Summary

Chapter 12

It is mid-summer and haying time. Phil oversaw the migrant workers there to handle the backbreaking and dangerous work. The eight-man crew who would camp together for days along the farthest reaches of the ranch was a motley assortment, one an aging former circus worker whose daughter died in a fall from the trapeze, another an ex-con who taught Phil to twist and braid rawhide strips into rope, another a husband in flight from his wife and family. Phil, given to philosophical speculations at night around the campfire, saw in the braiding of rope that he practiced a metaphor for humanity itself, “how like the very lengths of rawhide rope a man makes, human character is woven on a strand of this and a strand of that—sometimes beautifully and sometimes poorly” (222). George showed up only to bring the haying camp its...