I liked to offer help with every task I followed them on.
Brother Phil was moving an auger pipe between silos when my stupid question repeated itself.
He flung an arm out to show his well-routined task could be done one-handed, and my face reddened.
I had helped cut some branches from atop the workshop roof when Phil thought it would be fun to fire up the petrol-driven pump and attempt to hose me clean off the top. He nearly did.
Since it was the height of the heading season (“Great, but where are we heading?”) the lads cycled through harvesting the wheat around the clock in four-hour shifts.
I accompanied Bruce in the enormous cabin of a monstrous combine harvester.
The sun had set, the engines roared, the CB squawked and quail occasionally burst out before us from the golden, ripe wheat.
There was no disaster to follow this adventure, but simply a thumping heart when Bruce casually said “and this is how you do a corner” and I realised I was about to take over.
The thumping turned to palpitation when Bruce then said “leave ya to it” and leapt from the cabin.
It was now dark, and yes, the floodlights were sufficient, but no, I was not really paying attention to the corners bit half an hour before, and after a couple of laps of the suburb-sized field, I noticed to my left that nice big half-crescent swirls of wheat still stood unharvested in the stubble.
Bruce said nothing when he returned as if he was ignoring my poor attempt at crop circles.
I went to bed and dreamt of aliens trying to land, but couldn’t quite do it.
The next day we disc-ploughed a field of stubble.
“It’s a paddock, Ted, not a field.”
I was left alone after another lesson on getting the corners just right and once again I was not really paying attention because once Bruce was out of sight I missed the first four sweeps and looked behind me to see in each corner of his paddock a Scandinavian burial mound.
The result wasn’t what I was after and when Bruce returned he found me on my back, exhausted, with about a quarter of a whale-sized ridge of dry earth kicked not quite flat with my boot prints all over it.
The red dust had caked all over my sweating face and bare, heaving chest.
“There’s an easier way, Ted. Come with me.”
But the 50-year-old grader had a flat battery. Bruce decided we would push-start it.
“Bruce, I’m not Clark Kent.”
He then procured a spare tractor, chained up the grader behind it, and dragged it with me behind its wheel on the kilometre-long driveway at top speed.
At his signal, I let go of the clutch and the dinosaur beneath my cracked leather seat, without cabin, seat belt or roll bar, shuddered to a grinding halt much like the Titanic, but with a lot less ice, slightly sideways, and not quite breaking my ribs into the steering wheel.
King of the world, I was not.
“Looks like it didn’t work,” I said, thinking a city-boy surrender was evident.
“Let’s do it again. Try first gear.” I am sure that was a smirk.
Several attempts later with equal rib-cracking hilarity and the decision was made to give up.
Yes, it had been a smirk.
We finished discing the paddock, got my four remaining dust sculptures flattened somehow, and I slept like the dead that night, and dreamt, oddly, about annoyed Vikings.
