Pea Picking

Pea Picking

By Bruce Beaver

To realise the futility of pea-picking,

its broken-backed and bruised-kneed endurance

tested up and down the crowded rows

of squat, green, sparsely bearing bushes;

the side-of-the-finger-splitting ritual,

left and right forefingers and thumbs

cut and bruised bloody, the neck breaking

under the bludgeoning sun, the eyes, ears, nose

and lips crawling with stickybeaking flies;

the stink or perfume (sometimes vaguely both)

of your fellow pickers beside and ahead of you;

to understand why you are doing this at all

day after blistering day for four shillings

a bushel or two kerosene tins full you had to be

either seventeen and desperately

in need of more than two pounds to buy the Collected

Letters of John Keats (that is ten bushels

when you were averaging four bushels a day

for the several days allotted to the picking).

Or perhaps you had to be Aboriginal

and aged from fifteen to sixty-five (male or female)

and be able to knock off ten bushels a day,

bushes and all, when you were supposed to pick

selectively, that is to leave the younger,

smaller pods for a second picking. Or you

might have even needed to be the farmer

himself. Too busy to supervise; keeping up

with most of the Aboriginals, only picking

selectively. Up five chains of bushes

and down five chains of bushes for about

five or six aching hours a day. I say

"futility" for I was too tired each day

to read the book when I had it; the Aboriginals

spent most of their pay on headache engendering wine;

and the farmer, my uncle, always seemed to time

his pickings to coincide with a glutted market.

The whole thing was an exercise in futility.

The old hands had pads of cloth or soft leather tied

to their knees and kept their backs fairly straight.

But if you were seventeen as I was then

and uninstructed you simply agonised

on sore knees shuffling forward boustrophedon

in a more or less literal way, knee-nudging over

soft and lumpy strips of bare earth

getting to feel a tiny twig or pebble,

even the compressed soil's own modifications

and innate consistencies of texture. The bushes

themselves becoming flayers of raw thumb

and finger-pad, splitters and groovers of nails,

the plump pods' contents edible but eventually

uninviting. Something like a vestigial

competitive spirit drove one to try and at least

keep up. The dust of earth and leaf-dust crimping

the nostrils, the heat of days turning the tongue

into a strap of hide cleaving to white paste.

The crazy fantasies: would Toulouse-Lautrec

have walked on his half-length legs and have merely plucked

the bushes' burdens without even looking down?

Would the Aboriginal girl in front have underwear

beneath her sack-like skirt, or a brassiere under

the off-white shirt? No, you saw small breasts

and purple-brown nipples once, and when she saw

you looking she smiled but not invitingly.

The black folk smelt of wood smoke and leaf mould.

I had been told I would smell to them of sour milk

and rancid butter. There were several deodorants

on sale even then but none of us thought to use them.

The girls had thin legs, thin thighs, and almost all

were waistless. But their faces were like a friendly

fruit, large, dark, with rounded features full

and ripe until the faces of my own kind

soured and flattened out to thin diminished

creases, cracks and bumps. At day's end I

would go to wash and eat and sleep at the farmhouse.

The Aboriginal pickers lolled or squatted

in the big barn's earth floored musty gloom, gathering

beside the several loaned hurricane lanterns

and about the central fire of sticks on which

a frying pan sputtered blessings on eggs and bacon

and later the communal billy black

as the brew it smokily and sweetly boiled.

Aperitifs of muscat and sweet sherry

were passed from hand to hand in the habitual

surreptitious manner, and the pouches

or battered tins lay open between crossed legs,

rice paper stuck to bottom lips as coarse

tobacco was reduced to fragrant shreds

in hands still acrid with the bushes' juices.

Then soft guitar accompanied song and softer

talk and sudden swallowed shouts as someone

gulped who should have sipped. And I awake

upon a sheeted bed two hundred feet

away, aware would lie and wonder if

the younger ones would go into the night

and love, as I would have given Keats's Letters

so to do. And out across the back

verandah of the farm I'd peer into

the starlit dark—so large the distant stars—

while through the barn's gapped timber walls the lanterns

and the dull glow of the compact cooking fire

showed, even the spark-sized crimson points

of hand-rolled cigarettes would wink and almost

beckon. Now I think the only ones

to leave the barn a while went to excrete.

More privacy was needed than a darkened

cow-bail or a tree's wide bole to lure

those shyest lovers out. They slept together

in a tribal dream of tiresome work and welcome

food and memoried rest. No taboos but

commonsense and something like distaste

to elevate a white farm to the statute

of home-ground. The elder ones, perhaps, while partly

drunk may have partly scored, but when the last

birds had quietened and the only sound

was cattle foraging about the dry lawn's

dew-soaked chaff, both barn and farmhouse turned

lights down and out. And then across the cooling

fields came mistily and fragrantly

sleep to all and Alchera's dreams to some.

Bruce Beaver (1928 – 2004)

Bruce Beaver was born in the Sydney seaside suburb of Manly on 14 February 1928. His childhood and adolescence were unhappy. He wrote his first poem at 17 – a response to the bombing of Hiroshima – and at the same age he began to suffer from what became a life-long problem, manic-depressive illness. He worked in various occupations, travelled in New South Wales and New Zealand, married, and returned to Manly to live and write for most of his life. His first book, Under the Bridge, was published in 1961, and his fourth, a breakthrough volume, Letters to Live Poets, in 1969. In all, he published more than a dozen volumes of poems and ten novels, as well as the autobiographical As It Was (1979).

Rising to prominence in the 1960s, Beaver's work had a considerable influence on the development on the 'Generation of 1968' and the 'New Australian Poetry' of the 1970s. Over the course of his career, he won several major Australian literary awards, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize (1970, for Letters to Live Poets), the C. J. Dennis Prize (1995, for Anima and Other Poems), the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award (1982), and the Patrick White Award (1982). In 1991, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, for service to literature. He died on 17 February 2004.

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I decided to use this poem today because I spent yesterday afternoon helping my neighbor pick peas.  We picked what we could before the rain started.  My share was the equivalent to two messes of peas.  If your unfamiliar with what a "mess of peas" is, it's the amount of peas needed for a meal.  Also, these were pink-eye purple hull peas; probably the most delicious peas ever.  I can't wait to cook them along with some pork chops, and fried cornbread.  Served with some sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions.  I might even fry some green tomatoes.  It will be delicious.