The Thresher's Letter
A moving sketch of two young brothers working the wheat fields of Yakima, finding connection to home through a pressed pansy.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The other day two young fellows, neither twenty years of age, stood near the post office delivery window. They were nice looking, wearing overalls and coarse shoes, and had come from the great wheat fields bordering our mountains in the hope of hearing from home. The elder said, 'Why, it’s from mother, Billy.' 'Thank God,' said the other. A pansy, sweet though faded, fell from the letter to the ground. The younger caught it up, and the moisture that had been clouding his eyes turned to blinding tears. He saw in his mind the old home beside the winding Susquehanna. The boys seemed to be in a world of their own, oblivious to the busy crowd that swept by them. The elder boy placed his hand upon his brother’s shoulder, whispering, 'Never mind it, Billy, we’ll be all right before long, for when the harvest is ended, we’ll have plenty to take us back home and to mother again.'
“Accursed be the human greed that causes the heart strings to be severed, that crushes the roof tree of the ancestors, that destroys the hearth stone and drives us, one and all, off times fruitlessly o’er barren lands and boisterous seas to alien skies.”
This piece captures the profound isolation of migrant agricultural labor, a constant in the Yakima Valley's history from the 1880s through today. It frames the human cost of the 'growth machine' and the economic necessity that pulls young people from their homes.
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