Song of Destiny by Paul Legler

Author:Paul Legler [Legler, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Coming of Age, South Dakota, Vietnam War, Bronze Star
ISBN: 9780878399413
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Published: 2013-09-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

While North Dakota winters are renowned for their fierce winds and bitter cold, the summers are the opposite extreme. North Dakota has one of the highest temperature differentials anywhere, with a record high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit just north of where I grew up at Steele, and a low of minus sixty degrees at Parshall. That August saw a week of record-breaking high temperatures, and I suffered in the blistering heat. We had no sooner finished putting up the last of the hay when my father put me on the windrower to start cutting the wheat. I was looking forward to moving to Fargo, a big town in my mind, and starting at the seminary, and I chafed under my father’s ceaseless persistence to work.

Once you’re used to it, driving a windrower requires only minimal attention. All you need to do is keep the rows straight for the combine and adjust the height of the cutter depending upon the height of the grain. On the hills, the grain is usually short, and you need to get the sickle down to the ground, so as not to miss any short grain stems, and to make sure there is enough of the stalk for the combine header to pick up. In the low areas around the sloughs, you cut the grain higher, so not as much straw runs through the combine and potentially clogs up the feeder. Those adjustments became automatic for me after a time. As I drove ’round and ’round the field, I would look to the sky and pray for thunderclouds and rain. If it rained, I could stop windrowing and drive to town and have some fun. While I was praying for thunderclouds, I knew my mother, at that same exact moment, was standing at the kitchen window fingering her rosary beads and praying for the thunderclouds that might bring hail and ruin the crops, to stay away.

It was very hot, the sun was beating down fiercely, and the sweat was making my shirt stick to the skin between my shoulder blades. The rotating reel of the windrower kicked up dust that settled on my perspiring skin, making me uncomfortably itchy. Grasshoppers flew up and struck me in the face. At the end of each row I stopped and took a drink from a half-gallon Thermos of cherry Kool-Aid Mother had sent with me. Before I even got around the field finishing the next row, I was thirsty again and thinking about the next drink and how cool and delicious it would taste when I gulped it.

On this day, the Lord may have heard my prayers and not Mothers. I could see thunderheads rising up to the west. Hour after hour they rose, slowly building up, and then churning more and more rapidly, until they towered into the sky and slowly swallowed the western sun, casting a gray shadow upon the earth. At six o’clock my father drove up in the pickup. He said that it looked like it was going to storm.

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