Thrashing

“For many years they [the Schultz family] had one of the big threshing machines in the area. Paul, covered with grease, ran the huge Case engine, and Carl operated the 26” White separator. It took eight hard working men and teams, and a couple of spike pitchers, to feed the brute. Many a neighbor’s field was cleaned in jig time” (James 483).

“The thrashing machine, or, in modern spelling, threshing machine (or simply thresher), was a machine first invented by Scottish mechanical engineer Andrew Meikle for use in agriculture. It was invented (c.1784) for the separation of grain from stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming. Mechanization of this process took much of the drudgery out of farm labour” (“Threshing Machine”).

“Thrash out or over: to talk over thoroughly and vigorously in order to reach a decision, conclusion, or understanding; discuss exhaustively” (“Thrash”).

I’m looking at a black and white vintage photograph which hangs in the hall outside my piano room. Pulling twenty horses in four rows (two rows of four and two rows of six), a large mechanical contraption with a rolling scythe to the right lumbers into the modest ascent, about one hundred years ago, of a wheat field. I am struck by the juxtaposition of the threshing machine with rows of dignified and muscular work-horses. Caught in this rare photograph is the “brute”—the thresher—an industrial revolution invention which somewhat freed my grandpa and his fellow threshers from back breaking labor. Also captured is the resigned and powerful presence of the horses. This image suggests to me an age that is long ago. Amazingly, though, I am uncommonly and intimately connected to it, because the Schultz family in rural Alberta (and their army of threshers) are my grandfather’s neighbors who lived one homestead over on the vast prairie.

I longingly study this old photograph for traces of my grandfather. Large-boned with limpid blue eyes, he was a farm boy surviving brutal Canadian winters and threshing in August. Uncle Jimmy bears Grandpa’s massive hands and shoulders, all the better to subjugate the brute, the subjugation by which the German immigrants would make it, narrowly, to the next year. Every grain—and the steps to its harvest—is hard won. And it’s hard for me to believe that this is my grandpa. My peers have grandparents who welcomed the Beatles to New York in 1964! My grandparents grew up in the 1920’s, during the Great Depression. My great grandparents are anchored in the Nineteenth Century. Grandpa, were he still with me, would be 100 years old four years from now.

Yet he still is with me.

. . .

On Grandparent’s Day, throughout my school years, my peers bring in their loved relative. As long as I can remember I sit alone while one or more doting grandparent hovers over their children’s children. I politely greet our school visitors and remark to them on the importance and achievement of my friends, their grandchildren. During art projects on Grandparent’s Day I work independently, while others depend upon the creative talents of his or her visiting grandparent.

What I discover is that nobody cares that I am not anyone’s grandchild. I am alone—and chronically lament over my condition. I have no grandparents and I miss, in particular, Grandpa Leicht. Yet, I do not agree to live with the emptiness that should have been filled by him. I rebel at my loss. And so, as a young child, I start looking for him.

. . .

It’s August on the Alberta prairie. A sense of remoteness, new to me in its intensity, claims my focus. Fescue grasses scritch against each other. A heavy heat, almost visible, rises far and close. A light wind whooshes past my face weakening the warmth of the dry day. Bugs whine and create white noise; a blackbird squeaks his rusty-gate song and, as Willa Cather says (capturing a certain demand-for-attention of the startling prairie), a red-tailed hawk screams in the distance, and yet “. . . the eye could follow up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky” (Cather 32). Except for the long abandoned Weise School, which is before me, and the isolated country road on which we have traveled far in search of this plot of prairie, the land seems desolate and untouched by civilization.

The school is now windowless and I scrape the heavy wooden door against hundred-year-old flooring hewn out by high-minded German Lutheran homesteaders intent on providing an education for farm children who lived out here by Dowling Lake. Birds have obviously been using the empty building as refuge for several decades since I see their droppings staining the perimeter of the room. The original slate blackboards are still nailed against the walls and a stray student desk remains. I notice that occasional visitors, over many decades, have left their signatures on the blackboard. Broken chalk remains in the chalk tray. I look closely at the names while family members wait outside on the deserted country road.

And then I see it.

Grandpa has left a note on this board. Two decades earlier, I deduce, he returned to this already long-deserted schoolroom and signed his name on the slate. He recorded the dates of his attendance at Weise School in the 1920’s. I study his powerful cursive: “Berhardt Leicht.” He had been in this very place! I am thrilled and dumbstruck.

. . .


I’ve learned, in searching for Grandfather, that my absent-but-utterly-influential forefather lives on in what makes up me. Here’s why: all we are, it seems, is a carrier of ideas. That’s it.

I can close—or open—my eyes and feel the presence of someone who is absent physically because I know her or his thoughts. What else is there? What remains? What defines us—after five minutes? I have sorted and sifted and cut away—threshed—until I have found something that’s permanent about us, and it’s our thinking. I have inherited a legacy of certain concepts, associations, interests, biases, joys—all ideas—from Grandpa, and so I feel his presence. Since thoughts are what make up me and because so many—not all, but plenty—of my thoughts are like his, really derive from him with a time-lapse, only, I know him in a certain way.

On that hot August afternoon my grief is assuaged because Grandfather’s influence in my life—and, thus, his presence—is unmitigated by both the gulf of years between us and his physical absence. I separate, beat, flail and winnow emotions and notions—an alter-thresher like the old, mechanical one—in search of him and find in the absence of my forefather, this inheritance of ideas and, thus, a certain presence.

I travel from my home faraway to an abandoned schoolhouse in Canada as if impelled by the need not just to touch Grandpa’s signature on that slate board, but to touch him, and learn that we find each other in surprising places. It’s crazy that Grandpa Leicht both looked and sounded like Richard Burton, the famous Welsh husband of Elizabeth Taylor, but that—his looks, his bearing his deep voice, his big hands—matters so much less than his mind and his motivation. This I can still find and so he is not nearly as gone as I had believed.

I understand how he—son of German-Ukrainian immigrants—could have lived in this raw landscape threshing in August and walking over snowy hills in winter to Weise School. I understand how he traveled from privation and isolation to the life of the mind and passed on to me my love of Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in G major,” which I am now memorizing. I see how he gave me, through a parent, a love of language. I think of my school dropout grandpa, who spoke only German until he was five, the eldest of six, completing eight years of schooling before stopping to care for his family. I reflect on the discovery (by a professor of New Testament Greek) of this prairie intellectual. I understand him, who read by the window in dusky autumn shadows, leaning close to the glass for more light. I see this man, the solitary figure, who tinkered with small engines and Swiss watches in the basement all the while listening to the “B Minor Mass,” and gazing alone into the things that matter. All that I am is so directly connected to a long-ago homesteader’s boy on the prairie. And I, too, have learned to thresh.




Works Cited

Jean James, ed., Hanna North. Lethbridge, Alberta: Robins Southern Printing LTD., 1978.

"Threshing Machine." Wikipedia. 2008. Wikipedia Foundation Inc. 5 Aug 2008 .

"Thrash--Definition." Dictionary.com. 2008. Dictionary.com LLC. 5 Aug 2008 .

Willa, Cather. O Pioneers!. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.