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Show 67 And that Arcadia was ruled by a tyrant, my father, who gave me orders, imprisoned me, stultified my dreams. Work could be backbreaking, monotonous, dirty. Once in a surly mood, sluggish with sloth, I was raking hay and I turned the rake at the end of the row with the pivot wheel in a deep corrugation. The axle snapped off. That made me more surly: iron should not break. Machines should work. In a field of thick alfalfa the mower would sometimes plug up time after time, the wheels skidding instead of turning, the cutter bar sliding over the hay and I would get down and unplug it and start again, over and over until I got so enraged that I would curse at the top of my lungs and kick the mower until I nearly broke my toe. I knew anger all right. Once while I was mowing, a pheasant hen took to the air so close to me that I nearly jumped off the iron seat, and I stopped the horses and got down and behind the cutter bar parted the fallen hay and saw her nest, and there upon the eggs lay her two legs. I sometimes dream of that too, of what happened when she could fly no more and tried to set down. The pale horse of death loped through that Arcadia as through them all. Once out hunting for rabbits, which we liked to eat, I sat down to rest and saw in a bush nearby a small, sparrow-like bird, grey, one of the commoners of the world, and, without thinking, raised my .22 and fired, hitting it dead center. I picked up the small corpse, an insignificant bundle of feathers in my hand where a minute before had been a vibrant being, and felt within myself some terrible loss. The bird ate mostly weed seeds, I had killed my helper. I had taken life gratuitously. Mice, on the other hand, were pests and should be killed, and I killed many of them in and around the barns, sometimes finding a nest and feeding the small pink blind squirming young to the cat. Out in the fields, often lifting a shock of hay I would find a mouse underneath, would chase it down with my |