My grandfather taught me scythe mowing, which is a rhythmic motion like dancing or lovemaking. It is a studious sweeping crescent in which the trick is to keep the heel (where blade joins snath) close to the ground, an angle that tilts the scythe point-up, preventing it from catching in the ground. I no longer mow with a scythe—a certain recipe for lower-back muscle spasms—but remember it the way the body remembers weights and leanings: riding a bicycle, skiing, casting flies. Finding a meter, one abandons oneself to the swing of it; one surrenders oneself to the guidance of object and task, where worker and work are one: There is something ecstatic about mowing with a scythe.

Wesley cut most of his hay with Riley’s help, the mowing machine clacketing beside him, cutting swaths of hayfield up and down and around. Then he paused, resting Riley in the shade, climbed down from his iron perch, fetched his scythe where it hung in another tree crotch, and trimmed around rocks, trees, or at the field’s edge where Riley could not mow for fear of snagging or snapping a steel tooth against rock or wire. Farmers no longer trim fields. The old trimming was uneconomic—an hour of hand-cutting produced seventeen cents worth of hay—but it wasn’t done for economic reasons; nothing was done for economic reasons. Things were done because it was the way to do them, an aesthetic of work, old habits bespeaking clarity and right angles, resolution and conclusiveness.

After a morning of cutting, my grandfather unhitched Riley from the mowing machine, or drove him home, pulling the machine, if the field was done. He watered and grained Riley, ate dinner and took a ten-minute nap on the living room’s wicker sofa. Then he hitched Riley to the rake, twice as wide as the mowing machine, with its curved metal tines that lifted and lowered by a lever beside the metal seat. My grandfather raked the hay into long wavery rows, then pulled the rows into small stacks by tugging the row on top of itself. When the field was spotted with piles of hay, he switched Riley from rake to rack, backing the old horse between the shafts of the homemade hayrack. The shafts were sapling poles with the bark off, homemade hardware added. (Like most farmers, Wesley kept his own forge; the shop stood near the saphouse, where he or Freeman made or repaired the farm’s iron hinges and implements; beside the forge was a lathe for turning wood.) The rack’s floor was pine planks, two wells cut in the flooring up front for the great wheels to turn into—wooden wheels with iron rims. From the edge of the flooring spokes leaned up-and-outward, three feet long and an inch thick with bark still on them, rising to split pole rails that formed a long narrow rectangle holding the hay in.

Loading the hayrack by himself had to be a fiddle. When I worked with him, we could fit three jobs—pitching on, loading, raking after—into two bodies; it was best when Anson the hired-man worked with us, some wartime summers, when three bodies divided the three chores. This was the old way of haying—no baler, no bales—when one worker with a pitchfork lifted a forkful to another with a pitchfork on top of the rack, who loaded the hay, tucking it here and there with the fork and treading it down; the loader’s trick was to knit the hay together so that it would not tumble apart on the journey home, to tuck and tread the forkfuls as if weaving a basket, then at home in the barn to unpack the hay and fork it into a hayloft: putting it together, taking it apart. Meantime the third partner, least skilled, pulled a wide wooden bullrake over ground where the stacks had been, cleaning and tidying, following the wagon to the next stack, swinging the bullrake up to deposit its fringe of hay on the next stack.