Triptych

Deleted Scene

Basil and the Bales, or An Homage to Miles Potter

Deleted Scene:

This scene was originally part of the epilogue of Triptych, "Next". Shortly after I wrote it, I realized that this scene echoed a similar scene in the plays The Farm Show and The Drawer Boy. The Farm Show was a collective theatre play created by Toronto actors in 1972. Toronto Actors moved to a small Ontario rural town and lived among the farming folk there for months while creating the play. Later, Michael Healy wrote a fictionalized account of one of those actors, Miles Potter, and the two bachelors he had boarded with while working on The Farm Show. This is The Drawer Boy. Both plays include one of the most popular Canadian monologues of all time: in which city-boy Miles Potter learns what it means to go haying.

The scene was cut for pacing, and I agreed that it had to go, as much as it pained me as an actor who grew up in the Canadian market. I'm pleased to be able to share it with you now.

 * 

Mark nodded without looking up, bent to shovel. "If it's hard on yer back, you could feed them instead."

Basil brightened.

"Sure." Feed. Feeding sounded good. Basil could feed. What would he have to do, just walk down the row and scoop seeds or something into buckets? No problem. No more bending and hefting. It would give his new blisters a break. "What do I do?"

Mark straightened and pointed up—there were two holes in the ceiling that Basil hadn't noticed before. They were spaced about eight feet apart, and centered on the other cement walkway on the far side of the stalls, close to the cow's heads.

"Go upstairs," Mark said, "there's hay. Need one bale for two cows. Shove enough bales of hay down the two holes, then come back down and break it up, spread it out."

Right. Okay. Seemed simple enough.

Basil could do that.

Pick up some hay and drop it down holes. Sounded like Tetris. Grateful to be off manure duty, Basil laid the pitchfork back against the far wall and headed towards the stairs. Push around some bales, he could totally do that.

How heavy could a pile of glorified dried grass be, anyway?

*   *   *

As it turned out, pretty damn heavy.

The hay was far more densely packed than Basil had originally calculated, and though Basil was a math genius, he didn't quite understand how, even when he calculated area x volume = mass he still came up with = 'too damn heavy'. Maybe hay was some sort of secret void of anti-physics where molecules weighed three times what they ought.

He was thinking of writing a paper on it.

Sweating worse than he'd been down below, caught now in the late afternoon sunshine that dribbled in around the high, dry boards of the walls, Basil was exhausted. They'd already spent all morning digging up the ship, freeing it from the tenacious roots of the crab grass above the strawberry patch, and his hands had blisters enough from the first shovel. Basil had only managed to toss down three bales so far and he'd been at it for nearly half an hour. It didn't help that the first bale that he'd rolled down the hole—after first making sure that Mark or a cow wasn't standing under it—turned out to be straw. Mark yelled at Basil that he was pulling from the wrong pile. The straw was close to the two holes, the hay was against the back wall. It all looked the same to Basil, but he did as he was told and hauled the bales from against the wall to the holes and these were heavier.

Basil's arms itched where the hay had scraped cuts into the bare skin of his forearms, and he would already see the allergy-welts forming around the scratches. He'd taken an antihistamine when they arrived at the farm, but that had been hours ago, and now Basil was sneezing. Which was just blowing up more barn dust. Eyes watering and desperately wishing for this whole ordeal to be over—and thinking that no damn Betamax was worth this torment, it couldn't be—Basil shoved a fourth bale down the hole. He straightened, his back hurting worse than before, and, recalling the layout of the pens below – accounting one bale for every two cows—counted. Only twenty three more bales to go.

 Bugger.

 Biting down on his bottom lip, Basil sucked it up and went back to the far wall.

 Mark was probably down there laughing his silent, stoic farmer ass off.

 Har har.

 Basil was seriously rethinking his milk machine guillotine.

 An hour later, Basil had finished dropping the hay down, though by the end he'd had to roll the damn things across the floor, and he cursed the engineer who'd designed the baling machines to tie them off in squares instead of a more manageable sphere. Yes, okay, they wouldn't stack as nicely, but they would be a lot easier to move. Basil could design a sphere-packing baler and Mark could put up little fences around the loft, like a ballpit in a kid's play pen, and Basil could calculate the exact trajectory and velocity for the bales to shoot out of the machine and up into the loft, and maybe he could even build a sort of gumball-machine inspired drop system with a moveable chute so the spheres would just roll right down into the holes with a tug of a rope. It would be much more convenient and the patent on the design would bring in enough to pay off a new mortgage on a new house in Canada.

Huh. And apparently Basil seemed to think that he was going to be around long enough to actually do this work for Mark. Well, he was married to Gwen, sort of, and...

Basil frowned, twisting his neck uncomfortably to rub his cheek and forehead against one dusty shoulder in an effort to scrub away the worst of the grimy sweat.

Why on Earth had Mark even brought up marriage in the first place? Now it was all Basil could think about. Trying to blank out his mind, Basil poured his energy and pushed his sore body into finishing up with the final bales.

Heading back down stairs, Basil blinked into the dim and spotted Mark at the far end, just coming back into the barn with the empty wheelbarrow. He put it back beside the pitchfork Basil had abandoned, then tossed said tool back at Basil's head. This time Basil was ready for it, and caught it quickly. The handle slapped against the blisters at the bottom of his fingers, and Basil winced but did not complain out loud. Thank god for the gloves, at least.

Without saying a word, Mark walked around the stalls to the left and kicked the hay bale Basil had dropped through the hole as close to the inquisitive noses of the cows as he could. Then he stabbed at it repeatedly with the pitchfork until it was all broken up and distributed to all the nearby mouths. He picked up the twine and shoved it in a pocket, half hanging out, and moved on to the next bale.

Okay then.

Basil went around the stalls to the right and started to do the same. The repetitive kick, push, stab and shovel was actually kind of soothing. It gave Basil plenty of time for his mind to wander, and now that he had spent so many hours lifting and pushing, while still sore, the muscles in his back and arms seemed to be shifting easier, stretching and pulling with a burn that was starting to feel kind of nice.

Endorphins, Basil decided. Endorphins rocked.

By the time Basil made it to the end of the row, Mark had already finished his side and balled up all the twine he'd collected and shoved it into a hole in the cement wall that was already filled with twine from previous feedings.  Basil moved to put his twine in the same place, and Mark pulled a handkerchief out of his other pocket and wiped his face and arms with it.  Basil glared at the handkerchief jealously.