Chapter Six #4
Nor did it escape Miles that scything was, without doubt, germane to his dissertation, at least to his previous dissertation.
Indeed, one of Miles’s favorite scenes in literature, one of his favorite strings of words ever arranged in order by a human being, was the moment Konstantin Levin takes up a scythe in Anna Karenina.
He’d long taught it as exemplifying Tolstoy’s complex relationship to labor, or exhibiting the latent tensions between the castes, or offering up, with the felling of the grain stalks, a premonition of Anna’s decisive fate beneath the train wheels.
But now, in the field, and later at home, the book before him, he found such interpretations superfluous.
The scything scene was not about Tolstoy, nor class tension, nor Anna; this was what a person who hadn’t scythed thought it was about.
The scything scene was about scything. The coats heaped on the swath, the whetstone boxes clanking, the sound of sharpening a blade, the sodden mushrooms bursting, the pain and then the numbness, the indifference to the rain.
In the novel, when mowers rinsed their scythe blades in the stream and drank the water, Miles could taste the flecks of grass and the rusty tang of the tin cups.
Should he switch topics again? he wondered; the only scythes he knew from folktales were magic scythes, which scythed the fields by themselves.
A nice image, but a bit of a sparse harvest in comparison to Tolstoy.
In any case, the scything was too tiring to leave any time for writing.
It was hard work, his wrists hurt, his shoulder hurt, and he’d begun to notice an ominous knot in his lower back, the first tinglings of sciatica.
Andrei, in contrast, moved effortlessly, and slowly Miles came to understand that this was the secret, this was the magic: not to hack or chop, but simply to slide the blade between the stalks, and they would gently settle themselves upon the ground.
The second secret, related to the first, was to keep the blade sharp, which was why they carried whetstones, why every quarter-hour they would stop and sharpen.
And then he loved it, loved the movement, the weight of the blade, the sound of the blade, the incomparable smells, the air sweet enough to drink.
He loved even the old Anglo-Saxon words, the “snath” he held, the “whetstone” used for “honing,” the “peening” hammer, the “jig” named after the dance.
“Stubble.” “Windrow.” The “swaths” they cut came from the German Schwad, said Andrei, the measure of a single swing.
Swath, whet, hone: without knowing, he’d been speaking scythes for his entire life.
One day, he brought Giuseppe. The dog ran circles around him, dipping in and out of the swath, snortheling with delight when he found rabbit holes or vole runs, excavating his discoveries in sudden earthen fountains.
Miles did not know that cottontails could scream, but these were days of learning, and this was exactly what they did, in terror, Giuseppe in pursuit, their harpy cries raising the blackbirds from the meadow.
Miles called him back, but Andrei told him to continue.
Once, he’d loved the little bunnies, until he’d seen the horrors they were capable of wreaking on a sapling.
At a certain point, he said, a man stopped siding with Peter Rabbit, and took the camp of Mr. McGregor.
They halted only when it was time to get Olive. Then Miles said goodbye to his scything friend, hauled the blade down to the shed, did his best to clean Giuseppe of dirt and dung and bur and worm, and set off on his drive and the first fifteen minutes of The Miscellaneous Minute.
Each night, at home, he thought about the next day.
Hunched over dinner, he swung his fork and knife across the plate.
In their yard, he scythed with Olive, gripping her snath-foot as he swung her squealing.
A new hero rose in his nighttime stories, his sword bearing the mark of the serpent.
And when he wasn’t scything, he found himself thinking of scything, dreaming of scything, and wondering what he’d do when winter came.
—
Miles Krzelewski, Scytheman, Master of the Peening Jig, Repairer of Broken Snaths, Whetter of a Mean Burr, Filer of Blade Nicks, Chips, and Tears, did not open his dissertation that autumn. Writing about it seemed to break the spell, and by now he knew he’d choose the spell over the paragraph.
Deep down, he also knew that Andrei, quondam biochemist, was hardly a peasant.
It was silly to pretend. The man’s country idyll sat upon the loud, cranking, sooty gears of global commerce.
Other than his scythe and sundry artisan hoes, he bought most of his supplies online from Lowe’s.
He scythed not for grain but to maintain a field in an arrested state of ecological succession, as a place where bobolinks might nest. His apples were grown on rootstock raised in Ukraine, grafted in a Maine warehouse, pruned with Japanese clippers he had FedExed each time he lost them.
The plastic apple-maggot balls were from Korea, and the clay he sprayed up on his fruit was mined in Georgia, sometimes China.