First Cut

by Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The radio in the kitchen said rain by evening. Mrs. Lapierre, who owned the house and had walked over to look at the burner on the stove that would not light, said the radio was in Portland and knew nothing about Stratford. Then she looked past my shoulder out the west window, where the mountains across the river in Vermont stood up sharp as if they had been inked that morning, every ridge and every spruce on the ridge, and she said, "Well. Maybe this time it does."

That was Thursday, the eighteenth of July, 1957. I was forty-four years old. I was a guidance counsellor at a high school in the Bronx, and the Board of Education had given me the month and a small sum to write a report on what the Board called the holding power of the secondary school. Holding power means how many of the children you can keep in the building until they are eighteen. It is the language of a dam. I had rented Mrs. Lapierre's house because it was cheap and far, and because my wife, Esther, had taken our daughter to her mother's in the Catskills for July and had said to me, kindly, "Go and be lonely somewhere you can work." Esther knows that I am a queer man as well as her husband. That is all I intend to say about my marriage, which is a good one, except that it explains why I had spent the week on Mrs. Lapierre's porch with the Herald Tribune on my knees, not turning the pages, watching the man across the road cut his hay.

His name was Gérard Paquette. I had learned that from the mailbox. He farmed his father's place alone, thirty acres of meadow and a woodlot going up the hill behind, with a team of horses, because, Mrs. Lapierre said, a tractor and a baler cost more than the farm, and the Paquettes did not borrow. He had mowed the last piece, the four acres down by the river, on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday it lay and cured in the sun. That morning he had been out with the dump rake since the dew went off, raking it into windrows, and the windrows lay across the field like the lines on a page.

I watched him until eleven. Then I put the paper down and went across the road, because the mountains were too clear and he was one man and there were four acres.

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He saw me coming the length of the field and did not stop the horses. When I got to him he pulled up, and he looked first at my shoes, which were city shoes, and then at my hands.

"I could help you get it in," I said. "If you show me. I don't know anything."

"You know how to drive?"

"A car."

He considered that, without contempt. He was thirty-three, I found out later, and built narrow, with a long neck burnt dark to the collar line and white below it, and a way of standing with all his weight on one leg as if the other were resting for later. "Then you go on the load," he said. "Loading is easier to learn than pitching. Worse when you do it wrong."

He went to the barn for the hayrack and a second fork. I stood in the field and smelled the hay, which I had never smelled before in that quantity, and which does not smell like anything else: green and sweet, and underneath, a little like tea. A deer fly found the back of my neck. I killed it and another came.

What he taught me in the next hour I set down here, because nobody had taught me anything that way since I was a boy, and because I had spent nineteen years in an office doing the opposite.

He did not explain. He hitched the team to the rack, put me up on it with a fork, and drove alongside the first windrow, and he pitched a forkful up to me, a great loose armful of hay on the tines that came over the side of the rack like a wave. "Corner," he said. I put it in the front corner. "Other corner." I put it there. "Now middle, on top of them, so they don't slide." I did that. Then the back corners, then the middle again. Corners, corners, middle. Tie the corners down with the middle. That was the whole of the theory, and he said it in perhaps fifteen words over forty minutes, and the rest I learned with my feet, by walking on the load and feeling where it was soft. A soft place in a load is a place where it will open on the road. You learn that by the third forkful if you are paying attention, and you are paying attention, because you are standing on it.

He drove the team from the ground with the lines over his shoulder and talked to them in French. Hue to go on, a click of the tongue to go faster, wo to stop. The horses were Duke and Pet, Belgians, the colour of a penny that has been in somebody's pocket, and they knew the work better than I did and moved along the windrows without being told, and stopped when Gérard stopped pitching.

The first load was high and handsome, and I was proud of it. On the turn through the gate the whole back corner slid off into the road.

I stood up there on what was left and looked at it. Gérard looked at it too. Then he said, "Middle," as a man might say amen, and pitched it all up again. He did not say anything else. He did not need to. I have sat across a desk from perhaps four thousand children and told them, with the help of the Kuder Preference Record, what their aptitudes were. I do not think any one of them learned from me in a year what I learned from that corner of hay in the road in one minute: that a thing done for its own sake, in front of you, with the result falling off the wagon when you are wrong, teaches you without any teacher, and the teacher, if there is one, has only to stand by and say one word.

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The barn was a high old bank barn set into the hillside, grey shingles, a cupola with no weathervane. Gérard's father had hung a hay carrier on a track under the ridgepole, and a big double-harpoon fork on a rope came down out of the dark of the peak to the wagon on the barn floor. Gérard stabbed the fork into the load and set the barbs with a lever. Then he unhitched Duke and gave me the horse. The rope ran from the fork up to the carrier, along the track, down through a pulley at the far end of the barn, and out of the back door, where it was hooked to Duke's whiffletree.

"Walk him out," Gérard said. "Straight. When I holler, stop."

I took Duke by the bridle and walked him out the back of the barn and down the slope behind it, and the rope came taut behind us, and I heard behind me and above me a great tearing hush as a quarter of the load lifted off the wagon, and then a click, which was the carrier catching on the track, and then the rumble of the carrier running along the track into the mow. Gérard hollered. I stopped. He yanked the trip rope and the fork let go, and a quarter of a load of hay fell into the dark of the mow with a sound like a pillow dropped on a floor upstairs.

Four times for each load. Duke knew the way down the slope better than I did, and the way back up.

Between the second and third load we stopped at the well by the kitchen door. Gérard drew a bucket and we drank from the dipper, both of us, the water so cold it hurt my teeth, and he poured a second dipper over his head and stood bent with his hands on his knees while it ran off his nose onto the stones. Then he looked at my hands, which were coming up in blisters at the base of each finger, and poured a dipper over them too, slowly, holding my wrist to keep my hand still under the water.

"What do you do in New York?" he said.

I told him.

He thought about that. "You're the one that says what course," he said. "Commercial, general, college."

"That's right."

"We had one of those in Berlin." He let go of my wrist. "He told me general. I was sixteen. I went in the mill." He meant the paper mill, the Brown Company, where most of Berlin worked; you can smell it from twenty miles on a damp day. "Wood room. Twelve years, less the Army. Then my father died and I came home."

That was all. He did not complain of it, and he did not ask me to say anything. But he looked at me, and I felt that I was expected to say something true.

"I put boys in general every week," I said. "I give them a form to fill in, and the form tells me. Then I tell them."

"And they go."

"Most of them go. Then I write a report on why they go."

He laughed, once, a surprised sound, and hung the dipper back on its nail.

I will say this plainly, because it is the whole of my report and the Board will not print it. The boy in the guidance office is not a person to the school. He is a figure in the holding power. The school is not organized to help him find out what he wants and is able to do; it is organized to keep him in the building, and when he cannot be kept, to sort him and file him so that his leaving does not show. It takes the most curious and capable boys it has, the ones who would rather be doing something real, and it teaches them in four years that what they want is not to be had and that their own hands are worth nothing in that building, and then it is surprised when they walk out to the mill, where at least the hands are wanted. Gérard at sixteen was not a dropout. He was a young man who left an institution that had nothing to offer him for one that, God help him, paid.

And here he was at thirty-three with a farm that does not pay, doing the most intelligent work I had ever seen done, and teaching it to a man from the Bronx in fifteen words.

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Inside the barn, on the big beam over the threshing floor, there was writing. I saw it while we were waiting for the third load to settle in the mow. It was a column of dates, in pencil and in carpenter's crayon, some of it faded nearly out. 1re coupe, 28 juin 1921. 1re coupe, 4 juillet 1922. Down the beam, one for each summer, in a square, careful hand that slanted backward, until 1952; then four more in another hand, smaller, upright: 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956. The last said 1re coupe 15 juil.

"My father," Gérard said. "Then me." He did not explain why they wrote it. I did not ask. I think there is no reason, the way there is no reason for most of the things that keep people alive.

By the fourth load the sky over Vermont had gone the colour of slate and the mountains had disappeared, all at once, as if somebody had pulled a sheet down over them. The air went still and heavy. The deer flies were frantic. We had both taken off our shirts by then; it was hot as an oven on top of the load, and Gérard had been pitching for three hours without a pause longer than the well. I was standing above him with my fork, and he pitched up a forkful, and I took it, and he pitched up another, and between those two forkfuls I was looking at him, his back and his arms, the white line at his collar, the sweat running down into the waist of his trousers, and he looked up and saw me looking.

He did not look away. Neither did I. It was the first honest thing either of us had done all week, and we were both fairly calm about it.

"You don't read that paper," he said.

"No."

"All week. Every day, the same page." He pitched another forkful. "Corner."

I put it in the corner.

There is a great deal of nonsense talked about this, by the psychiatrists and by the police and by the men themselves, about the danger and the shame and the signals and so on. I have had my share of the danger and the shame, in parks and in the bars on Third Avenue, and they are real enough. But what happened in Gérard's field was simpler than any of that, and it is the way these things ought to happen, and sometimes do, when there is no institution standing between two people to tell them what they are: a man saw that he was wanted and said so. That is all contact is. You notice what is there, and you say it out loud, and then the next thing can happen.

The next thing was the fifth load, because the hay came first.

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We got the last load onto the barn floor at a quarter to five with the first drops falling, big drops, far apart, that made dark coins in the dust of the yard. Gérard ran the team into their stalls and I stood at the barn door with my blistered hands and watched the rain come across the river. You could see it come, a grey wall walking over the meadows, and then it hit the barn roof all at once, so loud that Duke threw up his head in the stall, and the yard turned to running mud, and the smell of wet dust came in.

He came back from the horses and stood beside me. We watched the rain on the four acres, which were stubble now, bright green between the rows where the windrows had lain.

"Got it," he said.

"We got it."

We forked that last load off by hand into the bay, since he would not take Duke out in the lightning, and then we went up the ladder into the mow, where it was dark and hot and smelled of the whole afternoon, and there in the new hay we made love. I recommend a hay mow for it to nobody. It is scratchy, it is full of dust and seeds, and something bit me on the thigh. It was also the best I can remember, and I am a man who has a lot to remember. He was not shy, and not in a hurry, and he did not afterwards say anything about what it meant, which is a courtesy I have not often been shown.

We lay on our backs and listened to the rain on the shingles a yard above our faces. After a while the thunder went off east toward Maine, and the rain settled into a steady pour, the kind that goes on all night.

"Second cut is the end of August," he said. "If it's a good year."

I said that I would be in the Bronx at the end of August, explaining holding power to the Board of Education.

"Sure," he said. Then: "Saturdays, maybe. It's not so far. There's the train."

I said nothing to that, because I did not know yet what was true, and I had decided that afternoon, on top of the fourth load, that I would not say anything else to him that was not true.

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When we came down the ladder it was nearly dark in the barn. Gérard went to the beam over the threshing floor and felt along the top of it until he found the stub of a carpenter's pencil, flat and red, sharpened with a knife. He licked the point. Then he held it out to me.

"You write it," he said.

I said it was his farm and his father's beam.

"You loaded it," he said, and put the pencil in my hand, and closed my fingers on it, the blisters and all.

So I wrote it, standing on an upturned bucket to reach, under his own four years and his father's thirty-two. I wrote it in English, because I have no French but hue and wo, and my handwriting, which is a guidance counsellor's handwriting, made to be read by a principal, looked foolish there, round and slanting the wrong way. First cut, July 18, 1957. Gérard held the bucket steady with his foot and read it aloud, slowly, as if it were in a foreign language, which for him it partly was. Then he took the pencil from me and put it back on top of the beam where it lived.

Outside the rain was coming down on the stubble, and in the stalls behind us Duke and Pet were pulling hay out of the rack and steaming in the dark like two kettles.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Paulō Goodmanō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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