I wonder who died

Among the things in mom's house in San Antonio that we wanted to make sure stayed in the family when she moved was her dining room table. It was solid and gorgeous and even without inserting the leafs it was bigger than she'd needed for quite some time. Extended as far as it would go I doubt that it even would have fit in her dining room. She'd inherited it when her parents died, and they'd held onto it from the days they'd owned a farm.

Mom had grown up on a working farm with her four sisters, but they didn't need a table that size to feed a family of seven. When harvest time came around though they needed to drop all five leafs into the table to stretch it out far enough to fit their seasonal help around it. How's that for a sign of how times have changed over just a couple of generations - it's hard to even imagine a migrant farm crew these days being invited to come in to dinner with a farm owner's family, but I didn't get the impression that it was out of the ordinary when mom's folks did it.

One day she was reminiscing about the burly farmhands packed in shoulder to shoulder after a long day in the fields. Libraries could be filled with what I don't know about farming, so mom began filling me in on life before the invention of the combine. As I understand it, they used to have to cut and bundle wheat as individual steps, then leave it out to dry before they could separate the grain. When the time came for that, crews hauled it in to where the thrashing machine was set up and threw the bundles down onto a conveyer that fed into the machinery that ground and pummeled the wheat until the grain was separated from the straw. The little lesson in old farm technology prompted another memory for mom...

"I was in the yard with mom when she saw smoke coming up from the direction of the neighbors field where the thrashing crew was working, and she said 'I wonder who died.'"

"You mean they'd set a fire to signal for help?" I asked, figuring I had it all figured out.

"No, sometimes one of the men feeding the thrasher would fall in, and there was no way to find all the pieces of him that got mixed in with the straw. They just had to burn the whole straw pile."

As it turned out, the fire was just caused by friction in the machinery, but it doesn't make the story all that much less disturbing. I've had some dangerous jobs before, but I have a hard time getting my head around a job where gruesome death was routine enough that the default assumption when you saw a fire in the workplace was that they were disposing of somebody's mutilated remains.