The Last Sheaf

Tom Weaver wasn’t born into a farming family. His dad worked as an advert supervisor for Jemberson’s, a Health Insurance broker, and his mum made beautiful baby clothes from offcuts, which she sold online through a website Dad built for her using an instruction book he had stolen from the IT office. They were happy and fulfilled and lived a semi-perfect urban life. They knew nothing of the countryside, apart from wasps, flies and the rogue sheep that chased them down a lane once on holiday in Wales! Tom though, never wanted to follow Dad into an office career, or Mum into entrepreneurship. No, he wanted to drive tractors. Always. Ever since having his first yellow and green John Deere toy with back hoe. His model JCB Fastrac with its range of tools soon took preference, before being set aside for a big, red Massey-Ferguson which took his heart completely at age seven. He informed his Mum and dad on his ninth birthday that agricultural college was where he was going to go, to learn how to drive tractors for real, and to do all the jobs he now understood could be done with the beautiful, shiny and modern machines. And, that is what he did.

Nine years later, eight O’Levels gained, and an A’Level or two thrown in because Dad said he needed good qualifications, he sought for, applied to and won a place at the most prestigious Agricultural College in the Midlands, vowing to learn everything he could to enable his dream.

Leaving with a degree in something to do with farming as Mum put it, Tom eventually joined full-time with the Europe-wide Farming Contracting Company  Oerbelssons, whom he had done specialist training with, worked for and used as the focus for his study in his final year. There was nothing he didn’t know now, and he was going to use all that knowledge to be the best tractor driver in the world….

His first placement was to three related farms near a small Derbyshire village, and his job was to cut and bale their fields of wheat. He arrived early on day one, being dropped off by the delivery transporter who had spent the two hours driving time quizzing him about the college he had been to.

Tom had been shown the four fields he was there to cut by an older gentleman from one of the farms, and had set out his plan of action and got straight to work. He had been informed that one specific field was to be cut last, but given no real reason, and decided to go against this as it was not the most efficient way of doing the job, much to the amusement of the older man.

Tom started the first part of the job, the cutting and threshing, where his magnificent machine grabs the standing wheat and slices the stalks. It then separates the grain from the seeds and stores both in the holding tank. The cut stalks were then ejected back onto the field in lines, known as windrows. Tom loved doing this, he knew what he was doing, why, and what the best ways were.

As he moved on to the penultimate field he noticed a group of men had gone to stand in the far corner, almost as if they were building a wall. “Strange!” he muttered to himself, but took no real notice.

By early evening only one patch of the field of wheat remained standing, that corner. He turned off the harvester and dismounted and went to talk to the group of men who had stood watching him. “What’s going on chaps?, you are going to hold me up if you don’t move”  he shouted.

There was a mumbling between them, then one man walked over and said: “The older farm hands always refuse to cut the last sheaf of wheat until sunrise” he explained that they were insisting that “Jack’s still in there.”

Tom had little time for old country superstitions though. His new combine was going to get behind schedule, rain was forecast sometime tomorrow, and every hour counted. The stalks would need time to dry correctly before he started the baling of the straw. Determined to finish the job, he dismissed the warnings as little more than folklore clinging to a bygone age.

As dusk settled across the fields, things begin to go wrong.

The combine repeatedly stalled for no apparent reason. The GPS lost its signal. His radio filled with bursts of static that almost sounded like whispered voices. Every route he took seemed to bring him back to the same untouched corner of the field, where the final sheaf swayed in a wind that barely seemed to stir the rest of the crop.

Watching from the farm gate, the older men make no attempt to intervene.

They’d seen this before.

Through the long summer evening, Tom became increasingly unsettled as fleeting shapes appeared between the stalks and footsteps seemed to follow him through the stubble, always just out of sight. The deeper he ventured into the field, the more certain he became that he was no longer working alone.

By dawn, the machine stood silent. Stopped outright, but not broken, Just unworking. He was flummoxed.

The last sheaf remained untouched. The tractor just would not go over that patch of field.

Without a word, Tom climbed down from the cab and walked back to the farmhouse, where he had been given a room to wash or sleep, whatever was needed. He drank hot, sweet tea, ate a cereal bar and waited, watching the fields through the window.

The group of farm hands  began to gather a bit later that morning, the sun up and shining down on them. Tom silently joined them. Wanting to see what happened. Wordlessly the men walked out to the final corner and altogether cut the final stalks by hand, just as generations before them had always done.

Nobody asked what happened during the night.

They knew.

As the last sheaf was lifted from the field, one of the old men smiled, turned to Tom, nodded towards the rising sun and quietly said,

“There now, Sun’s up … Jack’s coming home. It’ll all be alright now me lad!” He winked and put a finger to his lips before turning back to his friends to continue their vigil for nature.

Tom smiled at him, shook all the men’s hands and singularly walked over to his tractor harvester, which after he climbed on and turned the key, started first time, roaring with new found life.

“Perhaps there are still some things for me to learn after all” Tom laughed to himself, as he drove towards the baling attachment to continue his work.