Soon the sickles could be heard in the grain fields, and the stalks fell. Together, my brother-in-law and I reaped, while my wife bound the sheaves behind us. It was the same view as far as the eye could see: grain field after grain field, and men, women, and children working busily on all of them – the men only in shirts and trousers, the women in gathered-up skirts and sun hats that they pressed down on their necks for shade. All hands were hard at work, since most of the income for the whole year was earned at harvest time. If the grain ripens in quick succession, then the reapers’ earnings reach an acceptable level, sometimes up to 20 to 25 marks per Ditmarsch morgen. The binders’ wages are half as much, since a binder can bind and stack as much as two reapers can cut. Since a reaper can average about two to two-and-a-half morgens per week, and a binder about twice that, sometimes a husband and wife can earn several hundred marks during harvest time, especially under the pressure of piecework. If, however, the different types of grain ripen in slow succession, so that there are some days of lag time between each of the crops, then it is not uncommon for reapers’ wages to only amount to 16, 14, or even 12 marks for each morgen, and half that for binders. In such cases, the worker’s best efforts are to no avail – it is impossible to scrape together even a few extra groschen for a rainy day, and many a day laborer’s family looks ahead to the winter with even greater anxiety. For that reason, harvest time always seems much too short; it’s barely started when it’s already over again. Yet as long as the harvest lasts, the day laborer knows only one rule: toil, slave away, work yourself to death. Here the old adage literally becomes true: piecework is murderous work! You drive yourself so hard that you wish the day had 48 hours instead of 24.
I left the house as early as 3 a.m., reaching the fields after a half-hour walk. At about six in the morning, we had the first breakfast, which my wife would have delivered to me in the meantime. We supplied our own food at work, as did most of the laborers who took their families to work with them. That meant earning a few extra marks per morgen; and since it was necessary to cook for the family in any case, it was better for a married man to get cash, not food, from the farmer.
When the weather is good, the work goes quite well. To be sure, until eight or nine o’clock in the morning, the reapers are usually soaked with dew from the knee down; but after that things go more smoothly. The plight of the binder is much worse: the entire front of his clothing gets soaking wet in the process of binding the dewy sheaves. The hands suffer the most; the dew makes them soft and sensitive, they look like the hands of a washerwoman who sloshes around in water all day long. Then the fingernails get worn off and cause pain, the fingertips become raw; frequently, the binder injures his hands on the sharp stubble or cuts a finger on the flat-pressed stalks. As soon as the dew has dried, the tips of the grain get sharp, and the higher the sun rises, the worse they prick. During the first few days, the binder’s hands sting so much that he can hardly bear it; but once they are covered with little pricks and cuts from the stubble, they become increasingly numb to the pain. How often I secretly pitied my wife! But to what end? You can’t afford to be sensitive in the country; otherwise you don’t earn anything – and you simply had to take advantage of the harvest weeks.
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