The Unplowed Sky by Jeanne Williams Page A

it.”
    â€œRory! That feckless, reckless, rollicking, frolicking young hellion? He better not come hanging Sophie, or I’ll send him off with a flea in his ear and a bee in his bonnet! The very idea!”
    â€œBeg pardon, Miz Brockett.” Shaft spoke contritely, but his beard didn’t quite conceal his grin. “Now, ma’am, I kind of need them chickens if I’m going to fry ’em up for supper.”
    â€œIf you ever tasted Sophie’s cream gravy—oh, all right, Mr. Hurok, I’ll get the things right over.”
    The Model T had a self-starter. After some whines and screeches, Mrs. Brockett wrestled it around and chugged toward the farm buildings. Though a mother’s boasting could be discounted a bit, Hallie felt hopelessly inadequate beside what she had heard of Sophie.
    â€œShaft, if you’d like to hire Mrs. Brockett’s daughter—”
    He gave her a stricken look. “That woman would try her best to get Garth hitched up in double harness, and I don’t want to see him smashed up the way he was when I first met him.”
    â€œHe’s been married?”
    â€œHis wife, back on Lewis, ran off with someone else while he was in the army. Guess that’s one of the reasons he came to Canada to work in the harvest and wound up down here. Good grannies! It’s already time to start to start fixin’ afternoon lunch!”
    So Garth had been married, but wasn’t now. Did he distrust all women because of that? Hallie seethed with questions but sensed that Shaft was reluctant to discuss that private part of his friend and employer’s life. Tossing the dishwater out the door, Hallie looked for Jackie, didn’t see him at first, and got a little scared. She wasn’t used to watching out for a child, but she had to learn fast. If he wandered over to watch the threshing and got in the way before anyone noticed—What if he got caught in that long belt stretched from engine to thresher or got in the way of the pitchforks wielded from both stacks to feed grain into the separator?
    Her scalp prickling, Hallie started to call, then gratefully stifled the cry as she saw him. There he was, cuddled up against Laird in the shade between tree trunk and shack. Smoky, in turn, was curled up in Jackie’s arms. Lambie, the little boy’s threadbare companion, might lose some of his magic to the charm of these real animals. But if Jackie came to love them, wouldn’t the parting be cruel when the season was over and Hallie had to find another job?
    She’d worry about that later, much later. Right now she was relieved that Smoky, Laird—and Shaft—would fill some of the emptiness left by Felicity’s desertion, that dreadful sense of abandonment that Hallie herself had felt when Daddy brought home a new wife to take Hallie’s mother’s place—and her own place, too, as it turned out.
    No woolgathering! She had to prove to Shaft that he hadn’t made a mistake in hiring her, especially when the formidable Sophie, who could wring chickens’ necks without a qualm, would arrive at any minute. Hallie hurried inside and began to make piecrusts.

III
    As she carried a basket of sandwiches out to the crew, two apiece with mustard spread on inch-thick slabs of beef, Hallie wished for a sunbonnet. Her only hat, the straw boater she had been wearing that morning, didn’t have a broad enough brim to shelter her face. Jackie trotted proudly along with a pan of gingerbread, overshadowed by Laird, who stood inches taller. In the fingers that weren’t gripping the basket, Hallie carried a burlap-wrapped crockery jug of water to replace the one stowed under the separator.
    At Shaft’s direction, she had stirred a spoonful of oatmeal into the water. “Cuts the alkali,” the cook said. “Keeps the men from gettin’ the trots, which can be pretty inconvenient when you’re threshing.” He carried