads of cabbage. Not tiny little seeds that you have to sweat over.
But father wouldn’t agree. We can’t afford it, and besides, the hay stays straight when you mow it, but harvesters mess it up so it isn’t any good either for mending the thatch, or making chaff, or stuffing mattresses. And Antek and Stasiek there, they’re growing up. They wouldn’t have anything to do, they’d have to sit around idle if we had a harvester. And when the crop’s been flattened by the rain, you need to mow it by hand anyway, a harvester’s not up to the job.
I didn’t get back on my feet till the wheat was ripe. But we only ever grew a half-acre or so of wheat. So as to have cake for Easter and Whitsun and Christmas, as a base for żurek, and from time to time, mostly on Sundays, for dumplings. As well, the crop hadn’t succeeded that year. It had been overgrown a bit by thistle and gotten lodged by the rain. The police had given up on looking for the culprit. Searching at harvesttime wasn’t the best idea anyway. The farmers were all carrying scythes and the blood was hot in everyone’s veins. And whatever happened the dead man wouldn’t be brought back to life. Besides, he’d been killed among his own people, it was none of the police’s business.
I did a bit of mowing, but I started to feel dizzy and mother told me to go home. She even went after father, saying he should be ashamed of himself, sending me out to work like I was his stepson or some foundling instead of his own son. The poor thing ended up in tears. Because father had been trying to get me out to work since the third day. He came up to the loft where I was hiding while I recovered.
“Are you not getting up? We need to make a start on the rye tomorrow. The spikes are beginning to ripen. You’re not hurt that bad. Looks like flesh wounds. If you could use a knife you can use a scythe. You’re going to come to no good. You’ll end up in jail. We never had a bad seed yet in the family, but it looks like we’re going to now. Grandfather Łukasz killed a man, but that was for the sake of justice. And he ran away to America. You, where are you going to run to? Stach Owsianek only has one leg, the other one’s made of wood, and he mows like no one’s business. Or Mielczarek, his body’s twisted like a tree root, but when he picks up that scythe you’d never know he was deformed. He stands there straight as a fence post and the crop lies itself down in front of him. See, when you’re mowing rye you forget whatever’s wrong with you, whatever hurts. I mean, it’s not like they killed you to death. And if something hurts, it’s best to walk it off. You got cut in the side and the back, but your arms are fine. Your legs are fine. And for mowing all you need is your arms and your legs. If someone’s a good mower they don’t even need to twist. They walk forward like they were going down the road, and their arms swing to and fro in front of them all on their own. The man and his arms are separate. And it’s just legs and arms. You ever see the priest walking along saying his prayers? It’s exactly like that — step by step, slow as can be. Sure, it hurts. But once you’ve mowed a swath it’ll pass. After the second swath you’ll forget you’re injured. The Lord Jesus was stabbed just the same as you, and he’s been hanging on the cross all these thousands of years. His wound isn’t healing. And he has to keep looking at all the badness. Don’t you think he’d rather be mowing than hanging there on the cross? But how can he come down if that’s his lot? The worst part is getting started. Even if you’ve not been stabbed, after the first day it feels like you have. In your arms, your legs, your sides, your back, everywhere. But once you get going your scythe won’t let you rest. Only enough to sharpen it up. Or cross yourself when they ring the Angelus bell. After that it’ll pull you back to work, and on, and on. Till the very end. That’s how it is with a scythe. Wounds’ll often heal quicker when you’re mowing than if you’d gone to church. Wounds of the body, wounds of the soul, wounds in the family, in the village, out in the world. It was thanks to the peasants mowing all those hundreds of years that they could stand having masters. Once you’ve done some mowing, you can put up with all sorts of things, and forgive even more. And how someone mows will tell you whether they’re good or bad, mean, or false. And even when death comes, it’s like he just took the scythe from your hand at harvesttime when you were getting tired, and he took your place and finished what was left of the rye and the wheat and barley. Depending on what you were mowing. When you mow in wartime, it stops death being so terrible. And you, you didn’t get stabbed in wartime, it happened at a dance. You and your pals were having a party, not crying. Holding young girls, not the dead. Drinking vodka, not bitterness.”