hired man

noun, hired hand | ‘hired hand’ = N. Amer. a person employed to do usu. manual work on a farm, ranch, etc. (COD)

“Dad always seemed to have one or two hired men, and this guy, he’d find a hen’s nest and maybe five or six eggs in it. He just stab ’em on the end of the pitchfork, sucked ’em. So he showed me how to do it.”

“There was the two brothers here most of the time, and they’d have a whole bunch of hired men working for them, eh.”

“Maybe he had been a hired man or something. I don’t know.”

“I was the hired man.”

“Back in those days, when Dad first went to the light in 1941, you had to hire your own assistant. The government didn’t do the job for you, eh? That’s where your father-in-law was his first hired man.”

“Dad, he farmed after he went to the lighthouse for a while, but it was just too much. I mean he had to be there. Like, for an example, you’d be there and if a thunderstorm comes through, you had to blow the horn. That’s that simple. He was pretty well tied to the place. And when he paid his own hired man they only come up at night. To spell him off to watch the weather, eh? ’Cause somebody had to be up.”

“We got in, and all of sudden we could hear someone snoring. Just froze, eh. And we really listened, and evidently Tom had some hired man, and he used to sleep out there or whatever, eh. Well, you never seen two girls take across that field and over that fence and on those horses.”