Each and every day he went to his summer job, Jay felt like a time traveller. At home, he’d hit the electric clock alarm, pop breakfast in a toaster, and eat while watching the early, early news on TV. Then, through the winks of early dawn, he’d walk a half-mile up the dirt road and step into the nineteenth century at Old Walter’s farm.
            The old couple would be in the barn already, milking their twenty-one cows by hand. Mabel was always fussing and lippy at hers, and Walter sang softly at his. Jay would grab a three-legged stool and join in, putting his head to the next beast’s warm flank and working the bulging udders with rippling movements of his hands. The first streams of milk struck the pail with the sound of coins in a tin cup.
            After the milking, as Walter limped and tiny Mabel scuttled to their old house for breakfast, Jay released the cows from their rusty stanchions and watched them jostle out of the barn and on to the pasture. By the time Jay had cleaned out the barn and spread the straw the smelled faintly of honey and sun, Walter would be back and ready for the day’s work. But first he’d rest his eighty year-old body and withered leg by the wall of the hen house that caught the early morning sun. He’d smoke a pipe so blissfully that Jay decided to ask for one for his sixteenth birthday. Between puffs of the pipe and winks of his pale blue eyes, Walter told stories of barnraisings and rum-running and some dang fool who put a bale hook through his foot and died of blood poisoning fifty years ago.
            “Left his wife and seven littl’uns, Mr. Man,” he’d say, shaking his head tightly while tapping his pipe ashes out. Walter would put on his big straw hat and straighten the bib of the overalls he wore on even the hottest days – “Keeps the cool in and the heat out, Mr. Man,” he explained – and decide the morning’s task. Jay’s favourite was anything to do with the horses: two shaggy brown giants as square and docile as mail trucks. Jay harnessed them, wrestling with lines of hard leather while dodging the eight spade-like hooves they shifted in impatience at his fumbling.
            Some days, they horses would be hooked to the spreader that tossed pungent arcs of manure on young fields. Other days it would be the wagon, and Jay and Walter mended fences by straightening listing fence posts and restringing stiff, rusty barbed wire. In the blistering heat of late summer, Jay tossed pitchforks of hay by the thousands, and marvelled at the horses’ power. While the wagon slowly sank under the weight, Walter would click his tongue and they’d lean into their creaking traces and stop automatically at the next pile of hay. No matter the work, Walter wouldn’t rest. He shuffled along, dragging his useless leg like a sack of grain. And always, he’d talk; about the tenth generation of hawks in the big elm, or the boy that was run over by a tractor, or how God had made a might fine world.
            At lunch-time, he always said, “We only work between meals, Mr. Man,” and they’d go back to the house to down ice coffee and double helpings of the meals Mabel made on a wood-burning stove. In the hot kitchen, she swatted flies with short, precise swings that made Jay think of Braves’ hitter Ralph Garr, and then she’d move out to the cool of the veranda to track down some more.
            One day in early September, she surprised Jay by sitting with them.
            “It’s only for a few days, Mabel,” said Walter. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”
            “Yes, fix the leg, Walter,” she said, “But first we sell the farm.” Jay paused in mid-chew; he’d never heard her speak a full sentence. She always seemed too busy; too distant.
            “You’ll be fine. You have Mr. Man here.”