Tools make work easier (Cumberland Saga)

Evan reluctantly walked over to the shovel.

“I got some work gloves if you want them” Blain informed him.

Evan looked at the grubby, battered gloves and declined. No way in hell was he going to put his hands into those things.

Awkwardly picking up the shovel, he saw Blain pick up the fork.

Walking over to the chicken shit piled into the trailer, Evan tried to jam it in and wasn’t very successful.

“Try to take a smaller scoop” Blain suggested. “and try sliding the blade of the shovel in where you see a band of bedding”

If Evan hadn’t been such a flight risk, Gregor would have run the skid-steer and would have fluffed up the chicken-shit to make it easier to shovel. As it was, the fertilizer was still caked and stiff.

Evan finally got a modest amount of fertilizer balanced on his shovel and dumped it to the side.

Blain effortlessly speared an identical amount and dumped it six feet to the side of Evan’s. Then he pointed with his fork “My pile, your pile. I am going to take just as much off this trailer as you do. No more. No less.”

“But it will take all day” Evan wailed.

“It will only take that long if you spend more oxygen yappin’ than workin” Blain said. “Take another shovel-load out.”

Bit-by-bit, Evan started to get the hang of using the shovel. It wanted to twist and turn in his hands.

“Put on the gloves” Blain told Evan.

“I already said ‘NO!’ “ Evan told him, petulantly.

Blain held out his hands. Pointing to the palm of one of them he said. “See those? Those are calluses. You don’t have them. If you don’t put on a pair of gloves you are going to have blisters.”

“So I won’t work if I have blisters” Evan rebutted. Check-mate!

“No work. No food. Even if you have blisters” Blain informed him.

With a comical look of disgust on his face, comical to Blain, anyway, Evan pulled on the work gloves.

It took an hour-and-a-half to unload the trailer when it should have only taken fifteen minutes.

Blain tooted on the horn to let Gregor know that it was time to move the truck. It only took Gregor five minutes to walk the quarter-mile distance between where he was working and where he had parked the truck.

It only took an hour to remove the second half of the load.

Blain tooted on the horn again and Gregor drove off in the truck while Blain and Evan took a break. Blain shared his mid-morning snack.

Gregor showed up with the second load a half hour later. He had loaded it himself and had fluffed up the chicken-shit.

Unloading went even faster at forty minutes per half-load.

“Its time for lunch” Evan informed Blain.

“We aren’t working by the clock, here. We are working by the job” Blain told Evan.

“What the hell does that mean?” Evan asked, completely confused.

“We work until we get four hours of work done” Blain said.

“Its been four hours” Evan said.

“It was two hours worth of work” Blain informed him. “We still have two more hours worth of work to do, and if you keep cussing, I will add to it.

Evan folded his arms over his chest in disgust. “You can’t do that.”

Blain didn’t respond, he just looked steadily at Evan until Evan broke eye-contact.

“Now we have to spread the fertilizer” Blain told Evan.

“Ick!” Evan said. “Isn’t there a machine that does that?”

“We are going to use five-gallon buckets. We fill them. We carry them. We dump them on a grid” Blain outlined the plan.

Evan shook his head in disgust. Nope. Just NOPE.

When filling the first five-gallon bucket, Evan slid the shovel deeply into the pile of fertilizer and lifted up on it, snapping the handle.

“Darn! Too bad. I guess I can’t work” Evan said, his voice oozing insincerity.

Blain didn’t respond. He walked to the bed of Gregor’s truck and pulled out one of Sarah’s trowels.

Handing it to Evan, Blain said “Nope. You can still work. It will just take longer before you get to lunch.”

Evan flung the trowel out into the garden plot.

“Don’t matter” Blain said. “You can use your hands. Tools make work easier. Getting rid of the tools does not make the work disappear. It just makes it harder.”

Evan swore a stream of words that Blain pretended to not hear. Blain calmly leaned on the handle of his fork and waited for Evan to wind-down. Finally, Evan went hunting for the trowel.

It was three in the afternoon when Blain and Evan walked back to Walter and Amira’s cabin for lunch. Amira pointedly asked Blain “Did he do enough work?”

“He did enough to earn lunch” Blain informed her “but he hasn’t done enough to earn dinner.”

It was dark before they stopped spreading fertilizer. Evan started trudging toward the cabin when Blain stopped him.

“Where are you going?” Blain asked. By his figuring, the two of them working together had taken 12 hours to accomplish what would have taken him 4 hours to do if he had been alone.

“We are done. I am going to get dinner and then fall into bed” Evan said, mumbling in his exhaustion.

“We aren’t done. We have to take care of our tools” Blain told him.

He had Evan pick up the shovel with the broken handle and together the two of them went over to Sig’s house.

Blain knocked on the back door.

“Evan broke the handle of this shovel. I know it is late, but can you replace it so we can use it tomorrow?” Blain asked Sig.

Wordlessly, Sig pushed open the screen door and led them to his small workshop.

In spite of his exhaustion, Evan was intrigued as he watched Sig make the tool handle. Sig turned on an LED light and then inspected the broken handle and then selected one of the quarter-rounds he had standing upright along the wall. Sig first split a plank from a four-foot long, knot-free flitch of hickory. Then he split a square-shaft from the edge of the plank. Clamping  the rod with a foot-treadle activated clamp on a bench, he used a spoke-shave to round the square shaft into a round handle.

“Why do you do it that way?” Evan asked. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to buy one?”

“All the strength in the wood is with the grain” Sig said. “Store-bought ones are milled from planks that don’t follow the grain. They gotta make them a lot thicker and heavier than they need to be, cause of that.”

“If I am going to use a tool all day long then I don’t want it to weigh an ounce more than it has to be. It might be less effort to buy a handle but you pay for that cheap with every scoop you take.”

Evan was nodding off as he finally got around to washing up and eating the (cold) supper his mother had saved for him. He had nightmares about shoveling hot chicken-shit with his bare hands.